183 – How to work less and make more money with dentist Paddi Lund. This is the ‘Happy Business’ episode.

Paddi:

Sorry Tim, not true.

Tim:

Not true.

Paddi:

No. I didn’t sell it. I just closed the doors.

Tim:

Walked away.

Paddi:

Just walked away, Tim.

Tim:

Sold the building.

Paddi:

Yeah, I sold the building. Interesting in that this is everybody’s plan, isn’t it? You build a business and then sell it, but for me, one year I thought, whatever year it was I’m not sure, I thought “I’ve got enough.” My lifestyle had been gradually becoming less and less expensive throughout the years. I live a very frugal, minimal life. I have three shirts and two pairs of jeans and one pair of shoes and a backpack. And this is how I lived all the time. And so I suddenly thought here I am with enough money to last me for the next 200 years, why am I bothering to sell this business? And it was a little like selling people almost. There’s people that I got to know for such a long time and served them. So now I felt a little bit funny about leaving them with no one to look after them but on the other hand I thought I didn’t know anybody that I trust enough to hand these people over. So I said to them “I’ve got a friend down the coast who’s pretty good and he can take some of you, but otherwise you just going to have to look around because I didn’t know anybody” and I gave it a couple of months just in case anybody had any major problems and I closed the doors and I went home.

Tim:

You could have sold it and given the money to charity. Did you consider that?

Paddi:

No. I’m not very altruistic, Tim, unfortunately.

Tim:

You’re very honest though.

Paddi:

I have a degree in medicine as well as dentistry, so I can do a bit of medicine and a bit of dentistry. I was doing a bit of that in the north of Thailand. Eventually I figured this also doesn’t float my boat. I just haven’t got that very altruistic gene.

Tim:

So you’re a fellow who…you’ve studied a lot. I mean you have invested a lot of time. How many years is a medical and dentistry degree?

Paddi:

I did surgery as well.

Tim:

We’ll just factor that in, so I’m guessing you’ve invested over 10 years.

Paddi:

Maybe 11 or 12 years, something like that.

Tim:

At that point, when you’re studying, you must…well no, I won’t say ‘must’ because I don’t think ‘must’ is a word that’s going to be used much around here. But you thought “I’m going to build a dentistry practice. I’m going to build an empire” or did you always think you at some point going to have three shirts and a backpack?

Paddi:

No. Like most people, I went through the stage of empire building and found that I wasn’t…though I was okay at managing a few people; I was not good at managing a lot of people. I found my optimum number was about 2. I can well manage 2 people. More than that, it gets more complicated and I stop enjoying myself. Also, as I was empire building, I found that I was being a professional, employing other professionals. I would often make less money that I should have done because I was spending my time managing when I could have been spending my time working as a professional, which is usually a fairly high dollar value. It’s a big jump from being a competent, relatively expensive professional provider, to building a small empire. Some people can do it but it’s very rare.

Tim:

Okay, so if we can just hop in that time machine and go back in that point in your life because you did empire-build, you did study for those 11, 12 years, you did go out and try to build an empire in a point of time like from what I understand, many dentists find themselves immensely unhappy. And you had a very unhappy practice. You considered suicide. Can you just tell us about that point in your business life?

Paddi:

It’s to do with empire building and wanting too much. No matter how much money we make, we can always spend more. It’s easy to have a lifestyle that’s bigger than your business and it leads to…well Charles Dickens said it very well. I think it was Mr. McCool giving advice and I paraphrase. Please don’t send in letters if I’ve got this wrong. This is a paraphrase. He said “basically annual income £1, annual expenditure, £19.11, result happiness. Annual income £1, annual expenditure £1.01, the result is unhappiness.”

Tim:

Spending more than you’re getting.

Paddi:

Exactly. And it’s like being on a financial treadmill. It’s horrible. And most people get into it at some time in their life. They develop high maintenance habits. They eat expensive foods; go to expensive restaurants, because especially professional people they feel that’s their due and also they’re expected to do it. Many people will have a high maintenance spouse and high maintenance children, they’re going to.

Tim:

Did you have, I don’t know what the word is, Paddy, anchors. What did you have that was keeping you there? Did you have a wife? Children? What were your highly expensive habits?

