Dr James, 0s:

This episode is a little bit different. Today. We're not really talking about finance so much, but we still are at the same time, because we're referring to somebody's journey, and that lovely somebody is Mr Daniel Jones, who's sat in front of me right now, and Daniel has a really interesting tech startup that is designed to help dental practices, which we're going to come on to talking about in just a second. It helps them whenever it comes to their finances, but before we talk about that, probably nice to just have a little bit of an intro, wouldn't it, Daniel? I think that'd be a great place to begin.

Daniel, 28s:

Indeed, thank you very much for having me on the podcast, James. It's lovely to be here. In terms of my background, so I actually started my career in finance for a couple of years doing a mixture of mergers and acquisitions and leverage finance, which was a great grounding in the world of finance. Well, it was well paid also. But it's not what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Candidly, I was thinking of going into private equity and I wanted to do something a bit more creative where I felt like I could build something, and I'd always been very entrepreneurial. So I actually went to work work in a startup. So I went from some 16,000 person international organization to a startup where I was the third hire and walking in this boxes, uh, all over the place and my computer wasn't set up properly, um, first day. But I was there for two years. Um, it was, I'd say, the most formative experience of my career because in that time I learned how to build a startup from the ground up. I worked with fantastic founders. We built that business in the space of two years to over a million and a half in revenue and we raised over a half million dollars in seed funding. But it was fantastic and that led me on to what I'm doing now with Medfin. I'm the co-founder and CEO. I'm perhaps going to talk a bit more about that in a minute and why I got interested in the medical space and dentistry in general.

Dr James, 1m 48s:

Sure sounds fun, Medfin. Have I got that right? Or is there an I in there? Med-e-f-i-n. Medfin. M-e-d-f-i-n. Medfin. I just wanted to make sure I nailed that one. But yeah, no story. Uh, quite the quite. The journey to uh then obviously become associated with the dental industry with time. And just for context, Daniel, you are 25 years of age. I've got that right, haven't I?

Daniel, 2m 13s:

I am.

Dr James, 2m 13s:

I am 25, yeah, 26 in August, though so getting getting older, 25 and three quarters, something like that, something like that. Anyway, back to what we were saying. I mean, it's an interesting one because obviously you saw an opportunity to help dentists. That's how a business works. It helps make our life easier, it fixes a problem. I suppose you could say so. How did that come about? As in, how did you catch wind of the struggles that dentists have?

Daniel, 2m 47s:

have. Yeah, it's a. It's a great question and actually my my interest came through being interested in healthcare more generally. So I was in my final year of university at Cambridge and I got diagnosed, sort of out of the blue, with a really severe heart condition. Um, co-optation aorta was caught very late in my life. Typically it's detected far earlier but missed multiple times when I was growing up. Um, and I had to have corrective surgery for that and the process for getting that sorted. You know, I was six months out from final final exams. I didn't bounce around the nhs for what felt like almost I think it was almost two years. Um, I was originally safe to have open heart surgery. I got some private advice to get back to the NHS, managed to get slightly less life-changing surgery, but I came out the other side. You know, frankly it was a really poor experience. It was a really tough time and I came out the other side thinking I'd love to apply my skill set and what I know and the things that I'm good at to contribute into helping healthcare as a whole. So that's what got me interested in healthcare. And then as for dentistry, so I was sort of looking at the different verticals within healthcare and trying to work out where to start. Where would be an interesting place to start, and I think one of the reasons why we settled on my co-founder, matt, and I settled on dentistry was because of dentists. We found them to be some of the sharpest people in the healthcare industry, some of the most commercial, and when you're building software, like we are, that focuses on the commercial side of healthcare and the financial management of practices, it made sense to start somewhere where people are already really thinking about that and they value that, and for us, especially in the uk healthcare landscape, the place that that made sense to start was in dentistry. Um, my godmother works in the dental profession, so I've spoken to her about stuff, and I also had a few friends that were involved either in dentistry as associate dentists or in other dental startups, so I was able to lean on them early in our journey. Um, and that's yeah, that's really why, why we started and it's been it's been fantastic working with, with so many dentists up and down the country so far interesting and you know what?

