IAM1982 – How this Couple Grew Their Dental Practice Organically

• Background: Ed Challinor co-founded Smileworks Liverpool along with his wife, building a sought-after dental and medical aesthetics practice.
• Growth: Their practice has experienced significant organic growth, thanks to a strong digital marketing suite and engaging website.
• CEO Hack: Ed recommends reading a lot and using an app like Blinkist for condensed information.
• CEO Nugget: His suggestion to other business owners is to not be afraid to raise prices when needed.
• CEO Defined: Ed sees a CEO as someone who holds a world of responsibility, ensuring the direction and success of a company.

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Transcription:

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Ed Challinor 00:00

So we thought we need to make a dental practice that's enjoyable, that has wonderful customer service. It makes it easy. We looked at businesses like Southwest Airlines. We looked at businesses like Pandora here in the UK. We looked at businesses that weren't dental businesses to find how we were going to be special.

I think the difference maker is custom 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 is we care about our patients and we put them first.

Intro 00:28

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 00:56

Hello, this is Gresh from 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.

Ed, it's awesome to have you on the show.

Ed Challinor 01:10

Thank you very much. Thank you very much.

Gresham Harkless 01:12

All right. Ed 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 U. K.

They have an enterprise-level digital marketing suite and receive 35, 000 users to their website each month and treat dozens of patients a day at their state-of-the-art airline being dental practice in the city center.

So, Ed, I just wanted to ask you again, are you ready to speak to our I AM CEO community?

Ed Challinor 01:40

Yep. Sure. Far away.

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Gresham Harkless 01:42

Awesome. So one of the first things that I usually do anytime that I have a guest on, especially on the I AM CEO 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 01:56

Mine's a romantic one. Can it be romantic?

Gresham Harkless 01:58

It can be. It can be. It's the perfect time for that.

Ed Challinor 02:01

Okay. 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 the kind of zero-sum game.

I met my now fiance and she was a dentist and she was this wonderful dentist. She was at the top of her game and she said, I want to start my own practice. So I said let's do that. I'll quit my job. How hard can digital marketing be? 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 02:41

Awesome. I guess for your practice and everything, obviously, that was a very romantic story, so I appreciate you. I wish every entrepreneur's story can be as romantic.

Ed Challinor 02:53

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

Gresham Harkless 03:00

I see a movie coming about.

Ed Challinor 03:03

Yeah. Yeah.

Gresham Harkless 03:04

So I guess, could you tell us a little bit more about what type of products and services that you guys provide?

Ed Challinor 03:09

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 a piece. You need dentists, associates who you have to pay loads of money to. They're 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 two 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. We're just going to get some patients together who trust us. We did that. I sat on the front desk in a tiny little room and MJ treated her patients and they became friendly with her. One patient turned to two and two turned to ten and ten turned to a thousand.

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. By the time a year passed, you could show me just about broken even. And we went to the bank, we said, Hey, we want to do dentistry now. Can you lend us some money? And they said no. So we went to a kind of lender of last resort, which is actually a European lending scheme for the MSI. They lent us some money as part of an entrepreneur scheme because we've had this relationship with the bank and because we were a startup.

So they gave us 7, 500 each, which is about 20, 000. 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. Then with the money that we made from that, the margins tripled when we were 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 got two more dentists and we got a hygienist and we've grown organically and 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, five years ago and said, Hey, here's 2 million quid go and build small works, we'd have probably gone bust because I didn't understand business. I had 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 05:46

That makes perfect sense. Growing organically gives you the opportunity to do that. Often a lot of people that start businesses, they sometimes think that revenue or money is usually the only thing way that they have to worry about. That if you have enough money, then you can be successful, but that's not always the case.

It's great that you guys were able to see that and start to develop, build those relationships and grow it organically. So as the revenue started coming in, you were able to invest and grow it even bigger.

Ed Challinor 06:11

Do you know what? There is one thing that will always solve your problems, and it's not money. It's customers. If you have customers that you've got relationships with, they will solve all your problems. All 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. You're going to just be in the position you were 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. If you get series a funding and you're a tech company, well done, you've just doubled your chances of failure. That's a fact.

Gresham Harkless 06:59

Wow.

Ed Challinor 07:00

Yeah. So organics the way for me, man.