Paddi:

No. Mine were more prosaic. Mine were fast cars, expensive restaurants and expensive resorts, I think, probably expensive house. I’ve been married a couple of times. My wives were pretty sensible. In fact they probably gave me some of the best advice I’ve had in life. I can’t blame them.

Tim:

What was that? What was the best advice? Leave me.

Paddi:

I can’t tell you that at this point. I should have to discuss it with them before I can tell you what their advice is.

Tim:

I’ll ask again in about 15 minutes. So Paddi, I think we all get where you were going with this and so at a point in time you’ve just imploded, have you? Was there a day that you reflect back on where you imploded?

Paddi:

Yes. There was probably a particular week where I started to go insane.

Tim:

Would you mind sharing that with us?

Paddi:

I could. For me it’s a rather boring these days because I’m past that. I don’t need to do that anymore, but it’s a method of escape. If we get stressed enough in our lives, we search and search for escape and eventually most of us end up with some sort of escape through showing how stressed we are and becoming slightly insane. We call that breakdowns, stuff like that. There’s all sorts of names. But it’s a way of dealing with the situation. Your brain is saying “I can’t go on like this anymore. My body can’t go on like this anymore.” It’s a compensating mechanism. We just can’t function anymore doing this sort of thing. And many people end up in mental hospitals and many people end up changing their job and many people in professions end up killing themselves, but I was a little more pragmatic and my brain works a little different than many people in that I often see a strange answer that other people don’t see and my strange answer for this situation was to get happy. The insight I had was “I’m unhappy.” You say I’m simple but many of us don’t come to that. We think “I’m working too hard. I’ve got too many responsibilities. The economic situation is bad. I’ve got a difficult profession.” Basically what it boils down to is “I am unhappy.” For me the purpose of life is to be happy and I think it’s the same for most human beings. And if we’re not happy, life is terrible and we often want to end it. For me, for someone who’s pragmatic, when I decided I wasn’t unhappy, I thought I was going to do something about it. Rather than just take pills so that I can tolerate the situation, which is a very common outcome also, I decided I was going to change the situation. And so I set about changing the situation and probably my second insight was it was my job that was doing it to me. It wasn’t my private life. It was my job. My job was very stressful. I’m stressing because I was trying to provide…I was trying to work so hard to make lots of money and I was trying to make lots of money to try and buy little happiness in my private life because I had so much unhappiness in my business life, so much stress. But that’s very inefficient way of going about life, I decided, and I thought I’m going to build a business that gives me happiness.

Tim:

A happy business.

Paddi:

Well you could say that but that doesn’t really illustrate what I was doing. It did end up being a happy business. You’re absolutely right. But the aim was, and this I think is important, the aim was to make me happy. Does that make sense?

Tim:

The aim was to make you happy. Yeah, you were the problem. You were the problem.

Paddi:

I had a problem in that I wasn’t happy and anybody who is not happy has a problem, I suspect. Would you agree with that?

Tim:

Absolutely. And this I guess too is reflecting in your staff, in your patients. I mean it was just kind of the whole ripple effect was dark.

Paddi:

Exactly. The more we are unhappy, the more people around us become unhappy. And the more people around us become unhappy, the more they influence us to be more unhappy. If we live in an environment where there are happy people, we tend to be happy. If we live in an environment where there are unhappy people, we tend to be unhappy.

Tim:

Would I be right, Paddi, in saying that you were lucky in the sense that you were in a very dark place but you somehow have the mental capacity to realize that you needed to be happy because many I guess wouldn’t.

Paddi:

I’m not sure whether it’s luck or not Tim. That’s a whole philosophical question. I suspect it was due to the fact that I had great parents and a good education and an unusual brain. Is that luck or is that predestination? I don’t know.

Tim:

Yeah okay. That’s another podcast interview somewhere else. Did you have people tapping you on the shoulder, any honest people around you, because I imagine you’re living in a fairly unreal world at this stage – nice resorts, nice cars, nice houses, nice restaurants? In that environment, there’d be a lot of dishonest people. I don’t mean criminals. I mean people saying “you’re great, Paddi. We love you, Paddi.” But did anyone tap you on the shoulder and say “you’re a fool, Paddi.”

