Dr Bobby, 1m 15s:

Alright, fantastic. Thank you very much, everybody. So we'll wrap through. Obviously, we're not got a huge amount of time. So uh what I want to try and get from that was just to work out where everybody is, because everybody is at different stages completely. Some of you are practice owners, some of you are associates, you're right at the beginning of the stage. And there's a massive variation between your knowledge, understanding of business, and how things work and how to build a successful factor. One of the things I really find fascinating though is there's been a huge resistance in the last couple of years of principal owners who've already owned practices wanting to open spot factors who have never done it before. And uh it's a whole new learning curve for a lot of those principal owners. When you buy a factor, take something over, it's quite straightforward. You've got some cash flow, you take over the systems, the processes, and adjust it. But building a factor base from scratch is a whole different whole game completely. So there is some nuances between all of it.

Dr James, 2m 12s:

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Dr Bobby, 2m 55s:

I'll just share a little bit really quickly about me and my experience and where I've come from. So this is my practice, Avenue Dental. Uh, one of my team members is here today, Abby, who's right at the back. Um, from the practice who's been with me for the last three years now. Um long story short, I worked in seven years for mixed practice, loved it, NHS private, did a lot of private work, had a great experience in that practice. However, at one point my principal decided to sell that to a corporate. And I loved my job. I loved dentistry and had a real passion for it. I hated it at dental school, really struggled, but I really found my feet when I landed in this job because I had such a great mentor. I had a great person who was teaching, sharing, educating, and really happy to support and spend time with us as associates. The decision came at some point for himself that he had to sell for whatever reason, and it got sold to a corporate. And within that next 12 to 24 months, that practice basically evaporated. So the patient list, the team, everybody essentially left. I think there's still probably only one person out of a team of 25 that is still within that building as it stands, and I was mortified. I hated it. I'd spent seven years of my life giving everything to this, and literally overnight, what it felt like it disappeared to the point where I was that frustrated I actually left dentistry. I was just fed up. I told my wife one night I've handed my notice in and didn't even ask her and said I'm done. And I left and I walked out. And you know, if you work in corporate, you know, you might have similar stories, but it just wasn't for me, and it wasn't the pathway that I wanted to go down. After a bit of soul searching for 12 months, spent a bit of time outside doing other bits and bobs. I actually realized I love dentistry, I have a passion for it, and I missed being with patients because business aside, which is what we teach and what we help dentists with, I am a clinician at heart. So I love doing dentistry, I love spending time with my patients, I love caring for other people because that's who we are. Business aside, we can get other people to help with that who know more about it than we do. Um, and then at that point, the opportunity came up to build my own squat. Went round round by practice, set up a squat, spoke to my old principal, and the answer was really simple. Financially, it just made way more sense to set up a squat. So decided to build Avenue Dental, which is what you can see here. Started to build the practice and set up the squat, and it was an absolutely horrific process. It was a nightmare. Wasted loads of money, nobody was really teaching about helping dentists who set up squat practices at the time, all around business, and all in all, ended up in about 50 to 70,000 pounds of debt, which shouldn't have happened at the time. And everybody in this room has probably heard of dental tax. Everybody heard of that, it's a term we get shafted in simple terms, uh, on a lot of fronts, but ultimately because we don't know any different, you know, as um independent clinicians. Long story short, we are now three years in, very successful practice. Uh, three years we've got uh a team of around about 15 now in the practice, and we've just put in planning permission to take up stairs so we can expand to five surgeries, and within three years we're comfortably doing um seven figures, and uh the people in squat success are getting to that point within 12 months now uh when it comes to turnover. However, when we rewind and we go back right to the beginning, every dentist has what I call the dentist dilemma. We're an associate, we come out of university, we have to work for a few years, and we get to a point in our lives where we have to make a decision as to what we want to do next. There is no right or wrong answer to this whatsoever, but the biggest thing is to understand. I am not here to tell people that you have to set up a squat practice or you have to go into practice ownership. You have to have a decision-making framework to understand for yourselves as to whether it is the right decision for me and do I understand what is going to be required of that if I go down that route? What is the pros and cons? And four or five years in, everybody will question themselves as to do I do this or do I not, do I stay as an associate? There are quite happily some associates who are making plenty of money, doing well, investing in other aspects, and that's great, it's the right thing for them. But if you're gonna go into practice ownership, you have to understand the realities of it, but also if it's something that you do question and you think about that, then you have to make sure that you get to the end of your life without living any regrets. So, one of the biggest things that I come across is dentists saying, I wish I'd opened a practice or done it sooner, and what stopped you? It was financial constraints, it was this or that. But actually, if you ask yourself the question, what is the worst case scenario? And the answer is, well, as dentists, if we're doing high value work and we can make 200 to 300,000 pounds a year as being an associate, actually, if I ended up with a squat