Gresham Harkless 07:02

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 makes your organization or company unique?

Ed Challinor 07:14

This is a good question. We had this dumb idea in 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 practices better than all the rest? Because we always wanted to be number one. There was never 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 a real good plan. We were sitting there in the Virgin lounge and we were like dentistry is a little bit like flight. 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 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 great flight, it's a joy. Or if you travel on a rubbish, delayed easy jet flight, I don't know what you have over there in America, your 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. It makes it easy. We looked at businesses like Southwest Airlines. We looked at businesses like Pandora 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 maker is 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 is we care about our patients and we put them first.

Gresham Harkless 08:38

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. That can be a huge differentiator, but it's also awesome that you looked at other businesses outside of the specific industry you were in to get ideas on how to differentiate.

Ed Challinor 08:50

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 get it for free. So we looked at America. I joined all the American dental podcasts and it feels very American here. 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 them and we've tried to model them.

Gresham Harkless 09:30

Awesome. So, I know one of the big things that we try to do 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 09:47

Oh man, that's tricky. Why do I sell out? It's just reading. It's books. So if you want an app, the app is Blinkist, which is the one where you can read a book in 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 must have read a hundred books about business and about marketing and about pricing and about profit points and about aggressive competition.

I've even read books about dentistry. So I would say that my Kindle, and my audio books on my iPhone in the gym, that's my hack.

Gresham Harkless 10:20

That makes perfect sense. And yeah, I love those kinds of short snippets of a book that you can get. It gives you enough to know if you want to continue longer to spend that more of investment of a time to read even more into that book. But that is a great act to use.

Another big question I had is what I call a CEO nugget. So that might be a word of wisdom. You've already given us a lot of great concepts, but 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 10:45

Yeah, I'm going to 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, but 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're going to have cheap customers, you're going to have cheap business, and you're not going to make any margin.

So price yourself, double your prices. That's my nugget.

Gresham Harkless 11:22

I love it. I love it. Yeah, definitely, and then you start to attract the people where you may not necessarily want to attract those people. So that's an awesome nugget to implement into our businesses.

But one of the most exciting things that I get to do is, to ask, different CEOs, whether the people that are starting in their parents 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, Ed, what does it mean to you to be a CEO?

Ed Challinor 11:48

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. A lot of founders, I want to warn you, if you think that you are going to start a company, or if you think that the boss is going to go away, you are wrong. Because you've become the worst boss in the world. You've become the worst boss of you.

Gresham Harkless 12:19

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Ed, 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 give you the floor again, just to see if there was anything additional you want to tell our readers or our listeners. It could be words of wisdom or just anything else additional about your business.

The second part is just the best way for people to get ahold of you.

Ed Challinor 12:40

Okay. I'd say one of the most transformational things for us has been people. So learn how to hire. There's a book called Who, and there's a book called Top Grading. You need to read those. They're must have reading.

Also in terms of marketing, people, small businesses, they think, Oh, we've got to do direct response marketing. Let's do face. Let's do marketing on LinkedIn. Let's do Google AdWords. It's all about inbound. If you want quality leads and quality patients, 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. The kind of outbound marketing, lead chasing, spending money to make money. You need financial clarity to do that.

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. It's your beautiful business. Write about it, build some relationships with bloggers, build some relationships with the press, tell the world, and that will pay dividends that you will not believe it

Gresham Harkless 13:52

It makes perfect sense. Yeah, definitely. It's insanely important for entrepreneurs and business owners to be very strategic about what it is that they're doing. That's awesome word of wisdom that you gave us as well.

Ed Challinor 14:02

If you need to contact me, it's ed@sexydentistry. So sexydentistry.com. You can also just hit up at smileworksliverpool.co. That's our website. I love answering questions from people starting businesses.

I've got, loads of CEOs and I just like helping people. So yeah, hit me up on your business email and I'll answer you.

Gresham Harkless 14:26

Sounds like a plan. We'll have those links in the show notes, just in case anybody wants to follow through, but thank you again, Ed. I appreciate it.

Ed Challinor 14:33

No problem. Great to speak to you.

Outro 14:35

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO podcast, powered by CB Nation and 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 Apple Podcast, Spotify, Google podcast, and everywhere you listen to podcasts. Subscribe and leave us a five-star rating. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless Jr.

Thank you for listening.

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