By Luc Wade, Marketing Director at Hive Business.

We’re asking our most prominent clients in dentistry for real life advice on the challenges of running a successful business, and for our second Q&A I spoke to a big hitter in periodontics, Neesha Patel.

Neesha, like everyone we are interviewing, has shown a formidable appetite for seizing business opportunities to grow her dental practice. She runs Pure Periodontics in central London, a pioneering clinic that caters to the rising demand for specialist perio care as part of better systemic health, a subject which she’s published and lectured on. Pure Perio won Best Periodontic Practice in 2013 and Neesha joined Dentistry’s top 50 in 2014.

She’s also a consultant and course director for postgrad training in clinical periodontology at King’s College Hospital and trains foundation dentists at the London Deanery.

Here’s what she had to say…

How has dental business changed over the past five years and what are your predictions for the next five? 

What immediately springs to mind is patient expectations. The days of patients just coming in and the doctor saying “this is what you need” are long gone. People are much more health savvy, they don’t take things at face value, they do their own research and they shop around, not only for the right practice but for the right dentist. We’re seeing this at my practice — since we started a marketing campaign with Hive just over a year ago we’ve found the vast majority of our patients are self referred. They’ll have a dentist who may be recommending a referral to somewhere else, yet they come here. I think with the internet and all the information out there, people’s expectations are only going to rise.

We’re a specialist practice, and I think there’s definitely a growing trend among consumers to seek out specialists. General dentistry, at least in private practice, might not be as important any more. As technology increases there are so many more things to do in all specialisms, and patients are drawn to the increased range of treatments on offer.

In the next five years I think patient expectations will continue to rise and they will be looking at how good you are not just clinically, but how you deliver that care, how you answer the phone, how the reception looks and how your surgeries feel. The technology will be important, but how you deliver that and whether your team is on the same page will become key to success. It will differentiate the successful practices from the crowd, in the same way that once the location of your practice was everything —all the practices on Harley Street were once thought of as the apogee of dentistry, whereas now people realise that’s just real estate, and it’s the experience that matters.

How do you deal with the dichotomy of your clinical and business roles?

It’s tough, because we are growing — I’ve been around for about five years, which seems like a long time, but when you’re growing it’s relatively new. When I block out time to work on the business but I’m in the building, I can end up seeing patients who need attention. It’s hard to cut out time and it bleeds into weekends. In the new year I’m hiring an associate [on top of Neesha’a team of perio-trained dental nurses and hygienists] and I’m going to take a regular day for business and have my weekends off.

What advice would you give to ambitious dentists who wish to acquire or grow a practice?

One of my regrets is I didn’t take the plunge soon enough. I always thought I didn’t know enough and I looked around and thought others knew more, when I could have started earlier. Also, do your homework in terms of location and business plan. It’s not easy running your own practice, there’s so much more on your plate, but it’s worth it because you don’t answer to someone else. If that’s not an issue for you I would think very carefully about it.

With infinite time and budget, what would you consider implementing to transform your dental practice?

I would increase the size of the premises. When we kitted out the practice we did it so there were two surgeries and we staggered the introduction of the third one. We thought we wouldn’t need it for three years but now we’re thinking March or April. On the marketing side there’s so much you can do, but you have to pace yourself with a budget. If money was no object I would go for advertisements in glossies and try to get into the newspapers with some high level PR. That’s an area I’m interested in but we can’t do it yet because we’re allocating budget elsewhere.

Periodontal treatment and disease is so much at the forefront of all round health now, and if we got into mainstream media that would really help us. I think I could develop my public profile with my work at King’s and the increasing public awareness of the links between diabetes and gum disease, especially given the increasing diabetes epidemic, which is hitting London’s population particularly hard.

If you could give your 21-year-old self a piece of advice, what would it be?

Take more risks. I come from a medical background, a lot of my family are medics. I think that made me a bit risk averse. My parents’ generation didn’t need to know about marketing and the commercial side of things really and so when it was my turn I realised there was so much more involved, which is perhaps why I held off longer than I needed to, out of wariness.

I would also learn more about business. There’s not enough emphasis that dentistry is a business when you’re training, even though it’s such a huge element of what we do. There’s not enough in the curriculum, so I would go on a proper business course. I would have used all that time I had at university to do online courses or something on the side. There was time but I didn’t use it. Now I realise what it is to be busy! It gets harder and harder to find time now. I have friends in the business who grafted in the beginning and now have it easy. Other friends are at their practices all the time, even 10 or 15 years in. Being efficient at business makes the difference and starting early helps.

If you would like to disuss this article, get in touch on 01872 300232 or email us at hello@hivebusiness.co.uk.