practice which wasn't that successful or bought a practice, if I had to cut my ties, can I make it work? Can I sustain it? Can I pay off the debts within a few years? And often the answer is yes, but we just don't think about it that way because we get too scared. So, what I want to talk about today is in squat success, we have three pillars, which is everything I've written in the book that every one of you will get a copy of today, as to what makes a squat practice really successful. So, after teaching dozens and dozens of dentists go through this process, you can bring it down to three points. Number one is something we call the certainty compass, number two is the ATM algorithm, and number three is the invisible waiting list. And I'll explain exactly what all of these mean going forwards. The first one we'll start with is what we call the certainty compass, and the certainty compass is how do we make better decisions? Whenever somebody starts thinking about setting up a squat practice, we're overwhelmed, we're bombarded, we have 10 million different questions going through our heads, and we get overwhelmed and we have no place, no idea of exactly where to start and what to do. So we have to have a framework as to how do we make better decisions. The A-team algorithm is everything to do with setting up your teams in your practice. You cannot build a successful practice, whether it's a squat or an existing practice, without a phenomenal team. So the squat practices who I see fail or do not very well, or even in existing practices, is because they've put nowhere near enough emphasis on this middle piece as possible. Historically, it's been nurses, they get paid minimum wage, we don't want to really see them develop, we don't want to see them grow, and how do we keep our payroll as low as possible? Well, actually, it's the opposite. How do we raise them? How do we bring their standard up? How do we actually bring them into a part of our culture and our team and the patient care that comes with that and reward them fairly for it? And off the back of that, we should see that our profits go up. So it's an investment, not a cost, which is what most practice owners view it as, especially when they're looking at their PL or their cash flows. The final one is what you call the invisible waiting list, and that is how do you build a list of patients, four or five hundred people who are ready at your door when you open your practice from scratch without spending a penny on marketing. The last practice that opened in Squat Success was in Norwich, and I'm going up to see them next week. They've opened with 156 new patients seen in their first month with spending around £2,000 in marketing spend. So you will look on the forums, the Facebook groups, you will see practice owners who are struggling, practice owners who can't get new patients through. However, we have our own pattern of what we're seeing that there is huge demand. Patients want to be seen, they can't access NHS dentistry as freely as they could before. And our job is actually how do we identify our target market, our demographic, and how do we go out and get them? And do that at minimal cost rather than going to an agency and saying, here's my money, and they will charge you a hell of a lot to do the same thing without much of the reward. So when it comes back to the certainty compass, what I've realized is that dentists all have what I call free decision-making infections, basically. We all go through a process of when we're making decisions and we base them around these three things. The first one is what I call the prestige virus. So this is where we make ego-driven decisions and we obsess over luxury, and all of this stuff actually has no impact on our business whatsoever. So when I was an associate, the first thing I did was I went out after around about six months and I bought that car that you can see there, which is a BMW M4, because my principal had Lamborghinis and Ferraris, and all the associates had BMWs and Porsches, and I'm not even into cars whatsoever. Don't care. I actually don't have a car today, believe it or not. My wife does, but I don't. I get the train or I walk. Um that was what you call an ego-based decision, and it's something that we call the prestige virus. And a lot of dentists, when they're thinking about setting up a squat, often ask the question: what are my colleagues gonna think of this on Instagram? What are other people gonna think if I don't have the prettiest chair, the fanciest this, the fanciest that? And it clouds logical judgment completely. So you have to switch your social media off and ask yourself some better questions and not focus on what other people are doing. The second one is called the quick fix fever, and this is the one where people rush massively. So you have a couple of bad weeks in your corporate job, and things are really, really going bad, and I want to get out, I'm sick and fed up, I hate it, I can't make the decisions that I want to make, I'm done, and you rush your research, and you don't do anything with any due diligence, and you make a big mistake, which will cost you a lot of money in the long run. And I can give you a clear example of this because this is a real example of a message that I received one night, so everybody can have a moment or a minute just to read that. And this came around about nine months ago. So this particular individual was in a corporate, hated it, went and found a building on a high street where he thought it was an affluent area, set up his squat practice, was running his own marketing, doing his own Google ads, and had no team in practice. So he had one person ad hoc, you know, during that process, and this is what came of that, and that practice shut down in the end. So I've spoken to him since. That's not a situation that I want to see anybody in, but sometimes you have to slow your decision-making process down in order to stop that happening, whether you're in a bad situation or not. And then the final one is something called the analysis paralysis syndrome. So everybody will suffer from this to some extent, and dentists actually do really, really well with this one because they just overthink, overthink, overthink, overthink. And we've got a huge amount of dentists within our own groups who've been through this process, which I can talk about here. So you've got Dan, starts his research, comes on squat success, continues