How Independent Dental Practices Can Win In A High-Cost Market

Your practice can feel busy and still be going backwards financially. That is the uncomfortable truth we tackle with zero doom-mongering and zero sales pitch, just straight talk from two people who have spent decades inside UK dental businesses. We start with the number too many owners do not know: operating costs per utilised surgery per day. When that figure jumps and your fee list stays mostly the same, margin erosion becomes inevitable, morale dips, and you end up working harder for less.

We dig into why dental pricing often lags behind real-world inflation: fear of patient pushback, habit, and the temptation to copy what others charge locally. Then we map out a practical pricing strategy for independent and owner-managed practices, including how to separate sensitive prices (plan fees, check-ups, hygiene) from non-sensitive items, why Invisalign and implants behave like commodities, and where incremental increases can add up fast without damaging trust. The thread running through it all is value: patients will pay when the experience, communication and clinical confidence are clear.

Finally, we talk about the risk of “flying blind” in 2026. If you only discover performance at year end, you cannot steer. We share the core KPIs we’d want on your dashboard: chair utilisation, profitability by fee earner, EBITDA for practice valuation, plus recall rate and case acceptance so you can grow sustainably without endless new patient churn. If you want your practice to survive and prosper through uncertainty, subscribe, share this with a colleague, and leave a review with the question you want us to answer next.

If you require any help, don't hesitate to reach out to the Samera team at www.samera.co.uk. We are all here to help you!

Thank you,

The Samera Team

Transcript

Heatwave Hellos And Big Experience

Arun 0:00

Good afternoon, everybody. On a sweltering hot day in June, I think everyone is sweating. Where I'm down here in Guildford. And well, how about you, Chris? How are you doing up there in the north?

Chris 0:10

Often up in the northwest of England that we can say that the temperature is 30 degrees and it's absolutely sweltering. So, quite frankly, I'm enjoying the moment.

Arun 0:21

Well, for those who don't know Chris, and I'm sure virtually the whole UK dental industry knows Chris. You've been around, I won't say a rod, probably over 30 years in the sector, I imagine. Is that right? Maybe maybe more it's rather interesting.

Chris 0:33

The very first dentist who I ever spoke to professionally was in July 1993. So I'm going to claim 33 years of uh being in conversation with dentists about their businesses. Uh, but the other interesting observation about that is that although my first dentist was 1993, my first client in dentistry was actually 1987. And the reason for that was because during that first six-year period, I was building up a client base at dental laboratories, largely through a combination of word of mouth and public speaking. But it was only six years into the dental technicians. The very first one of those technicians actually said, I've got a dentist client of mine who I think I could deal use a bit of help. Uh, and that began that journey. So it's almost 40 years since the first person in dentistry. Uh and I think you're similar time scale, Aaron. Is that right?

Arun 1:31

A bit a bit a little bit short, 25 years, about 24 years, 24 years. I got dragged into the sector because I married a dentist, okay, and still married, okay. So that's uh success, I guess. And she'll come around here hitting me on the head in a minute, but um still married, and still she still runs her clinic, Smeeter. And yeah, since that very first client of Smeeter, then we've surely added clients over the years dotted around the country. So yeah, it's all good. But today we're going to be talking um live and uncut about what Chris, you tell you describe it. You you're you're always good with the words.

