Dentists Who Invest

Podcast Episode

Full Transcript

Dr James: 

Hey everyone, welcome back to the DDentists who Invest podcast. Super interesting podcast today because I’m joined by a young man. I say young man but he’s a year older than me, but we’re both young, At least I think we are. Anyway, we’re still clinging on to our youth, right? Because I’m 31 and you’re 32, Harry.

Dr Harry: 

We’re not clinging. We’re not clinging.

Dr James: 

Yeah, we’re comfortably in our youth. Yeah, I like that better. I like that better man, but yes, anyway, joined by my good friend, Harry Gill, who’s going to share his super interesting story on how he managed to get practice finance through a slightly unconventional route than not a lot of us are aware about. Harry, my friend and fellow podcaster, you’re sat in your podcast studio right now. How are you?

Dr Harry: 

I’m good mate. Thank you for having me on. I really appreciate it.

Dr James: 

Oh, dude, it’s my pleasure, my pleasure, my friends, I restart too, because I saw you on Instagram as the practice blueprint, the squat practice blueprint.

Dr Harry: 

Yeah, yeah.

Dr James: 

And I thought to myself that’s really interesting, because I knew you were young and I knew you’d created your own dental practice. But not only have you done that, you’d created a course or a well, a blueprint, quite literally, that that others could follow to set up your own practice, which I thought was interesting and I really really wanted to get you on to share your story. So maybe it might be nice, on that note, maybe it might be nice if you told all of the guests just a little bit about who you are, just as a bit of an intro, and then we’ll get into the nitty gritty about your dental practice and your unconventional route to finance. Keep dangling the cart for everybody, but it is.

Dr Harry: 

So I’m Harry Gill. As James has mentioned, I qualified from Newcastle University, bds 2014, and moved down to West Yorkshire by Apprentice Dance really, when they just centralised that process of the VT thing. So we ended up in the Leeds area, I ended up in Ilkley, and then one thing led to another milestone implant course in 2017, which really changed my perspective on dentistry and my enthusiasm for the career. And then, after that, you know, opened own squat practice in May 21, now May 2021.

Dr James: 

Yeah, and I’m actually glad that you said that, because this is something that we touched upon prior to what we spoke today, which was that you weren’t always super enthusiastic about dentistry and now you’ve got your own dental practice, and that’s a really cool thing that we should just mention right now, because there’ll be lots of people out there who feel that way, you know, so maybe it might be nice just to delve into that a little more, because you told me in dental school you were never enthusiastic about it right.

Dr Harry: 

Yeah, I mean I failed first year. And the reason I failed first year is because I literally did no work. I had no motivation at all to do it, none. And I failed. The reset in the summer and resetting the whole year again right. And I only reset the whole year because my family convinced me to right, because I just wanted to leave. I was done, right. So that was kind of a little window into my dental school experience. I was fighting it all the way through. I’m glad in retrospect that I did qualify as a dentist. But even in VT, I remember saying to my friends like, literally, I was in a group of VT students who were buzzing about being dentists and I was saying to them all I don’t see myself doing this for more than a year, I’m going to be out. So I think what changed for me was I had children quite young comparatively, so my daughter arrived when I was 25. So that puts you in a situation where you need to pay the bills and you’ve got real adult problems to deal with, so you don’t have luxuries such as existential crisis about your career path. So I kind of had to do it and then, thankfully, like I said, 2017, my practice manager literally said to me would you be interested in doing an implant course? And I said yeah, maybe. And then I looked into it, did it and I kind of fell in love with it. So, yeah, that’s really allowed me to continue being a dentist. Implants, yeah.

Dr James: 

Here’s the thing, though. Like you know, what I never appreciated at the time, prior to my dental degree, was that five years is a huge flip in gambit. Okay, to find out that you potentially don’t like something. Obviously, what I’m referring to is the five years in university, yeah, but you know what? Your story had a happy ending right, which is great, but for you it was like six, seven years in limbo. That’s crazy, and the inspiring part is it shows you that if you keep going, there might be something there for you within the thing that you didn’t think, that you enjoyed Are you with me, I think.

