FUTURE PROOF:A PRIEST coming in for a full set of veneers? Founder of Smiles Dental Emmet O'Neill knows that boom-time phenomenon is unlikely to happen again.

“I’ll never forget it,” he says of his collared customer’s 2007 request. “But that would never happen today. The mix in our business is very different now.”

Set up in 2005 after O’Neill sought to get his own teeth whitened, the young entrepreneur identified what he thought was a gap in the market for tooth whitening, an industry already booming in the US.

But even at a time when consumers had more cash to flash, he admits “we over estimated people’s vanity. We over estimated the demand for that kind of service.”

With the dentists and facilities in place, he decided to extend into more general dental services where Smiles’ philosophy would set it apart. “I always felt when I went to the dentist, I’d sit there reading a magazine from 15 years ago and wait 40 minutes to see the guy. You didn’t really know what was happening or how much it was going to cost and that just heaps anxiety on top of the fear of the dentist.”

With a policy of low wait times, transparency on procedures and price, and up-to-date magazines, Smiles repositioned itself and is now the largest general dental provider in Ireland. It’s also open 364 days enabling gluttons for punishment to even get a Sunday appointment.

“I think as a business what you start out as and what you finish up as are always completely different. The most important thing is to be able to wipe the chalk board down and pivot into a new area.”

O’Neill says when the recession did bite, it was more “death by a thousand cuts” than a fall off a cliff. Changes to dental entitlements in the 2009 budget proved the biggest blow.

“That was a very worrying time,” says O’Neill. “While it was a difficult part of our business in that getting paid for the work was slow and bureaucratic and required a lot of management, it was still nice to know that 40 per cent of our business was coming from the government. Then that was turned off. That for me was literally the biggest, ‘oh no, will we make it through this?’ moment.”

Reacting quickly kept Smiles on track. “In 2010, we cut all our prices by 30 per cent across the board – so we reacted really, really fast and we promoted that. Our business went up by 50 per cent and that was a turning point for us.”

With outlets in high profile locations, revisiting rents was another shrewd move. “We went to all of our landlords in 2009 and just did deals with them,” says O’Neill. “We were really upfront with them and said ‘this is what we are willing to pay’ and they all worked with us.”

Negotiations yielded a 25 per cent reduction in rent and he says landlords are “very pragmatic ... they want to keep the show on the road”. The bigger issue, he says, is rates. “In our O’Connell Street branch, we pay €40,000 a year in rates which is insane. The city councils have to get their money somehow and I know they need the money, but how does a business pay for that?”

But in the teeth of the recession, Smiles has grown from 10 to 20 practices, including 16 in Republic and four in the UK. Treating 150,000 patients last year, the company’s dentists are self employed and contracted by Smiles. He says prices at the company’s Lisburn and Omagh clinics, towns known for attracting dental refugees from the Republic, are the same as those in its Dublin clinics.

The move into the UK was a natural progression, he says. “We wanted to prove our business could travel outside of Ireland. The UK is 10 times the size of Ireland. It’s a much bigger market for us. We want to have 40 clinics in the next three years and we can’t have 40 clinics in Ireland.”

He says while customers are more price-conscious, it’s the internet that has most altered buyer behaviour with customers not only using it to shop around but also to inform themselves about dental procedures.

Appreciating that it’s hard to take in what your dentist says when he’s wearing a facemask and wielding a drill, Smiles will from next month enable patients to view their treatment plans online. “We’re letting patients log on and see their records and see videos related to their treatment plans so they can understand what’s going to happen,” he says.

So has the recession brought lessons? “Definitely,” says O’Neill. “There is a lot of fat in any business and it’s only when you have a gun pointed at you that you realise where the fat is and that you have to cut it very fast.”

He says while it can be a tendency in business to slacken off and spend more loosely as an economy improves, he’s determined not to let that happen.

“We definitely did that between 2005 and 2008, we weren’t as tight as we should have been in hindsight – but I’d like to think the culture of our business has changed. We are very much focused on cost now.”