Chris 2:04

What we wanted,

No Doom And Gloom Promise

Chris 2:05

I think, to to start this uh series of conversations about we're was talking about not doom and gloom. You know, that this podcast isn't going to be one of those podcasts where consultants say you're all gonna die, but if you come and buy my services, I'll get you out of it. You know, that that's not what this is about. I think the really, really important thing for our listeners to understand is that there's never going to be a sales pitch on this podcast series for either what I do or for what Aaron does. We know that you're all sensible grown-up people, and we know that you'll choose to contact us if and as and when it feels appropriate. What we want to do is to bring a combined 65 years of experience of uh working with dental businesses to, in this particular case, June 2026, to look at the reality of the landscape in which we're operating at the moment, to have no holds barred in terms of describing the challenges that we're all facing in the marketplace at the moment, and also hopefully for the two of us to share with you some tips and ideas and top tactics that might help us to navigate through that landscape. What I'm going to say before we start is that there has never been a single day in my dental career where the bottle hasn't been both half empty and half full at the same time. And so you can choose which of those bottles you pick up and drink from. So we can spend the next 30 minutes talking about the bottle being half empty and oh my God, there's white space, and it's challenging in the marketplace, and uh the NHS contract changes are difficult to understand, and our corporates are out there doing what corporates do. What are we going to do about it as independent practice owners? That's the half-empty conversation. I'm going to come back to some of that in a minute. But let's just also remind ourselves that there is a half-full conversation that says that the digital workflow in dentistry is more exciting today than it has ever been in the decades that the two of us have operated within the sector. And also what I'm going to say, and you know, we're aiming this podcast at independent, owner-managed dental practices, both mixed and private and specialist. We're aiming ourselves at a place in the middle of the market where on one side of the market we've got corporates, and when on the other side of the market we've got the what I'm going to describe as the full NHS landscape. And there's a place in the middle which is mixed and private practices. We want to address ourselves to those people. And I think that we in that particular place are in a sweet spot at the moment where there is an unprecedented opportunity for us to go out into the marketplace and to do things that fully NHS practices can't do, and to do things that corporates can't do, and to carve out a space for ourselves in the market. It's a world of opportunity.

Arun 5:10

Yeah, absolutely. And I'll just add one point to this, Chris. You pretty succinctly put that. But as you said, that gap in that middle market is where the opportunity lies. I think over the last few years, we've seen many groups emerge, people buying, acquiring, but integrating those practices together, it hasn't actually worked particularly well for many of those groups. And the whole idea or the whole premise of that was they're going to buy a few practices and at a certain multiple

The Sweet Spot For Independents

Arun 5:35

and consolidate it together and sell it onto a new party who'll pay even more for it at a higher multiple. But those higher multiple paying parties aren't really there at the moment for sure. So for many people who are running their private practices, you have to think, well, I might be 20 years into my career, I might not want to, I might want to have an exit strategy, but maybe that now is not the right time to exit to one of those parties where you might have to get rolled over equity, all that type of stuff, and maybe re-engineer your business, look at your business again and run it to its optimum. And that's what I think many, many practices will have to do over the next few years is look at their practices, optimize it, introduce AI, introduce technology, introduce new workflows. And that then is a real opportunity. And when you own one or two practices, it's so much easier to manage as opposed to when you've got 10 practices, 20, 20 practices, 50 practices. Okay. And that's where I think a lot of those groups may become unstuck or are becoming unstuck already. But let's move on to our first question today, Chris. Pricing. Now you we were talking earlier, you were talking about operating costs in a surgery have shot up over the last four, five years. In your experience, talking to lots of practices, I know you've probably talked to them more than I do. I'm more of a the finance guy, but what have you seen and what's the impact on practice morale, performance, etc.?

Chris 6:54

Well, let's first of all get a very, very quick, rough and ready definition in place. Operating costs per surgery per day. One of the most important numbers in dental history that a lot of dental practice actually, uh practice owners don't actually know. So, what is it? In any business, if you look at your profit and loss statement, you'll see sales at the top, you'll see something that accountants will either call variable expenses or cost of goods sold or cost of goods. And that will be the expenses that only arise when dentistry takes place. So that will be your lab bills, it will be your material costs, and also, of course, it will be the remuneration for your self-employed clinicians. And then below that, you'll see another heading which will either say fixed costs, overheads, operating costs, and that's the money that you have to spend, whether or not there's any patients in the building.

Arun 7:45

If it snows for a week, you have to open the door up, to pay the electricity bill, etc.