Dr Harry: 

I think part of part of James is not being in resistance to it, but sometimes you have to accept that my life has led me in this direction and you’ve got a skill like we sometimes take this for granted, that we’ve picked up a skill that is quite unique and allows us to earn a degree of money that a lot of other careers don’t give you. Like, how many jobs can you walk out of uni and almost be guaranteed to get a job and be guaranteed to be paid straight out of uni? Around 30, 35 grand. There’s not many. There’s not many. So you’ve got to really like assess how I’m being so negative.

Dr James: 

Yeah, yeah, I’m sorry, we finished this then. Yeah, yeah, yeah no, yeah, that’s cool man and like, but here’s the thing you tried different things Right, and you know, put it like this right If we keep putting the same energy into our life, the same effort and doing the same things, we’re gonna get the same result. You know, and you kept going and going and going. You find implants, you find the thing that you love and then, by extension of that practice, ownership and that’s the whole. I mean podcast today, because when you told me about this story, I was like, wow, this needs a platform, a little bit like for the listeners of the, for avid listeners of the Podcast. I hope everybody is listening to Jimiil’s episode, which is gonna be like two, three episodes Before this one, depending on what time this gets released that but that guy is 28 and he owns three flipping dental practices and his energy is just phenomenal. I have never met someone so well. Actually, that’s not true. There are some people out there that are that excited to talk about what they do for a job, and to me there’s one of them and I love it and I just think it’s incredible right, and when I’m going with this is I just think it’s Really awesome that both you guys have found your groove. And yeah, just shout out to that episode for anybody hasn’t listened to it. It’s one of them the most the most downloads that any of the podcast has ever got. After seven days, we really went down a storm, but of course this episode is gonna be better. Build on it, right, harry, when we learn about Harry.

Dr Harry: 

Maybe, maybe it’s a jameel’s, a jameel’s a character, so if you haven’t listened to that, I would recommend you listening to it was it was a great podcast with him, for sure.

Dr James: 

No, it was good. It was good. So, yes, your story you told me off camera. It started. It started out. Your wife and you have developed an app over coven.

Dr Harry: 

Yeah. So in lockdown, obviously thinking about what to do not very good at doing nothing. So we started developing an app. It was actually her idea, because she used an app called fresher or something similar to that to book like spa appointments or something. Okay, we were like I wish there was something like this, a dentistry where you could just book, like straight into a dentist with an emergency or Invisalign consultation or whatever, and just do it straight through the application. So we built that and then we went through rounds of funding, which was very interesting it’s a bit of podcast in of itself outside of it, like but Long story short, eventually we did get funding from an angel group of investors and that’s where we met the investor that we ended up originally Going in with the new dental site. So complete. This is how it works, james. You don’t. You make moves and you start doing things in the real world. There’s almost like a cascade and that energy will end up somewhere you know. So you might not plan it to end up in owning a practice, but it ends up going in that direction.

Dr James: 

Yeah, well, this is the thing. That’s what I always say to people about business. That’s what I always say to people about business. It’s just, this is what I always say to people, like whenever they’re gonna start a business. It’s like I feel that, realistically, just like anything in this world, business is a skill, right, most things are skills, right. What’s the skill? Yeah, a skill is when you have the ability to recognize certain patterns and you can Employ or undertake certain behaviors, which makes makes you more likely to be able to obtain success from those circumstances. Right, don’t look that up in the dictionary, I just made that up, but that sounds like what a skill could be, right? Okay, and that’s fair enough, and basically you get better at anything by doing it. Okay, and you can only read so many books and learn, especially when it comes to this sort of thing, right, so most people will. Let’s say, it takes you like 20 30 hours of doing something to get a decent level of aptitude, maybe what you start seeing results. Okay, and let’s remember those first 20 30 hours. The games, as in how much you improve is really rapid, right, and then after that, it’s about incremental games. There’s a lot of sweat for much less return right? The thing about it is lots of people will spend like two, three hours waiting or delaying, spending that first hour To just gain the flipping skill. Are you with me? Yeah, you think right, and I get in businesses a little different, you know, because, depending on your business model, there might be capital that you put down. Yeah, I get that, there’s gonna be risk there as well. What I’m saying is that actually, if you have the opportunity and it’s burning in your heart to go and do something, I actually think that’s a huge reason to just go and pursue it, because you’ll make it work. Most things work out, but most of us operate out of fear and this the thing is just, it’s a human thing to do. It’s fine. You know, we all do that to a degree. I suppose all I’m doing is I’m pointing it out so that we have more awareness because, again, self-awareness is one of the best skills that you can have.

