Not All Small Businesses Need to Scale: Bucking the trend with Moss Dental Studio - Guest blogger Tai Silvey

Waiting room counter, room for two only, by design

When my wife, Dr. Neri Moss, and I were building Moss Dental Studio, we were faced with a common question: how do we plan for scale?

From tech startups, to well-established business like BCAA, to dental practices, the desire to grow leads business builders to design their businesses to scale up. In many cases this makes perfect sense. Larger scale creates greater efficiencies and more opportunity to offer your valued products and services to a greater number of customers. Win, win, right? Of course, as a business grows, the challenges also grow. One challenge is the widening gap between the product or service provider and the customer, between the decision makers and the end user. To close this gap, successful companies need to become customer obsessed. They need to completely redesign their businesses to think outside in, to ensure every decision is made with the customer in mind. This customer centric approach has been widely adopted by companies of all sizes as they endeavor to keep their customers top of mind.

For small businesses, especially service providers like Moss Dental Studio, there is a simpler way to be customer obsessed; don’t scale. If you are standing right next to the customer (or patient) it’s easy to keep him or her top of mind.

Over many years, Neri and I have had a front row seat to dental practices of all sizes. Most practices are built to larger specifications than necessary, more rooms, chairs, and equipment than needed. Almost every dental expert I have spoken to advises this excess capacity based on “conventional wisdom”. Building additional infrastructure to support this excess capacity for scaling in the future is expensive, especially in a city like Vancouver. From my experience, this overbuild usually results in two outcomes: one, some rooms and chairs remain empty for the life of the practice; or two, the practice is scaled to fill them. As a dental practice grows, the addition of more patients and support staff increases the gap between dentist and patient. This is exaggerated even more as a practice scales to multiple locations or becomes a larger corporation, a common trend in the dental industry.

I’m not saying that scaling up a small business like a dental practice is necessarily the wrong decision, in other cases it may make sense. But at Moss Dental Studio, despite conventional wisdom, we have made a conscious decision to be small, to build strong dentist to patient relationships, and to be customer obsessed. This allows Dr. Neri Moss to bring her unique talents to every patient interaction and work with her patients 1 on 1 to provide a level of care that would not be possible in a scaled practice.

The proof is in the (sugar free) pudding. Not only is the approach extremely rewarding for both Dr. Neri Moss and her patients, word spreads and most new patients are finding Moss Dental Studio through word of mouth.

If you want to ensure that you stay close to your customers, one good option: stay small and don’t take your eyes off them, literally.

Tai Silvey