Full Transcript
Dr. James:
any minute. Here we go live and in the house, on the Dennis who invests Facebook group, we are super privileged to welcome this evening Dr Amen Rizvi, and we’re going to be talking about exactly what it says on the tin, exactly what the title of this live is, and that’s going to be about boss in multiple dental practice, isn’t that right, amen?
Dr. Aiman:
yes, it is. Hi everyone. This is Dr Amen Rizvi. Live with James Martin hmm, oh wow, amen.
Dr. James:
Who knew you said such a flair for hosting? You know, maybe you can’t take it from me. There we go, wow, wonderful, what you know what it’s a team. I know that we met each other absolutely loads, but you know what we lovely to do. We get a little bit of an intro about yourself because some people know you on the Dennis who invests audience. Some people have yet to meet you. It’d be great to bring everybody up to speed so I am actually an immigrant.
Dr. Aiman:
I, my husband and I we settled in England around 2009. We did our licensing exams. We started as associates, work for a few corporates, and well, working for the corporates made us realize that the best person to own a practice is actually a dentist hell yeah, preach it pushed us.
Dr. Aiman:
It really pushed us and it made us learn. So we are here and we owe it to those corporates really for pushing us to this point that now we are. The first practice we actually bought was to 2018 and the progression was very quick after that yes, 2018 yes yes okay so and, of course, the first one, and now, when I look back at it, I think it was relatively easy.
Dr. Aiman:
But now when I look at my life and running one, I think that was. I think the three practices do have their downs, but the the reward is amazing. I think it’s so rewarding, it’s. It’s something that it’s something that I always wanted to do. My husband knowing me, I was obsessed with this. Being an entrepreneur, coming from a family that my father was an industrialist and it always was at the back of my mind that I really wanted to run a practice and, yes, that’s it. So now we’re, we’ve got three and hoping to expand as much as we can really Holy guacamole.
Dr. James:
Well, hats off. And do you know what? You said something really interesting then. You said that looking back on it now, you feel like it’s straightforward. Once upon a time, a previous version of Amen, we definitely have said that right, because we had a lot of learning in front of us right Exactly.
Dr. James:
And it’s only when we learn we find it easy right? And you know why this podcast is so cool today? Because there’ll be so many people who, in that respective area of their life, whenever it comes to practice ownership well, they’ll feel exactly like how you did four or five years ago, irrespective of whether they’re 50, whether they’re 30, whether they’re 18, who the heck knows? The point is that that knowledge is in front of them and if we can expedite that journey hopefully it’ll be cooler than that by giving them the knowledge.
Dr. Aiman:
I know, and you know, what the biggest hurdle people think usually is the financing of it. Or would I be a great leader? Or can I be an entrepreneur? The basic problem is the mindset. The mindset has to change first. So basically it’s you the biggest hurdle. Is you no one else? When we took it upon ourselves to just get in there and go for it, it just started happening. It’s that rain thing. I always tell you, when you think about something too much, it happens. When you start focusing on something, it happens it generally does because it’s something positive your brain links you to. So exactly this is what happened to us and I would push anyone or everyone to do it. I know it’s not everyone’s thing, but who else is better to want to do it than to practice and dentist himself or herself?
Dr. James:
I think so, and do you know what I definitely don’t want to do too much talking on tonight’s live, because we’re going to learn from you.
Dr. James:
And to be honest, the listeners on the platform. They’ve heard my opinions on most things. I don’t want to bore them and I’m pretty sure I’m in danger of getting to that level pretty soon. So I definitely want to let you do most of the talking. But I can’t resist jumping in on the mindset thing just for two seconds.
Dr. James:
You know Cristiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi. What makes them able to say that they’re the best players in the world? They have evidence, right? Yes, but they had to go out there and create that evidence, right. They had to go and do those things to give themselves evidence. They didn’t become the best players in the world without any evidence. They had to create the evidence first. They had to go and do the thing, and it’s exactly like running dental practice, it’s exactly like running a business.
