James Fletcher, project manager at Hague, shares his top tips for relocating a dental practice and how you can maximise opportunities for growth by making a strategic and well-planned move to new premises.
There are many reasons why you may want to relocate your dental practice, from your lease ending to wanting to expand your business, now or in the future. Either way, relocation offers a unique opportunity for dental teams.
Relocation versus squats
Relocating and setting up a squat may seem similar, but they are different entities. Squats tend to be set up by associates leaving a practice or dentists who have been working for five or so years and now want their own practice. Relocations are more the realm of long-standing practices that are looking to expand and get more space.
The time frames involved with relocating and squats are very similar, however. In both instances, you will need to look for properties, negotiate with landlords or sellers, and deal with solicitors. But, if you are relocating, you are not starting entirely from scratch.
While relocating is a perfect opportunity to update your interiors and furnishings, in most cases you will have existing equipment you want to bring over to the new premises. For example, a chair or a compressor that’s only a few years old. So, there’s often less expense around capital equipment. In a squat, everything is usually brand new.
Opportunity knocks
In the last 10 years, current legislation has dictated that all practices have decontamination rooms, while digital dentistry equipment needs space. Many are adding a treatment coordinator’s office to their list of requirements. That means current locations often just don’t have the adequate square footage to cope.
Relocating offers huge opportunities to dental teams. It allows you to put your mark on a new place and develop your dream practice, one that reflects you and your brand, and that can grow with you into the future.
Even if your hand is forced and you have to move because your lease is up, and your landlord doesn’t want to renew it, this can be a positive because it allows you to move to a bigger property and put your mark on it.
Dentistry is an extremely competitive profession, and relocating really gives you that opportunity to rise up. There are a lot of new dentists coming through now who are really giving their practices the ‘wow factor’, which risks many well-established places being left behind.
Future-proofing
One of the biggest reasons for relocation is future expansion.
You may not feel like the time is right to relocate in the post-covid world, but, actually, if the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s the need to future-proof our businesses.
Relocation is a fantastic opportunity for future-proofing. It may be that your current practice is at capacity, and you need to move to expand. Or you might think, ‘in two or three years, we’re going to outgrow this place’, and a perfect commercial unit comes up.
A lot of future-proofing is to do with space. You don’t want to limit yourself in what you’re doing. So, if you are already at full capacity, you want to relocate to somewhere with growth potential now and in the future. You might think, ‘there’s a big back garden, and I could easily build a two-storey extension there in five years if I needed to’.
You might currently be in an old, converted house and want to go into more of a commercial unit where you can put your mark on the clinic’s design rather than working within the parameters of what the building offers.
By relocating, you can get more practice space, and that means you can add extra surgeries and services. If you were originally just doing general dentistry, you could develop a multi-discipline practice, bringing in different disciplines, like implant specialists, periodontists, hygienists, orthodontists or even Botox and filler practitioners. You could try to offer all those things under one roof.
You can also create space for things like 3D dentistry that you may want to do in the future. That is what patients want. They want to be able to go to one place and have everything done, and they are prepared to pay a premium for that convenience.
Ergonomics and the patient journey
Ergonomics is extremely important for dentistry and the patient experience within the surgery, as it would be in any development.
In your existing practice, you’ll be working within the confines of what you’ve got. You might be twisting and turning into some really awkward positions. But when you design a new practice for yourself, you can ask: ‘What’s not working for me, where I am now and how can I address that in the new property?’
It gives you more scope to consider ergonomics.
This is also an excellent opportunity to look at the patient journey, and not just how a new building would allow you to create flow through the space.
We are creatures of habit. If you have an existing patient database and are moving from A to B, you don’t want to move too far away because your demographic knows that practice and people don’t like change.
So, you need to be in fairly close proximity to that practice because people know the bus routes, the train routes, and how to drive and walk there. You don’t want to alienate existing patients, as people just want ease and consistency of things.
Where to start
Once you have an idea of your budget, the first thing to do is to start looking for properties, whether that be freehold or leasehold.
We are seeing more and more dentists purchasing the freehold of properties rather than a leasehold, so they can make decisions on the spot on what they want to do with the property.
In the last two years, we have seen some fantastic high street locations becoming available, paired with the ease in D1 planning, which has meant many of you realise that it’s now an ideal opportunity to relocate.
Once you have found somewhere you think is suitable, you need to engage with an equipment supplier, like ourselves, or an architect, who can do a feasibility check to see if what you plan to do will work in the space. It’s at this stage that you can really bring your ideas to life and create the practice of your dreams.
Relocation can be an exciting next step for dental teams. It allows you to put your mark on the design and more possibility for growth, setting yourself and your patients up for a successful future.
For more information visit www.haguedental.com