Dr Harry: 

Absolutely yeah. So just moving on from on the trajectory. So we had this private investor. Now he wasn’t putting up front capital at the time. What he was doing was putting his name and assets up Basically as a charge so that we could get the bank loan for the project. Now he was involved in the dental industry and had exited before From a business successfully and stuff so on paper looked like a really good partnership. However, as time passed I started to realize, as did my wife, that with those a real misalignment in terms of values between us and him. So that led to the difficult point where, you know, I talked to a few people and I said look, I don’t think this is gonna work long term. And they all said to me You’re better off dealing with this now, before you’ve opened the business and all this other stuff. So we literally had to unwind everything. So we already had bank loans in place, we already had all of the fact the practice bill that started were probably 35% of the way through and we literally had to unwind it all, which was incredibly stressful. So but I’m glad we did it, because when you go into partnership with someone in a business, if you recognize that there is a misalignment in vision and values and how things are going to be done. That needs to be sorted out quick. So it was extraordinarily stressful because you’re faced with the bank possibly pursuing your assets. You know, to recover this because of this breakdown and coming after, you don’t really know what’s gonna happen in that situation. So I was in a situation where I had to find Investors with capital to put in, like I was forced to, you know. So I also nearly lost the lease as well, because he was one of the his assets, of one of the securities. On this. Getting the lease because, remember, associates between 20 and 21, we weren’t earning as much as we had been before because we had the lockdown period and I was basically doing an emergency dentistry for two or three months and finishing off implant cases and then then it started to boom after. So my accounts personally and the wife’s account accounts didn’t look as good as they had done. So you’re in a position where and this is another one where you’ve got the stress of saying, look, I need to make this happen and I’ve got about three weeks to do it because the practice fit is about to walk off the job Right and you just have to make it happen. So what we did was a very thorough business plan, extremely thorough. We tried going down the bank loan route. It wasn’t working so we had to then cold pitch to people. So this is an example of my first investor. My daughter goes to a private school and at these private school parties you know the kids parties that you go to you end up talking to the other parents. And then one of the other parents I kind of got on with quite well at the time so I literally just rang him and I said I’ve got a business proposition for you. And then we met the next day in this half built dental practice with the shutters down and had a full afternoon just talking in this building site about what my vision was for the business and why I’d be a good investment and kind of broad terms to start off with. And then that ended up moving in the direction of actually getting actual upfront capital investment. So yeah, that was a big portion of the story really Trying to pull it out of the bag.

Dr James: 

Just sit. When your backs against the wall, you make it work right.

Dr Harry: 

Yeah, it is extremely stressful. I don’t want other people to have to go through that, you know so that’s why, when I’m teaching the course, I do have quite a quite a prescriptive way of doing it and I want it to be reproducible and I want to try and decrease the stress, because I wouldn’t really wish that kind of stress on anyone, because it was really harrowing as an experience. But I’ve definitely learned a hell of a lot from it. You know, and pitching pitching cold, you know, and selling someone on a dream If you do not believe in your vision and you don’t have clarity on what you’re trying to do, how can you expect someone else to buy in literally buy into a business that doesn’t exist? You know, this is what I talked about. You have to fully believe in it and you have to understand the numbers and ideally, as an associate, you need to be able to back those numbers up. If you’ve not generated decent gross revenue, how are you going to go to a private investor and say, oh, I’m going to do this, this and this, and they’re going to say they’re not mugs. They’ll say to you well, where’s the proof? You know, so you need to. In my situation, I had to have been in the situation, as did my wife, that we had a track record of high grossing numbers in dentistry already, thankfully. Otherwise it would have been a non-starter from a private investor’s perspective.

Dr James: 

That’s interesting. So this, it was a gyro girl, yeah a dude.

Dr Harry: 

Yeah, it was a dude.

Dr James: 

Yeah, so his background was in any way. Was it dental?

Dr Harry: 

No, no, no, okay, Right, wow, not at all. He’s just a. He run a food company that supplied restaurants with the food that they use, and obviously then he ended up exiting from that with his brother, and then they had quite a bit of money in there to just become serial investors effectively.

Dr James: 

That’s cool as hell. That’s really cool. And is it something? Did he do venture capital-ish things before? Were you very much the first person?