Chris 7:50

So exactly right. It snows for a week, nobody comes in, or if we have a heat wave and nobody comes in, but you've still got to pay the mortgage, you've still got to pay the council tax, you've still got to pay payroll costs for all of your employees. They are fixed costs you've got to pay no matter what. And one of the exercises that uh Aaron and I will do with any client is to say, let's work out those fixed costs on a daily basis and let's divide them by the number of chairs that are in use, double underline in use. And let's work out this magic number, operating costs per utilized surgery per day. So let's go back to 2022. Boris Johnson, rather ironically, given the date and the week on which we are recording this first broadcast, Boris Johnson is being marched out of Downing Street by his own party. And little do we know that Liz Truss is going to walk in the door and is going to institute a few weeks of utter

The Real Cost To Open A Surgery

Chris 8:55

economic chaos. But at the moment in time where Boris Johnson is saying bye-bye, you look across a cohort of independent owner-managed dental practices in the UK and Ireland, and you will see an operating cost for surgery per day running in the region of about £450. Now, let's just do statistics. That's a bell curve, and there are some that are more expensive than that, and there are some that are less expensive than that, but up on the top of the bell curve, £450 per day to open a surgery is around about your average. We're now going to fast forward the clock to this week, and Keir Starmer is being marched out of parliament by his own party. Funny how things work out. And that same practice with those same people doing that same thing in that same building, no change, but that operating cost is now £850 across my client base. That's an 89% increase in four years. So I'm going to ask a rhetorical question of the listeners. Number one, if you've got a dental plan, has the cost of that plan gone up by 89% in the last four years? Number two, if we were going to do a screenshot of your FIPA item price list, has that price list gone up by 89% in the last four years? And we all know the answer's no. And the reason that why haven't they put the prices up in line with increases in operating costs?

Arun 10:28

Well, good question. Now, if you look at the 89%, as Chris has mentioned, if I look at our client base, it may not be 89%, but some might be higher, some might be lower. But the point we're trying to make is they've gone up significantly. Okay. And it's not just in dental, as we've seen in the restaurant trade. Uh, business rates have gone up, the uh electricity's gone up, staff costs have gone up, um, national insurance costs have risen as a result of the change in government. So all of these costs have compounded. Now, to answer your question, why haven't that been been reflected in pricing in dental dental practices? Mainly because of fear, I personally think. I think people are scared. If I put my prices up by 10%, 20%, 30%, 50%, whatever, they worry. Now, I know back in 2022, they were charging, let's say, two and a half grand for an implant. The same, they still charge two and a half grand for an implant now. Um, and that's a that seems to be the standard price that everyone just charges for an implant, maybe two and a half to three thousand pounds, as an example. Invisalign costs have gone up, software costs have gone up, but none of the pricing has been reflected in that. So ultimately, as an accountant, you see the margins just squeezing, squeezing each year, whether you're doing monthly accounts, annual accounts, you just see, well, the problem that many dentists used to moan about before is that are my tax bills too high? That question isn't being raised as much as now because their profits have been diminished and therefore they're not having to pay so much tax. So I guess there's something good in that. But the point I'm trying to make is that it's the fear they have of what will my customers do? What will they say? Now, I was in London last night on a Monday, okay, in a pub in Soho. It was round to buy a pint of Guinness, I think it was £10.50 or something like that from memory. Back in 2022, I think the average price of a Guinness was around four quid. So, yeah, this pub, a very average pub in Soho, packed, okay. Okay, it was hot weather, people want to get a drink. But what I'm trying to say is that people still have that demand. People want to go, people want to do these things. And if they're getting good service, getting good experiences, they'll come and get go and enjoy those things, whether it's going to a pub, whether it's going to a restaurant, or whether it's going to go and see their dentist to get their teeth done and look after their health. Because ultimately, that's what dentistry is about. It's looking after your well-being and your health for the long term. So the point I want to make here is that you shouldn't be scared to raise your fees. It's an opportunity, as Chris outlined right at the beginning, it's an opportunity to offer new services. And therefore, you can then, if you raise your fees, you can then invest in other things, in your team, in your environment, in your products, whatever you want to do in your clinic. And I think if you can overcome that fear factor, um, and you don't have to raise them all in 89% in one go, far from it. You might just do 10% here, 20% on one service. Look at your different product lines. And if you look at use something like Dentally or Sophore Vexin, you can run your whole fee fee items and some things you might put up by 50%, and some things you might put down but put up by 10%. A great example will be x-rays, little bitewing x-rays. You might be charging 10 quid a bitewing x-ray, but if you put them up to 14 quid, that's a 40% increase. But think about how many bitewing x-rays you do a year. Probably thousands. Okay. Four pounds on thousands of bitewing x-rays is a lot of margin. So that's what you need to start thinking, breaking it down granularly, to then think what can I put up and what can I do and how can I do it to overcome that fear and to actually do it.