his research, after a year, finds that the market's changed, still needs to do more research, got spreadsheets for spreadsheets, and still keeps going on and on and on. Dentist number two, Matt comes, does his research planning, bang, three months, we're done. Let's execute, let's build it, let's go. And by the same time, within you know 18 months or two years, one dentist has a practice which has some equity. One dentist has nothing other than his associate job, which is where he started up, because he just could not carry on. So after knowing all of that, we have to have a process in our heads of how do we ask better questions to make better decisions when we're going down this journey, and that's what the certainty compass is. So we're all dentists, we love treatment plans. So, how do we actually relate it back to this? What is the treatment for all of these infections that all of us dentists face at some point? So, for the first one, number one is whenever you're making a decision about anything, you always have to ask, what is the patient benefit? Will a 30,000 pound dental chair affect the quality of your treatment compared to a 15,000 pound chair? So the guys at Braggate at the back will not like me saying this. We've had this a few times when we've been speaking, but the answer is true. If my patient is comfortable and they get the treatment that they need and it fits my budget at that price point, it's sensible. Why would I have to spend the extra money? I can upgrade at a later date once I've got some money coming into the bank and built my business. Not a problem. Second one is what does the data say? We have to have concrete data to make effective decision making, and this is one of the ones where dentists really lack the most. We don't do enough research, we're not taught how to do it, and we go off our guts, exactly like what we saw with that particular dentist in the quick fix fever, who was rushing to get out of where they were at. We have to understand what the data says, is it a good place to build my business or not? And how do I learn how to do that? How do I learn to do that research? Not just saying, oh, here's a building and it looks suitable, it's a nice, pretty high street, and it's an affluent area. Load of rubbish. We've got to put some figures behind it and some analytics. The final one is what is the worst case scenario? So, this is the biggest one out of all of them, and you have to ask yourself whatever decision process you go through when you're setting up your squat or building a little buying a practice, if it all went, you know, really, really belly up, what will happen afterwards? Can I survive? Can I sustain myself? And that question alone will help you sleep at night. Because the answer is, if yes, I can carry on, I can go and do something else, I can carry on working as an associate and I can make it work, great, not a problem. But if the answer is no, well then you have to have a serious think as to whether you should actually go into practice ownership. Should you be setting up a squat at that point? And the answer is if it's no, then no, you shouldn't be. Wait, build some cash, put your money into educational courses, go and learn a bigger clinical skill set, build that high value within yourself, and then do it. So a few laughs there. Got some A-Team uh fans in the room. So the second part of um, you know, what pillar of squat success is, like I said, the A-Team algorithm. So, like I said, this is one of the most fundamentally flawed things within dentistry in the UK at the moment. So the practice owners in the room will know this, you're nodding, I can see it in your face as you're smiling. And it is how do you build these teams and how do you get that from scratch? In my opinion, your business will not succeed unless you get this bit right, especially as a squat, because one bad hire can ruin your business. And you know, ultimately, when we're setting up a squat practice, it's an opportunity. You know, we view it as recruitment, but actually, we have an opportunity to get the best of the best of the best talent that there is in the industry. So most dentists view it as two months before I'm gonna open, I've got to go out. Oh shit, I need to find some people now to help me in my practice. Well, actually, if you put some thought behind it, how do I actually go and take the best people in the industry and bring them into my practice? Because that's what we need for our practices to survive going forwards. So it is an opportunity for us, and this is one of the biggest things that we can win at against corporates, bigger companies, mixed groups, um, mini-groups, because as independents, we can offer more. We have an opportunity to build the culture that we want, the teams we want, the people we want, and be passionate about that. Whereas the corporates can't do that. So, why are we not using that to our strengths? Because we should. It's a superpower for us to get the best of the best. So, everybody's been on Indeed, and you look at the ads, and if you read a typical ad on Indeed, that's exactly what it looks like. And if you were to read that in terms of dental marketing, it would read patients required must have teeth and money, or no teeth, and even more money. Please call for best price. We have instant appointments available, yeah. And that's what you'll see, 99% of what you look at on indeed. And you know, opportunity marketing is we're selling it as an opportunity, it's an opportunity for those people to come into our business. So, why do we not talk about it like that? Why do we not see this kind of stuff out there more? Why are our teams not talking about it? The people who rein our existing practices, if you're gonna be opening up a squat, they should be vouching for it and screaming from the rooftops about this. Your culture, your practice. But that's your opportunity. And if you're starting from scratch, in my experience, and I've learnt this the hard way, if you get somebody who is toxic into your practice, which I've experienced a couple of times in the first year or two of setting up my squat, it can be horrific. And that cost can be hundreds of thousands of pounds. Not a direct cost in terms of financially, but the drain on the other team members. So that one bad person can kill the rest of your team and your business off the back of that. So it's something that needs a lot more emphasis put on within dentistry.