Dr. James:
Someone just doesn’t give it to you and you become the best person in the world. You have to create the evidence. What is the evidence? The evidence is taking the actions that give you the highest chance of eventually achieving that outcome. You have to put yourself out there. The clue’s already there. It’s got to be outside your comfort zone, and if you can’t see it like that from that perspective, well, that’s the mindset that we need right. That’s the mindset that we need to remind ourselves of every single day. If you want to be in the best in the world, you need to give yourself that evidence. And in order to create that evidence, you need to take action.
Dr. Aiman:
Exactly, and you get nothing in life unless and until you. You risk that you jump in into something that is outside your comfort zone. You take the risk. Everything has risk. You go in your car every day. That’s a risk. The driving is a risk, everything is a risk. So I think this is a calculated risk. Come on, business assets, everyone knows, is a good asset to have in the long run. So it is a calculated risk. It does take your time, but why not invest that time in yourself, in growing yourself, rather than growing someone else’s business? It’s just easy. It’s easy maps.
Dr. James:
Preach. You’re preaching to the choir over here and aiming on that exact journey that you were talking about, just Dan. This podcast is specifically entitled Bossing it With Multiple Practices. I’m really keen to focus on is that from single practice ownership to multiple practice ownership. And let’s touch upon the mindset thing for two seconds. When you get to the point where you have one function in business that’s doing well and profitable, that’s an achievement in and of itself. What gave you that hunger to take it to the next level and get another practice?
Dr. Aiman:
I think it’s the I like, the challenge, it is the adventure that, okay, we’ve done this. This looks great, we’ve got a plan, we’ve got a workbook. Let’s replicate it and do something into another business now. And, to be honest, we don’t. We like buying practices which need a lot of work on them. So it’s like getting in there from scratch and when I say scratch, it’s completely we get in there, we, we change the systems, we do everything from the scratch, because what’s the point of buying something that does not need improvement? So we get in there, we do all we can, and this is this, this, this is this thing that we have in ourselves, that we want to do something different. Let’s just go and do it again. And that’s exactly what has driven us in the last five years. And it keeps driving us again and again.
Dr. Aiman:
And I would say the first one is it’s a guinea pig, it’s. You make so many mistakes and you make disastrous mistakes. And let me tell you, I was very hard on myself self four years back, and whenever I used to make a mistake in the leadership role or something like a stupid decision I had to make for the practice, I was so hard on myself. But now I look back and I say, oh, I learned from that, so exactly. So I think the first one is always difficult.
Dr. Aiman:
The replication of the business to the next one or the one after is not as hard. It’s just the managing of a lot of staff, a lot of people. That’s the challenge you have, and to have that mindset that you have to have the same kind of ethos behind every practice. You can’t just have one that’s functioning differently and the other one that’s completely different. So of course you have staff swapping over. You’ve got recruitment of dentists that are trying to help you in other practices as well, so you can’t have something that’s completely different from each other. It all has to be the same. That’s the challenge.
Dr. James:
So creating an ethos that will cover you through from single practice to multiple practice, yeah, maybe like a business mantra or what’s the terminology? Like a set of values for the business. How did you go about that?
Dr. Aiman:
So basically, you do know about this. For us, our business plan is not a conventional business plan. It’s not like a usually dentist team up together or husband and wife dentist team up together by practices. What we decided not to be, it’s completely over to my husband. My husband had this idea as soon as we wanted to buy a practice. Let’s get the manager to be a shareholder as well. So she’s.
Dr. Aiman:
So that’s different. A big shout out to Maxine. She’s amazing. So she actually worked as a manager in a corporate and amazing lady she actually we met up and what she does for us no one can. She’s as invested in the business as us. So imagine having a person who’s a manager, who’s actually got a lot of knowledge on finance, who’s actually good in staffing but is invested in the business as much as you. So there’s one thing my father said to me when we were making this plan. He said it’s great that you’re adding a person in your business who would pick up every penny in your practice as it’s hers. So she would say with like it’s her money. So this is exactly what we did and it has worked for us. It has completely it’s a different setup.
