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Think differently

Many things are going on at the moment; it's f*ck*ng mental.

There are job interviews and tonnes of business development and massive stuff within the practice and opportunities outside, but one of the biggest things on the horizon is the fact that the practice is full, and we need to consider our capacity and moving forwards to increase that capacity.

This is one of the most common stories in dentistry outside of the NHS at the minute (NHS dentistry has no capacity but a really limited ability to increase it).

Private dentistry has no capacity, and people are scrambling to increase it, putting surgeries into staff rooms and sheds in the back garden and anywhere else if you speak to the dental fit-out companies.

We've done this before.

We were running basically a 2.5 surgery practice (we call surgeries treatment rooms) in the bungalow and we were turning over more than £2 million a year (2.4 million at the best times) in that small space.

We absolutely suffocated there, and we had to move, and we knew for some years before we had the ability to move that the suffocation was terrible and the only mechanism we had to make it better was to increase prices.

And so, we moved to this Taj Mahal, all singing, all dancing practice and within three years it's full, and we need more space.

We had factored in the opportunity to build another one of these buildings next door when we built the three buildings on the site in the first place and now, we're in the stage of getting towards building that and finalising designs and how we're going to do that.

When we did this the last time, the plan was to go really conventional on everything in the building to make it as safe as possible on chairs and x-rays and all that jazz until I realised, we couldn't do that, and we shouldn't do that, and we mustn't do that.

For our place to stand out and to have a unique selling point and to be different, we have to think differently.

And so, we went down a different route of dental supply to Planmeca at that stage and in the discussions with them, we were absolutely blown away by their ethos and their service and the way they go about their business.

I went to Helsinki to see our future dental chairs being built, and I remember chatting to one of the guys on the line who was building one of the chairs, which may have come to my practice just to find out how invested he was in the work that he did and how the company looked after him.

We saw CBCT machines being made, and we met lots of the product leads in different areas and saw some fantastic R and D projects that might never see the light.

I was hooked, and the relationship was built, and the chairs went into the practice.

Nothing is perfect. I'm not going to tell you that we've never, ever had a problem with anything Planmeca did. 

But we've had a problem with everything everybody did, including what we did, because this is complicated.

I can tell you, though, that through Planmeca and DB Dental, they fixed every little thing we ever asked them to do.

We never had a problem; their service is incredible.

But more than that, the design of the chairs every single day sparks comments from patients and positivity from patients, and the guys who come here love what we have and love what we do with the equipment that we have chosen.

I've told this story many times, but we planned to put the spongy, really comfortable memory foam type upholstery on all of the chairs, but we ran out of money (the project was that hard), and so, in the end, it only went on one chair in the big surgery room.

Every single day people comment about that chair, how it's the most comfortable chair they've ever sat in, and how it's totally different from anything else.

We're now reupholstering the other five chairs in the building to make sure they're the same as that.

And so, if you're thinking about putting a chair into your surgery, CBCT or any of that jazz that so many people are looking at. You're thinking 'Well, I'm not going to have that because I could have something which is 15 pence cheaper in the long run or this or that or the other', I'm going to ask you to think differently and at least to look, because when we did, it turned out to be one of the best decisions we ever made.

We have a relationship with Planmeca; they help us in education, but we only do that because we believe it, not because they buy it.

By Colin Campbell on 02/05/23 18:00