Paddi:

To a certain extent, my wife Deborah was very sensible, but she also didn’t have all the insight into the situation but she gave me good advice. Yes, Deborah was pretty straightforward with me. But most people are not introspective enough to understand this problem because most people have the same problem. I think that economic and social success gives us happiness and that is not true.

Tim:

It’s a hard one to overcome, isn’t it?

Paddi:

It’s so well promulgated.

Tim:

Thanks to marketing and advertising.

Paddi:

Nowadays marketing, the whole world is skewed that way. It is modern marketing but it’s been here since time in memorial. Rich people are going to be happy. People who are socially successful are going to be happy. Yeah there’s a slight amount of truth in it but it misses the whole point. The point is we need to build a life that makes us happy and not much of that life needs to be to do with the social systems and economic systems that we have.

Tim:

Paddi, I almost feel guilty about leaving the philosophical discussion. I feel it’s going to come back anyway.

Paddi:

Guilt is useful.

Tim:

Yeah it is good. It keeps you honest. You decided you needed to create a business that made you happy, so what did you do? How did you go about that? I understand one of the first things you did was fire 75% of your client-base?

Paddi:

That probably wasn’t…that’s an interesting story and it makes it sound a little more uncaring that it was and it certainly wasn’t the first thing that I did. The first thing that I did was introspection to decide what made me happy and what made me unhappy. It’s really hard introspection. It’s hard to figure out to sit down for half an hour and think “what is it in my life that going to…how can I build a life that’s going to make me happy? What is it about my current life that makes me unhappy?” To do that requires an enormous amount of energy and it makes your head ache. I know from personal experience. It’s very hard to think that deeply. Usually we shy off and go on with life. Does that make sense?

Tim:

Yeah it does, absolutely. You’re an honest fellow and this is an honest session. I’ve just been in China, as I said before we hit record, for four days and I went over there to give a talk and I knew I had some spare time and I was going to reflect, I’m in a very busy time in my life at the moment. I was going to do some introspection. I didn’t call it that but I went to do it and I found it all too hard.

Paddi:

You’re being honest too, Tim. Yes, it’s one of the hardest things in life. It’s easy just to get on with doing stuff.

Tim:                      

Absolutely.

Paddi:

Much easier. And that’s not just in life, though life is the most important thing. It’s also in our business. So often we just keep paddling and don’t think about the systems that might make it less arduous to pedal. Introspection is like that. If we introspect and go through the pain, we can make our life less arduous but we have to pay the price to start off with it. You don’t have to do it for a long time to start off with it. You can do it for a minute or two. As I was explaining to my Thai boxing teacher today; he’s a great Thai boxer but he’s not that wonderful a teacher because we hasn’t learned to think. He’s learned to exercise his body and put up with the pain of his muscles but he hasn’t learned to put up with the pain in your brain when you think. When you think with the part of your brain that’s not used to thinking, it hurts. That’s introspection. If you’re not used to introspection, take it easy. You’ll get there.

Tim:

What’s the question that you sit down and ask, Paddi?

Paddi:

“How can I be happy and what is it that’s making me unhappy at the moment?” I assume most people understand that if they’re happy in life, that’s good and if they’re unhappy that’s bad. It’s almost innate, isn’t it? We get this good feeling when we’re happy and we like it. We enjoy life. And we get this bad feeling when we’re unhappy.

Tim:

Makes sense.

Paddi:

Do you accept that?

Tim:

Absolutely.

Paddi:

Happiness is the most important thing in life. We sometimes think the most important thing in life is family or religion or country or community.

Tim:

I would always say peace. I think it’s a subjective question. I like pushing concepts. So is happiness the end point? To me I would have thought to be at peace with who you are would be the end point, not happiness.

Paddi:

If you’re at peace with who you are, you will be happy.

Tim:

You will be.

Paddi:

I think so, yes. But that’s certainly a component of happiness. This is my tenor that happiness is the most important thing in life and that we look for things that make us happy and some of us find that we get happiness from our religion and from our country and we tend to think that these things are more important than happiness but in actual fact what we supply our happiness, that’s what supply our happiness. The end point of it all is happiness and we have different sort of tools that we use in life. For me that was my first ‘aha’ moment. Yes, I want to be happy. And the second one was discovering what it was that made me happy and pursuing it.