Dr. Aiman:
A lot of people wouldn’t want it. They would want the entire cake and they would want to cherry on it. But come on, in the next 10 years or 15 years when I sell the practices, that share that went there has actually helped me right now to have a personal life, to maintain that personal life, to not be doing paperwork all the time or just some users task that the CQC has informed us about. So she handles what she can handle best. The delegation part is the key. So, from going from one practice to multiple practices, delegation is the key. If you can’t do that, I’m sorry. It’s not gonna be easy for you because you have to lose control somewhere. You have to lose control where it’s necessary. So I think that is the biggest advice I can give anyone is the delegation of it.
Dr. James:
Well, you know what? Two quick things on that. Everybody focuses on how they divide the pie up, and what I mean by that is how they divide the business up in terms of percentages and equity. What they forget is actually the biggest factor is how big is the pie in the first place? Be with me, exactly Because would you rather have 50% of 100K turnover or would you rather have like 10% of Let me do some math in my head here 50%? We’d rather have 10% of 1 million turnover, right, because even though these percentages are massively different, in the second example you’ve got 100K, whereas in the first example you still have 50K. So actually, how big the pie is blows everything else out of the water. That’s the first thing.
Dr. James:
And then the second thing is this what I’ve always noticed in business that the second I welcomed more brains into my business. They could just see things that I just didn’t have the bandwidth or time, oh my God. And it’s really hard to understand until you actually go through it. It’s really hard to appreciate until you’ve actually seen that happen and you don’t even yeah, you’ve given away equity, which is great, you know, and that’s really, really, really worked for you. And what I’ve said to other people is you don’t even necessarily have to do that. These can be coaches, these can be mentors, these can just be people who have maybe equity in another business that you own, but not necessarily the main one, because you’re still leveraging their brain power at that stage. It’s really cool. What I’m saying is it’s really good to be open and receptive to having more eyes and brains within your business.
Dr. Aiman:
It is. And, james, I would always say if I have an incentive for something, you would always do it. Yeah, it’s key. It’s key, it’s human nature. If you give, if you incentivize something, it would be done better. So why not give everyone an incentive? And this is our business plan. The staff gets incentivized, everyone gets incentivized. If you are doing better, you will receive a reward for it. So what happens is the rest of the staff looks at the one who’s performing well and is being rewarded. They just learn from it. It’s so easy. So it’s just something that you have to do. Really, we did learn with time, but this we had it from the start that we are going to do this.
Dr. James:
I think the carrot is stronger than the stick, like way stronger than the stick. It’s way more powerful motivator. But anyway, moving on, okay, cool. So definitely in your instance, equity sharing with the PM really, really, really helped. I can already hear people through the screen and I can already anticipate what people might say to me or what people might say to the single practice owners who are going to multiple practices, and they’ll say how do you have the time, because my time is already saturated even with single practices. How did you overcome that barrier, the time barrier, eman?
Dr. Aiman:
My delegation, my children are delegated as well.
Dr. Aiman:
I have someone in a nice way. In a nice way. So I have help for everything. So it’s a well run, completely well run system. I have to form that system so I’m spending quality time with my children. That necessarily doesn’t mean that I’m on there on every school pick up and drop off, it’s just I’m there. When at home with them, I make sure my personal life is not effective. I have a good social life as well and the growth of the business is still happening.
Dr. Aiman:
So when I’m in surgery doing my patients because I really like to be hands on in the business to see what’s happening so my husband and I we try to work in every practice that we have to just get a bit of you know, like if something wrong was happening we would know. So we just try to put our foot in every practice here and there, just go there for half a day, do some patients? Patients tell you a lot. You would know about the reception if you work in the practice for a day. So that helps us. But we are flexible as business owners. We can start at 10 and maybe back up at 30 that day. So that helps us, the flexibility helps us.