Chris 13:51

One of the things that I talk to my clients about is prices which are sensitive and non-sensitive. And so, sensitive price would be the cost of a dental health review or checkup or whatever it is you want to call it because people remember what they paid six months ago. Sensitive price is a fee per item hygiene visit because I remember what I paid six months ago. Sensitive price is my dental plan. Uh, and of course, one of one of the particular challenges with a dental plan is that there's often a contractual obligation only to review that price once a year. And the reality again is that the fear factor state steps into the plan pricing because they think, oh my God, you know, we're already running at 25 quid a month, we don't want to put it up by 20%,

Why Fees Have Not Kept Up

Chris 14:40

because if we do a 20% price increase, all the plant members are going to leave. Now, there's no evidence to support that fear. In fact, the real evidence, and one and it's hard and concrete evidence, is that during 2020, when we had uh lockdown and when we had the return to work period, if you look across the plan providers, there was nearly 97% loyalty from plan members who carried on paying all the way through lockdown and also carried on paying all the way through the return to work phase, even though there may have been a delay in getting them back in line with their review system. And the five there are two more sensitive prices that I want to talk about. Invisalign is a sensitive price because it's the world's greatest globally commoditized product, and every Tom Dicker knows what the price of Invisalign because they're bombarded with Facebook and Instagram advertising all day long. And of course, the price of a single restored implant is sensitive because, again, there's a lot of internet marketing that goes on that promotes prices within that particular commodity because dental implants have become a commoditized price. But as we said earlier on, there are individual items of treatment and there are also individual treatment plans. And an individual item of treatment, the last time I had a crown replaced was a number of years ago, and so I don't remember what I paid for it. And also, if a dentist is putting a bespoke treatment plan for together for me, which involves multiple treatment modalities, that's my treatment plan, and I'm not comparing it with a guy down the road who had another treatment plan for a completely different modality. So, what you've got to do is you've got to really get savvy and say, think about sensitive and non-sensitive prices. And as you say quite rightly, Aaron, think about where you can implement higher increases into non-sensitive pricing areas within your practice because they accumulate like a snowball, and the more you do of it, the better it's gonna get. So, what we end up with is uh two ways of pricing. There's emotional pricing, look at what everybody else in the postcode is charging, and think about your own fear factor. Scientific pricing, which is open up an Excel spreadsheet, and people like you and I have got plenty of templates that we can share with people and conduct a forensic analysis of the operating costs of your business, transfer that into a spreadsheet that can spew out even faster nowadays with the help of AI-generated systems to give you a scientific price list. Take a look at what that tells you about the gap. And as you say quite rightly, Aaron, we might not be able to bridge the gap in one go. But what we might do is to have a plan that says over the next eight quarters, we're going to have incremental increases in various prices across our list, which are going to get us back to our again.

Arun 17:42

Absolutely. And I think if you go back to the final point on pricing here, Chris, is that you can buy it's silly analogy, but it's there. You can buy a normal handbag which costs you 100 quid. You can buy a handbag, it costs you 10,000 pounds, it's still doing the same job. But what I'm trying to get across is this the value that people pay or they've perceived to get, okay, when they're getting buying the 10,000 pound handbag. So the same principle applies when it's to dentistry. As you said, it's bespoke service, bespoke treatment plan, fully explained, fully detailed, with the right technology, with the right clinician, with the right experience, history. It's how you present that value, okay, that makes the difference and how you communicate that to your patients or potential patients. And I think many, many dentists may historically, and I think it's less so in the young guys I see now, but historically, when they've been tainted by the NHS, they have that lack of confidence to put their prices up. But sometimes it's the younger guys who haven't been tainted perhaps by the NHS. They have the opportunity, oh yeah, I did this, I can do this, and they're happily will charge the the right price to get the right kind of margin for their services. So have that inner confidence to help. And I think that's a really important point just to highlight at this stage. Do you agree with that, Chris, or not?