Dr Harry: 

He’s done investments where he’s put a money upfront and then like a chain of restaurants he did as well before, so he’s used to going to, but generally it’s been in the food industry and the restaurants and stuff. So we were his first foray into medical like into healthcare, I believe. Yeah.

Dr James: 

Right, right, right, okay, okay, okay, Cool. So this conversation, the private funding that came for your dental practice, it came about through, you know, like a meet and greet, effectively, or you brush shoulders at a party, right, yeah, here’s my question. Right, for the people out there who are thinking about starting their own dental practice or will do one day, right, do you think that? What would you? What would you say to those people in terms, if you could look in the rear view mirror and think to yourself this went well, I would have changed this, or these are the conditions that made things go right, that meant that I was able to get this private funding. Or is there a formula? Or do you just put it on a blind lock?

Dr Harry: 

So I believe that I believe in serendipity. Like you, you do, you do make some of your own look. So if you’re in a situation where you’re a kid’s party and you can kind of say, right, I can’t really be bothered with being here on mass Sunday afternoon, right, and not talk to anyone and be a bit antisocial, it’s an example of having networking abilities and being able to talk to people and being cow’s mic and being able to engage and build rapport, which we should all be able to do, because we’re all dentists, right. So if you’re able to do that and build these personal connections and this is something private investors will always say they mainly invest in the person. So if they like you and you’re conscientious in the way that you’re approaching your business and you have got a track record within the industry so that you’ve proven ground already that you can generate decent figures, why not? Like you know, why wouldn’t they? You know, if you’ve presented that deal because, remember, it’s a deal Like, just think about it would I invest in this if I had the capital? And if the answer is no, you need to go and work on your business plan and you need to be able to say with confidence. You’re not begging someone for money. You’re presenting them with an opportunity to invest, and private investors have only got limited amount of places that they can put their money Right. There’s a lot of people out there like this, trust me, there’s plenty of implant dentists that will listen to you and there’s plenty of high grossing dentists out there who know those patients, who will not bat an eyelid about spending 20 or 30 grand on the teeth. Right, so that we know there’s a lot of money out there. Right? So it’s a case of there’s a lot of money out there. You just need to know how the investor thinks and understand their thinking and what decisions they will make. So if you understand that to some degree, then you’ve got a good shot of being able to pitch to someone and just say, right, here’s the proposition, here’s the cold numbers, here’s what I’m looking to do and here is how I’m going to make it attractive for you in terms of percentage equity stake, in terms of how it’s are we going to just take it as an equity? Are we going to pay you back over a certain period of time to show goodwill and allow you to attain a certain percentage afterwards? Do you know what I mean there’s a lot of things that you can do to make a deal very attractive to investors.

Dr James: 

Well, I think there’s a life lesson in there, really, and the life lesson is wherever you go, just be friendly and talk to lots of people, because you have no idea who you’re talking to. And when it comes to, when it comes from a place of genuinely just wanting to get to know that person, those genuine connections display who you really are and display a lot about your ethos, which actually make you attractive as an investment as well, if you think about it.

Dr Harry: 

Absolutely, because if they think that you’re a good person, then they’re going to be more inclined to invest in you. So if a project is exciting and they can see that you have a vape and an excitement for what you’re doing and a passion for what you’re doing and a real belief, which I did I almost have like a religious belief in New Dental and the brand we’ve created. You know what I mean Like it is a passion project as well to ensure that the patients experience a certain high end level of care that they’re not going to get anywhere else. And once that comes across and it’s genuine, why wouldn’t you invest? Because right now you look at the property market, not many, a lot of investors the residential property investors looking to get out of the residential property market because of these regulations that are coming in, these caps on rents. You know the ability for a bank to then give you loans when a tenant now has way more power than they used to have. It’s decreasing the appetite for investors to go into residential property. So they are looking for different avenues and everyone knows because the data is out there. Just go on the Christian Co General Market Review for every report, for every year and you’ve got cold hard data there to show investors there’s private equity interests in our industry more than loads of other industries, and our industry performed very well during the pandemic as well. On paper, so it’s a safe bet.

Dr James: 

That’s cool, because the traditional route is, of course, finance right, where you go to the bank or broker.

Dr Harry: 

Yeah. Broker who go to banks yeah.