Dr James, 23m 54s:

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Dr Bobby, 25m 46s:

The final one is the invisible waiting list. So, how do you build this list of patients? And it's what people think of as basically a lottery ticket because not everybody can do it, but it's not as difficult as what most people think. And when we look at marketing, we have traditional marketing versus community building. And what do we mean by that? So, with all forms of marketing, you have a trust timeline, you have something which is around authenticity, and the third point is around edutainment, building personal brand. Just out of interest, how many people in this room have personal brands on social media and use it actively for their dentistry? Put your hands up, everybody, yeah? Not potentially, yeah, no, but it's fine. Yeah, uh, yeah. Uh well you do, put your hand up. Anybody else? Alright, so let me ask it in another way, then why not? Because the most successful people we've had in squat success who've done up to two million pounds in revenue in year one have actually spent zero pounds on marketing because they've had such strong personal brands bringing their own patients in. You can't build that overnight, which is why this exists. However, the question is why would you not do it? What's stopping you? That that's an open question. Somebody answer before I pick on people. Confidence, yeah, that's one. Yeah. Yeah. What else?Consistency.Consistency is important. Time. Time, yeah, yeah. All good all good answers. And do you want to know what the truth is, the answer? So I'll come back to what do you want to go first?

Dr James, 27m 43s:

I think the thing that makes social media work is when you know when you realize what your voice is, what your values are.

Dr Bobby, 27m 50s:

Yep.

Dr James, 27m 51s:

Know your values and your voice is what comes over time.

Dr Bobby, 27m 56s:

Comes over time, but confidence only comes when you start. It doesn't happen overnight. So if I put it in a different perspective, every single one of you is sat in this room because I have a form of personal brand. So you've all heard of me, you've seen me somewhere, most likely across different platforms, which is why you've come today. But wouldn't you want to have a room full of patients like this if you could do that for yourself? Yes, exactly. Yeah, it's difficult. I know, I get that. Uh, but the answer is you have to start. And you know, one of the things we do in squat success is we actually force people to do this. The reason why is not so much because, you know, from the business perspective, but from the confidence side, and the other perspective on that is, you know, with the confidence side of things, is when you're gonna run your own business and you're gonna be setting up a squat from scratch, you have no choice but to be out there. You have to be in the public domain. Your face has to be out there, people have to know who you are, otherwise, how are they gonna find you? And if you don't have the confidence or the ability to be able to do that, you're gonna struggle with all the other challenges that come off the back of that because the world is changing in a very, very rapid way at the moment. So it's just something to you know bear in mind going forwards. But the key thing with it is it builds trust more than anything. So you can be a faceless corporate or you can be an independent who builds trust. Patients want to know who the dentist is, they want to see your content, they want to follow your content, they want to know what your values are, they want to know everything about you. That's why they're gonna buy from you. And coming back to that point around social media, and this is the key thing with it, because this is what most people think. People think that if I'm on social media, building your personal brand is about becoming an influencer, and it's not, it's nothing to do with that, it's about letting potential patients see who we are as humans, we're not machines, and they like to see that. And the dentists who do the most successful in squat success are the people who can actually get this across to their patients on big platforms. And it's a it's a big, big, big thing, and you can't understate it. And it's difficult to build a business in today's world without doing that.