Chris 18:58

I do. I want to share with you something that actually happened to me at half past two this afternoon, and I swear on my kids' lives, this is a true story. This happened to me half two this afternoon. I had a Zoom call with a dentist who I bumped into at a Practice Plan regional workshop about six months ago. Now, whenever Practice Plan asks me to do a regional workshop, the Chris Barrow workshop is all always a three-hour money talk. And what I mean by that is that it's a it's a three-hour presentation, which is very much based around this kind of area that we're talking about, which is understanding the numbers within your own practice and making sure that not only is your pricing right, but also that the productivity uh of your individual clinicians is right as well. And we'll undoubtedly on this podcast series, we'll cover other aspects of that because we need to talk about remuneration for self-employed clinicians. We need to talk about clinician productivity and profitability, and we're gonna go there. But I spoke to this dentist uh at half two today, and and as I always do with a call like that, how can I help? Let's call in John because that's not his name. And I said, John, how can I help? And he said, I said I heard you speak. Me and my practice manager came to your practice plan regional workshop six months ago. You were doing the money course, and he said, It felt like you were drilling into my head with the stuff that you were talking about in terms of in understanding, analyzing, interpreting your own data. And actually, we came away from that work, and my practice manager said she felt the same way as well. And we've gone six months down the line, he said, I bought this practice five years ago. I'm making an okay living, but I'm working my tripe out. I own the business, I don't know the numbers in detail, and I'm becoming increasingly concerned that

Sensitive Prices And Smart Increases

Chris 20:55

because I don't know the numbers, I'm really kind of flying blind. And he said, I wish I'd called you five years ago, but I didn't. And I wish I'd called you six years ago, but I didn't, but I'm calling you now. And I said, Okay, great. I said, John, here's what we're gonna do. You're gonna send me your last set of audited accounts, and you're gonna send me whatever up-to-date management accounts or financial data you've got. And what we're gonna do is we're gonna do a financial MOT and we're gonna look at those numbers. I'm gonna come back to your practice manager and I'm probably gonna ask a hundred questions. And over the next weeks ahead, what we'll do is that we'll create a full financial analysis and come back to you with prioritized recommendations as to the steps that you need to be taking in order to move towards a target profitability. Now, I very much suspect, Aaron, that had he been speaking to you at 2 30 this afternoon, he'd have been getting exactly The same feedback that I get, correct?

Arun 22:03

Absolutely. And that that John is a common person I talk to on a regular basis, my team talks to, where they they're flying blind. And you could fly blind as a dentist maybe five years ago. It was quite easy to. It was easy to. The margins were big enough, uh, the money coming in was good. Today, if you're flying blind, you are potentially digging your hole further and deeper and deeper. And when I have a client now who they do their annual accounts, they have no idea if they've made money or not made money in the year, how much tax they've got to pay. And this kind of goes on to the other question we were going to talk about. But the point I'm trying to make is that you have got to have visibility of your numbers month by month, okay? Or worst case scenario, quarter by quarter. But I still think the vast majority of dental practices across the UK just still do annual sets of accounts that ain't happening quarterly, let alone monthly. Okay. And I think that's a big gap. And in the good times, that was fine. But in these current times, you really need to be on it, as you've just highlighted, Chris, because you will then be able to make adjustments, change pricing, change costs, cut costs, make better decisions on the performance of the business. And that is something that it was all too easy for dentists to make money historically. It's a very different game now. Do you agree?

Chris 23:24

We're recording this podcast the day after Keir Starmer resigned. We're moving into a period now of uncertainty. We don't know who the next Prime Minister is going to be, although obviously it's not going to be too difficult to imagine. Come on from your next. We certainly don't know who the next Chancellor is going to be, and we certainly don't know what the economic policy of the government is going to be going forward. But it's a reasonable bet that it's going to be a challenging economic period for all of us. And that all of us means our patients, all of us means our self-employed clinicians, it means our salaried team members, and it means us as owners of our own businesses. And so flying blind, winging it is not an option in June 2026. And if you're sitting here listening to this broadcast and you're thinking, okay, well, I get cloud-based accountancy, I get up-to-date management accounts at the end of every month, I analyze all of my key performance indicators at the end of every month in line with benchmarks. I keep an eye on my operating cost for surgery per day. I also measure the individual profitability of every single fee earner in my practice on a month-by-month basis. And as a result of that, I make adjustments to my fee per item price list on a quarterly basis. If your answer is yes to those seven points, then get off this podcast. You don't need it, you go and do something else.