Dr James, 4m 53s:

I've had similar conversations with accountants who service multiple health care disciplines. So let's say pharmacists, let's say gmps, let's say pharmacists, let's say GMPs, let's say, well, yeah, the GMPs pharmacists, dentists would be the main ones that spring to mind and they say they always say James, relatively speaking, even though dentists, they have got room for improvement. I think it's definitely true to say they tend to be a little bit more commercially minded, effectively, versus the other professions, healthcare professions. You know, rightly or wrongly, we're not here to debate that today. We're just making an observation, but I think it comes with the territory because they obviously they have to run dental practice and they need to think about the numbers to some level. So you identified this mindset that dentists possess, this commonality that they share, and then you thought to yourself right, how can I use? What an interesting way to go about starting a business. You were like. You almost thought to yourself okay, where, where are the people receptive to my help? And then let me build something to help them using the skill set that I have. Have I got that right? Was it in that order?

Daniel, 6m 0s:

yeah, I think that's um, I think that's a good way of putting it. I think, in order to create positive impact and help people, you need to be doing it in the right place and with with people. As you say, they're receptive to that, and one of the things that I've loved working with dentists so far is how entrepreneurial many are, you know. Even so, yeah, the principal dentists often very entrepreneurial, quite forward thinking, but even associate dentists, because you're essentially the model of how it works. I think it attracts entrepreneurial people and, as an entrepreneur, I love working with other entrepreneurial people boom, there we go.

Dr James, 6m 37s:

So those two parts, those, those two parts fitted together. And then what happened next? As in, you thought to yourself right, my skill set is finance and I also have a software engineering background. What do dentists need help with? And then what happened next?

Daniel, 6m 58s:

yeah, exactly so. I think across the whole of healthcare, not just dentistry. One really big problem is that today the financial data and the clinical data are very disconnected. So what do I mean by this? The data that sits in your practice management system. It's quite hard to link that to your financial data and your practice performance and in order for practice owners to perhaps monitor how their business is doing, to visualize easily key KPIs, how the business is performing, it's often quite laborious for practices. Data sits in all different places and you'll have to do crunching numbers in Excel, taking numbers out manually from different places, and we don't think that should be the case and we think that actually healthcare providers and dentist practices can do better when they're armed with the data that they need to make good decisions about their practice and where to go in the future. So an example of this I would give is to get good KPIs from your practice management system, let's say, associate profitability, and it's often quite difficult to do that to get a really good, accurate picture a good, accurate picture of your sort of cash flow, what you're making the most money on, sort of your margins on different service lines In other industries. Today you have fantastic software that tells you these things. So there's companies out there like Pigment or Anaplan these huge companies that do great business planning software In healthcare. You don't get any of this. Pigment or Anaplan these huge companies that do great business planning software In healthcare you don't get any of this. And we think you know it's my thesis that dentists and healthcare professionals deserve great software to help them run their practices.

Dr James, 8m 42s:

And if you think about it I mean you saying that out loud it's kind of like a duality. It kind of conjures this duality of energies in me. Part of me is like, wow, yeah, of course they do. That would be amazing. But the second part of me is like I can't believe we're shooting this in 2025 and no one has got round to this yet. It's nuts, and you are correct. You think about the, because you're basically talking about practice management software and we're not going to name names today, but there is one avant-garde one on the market, shall we say, that offers a fully more integrated patient management software plus financial management solutions and KPIs.

Daniel, 9m 22s:

But beyond that, I mean that particular company, to my knowledge, is like 2% of the market, and the and the other 98, well, that's where you come in indeed, um, and I think it's not just in the uk, it's world, worldwide with dental practices, that you have this and actually, to be fair to existing practice management, uh softwares, they do the clinical side typically very well. Um, depending on the provider, they've got a lot of functionality when it comes to the clinical side and the software that's required to serve that. But where, in my view, through research and through speaking to a lot of dentists, where it falls down is on, like the financial reporting aspect and equipping practices with with the data and metrics that they need to perform really well financially as well as, at the same time as uh, delighting patients can we get a little more granular on the specific functionality, saying as much as you can say off your software solution?