Dr James: 

Why does that traditional route look? Just quickly, Because I know that this is what most people this is their frame of reference, right? And me? Me, I’ve never been through it and I know that maybe, perhaps you’re in the same boat as me. You’ll probably have more of an idea.

Dr Harry: 

No, we went like I said, we went through the bank loan thing originally.

Dr James: 

Oh, okay, well, there you go.

Dr Harry: 

The way it works is usually you’ll have a broker who will help you do it and they’ll have contacts in different banks. Now, the first caveat to everything is not everyone’s got a multimillionaire who they aim on the bank loan to help them get it. The reality is that banks don’t like startup dental practices. Oh, they don’t like them, right. There’s probably only one main lender who will actually finance you at the minute for a squat dental practice, and the reason is because it is a massive risk. They are much more likely and this is why the conversation with Jamil was so interesting. James is that he did something where he bought a practice with a small NHS contract, so it’s an existing practice that’s just got a small NHS contract, performing suboptimally. It’s way easier to get a bank loan for a site like that than it is for a cold squat practice, because you’ve never proven anything. It’s all on you as the person who’s starting your dentist. You’re not a businessman, right, and the banks will see you as a risk, so why would they do it? And also, the interest rates right now are pretty prohibitive. Man Like you’re talking what 7%? That’s high. You know so what I. One thing I say in my course is, every month you start underneath the sea, underneath the ocean just think about the ocean right. Every month you start underneath the water. How much you owe the bank is how deep you are under the water and you feel that pressure and your first job is just to get to sea level right, so you’re not drowning as a business. And then you’re looking to go beyond that Now. If your bank loan and your interest rates are super high, that means your payments are going to be higher and that means the pressure that you’re going to experience is going to be a lot higher as well, and that means that your quality of life will massively suffer. So it’s very important to know this going in, because every bit of your overheads can eat away at your sleep and your quality of life and your stress to a point where you just unrecognizable as a person. You know so, having an awareness 7% a lot. You know that’s a lot of interest, obviously religious background and stuff. I’m not a massive fan of interest anyway. So I’m happy I went down the road of private investors. That’s a cool thing. But what I’d also say is there might be a lot of dentists who listen to you, because it’s dentists who invest, right? Yeah, they’re probably not dentists with some excess capital, right? So if you’ve got these 28, 29, 30 year old dentists who’ve got the fire in the belly to go open practices and you can’t be bothered anymore, why not do a deal? Do you know what I mean? Do a deal with one of them and say look, I could put my money into property. What’s my gross yield going to be on a property right now? Do you know what I mean? Not great because of how high the interest rates are. So why not put a bit of money into some talented dentists who’s not got the capital to starve themselves fully but has got that passion and that fire in their belly to go and do it?

Dr James: 

Yeah, 100% I agree. And here is something else that just popped into my head when you were talking and I was just thinking to myself when it comes to this is something I wanted to ask you. When it comes, obviously you’ve got the benefits in terms of you’ve not got this repayment on the debt and the service and cost, which is the interest. Yeah, aside from that, why else do you believe that this path is beneficial for those that are out there? There must be other perks, right?

Dr Harry: 

Yeah, I mean the biggest thing is you’ve got people who are experienced business owners and successful entrepreneurs behind you, so they have a phone call away, so, and you’ve also got the access to more funds. If you prove yourself, then why not open practice number two, why not open practice number three? And then it becomes you’ll be in a leveraged position because you’ll be like, right, this is the percentage split we agreed. First time You’ve seen me perform, you’ve seen my track record In practice number two and practice number three. I want a better percentage split. And then you’ve got your bank with no interest payments, and you’ve got a situation where investors do not run in circles by themselves. They also have access to other investors, right, and they all have contacts. So if one of them says, hey, this is done well, they’ll be telling their friends, they’ll be telling their family, right, and then it can become a positive snowball for you. So that’s one massive benefit. And another massive thing for me is a weigh in. A lot of people are looking for a weigh in right now. Right, so they buy an existing practice. Jami, you mentioned this. You buy an existing practice. I say 1 million, 1.5 million. How much upside can you get on that. You know how much are you going to grow and optimize that business beyond 1.5 million in valuation. So you’re paying the bank debt every month. So accumulatively you’ve paid 1.5, but you’ll end up paying a lot more with interest by the time you’ve finished the payment. So what’s your upside on the exit? Right, and this is what I talk about with Scott Practices asymmetry to the upside. You put in a low amount of capital and in my case, you get other people to put their capital and you create a business that can be worth in excess of 1.5 to 2 million, which is what we’ve done in 18 months. Right, not everyone will be able to do that, but that’s what we’ve done. So I can say that that’s asymmetry to the upside, because then I’ve got a situation where the initial capital investment wasn’t even me, but let’s say it was 300K or whatever, and now the business is worth 1.2, 1.5 million more than that initial investment. And when else can you say that’s going to happen if you buy an existing practice? Really Not very often. So that’s another pro I would say.