Dr. Aiman:
And while I’m doing all this, there is one person, as I said, my manager, looking at other businesses right now and telling me okay, you’ve got two more here. So she creates a list at the end of the day and tells us can you give us the decisions for all this? So we just go yes, no, no, yeah, I like this and it’s so, trust me, it is. We don’t even have the decisions, because we have a husband and wife relationship in this, so we don’t even make the decisions in front of each other. She knows us very well, so she knows there’s a contrast to an opinion, so she would come to me separately, go to him separately and then amalgamated and make, like you both said, this. And this is where the line is, where I think this is where we can meet in the middle. So it took us time for that, it took us a lot of time where we would discuss it in front of each other and have and there is this what you call a comfort zone where your husband and wife you would say, oh, please, please. I do not want to hear this from you, I want it this way, so, but that had to be, you know, a line had to be drawn. So she does that she does that. So this setup has worked for us, this entire delegation of things that we think could have taken a lot of time from us.
Dr. Aiman:
I am not sitting in the night and making a pacelift for a dentist or deciding how much private they have done. That is not. I’m not going to do that. I have someone doing that for me. So things like these, they take up time. Why do them? I’m not good at it anyways, so why would I want to do it?
Dr. Aiman:
So this is exactly where you have to draw a line in the business. This is exactly where you have to ask yourself is it really worth it? Is it really that this one hour I’ve come back home is this one hour where I’m looking at the CQC has asked me a few things and I have to do this? Is it really worth it? Should I be doing this right now? Can someone else who is literally not as highly skilled as me do the job and maybe do it better?
Dr. Aiman:
So this is where I think multiple practices going to as multiple practices helped us, because we’ve already formed these boundaries, these boundaries where we would not go beyond them. We know what we want and it should be a fun process. It’s not like I do not want to be that practice owner who’s literally dying at 67, sitting next to a dental chair and can’t even get up. They’re selling their practice and we have bought practices from people who are literally completely lose it.
Dr. Aiman:
Because imagine, you’re so alone as a practice owner if you are a single practice I mean, if you are an owner of a practice you’re alone and you don’t have a partner. You’re just in there alone. It gets really lonely. So you’ve got to make the right decisions. We bought it from those dentists and we were surprised. They had no idea what was happening outside. They were in their bubble. So you don’t want to be like that. You don’t want to be in a bubble, you don’t want to be alone. The only way you can grow in a business is expanding expanding not just the business itself, expanding your vision, expanding yourselves. Be ready for a change, be ready for evolution, evolve yourself. So that’s what I would give everyone an advice for Do not try to save money in things that do not matter Really. That’s it, you know what it’s huge.
Dr. James:
My insight is actually such a massive part of business and I feel like you know this comfort zone, the thing that we talked about earlier. We’ve already established that if you stay inside your comfort zone, we get exactly the same results. But what people don’t often realize is, by definition, to come outside of a comfort zone, to lean outside of a comfort zone, it feels uncomfortable. Most people are kind of simultaneously running away from that feeling, but they want the results.
Dr. James:
But what if we could just reframe that? Actually, that discomfort is us growing and getting closer and closer to our goals? Yes, what if we could just go inside our heads and say, actually, that feeling that I’m experiencing right now? I’ve been conditioned to think that that is not a positive thing, but actually, in the context of what my objective is, it’s precisely how I want to feel, because I know that I’m growing. That was massive for me. You know, when someone said that to me for the first time, I was like holy moly, I should actually be actively pursuing that feeling rather than running away from it as most of us are. We don’t even realize we’re doing it until we pointed out, until someone pointed out to us. At least, that was how it worked for me and that was a huge revelation.