Dr James, 10m 19s:

I'd be interested to know or how dentists benefit of course.

Daniel, 10m 22s:

so at medfin we're we're broadly working on two sort of different different products, products that connect in with one another. That's what's on our roadmap, so I'll take those sequentially. The first is actually what I would call a next generation plan product. So, James, I'm sure you'll be familiar with the plan providers out there in the market today Again, I won't say names, but that allow practices to provide membership plans to their patients. Now, a lot of practice owners that I've spoken to love the fact that they can have this like guaranteed income. It brings peace of mind patients, like spreading the cost over um over over a period of time, as opposed to paying up front. I think it's also very beneficial from the patient perspective because it's like a preventative plan. But I think today the infrastructure for those plans is very, very expensive. So direct debit is one of the cheapest forms of payment and what dentists pay to plan for the stay is very expensive. We think we could do that a lot more cheaply and we also built a software system around plans to allow us to reduce a lot of the manual work when it comes to plan administration. So I'll give you a couple of concrete examples. The first is dentists that I've spoken to often spend quite a bit of time calculating how much to pay their associate dentists and hygienists specifically for planned patients. Our software does this automatically and will send you a sort of costed breakdown as a practice owner every month to help you with that in a more crunching number of spreadsheets, and it also connects directly into your practice management software. So when someone stops paying for example, let's say a direct debit fails that's automatically updated on the practice management system, which helps get around things like. I spoke with a practice in Surrey the other day and they had a very lucky man who had stopped paying for his plan seven years ago but it hadn't been updated on practice management software because it doesn't connect in with anything.

Dr James, 12m 27s:

I'm smiling because I've heard similar stories. Yeah, that actually happens. How crazy is that. But anyway.

Daniel, 12m 33s:

Exactly. He didn't say anything because he's getting a great deal out of it and they noticed seven years later, and so the connection in with the practice management software is essential. We built a lot of software and specific workflows around that, so it's essentially like tech enabled. A is what I would call financial planning in a NASA software, where we're able to visualize cash flow to revenue costs in a really granular way for practices in real time. We connect them with cloud accounting software and with open banking, and also we calculate a lot of key KPIs in real time. We surface this as a software that's really easy to use. At the moment, we're not doing forecasting, but in the future, where we want to get to my team and I we have experience with AI and machine learning We'd like to be able to do great forecasting for practices really simply, really easily, whereas today that would have to be done very manually. So you can think of it broadly as a big suite of financial software, and we want to bring all the financial information from a practice onto one platform.

Dr James, 13m 47s:

That platform will be medfin and you can do a lot of interesting things with that. Can I ask a question? It's a little off piste but it is somewhat related. In your opinion, what do you think the biggest kpis are the dental practices should be monitoring? And I get, I get that that's. I'm putting you on the spotlight there a little bit. It doesn't have to be our top 10 in sequential order, but maybe just some of the big ones that spring to mind yeah, I think, uh, chair utilization rate is a really important one.

Daniel, 14m 10s:

I think you want to be able to see revenue and profitability by associate dentists. Um, I think you want to be able to see the marginal profitability of a different treatment type. So you want a really good understanding of, like how much money as a practice you make on different treatments. So you want to have a good understanding of, okay, if I do this sort of crown, I make this much money profit if I do, um, if I do invisalign, this is how much I'm making, and a lot of practices they don't have this really granular data, and so I think it's important to understand the treatment mix and how that affects the practice too. Another thing and I would say this because we're doing a plan product but one thing that I realized when I started looking into the plan space is that actually a lot of practices they know how much revenue they're making on their plans, but often they won't have a really good idea of what the proper profitability of those plans are, because in order to calculate the profitability of a plan, you need to know how much of the entitlements the patients are using. So how many of those hygiene appointments and examinations are they using that they're entitled to and also the discounts that's being given away as part of that plan, because in a lot of plans you have like a 10 or 15% discount, but today they don't have that data and pull it together you just know what your sort of revenue is, but actually how much money a practice is making after those calculations. So our software calculates that too, which is, from what I understand, fairly novel.

