IAM004 – How this Couple Grew Their Dental Practice Organically

Ed Challinor is the co-founder of Liverpool's most popular dental and medical aesthetics practice and one of the fastest growing independent dental practices in the UK. They have an enterprise-level digital marketing suite and receive 35,000 users to our website a month and treat dozens of patients a day at our state-of-the-art airline-themed dental practice in the City Centre.

CEO Hack: Read a lot / App like Blinkist

CEO Nugget: Raise your prices

CEO Defined: The world of responsibility

Website: https://smileworks-hub.co.uk/
Facebook: www.facebook.com/smileworksliverpool/
Twitter: twitter.com/sexydentistry

Transcription:

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Intro 0:02

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place, Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I am CEO podcast.

Gresham Harkless 0:27

Hello, this is Gresh on the I am CEO podcast, and I have a special guest on the show today Ed Challinor and he actually is an entrepreneur and business owner. So I'm super excited to get the opportunity to speak with him. So Ed it's awesome to have you on the show.

Ed Challinor 0:42

Thank you very much. Thank you very much.

Gresham Harkless 0:44

All right. Edie is the co-founder of Liverpool's most popular dental and medical esthetics practice and one of the fastest-growing independent dental practices in the UK. They have an enterprise-level digital marketing suite and receive 35,000 users to their website each month entering dozens of patients a day at their state-of-the-art airline dental practice in the city center. So Ed I just want to actually as are you ready to speak to our I AM CEO Community.

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Ed Challinor 1:11

Yep, short far away.

Gresham Harkless 1:13

Awesome, awesome, awesome. So one of the first things that I usually do anytime that I have a guest on, especially on the I AM CEO do podcast is just ask for your CEO story. So wanted to get an idea of like your background, and what kind of led you to start your business.

Ed Challinor 1:17

Mine's a romantic one. Can it be romantic? It can't be you can't be it's the perfect time for that. Okay, well, I used to be a barrister, which is an attorney and I worked in London for five or six years, and I didn't like what I was doing. I was trying to help people. But as an attorney, you can't really help people. It's a kind of zero sum game.

I met my fiancée, my now fiancée, and she was a dentist, and she was this wonderful dentist. She was at the top of the game. And she said, I want to start my own practice. So I said, well, let's let's do that. I'll quit my job. You know, how hard can digital marketing be? You know, how hard can business be? Can't be harder than law, right?

So I picked up a load of books, and I started learning. And we started a little tiny practice together. And it's grown into this wonderful place where I'm sitting now.

Gresham Harkless 1:30

Awesome, awesome. Awesome. And so I guess for your practice and everything. Obviously, there's a very romantic story. So I appreciate you.

I wish every I'm sure every entrepreneur, which is each story can be as romantic.

Ed Challinor 2:28

Yeah. The women love it. They say they say so What's your why? What's your purpose? I'm just like, it's my fiance. Oh, my God.

Gresham Harkless 2:35

I see a movie coming about. Yeah. So I guess Could you tell us a little bit more about you know what type of products and services that you guys provide?

Ed Challinor 2:44

We started with just an exam bed because to do dentistry, you need a lot of money, you need dental chairs, which cost 10,000 pounds apiece you need dentists associate, so you have to pay loads of money to that, like specialists, you need lots of equipment, you need X rays, you need to be regulated, you need to have all of the forms in place, it is an incredibly expensive thing. Now, we couldn't afford that we couldn't get funding.

So what we did is we decided to swerve that idea, we thought rather than get 2 million pounds worth of funding, what we're going to do is we're just going to start with an exam bed, start doing unregulated activities, which are things like Botox and fillers. So we don't need a special chair, or we don't need anything by law. And we're just gonna get some patients together, trust us when we did that. And I sat on the front desk in a tiny little room and MJ treated her patients and they became friendly with her and one patient turned to two and two turned to 10 and 10 to a thousand.

And what we were doing at the time is we were getting a relationship with our bank with our business bank. And the business bank was seeing money coming in every single month and seeing money going out. And by the time a year had passed, we could show we just about broken even and we went to the bank and we said hey, we want to do dentistry now. Can you lend us some money? And they said said no. So we went to a kind of lender of last resort, which is actually a European Lending Scheme called the MSI F and they lent us some money as part of an entrepreneur's scheme. Because we've had this relationship with a bank and because we were a startup, so they gave us 7500 pounds each, which is about $20,000. And we got our first dental chair, we got our first dentist, we got our first decontamination room and an x ray machine. And we started doing this tiny little dentistry operation and then with the money that we made from that, you know, the margins tripled when we're able to do dentistry.