Arun 25:07

And you're doing really well, and you're a rarity in the dental sector, to be honest with you. Good luck to you.

Chris 25:13

If you're not able to answer those seven points, and if you are to whatever extent flying blind or partially blind, then what I'm saying is this stick with us on this podcast series because what we're going to be doing is we're going to be diving deeper into this area. We're going to be looking much more carefully at each of those seven points going forward. And we're going to be sharing with you what we believe are real-time contemporary tips and tactics and strategies in order to make sure that number one, you are measuring those numbers, but also, of course, what to do, because it's all very well measuring the numbers. But when the numbers tell you that you're not running profitably, what do we do next? And you know what? There are some massive questions here. What do we do when our operating cost per surgery per day is out of control? What do we do when our lab or material or advertising costs are higher than benchmark? We're out of control with it. And most importantly of all, what do we do when we analyze the individual profitability and productivity of our self-employed fee earners? And we suddenly realize that the reason that why we as an owner are working our tripe out, trying to deliver as much dentistry as we possibly can, is because we've got other self-employed clinicians in the building who are doing their best, but we're losing money.

Arun 26:45

And that's what I see all too often. Many, many, you might have a practice, let's say of four or five associates. One or two might be doing pretty well, they're grossing quite well. But what

Stop Flying Blind With Monthly Data

Arun 26:55

are their overheads? Okay, what are their lab costs? What are these things? Is that and are they at the end of the day making you uh a decent ROI? There might be someone generally doing lower volume or lower value production, but they still might be making you more money. And that's the thing that's visibility is the thing that really matters here. And then, as Chris said, you ultimately wanted them to be able to see which dentist ultimately is making you net money, okay, or net, which is making you which who is the most profitable dentist in there? And therefore, you can adjust your book, you can adjust giving patients to those more profitable dentists. All these things matter, okay? But if you don't have the visibility, that was when it all goes pear-shaped. So I'm conscious now, Chris, we've been talking for over 30 minutes here, and I don't want to drag this on for hours. But there's one question I want to cover, also probably take the to the rest of the podcast up. Is you were talking about operating cost per um utilized dental surgery. But if you had to look at three numbers that a practice should be tracking month by month, what would they be? What would you choose? I've got my own choice, okay? But what you what would be yours? And then I can then tell you mine.

Chris 28:03

All right, my my top three choices. Number one top of the list, operating cost per utilized surgery per day, the one that we've just been talking about. Number two is percentage chair utilization. If you have a chair and you practice, what percentage of time has that chair got a patient sat in it? So facility utilization is number two. And then number three, back to what I was mentioning earlier, is the individual profitability of every fee earner in your practice. With those three, you can change the world.

unknown 28:38

Okay.