Dr. James:
I really hope that was as powerful for everybody listening as it was for me. It was huge, particularly in business, because most of it is about perpetually pushing to the next level and the next level and the next level, to keep fresh, to keep innovative, all of those things. But listen, aiman, I like to keep these lives to around about the 20, 30 minute mark and I’m just conscious we’re coming up to that right as of now, as you speak To. What I’m curious to know just before we wrap up today to get the very most value out of this conversation, to give the very most value to the listeners is if you could pick three of the biggest lessons that allowed you the biggest revelations, or the biggest things that you feel contributed towards your success as a multiple practice owner. What would you say those things are? I have a feeling that building a good team and delegating is going to be in that top three somewhere.
Dr. Aiman:
Yeah, and then delegating, building a great team, not always thinking that you’re right. Being a good leader yes, not trying to clone yourself. That’s the basic thing. Oh my God. I started as a practice owner and I thought oh, why is this person not working like me? You are wrong, you shouldn’t work like this. No, that’s a different person. Come together, they can’t become you. So that’s what I would advise you, because I made that mistake. As soon as I started, I was like, oh my God you don’t even know how to hold that pen properly?
Dr. Aiman:
What are you doing? How do you put that blue tag on there? Do you get it? It’s small, pink like these. Try to clone yourself.
Dr. James:
I’m just laughing because I feel like when you were saying that just then, that definitely happened in the past. It sounds too authentic. I feel like that.
Dr. Aiman:
It is.
Dr. James:
Completely authentic.
Dr. Aiman:
And then it took me a while to get away from that feeling that, oh no, everyone is different in the world and they can’t be just like you. Perfectionism is, of course, good to seek perfectionism, but it doesn’t happen because these are human beings involved. So you can’t just have that perfect scenario where everything is amazing and everything is perfect. No, I think, just go with the flow. It’s just, every day has a different challenge. As a practice owner, you would start your day with a call saying that, oh, this has happened. The boiler is not working. Everything is your problem, isn’t it? So no problem is a big problem. I think it’s every day. It’s going to happen. It’s going to happen. Your problems are going to start, as a practice owner, as soon as you enter your building, because it’s your problem, it’s your business. But think about the end, the reward. It’s great.
Dr. Aiman:
So, delegation, not cloning yourself, giving people some benefit of the doubt, because I didn’t. Yes, one very important thing to, actually, I would say, people who don’t work with you. Well, as an entrepreneur, you have this intuition that someone who you’ve hired is not good for the business. Nine out of 10 times that person will not be good. So go with that Do not linger people, because I’ve done that and that has affected me personally to linger someone on. So I would say just try to form a team which is very like-minded, otherwise that one person can affect you. That’s it. And the last and not the least, is the lows in running a business can be very low, but the highs are higher, so always remember that.
Dr. James:
Zing. What an amazing line to end this podcast on. That’s where the hair is in the back of my neck, stand up, emin, because the highs are flipping high, and that’s what keeps us going. Emin, do you know what? You’ve actually got some love here in the comments from your staff members, so that’s what makes me know that you’ve definitely built a good team. They’re even on here tonight cheering you on.
Dr. Aiman:
I know I love them. They are the best.
Dr. James:
That’s cool, that’s cool, awesome, all right. Well, listen, emin, I think we definitely owe a big thanks to you from the Denysund Invest audience for giving up some of your Tuesday evenings. So I’m going to clap on behalf of the Denysund Invest audience. Feel free to join in at home. Everybody, everybody who’s watching, clap for Dr Em for giving up for Tuesday evening to be with us tonight and also to share her wisdom, which was hard earned over many years of ups and downs, trial and error and graft. And we’ve just got the little distillation right there at the end of the really good part. So we want to thank you for that, emin, because you’ve definitely expedited some people’s journey tonight. Emin, once again, thanks so much for giving up some of your time this Tuesday evening. I’m sure that you and I will speak again very soon and I’m all ready to come back to the next podcast episode that we’re going to do together. Much love.
Dr. Aiman:
Much love, thanks, bye.