Dr James: 

That’s cool, man, that’s awesome. You know what? There’ll be a ton of people out there thinking to themselves well, that’s all well and good for you, harry, you bumped into someone, so at that kid’s party, right. And then I say, and that’s fine. And you know what it is the thing, and not that I agree with that opinion, harry, because here’s the thing. What goes on behind the scenes is you just socialize with people and put yourself out there and after a while it’s like a bit of a numbers game You’re going to bump into someone at some stage, you know what I say sometimes in the religion is that God will present people with blessings, and some people don’t see it Right.

Dr Harry: 

So someone could say to me that kid’s party thing. But would you have picked up the phone and call them and ask the question? So that’s the point is there may be these people around you. You’ve just never switched that part of your brain on to say there’s an opportunity here.

Dr James: 

I agree, that happens all the time. Like you know, here’s an amazing mindset not to like, because I do wanna delve into this just a little bit more Okay, but here’s an amazing mindset and this is one that serves me really, really, really well. You know, if something comes to me and I immediately perceive this as something that’s gonna be a hindrance or a hurdle, right, you know what I started doing, maybe about like a year and a half ago. I started thinking to myself okay, james, instead of perceiving that as an issue, perceive it as something that you have yet to see the opportunity in.

Dr Harry: 

Yeah, that’s a good way of looking at it. Yeah.

Dr James: 

And it’s crazy, honestly. I promise you that 99% of the time, whatever you thought was, as soon as you start feeling that frustration that you’ve just confronted a hurdle right, recognize that and pause and think actually this is an opportunity I just haven’t saw, I haven’t seen, I haven’t realized how that was gonna serve me. Yet right, and I promise you, when you have that mindset, you’ll start looking at it with a different pair of eyes and 99.9% of the time, you’ll find a way to make it work for you.

Dr Harry: 

And look, let’s be real, right, I completely agree with you. But in terms of the investor thing and finding it and reproducing this strategy in your real life, let’s be honest, right, we’re all dentists who are listening. Most of the people that listen to this are gonna be dentists. Most of you are gonna know some affluent people. Yeah, yeah, right, it’s not rocket science. Even in the career around you, you will meet people who have got excess capital. Right, it’s just about knowing how to present a deal and pitch that deal in the right way in order to make it look attractive, because you can say to them there’s dental beauty, there’s Coliseum, there’s Riverside, there’s Dentex, there’s so much private equity money flooding the dental market. One thing I can offer you more than anything else is if you buy a property today and I said to you sell it in four years time, how much more are you gonna make? Right? But I can safely say to you, if I made this practice a success, you put 300K in. It could be worth 1.5 million, right, and that’s because of the private equity. And people see the private equity as a negative because it’s inflated prices for dentists. I see it as a massive positive, and that’s exactly what you’re talking about Framing of the opportunity right, and I see it as a massive positive because it allows us to have the opportunity to exit for way more than we would have.

Dr James: 

Love it, love it. You know, that’s cool and that leads me on too. If you could just summarize, let’s say you could go back and talk to yourself four years ago. Five years ago, you could put a hand on that older version of yourself shoulder and say, Harry, these are the things that you need to do to maximize your odds of creating a successful dental practice, because there’ll be a lot of people out there who feel that way. What would you say?

Dr Harry: 

That’s a tough one, tough I mean five years ago me probably would have said do one, I don’t want to open a dental practice, oh, okay. You know what I mean, but I think one basic thing is to always be learning Right. So I’m like this anyway. But if I was given advice to anyone five years younger or earlier on in my career, I’d always say keep that part of enthusiasm in your brain from learning from your assets around you. There’s so many people and there’s so many giving people in the industry as well, who you can access and learn from, and so many mentors that will just give you time you know and accessing these people and really making use of your time to tap into those people and really learn what you can and build those relationships, and that will definitely yield results as you get older.