Arun 28:38

Very good. So I'll give you my three, and there's overlap, there's no doubt about it. And I'll I'll sound like a real accountant here by saying I would look at eBit DAR, earnings before interest, tax and depreciation, ultimately the net profit or the profitability of the clinic. You can have all the revenue in the world, but if you aren't tracking your costs accurately, you don't really know what you're making. And remember, eBIT DAR is ultimately the determinant of the value of your business. Okay. Um, a multiple will be applied against it. So if you are looking to sell at some point in the future, you always need to be thinking, okay, what is my EBITDA? Because that's what a valuer will look at, that's what a buyer will look at. Are they generating a healthy eBid R or not so healthy EBITDA? And a multiple will be applied. And as Chris quite rightly said, you can then break that down, that eBit DA down into individuals, eBit DA per associate dentist, and work out, okay, that one's making me money, that one's not making me money. What do we do and what do we change? So that's one thing, eBit DAR. The other one I would look at is recall rates. Okay. You might have this base of patients in your books. Let's say you have 2,000 patients on your books. Okay, you can send the emails, you can send the reminders, but what is that recall rate? Um, do they come back every six months? Do the hygiene people come back every six months for their hygiene treatments? Because you because ultimately they are your patients, existing patients. And therefore, are you maximizing that existing patient base as opposed to having to keep getting new patients through the door? New patients are very important, and I would track that as another metro, but not so much as how good my recall rate is. And in my view, what you want to be getting that over 90% and or have systems in place to try and get that recall rate over 90. And then ultimately, the the last one in my mind is case um acceptance rates. Okay, you can put all the cases out there, treatment plans out there, and you might have a one grand treatment plan or a 10 grand treatment plan. But how many of those hundred treatment plans you put out there got accepted? It might look wonderful on paper, it might look wonderful on a screen, you send it all out, but did they actually get accepted? And that's a really important thing to measure. Now, if you combine my three with Chris's three, I think you've got a really work good working model, but you need to be able to track these, you need to be able to see these, and you need to be able to see these in an instant, okay? And I think that's where dentistry is going, okay. The technology historically hasn't allowed people to do that, but I think that's emerging, and various systems are coming together that will allow people to do this. And it's an exciting time in dentistry, as Chris highlighted right at the beginning. Yes, there are threats, yes, there are problems, yes, the economic conditions, new prime minister, all these things are happening there. But if you embrace and understand the numbers, I think that will help you tell your own story and drive your own story forward. And that's the exciting time, I personally think, that's there in dentistry going forward. We're always going to have a tumultuous time, I think, over the next 10 years. I think dentistry's been like that for a number of years. I think how we could our politics, our political

The Numbers Worth Tracking

Arun 31:40

environment will be like this for the next few years. Currently, we're getting a new prime minister. I don't know how long he or she will last until the next. So you've you've got to be able to drive your own business through this whilst we're navigating these uncharted times. Three numbers of Chris, I think that would be a good thing for you to cover. Any further thoughts on that, Chris?

Chris 31:56

Uh, not for now. I thought I I think what I want to say to our listeners um is as we've explained, this is the first of a brand new series. In a sense, we're kind of taking a punt on putting this out there and saying, listen, what we want to do is with the two of us want to come back on a regular basis uh from the perspective of accountancy and business development advice. Um, there'll be no teeth and gums on this series. Sorry for all the geeky dentists. Um but what is what is going to be in this series is a lot of very straight talking business advice uh because our hope uh is to help you to grow uh businesses that can survive and prosper through whatever challenges that we have ahead. And we're making a promise to ourselves that we're not going to be diplomatic, we're not gonna pull any punches, we are gonna be respectful and polite and courteous, both to each other and to the people that we talk about as well. We want straight talking on finance, that's where we're going with this thing. So if you've enjoyed it, look out for future episodes. If you've enjoyed it and you're seeing this on anything like a social media post, share it with other people and maybe just a word to say, hey, let's look at it, let's keep tapping what these two are up to and uh stay with them. And by the way, we will be creating environments in which you can ask us questions either before or during or after these calls. And so we hope as we begin to build our community, uh, we'll get more of those questions flowing as well. So that's me done. Final word, Aaron, to you.

Arun 33:32

Thank you, Chris. I think um it's been a great first episode. I've really enjoyed it. I think there's obviously a meeting of minds here on so many things. And as Chris said, please do share this with your colleagues and friends, or if anyone you think who you think will get value out of what we're talking about. We have combined experience, as Chris said, over 65 years, probably between the two of us in

Straight Talking Series And Next Steps

Arun 33:55

different ways and some overlap. And there isn't much we haven't seen in dentistry. Um, I remember the days when goodwill was like 30% of turnover or even less than that. Now we're at, I don't know, 200% of turnover. It's a very different game, and therefore you need to have your business sense and business now in this environment. Otherwise, you can get your fingers burnt very, very quickly and it can be quite ugly. But we're here, we're gonna be there and watch out for the next episode. There's a link um on the website, and uh, we'll be sharing that soon, and uh we'll go from there. But thank you, Chris. Thanks very much, and with a hint. You've taken some time to follow us on this.

Chris 34:32

Absolutely. Thanks a lot. Cheers. Bye.