We were still doing aesthetics as well, but the business just started making money and that money we reinvested and we got another chair and then we got another chair then we've got two more dentists then we've got a hygienist and we we've grown organically. Now that organic growth has meant that we've also acquired patients organically and we've built relationships organically.

So I think if someone were to come to me, two three, four years ago, five years ago, and said, hey, here's 2 million quid, go and build Smileworks, we'd have probably gone bust. Because I didn't understand business I don't, I've not read any books, I didn't understand digital marketing, we didn't understand how to hire people. So all of this kind of starting lean is good, because it gave me breathing space to learn business, and to learn all of the skills that you need to be a CEO.

Gresham Harkless 5:25

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And growing organically gives you the opportunity to do that. And often, a lot of people that start businesses, they sometimes think that you know, revenue or money is usually the only thing that they have to worry about. They had enough money, then you can be successful. But that's not always the case. And you guys were kind of able to see that and start to develop, build those relationships and grow it organically. So as your as the revenue started coming in, you were able to kind of invest and grow even bigger.

Ed Challinor 5:50

Do you know what there is one thing that will always solve your problems, and it's not money, its customers, its customers. If you have customers that you've got relationships with, they will solve all your problems or your hardships will go away. But just asking the bank for money, I don't know whether it was Warren Buffett who said, giving small businesses capital is like giving crack to kids. You're just going to waste it and you're not going to do the right things with it. And you're going to just be in the position you're in. When you first started out. There's another very worrying statistic, I know that 90% of businesses fail in the first year 96% fail in five years. And if you get a series of funding, and you're a tech company, well done, you've just doubled your chances of failure. That's a fact. Wow. So organics the way for me, man,

Gresham Harkless 6:42

It makes sense for a lot of businesses to definitely do it that way, and then grow it organically, like you mentioned. So I guess one of the things I wanted to ask you was what do you feel kind of makes your organization or your company unique?

Ed Challinor 6:54

Oh, this is a good question. We have this dumb idea, our business, we came up with our business on a Virgin Atlantic flight. And we were like, how are we going to make a dental practice is better than all the rest? Because we always wanted to be number one, there was no there was never any, any any question of being just a little lifestyle business, we wanted to take over the world like all entrepreneurs do.

So we thought we needed we need a real good plan. And we were sitting there in the Virgin lounge, we were like cool dentistry is a little bit like flying. Nobody wants to get packed into a little aluminium tube with a bunch of stinking strangers and fly at 30,000 feet to wherever you need to go. But you have to do it. Sometimes you just have to travel. And you know, it's the same with cars, you have to travel. And if you travel in a great car, it's a joy. Or if you travel like flight, it's a joy. Or if you travel on a rubbish delayed kind of EasyJet flight, I don't know what you have over there in America, low budget airlines, it can be a disaster.

So we thought we need to make a dental practice that's enjoyable, that has wonderful customer service that makes it easy. And we looked at businesses like Southwest Airlines, we looked at businesses like Pandora over here in the UK, we looked at businesses that weren't dental businesses to find how we were going to be special. And I think the difference makers, customer service and care, like people want to be cared for. And a lot of dentists are greedy, and they just want money. Whereas in fact, the difference maker with us, we care about our patients, and we put them first

Gresham Harkless 8:25

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And that can be I mean a huge differentiator. But it's also awesome that you looked at other businesses outside of the industry of this specific industry, you are in to kind of get ideas on how to differentiate,

Ed Challinor 8:37

Oh, 100%, the first place we went was America, because dentistry in America is all privately paying. Whereas here we have the NHS where you can sort of get it for free. So we looked at America, I joined all the American Dental podcasts, and it feels very American here. You know, we've got three Americans working here. We've got people from all over Europe, I think we've only got two people from Liverpool, which is our city work here. So it's a real mixture, and it represents our brand. And what we do, we've gone out to the entire world, looking for the best, whether it be business processes, whether it be staff, whether it be anything, we've looked for examples of the best, and we've tried to emulate those tried to model them.

Gresham Harkless 9:18

Awesome, awesome, awesome. So I know one of the big things that we tried to do and whenever we have guests on the show is to provide like, what I call a CEO hack. So that might be a resource. It might be an app or a book or something that you feel has made you a better entrepreneur and business owner, could you give us like maybe a CEO hack that's been instrumental for you?