Dr James: 

Amazing, that’s awesome. And what about if we were to take that one step further and speak to someone who’s thinking about on a dental practice and going down this route? Would you say it’s just about networking.

Dr Harry: 

Networking is a big part of it, because you understand different business models, different approaches, what’s best for you. You need to understand the business a bit more. So invest the time to really think about successful practices and talk to these people and try to see, right, what was your business model? Or you don’t even have to ask them. If you work in a practice, you’d be able to figure it out. You know and work at a few different places. So I mean that’s why I did it. Then you start seeing these gaps, you start seeing holes and you start thinking about how can I fill these niche that I’m starting to picture together and stitch together in my mind, and that’s through thinking about this stuff. So a lot of people don’t talk about that. I know if you want to do something, you need to kind of live it right. It needs to be something that you are your mind, your bandwidth and your back of your mind. You’re kind of making these kind of deductions and it will lead to you finding a niche within which to operate and then you can capitalize on that niche and really thrive with your business, because it’s always good if you can find a gap in the market, especially in your locality.

Dr James: 

Awesome, my man. Thank you for that. And you know what? How interesting is that Somebody’s been through it and walked in those shoes. We’re coming up to the 40 minute mark and that sadly means we’re coming towards the end of this podcast. I know I’ve had so much fun and it’s been definitely interesting to listen to Harry. One final thing, one final question from the man who’s achieved it himself. If you were hypothetically hypothetically, there’ll be people out there that are listening to this podcast that are thinking themselves well, I’m just teetering on the brink of starting my own dental practice. Should I do it? Should I do it? Should I wait? Is 2023 gonna be the year of the credit crunch Because the economic situation is looking so gloomy? Should I do it? Should I take the leap? What would you say to anybody out there who’s got that mindset, who feels that way?

Dr Harry: 

I’d say this, and I’ve said this to people who are teetering on the brink of joining my course or not. And there was one fella in particular in Scotland and he said to me it’s not the best time to open a practice. And I said to him when’s the best time? How do you know what the situation is going to be in the world in three years’ time? Is it going to be better? No, because the way I look at it is this how long of private equity are we going to take this for granted that there’s private equity interest in dentistry? I actually feel we’re in the perfect time. We’ve got data to support that. They’ve got an appetite to invest in dental practices. If you can set up your squat dental practice and keep lean overheads and a lean start-up model and just steadily grow that over two or three year period, you know you’ve got an exit. You could make a situation where you’ve changed your family’s life because you’ve made this move. Now, who knows, in three to five years’ time if private equity is going to switch to something else. I want to pursue a different career or a different industry. Ai is bloody popping up, man. The world’s changing, you know, taking advantage of the interest of private equity now. Do it now.

Dr James: 

It is. You know what. This is coming from me, the finance guy. I think people see investing in stocks and bonds and in your ISO, et cetera, as the way of financial freedom. It is, you’ll get there one day, but will you make 1.5 million of wealth over the course of 18 months? No way in hell, because the average rate of appreciation is like 10%, which kind of alludes back to what you were saying about buying property, unless you’re some total whiz. Realistically, you’re taking, you’re trading well, you’re accepting the certainty that those assets will grow, but they’ll grow at a very slow rate. The only real way to generate a lot of wealth very fast is business. Now, what do we as dentists know? What is our primary thing that we understand in our educated, honest dentistry? If you know, business has to be your vehicle to achieve great wealth in the significant, very quick pace, speed of time, quite a very, very short space of time. Then, actually, when we take that and marry it to what we know already, there we go. Take it from me. That’s like the quickest way to generate wealth when you pull it off and when you do it correctly.

Dr Harry: 

But of course there’s going to be some no- there’s three key words as well I would say for these dentists is approach it with humility, have a conscientious approach and be passionate about the vision of the business you’re going to build. If you don’t have those three things, don’t bother doing it.

Dr James: 

We’re going to end right there. Thank you so much for your time, my friend. We’re going to talk about it soon. See you later.

Dr Harry: 

Thank you, see you, bye.

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