Dr James, 15m 40s:

I really wanted to ask that question to you. It just popped into my head when we were speaking there because, as the, the kpi man and you know is, is, is one, uh, I suppose, way of looking at what you do, you've got to know which ones, how they rank in terms of their hierarchy. I thought that would be a really cool question to ask. You know what it is. It is interesting because there is actually uh and again, I won't name names there is actually a solution on the market and there's, there's an accountant that I know of who helps people with this sort of stuff. Uh, it goes to, uh, quite a good level of detail on certain things. Maybe yours might outrank it on certain areas. I don't know, we'd have to get into the specifics, but the way it's done is he has all these elaborate spreadsheets and you have to get a staff member to type the spreadsheets in at the end of the day, you know. So it's not. How can I say this? It's not automated. You know, uh, where, but it sounds like what you do is similarish, perhaps in more detail in certain areas. However, it's all automated because it's handled through software and again, it just brings me full circle and it just makes me think to myself in 2025, all the crazy things and solutions that we have in terms of software, how has no one got around to this?

Daniel, 16m 53s:

Yeah, I think it's a very good question. I think part of it is because the data work on the backend is quite complicated like to pull in all this data, to get integrations, to do the analysis. It's not like a simple thing to do, so perhaps that's a blocker, but yeah it's. I I know there are several sort of like consultants and business planning agencies out there that do a lot of great work with dentists and I think that for us it's not necessarily that we'd be looking to replace those guys. Um, we're not consultants, we build the software and we want to put the data and have that data visible for dentists and then, if they want to also engage um consultants that have done it before, you know, increased probability in practices all the better, because they would then be able to come in and see metrics straight away, see the performance in real time. So it really is actually would make that process easier as opposed to sort of getting rid of it altogether.

Dr James, 17m 49s:

Sure, oh, I see it. Yeah, just to clarify. I see that as a synergy. I find it interesting more from the perspective of different approaches, really. I find it interesting more from the perspective of different approaches really. And you know, it seems like such an obvious thing to automate that a solution like yours might be useful. Tell me this what happens now? Where do we go from here? What's next on the horizon from Medfin?

Daniel, 18m 12s:

Where are you guys presently at with the product? Yeah, so it's a good question. We are onboarding our first practices. Now terms of in terms of where we are today. Um, one thing I didn't mention, actually. So we're vc backed. We're backed by venture capital investors uh, we raised one and a half million pounds back in november from some leading investors here in london. We're also backed by the british business bank, which is, which is nice, um, and over the last few months, we've been building our software, doing research with dentists, asking people lots of questions. If you've received a LinkedIn uh message from me on uh on online and you're a dentist listening to this, I'm sorry. I've been trying to speak to as many people as possible to get feedback no need to apologize.

Dr James, 18m 58s:

Listen, that's a good thing. Hey, if you've got something good and you can help people, it's your duty to go and speak to people. That's how I frame that stuff to me, so I think it's a good thing I appreciate that, James.

Daniel, 19m 8s:

yeah, so we've been trying to speak to as many people as possible and now over the next sort of six months, especially towards the end of the year, our focus is really sort of working with um, forward-thinking dentists that want to take control of their practice finances, save money and to work with a I won't should go to. We're a startup, we're based out of London, we're growing quickly, but we're an early-stage company People that want to be involved in building the future and we're looking to significantly ramp up the number of practices we're working with over the next few months. We're looking for practices that are using dentistry as the practice management software, typically that between sort of one, between one and ten practices and based yeah, based based in the UK. So that's, that's the. That's the overarching plan. I appreciate it's quite vague, but, yeah, the main thing is just ramping up, testing and hopefully continuing to build a product that dentists love and get a lot of benefit out.