Ed Challinor 9:35

Oh, man, that's tricky. Why do I still do you know? It's just, it's just reading books. So if you want an app, the app is Blinkist. Blink ist which is the one way you can read a book in like 20 minutes, but what I find is I read the blinks to a book and then I want to go off and read the whole thing. I mean, I must have read 100 books about business and about marketing and about pricing and profit points and about aggressive competition. You know, I've even read books about dentistry. So I would say that my Kindle and my audio books on my phone in the gym, that's my hack.

Gresham Harkless 10:11

That makes perfect sense. And yeah, I love those kind of short snippets of a book that you can get it gives you enough to know that if you want to kind of continue for longer spend that more of investment of time to read even more into that book. But that is a great hack to kind of use. Another big question I had is what I call a CEO nugget. So that might be a word of wisdom, you've already gave us a lot of great content, but there's Is there anything else you can think of that might be a word of wisdom, or piece of advice you can give to other CEOs?

Ed Challinor 10:37
Yeah, I'm gonna say raise your prices, guys, don't be the cheapest. You always think as a new business, when you're starting out when you're a founder, we need to gain market share. That's number one thing on our list of things to do. And to gain market share, how are we going to do it, we're going to reduce our prices, we're going to be the cheapest,

Well remember, there is always going to be someone who is cheaper. And price is one of the only ways that customers can judge the quality of a product. So if you are cheap, you are going to remain cheap, you know, cheap customers, you have cheap business and you're not going to make any margin. So price yourself, you know, ther will be prices off my nuggets,

Gresham Harkless 11:13

I love it. I love it. Yeah, definitely you in the new site to attract people where you may not necessarily want to attract those people. So that's an awesome nugget to kind of implementing into our businesses. But one of the most exciting things that I get to do is, you know, to ask, you know, different CEOs, whether it be people that are starting in their parent's garage, or people that have big, huge companies like exactly what it means to them to be a CEO. So I wanted to ask you, and what does it mean to you to be a CEO,

Ed Challinor 11:40

it means responsibility. It means the world of responsibility, I come to work and I see machines that I'm responsible for I see people that I'm responsible for I see whole lives that rely on us to know what we're doing, so that they can function. And that is sometimes can be very stressful. And a lot of founders I want to warn you, if you think that you're going to start a company, or if you think that the boss is gonna go away, you're wrong. Because you become the worst boss in the world. You become the worst boss of you.

Gresham Harkless 12:12

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, Edie, I truly appreciate you taking some time out of your schedule, I know you're juggling a bunch, what I wanted to do was just kind of give you the floor. Again, just to see if there's anything additional, you want to tell our readers or listeners, it could be words of wisdom, or just anything else additional about your business. And the second part is just these just for the best way for people to get a hold of you.

Ed Challinor 12:33

Okay, well, I'd say one of the most transformational things for us has been people. So learn how to hire as a book called Who. And there's a book called Top grading, you need to read those there must have reading and also in terms of marketing, you know, people, small businesses, they think, oh, we got to do direct response marketing, let's do Facebook, let's do marketing on on LinkedIn, let's do Google AdWords, it's all about inbound. If you want quality leads, and quality patience, if you don't have a great big resource of salespeople, or if it's just you, and maybe a small team, you need to do inbound.

So that means going out there writing some great articles, optimizing them for SEO, and getting ranked on the search engine. That's the way that small businesses, especially local ones will be doing it, you know, kind of outbound marketing, lead chasing spending money to make money. You know, you need financial clarity to do that.

And small businesses oftentimes don't have the financial clarity they need and they may be actually losing money when they think they're making money. So turn yourself into an author, you've got this thing that you love. It's your baby as your beautiful business, write about it, build some relationships with bloggers, build some relationships with the press in some other world, and that will pay dividends that you will not believe.

Gresham Harkless 13:49

Makes perfect sense. Yeah, definitely. It's insanely important for entrepreneurs and business owners to be very s iF trategic about what it is that they're doing. And that's also my word of wisdom that you gave us as well.

Ed Challinor 13:58

If you need to contact me its ed@sexydentistry.com. You can also just contact smileworksliverpool thats our website. And I love answering questions from people from businesses. I mean CEOs, I mean I just like helping people. Get me on your business email and I'll answer you.

Gresham Harkless 13:58
Sounds like a plan. We will have these notes on Shownotes in case anyone wants to follow through. Thank you again. I appreciate it.

Ed Challinor 14:03

No problem. Nice to speak to you.

Outro 14:33

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO o podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I am CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening

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