Taming orthodontic chaos. How technology buys time, and how to turn that time into private growth through marketing and hospitality.

I walked onto the stage at the Dental Monitoring conference with a simple promise. No pictures of teeth. No before-and-after galleries. No clinical fireworks. Just the business of dentistry, and why the next two years will reward the practices that use technology to buy time, then spend that time wisely.

The brief I’d been given was blunt and practical: tame NHS orthodontic chaos, create time, and turn that time into private growth. I’m not arrogant enough to pretend I can fix the NHS, but by the time I’d listened to the sessions on technology and monitoring it was obvious that the route to sanity is not more effort, it’s better systems. Technology is not an add-on, it’s part of the operating model.

I started with what my client base is telling me right now. Money is tight. Margins are shrinking. Payroll has risen sharply as a percentage of turnover. Recruitment and retention are harder than they’ve ever been. And the NHS contract remains, to put it politely, a challenging way to run a business. None of this is news, but pretending it isn’t happening is the quickest route to stress and poor decisions. If the cost of running a practice has increased, then pricing must respond. There is no other source of funding.

Then I moved to the opportunity, because that’s the bit most people miss. Technology creates time. That time can be used to replace people, which is often the corporate route, or it can be used to allow your people to do better work, build better relationships, and generate more value. For independents, the second option is where profit lives.

From there, I focused on the two levers that keep any practice alive, marketing and patient experience. I challenged the lazy default of “we’ve hired an agency, so marketing is handled”. External marketing has its place, but it must be measurable and controlled. Too many practices don’t really know what they’re paying for, and don’t really know what return they’re getting. The fix is simple, you stay involved, you demand visibility, and you judge it on outcomes.

Then I introduced the two marketing engines that most practices underuse, internal marketing and inbound marketing.

Internal marketing is the discipline of turning existing patients into your unpaid sales force. I talked about Dunbar’s number, the idea that one person is typically connected to around 150 relationships, and what that means in a dental context. If a patient has had a positive experience, they are the bridge to everyone they know. The problem is not goodwill. The problem is that practices don’t ask, and they don’t systemise the ask.

So I laid out practical tactics. Review cards with QR codes, referral cards given at the right emotional moment, quick video testimonials captured on a phone, and an end-of-treatment review checklist that makes advocacy a routine, not an accident. Marketing is not the job of “the marketing person”. It is a team behaviour.

Inbound marketing is the second engine, and it is becoming non-negotiable as AI-driven search replaces the old model of Google-only discovery. The core idea is straightforward: identify the questions people are asking, answer them expertly, distribute those answers across multiple channels, and attach a clear call to action. When you do that consistently, you become the expert in your postcode, and the enquiries come to you.

I closed with a short, powerful reminder from Will Guidara’s work on hospitality. Service is what you do. Hospitality is how you make people feel while you do it. Your product will eventually be matched by someone else. Relationships take far longer to erode. That’s where the durable advantage sits.

My three Monday actions were simple: deconstruct your patient journey through the lens of hospitality, audit how you use your appointment time, and start inbound marketing properly. Then implement, because the only real failure of a conference is returning to normal by Wednesday.