Tim:

So you at least must have thought at this point in time, Paddi, that the idea of being a dentist and owning a dental practice was what you wanted to do. There were just things within the way you went about running that practice that were making you unhappy. Is that correct?

Paddi:

Can I switch it around a little bit and say life had taken me to the place where I was a highly qualified dentist or depending on what we’re talking about, a surgeon, and I needed a job to give me money so that I would live and buy food, but I also discovered that I wanted to be happy. My purpose became to run my business in such a way that it will provide me with happiness rather than take away happiness. Does that make sense?

Tim:

Yeah. Yeah absolutely. So everything that you would do going forward had to provide happiness or it didn’t fly in the world of Paddi Lund.

Paddi:

That’s it. So I set about adding all the things that made me happy and taking away all the things that made me unhappy. Does that sound logical?

Tim:

Yeah, totally.

Paddi:

If I talk about one, we’ll look at just one area. One area was what was my product? Previously I thought my product, when I was a physician, was health and when I was an oral surgeon it was taking away infections or cancer and when I was a dentist it was filling up holes. But in the end, as I explored this happiness concept more and more, I thought “no, most people are like me. They want happiness just like me.” My product actually is happiness. I would like to make my customers more happy than they were before, than they were before they met me. That became my purpose and the way I supplied it was through dentistry. It doesn’t really matter what business you’re in. If you can supply people with happiness, that is the perfect product.

Tim:

So I’m going to bring that back to a bit of marketing discussion here and say that you’ve identified that everything you’re going to in the practice going forward had to provide happiness to Paddi Lund. As a result, it will provide happiness to your staff and your patients. From what I understand…

Paddi:

That’s a little bit of a disjoint.

Tim:

I love how you keep fooling me up.

Paddi:

Go on, go on.

Tim:

No, go. Tell me the disjoint.

Paddi:

Okay. If I become happy, I’m sort of the leading light in the business, it tends to make other people happy. It’s not so selfish as it sounds.

Tim:

I agree absolutely.

Paddi:

In fact, by making myself more happy, I became more aware that my purpose to make other people happy because that is what made me happy. We surround ourselves with happy people, we become more happy. It’s wonderful. We’re social animals. We need to be happy and we discover that we get more happy by surrounding ourselves with happy people, so we start to make them happy. And then when they become happy, they sometimes start to realize the same thing, and they tend to want to make me happy. It’s a nice little circle. Makes sense?

Tim:

Absolutely. From what I understand, you went and identified a whole lot of things in the business and I imagined this was a joint kind of exercise amongst you and your staff and said “where is all the sadness in the business and what can we do to fix it?” Where I’m going with this, Paddi, is that I am interested and I would love you to share what the experience of being a Paddi Lund patient. In fact, you didn’t even call them patients. I’d love you to share that because it’s a really interesting story.

Paddi:

The main thing that I discovered in that particular time is that we’re greatly affected by how other people treat us. This impinges on our happiness greatly. You understand that? How other people treat us. What that means in our society is generally politeness. If people are polite and respectful with us, it tends to make us feel good. And if they’re impolite and disrespectful, it tends to make us feel bad. That’s, in a nutshell, what I discovered at that point. And I discovered it by looking at the interactions that we had with each other and questioning people about what it was about interactions that made them unhappy and almost 100% it was the lack of common politeness – the lack of please, the lack of thank you, the lack of respect, the lack of smile, talking about people behind their backs. There were also sort of areas that make people feel and the modern word is disrespected. I don’t quite like it actually, feel disrespected. We, together, made up a series of standards that we would use in our communication with each other. This is in my business family, which is what you might call staff or team. We made 7 rules or standards and put them on a wall and we attempted to live by them. We were not 100% successful but we certainly improved our happiness remarkably, remarkably. In fact for a long time every evening we would score our happiness.

Tim:

Wow! You don’t need to recite all 7 but what was an example of one of these standards, Paddi?

Paddi:

An example of one of the standards was if you want something from someone, say please. And if you receive something, say thank you. And if you somebody says thank you to you, you say welcome or it was a pleasure.

Tim:

Wow, it’s beautifully simple.

Paddi:

Most people when I say that, “that is too complicated. I’m running a business. I haven’t got time.”

Tim:

Really?

Paddi:

I can understand that but it really only takes about 3 seconds. Actually when I first thought of that standard, I had a lot of resistance to it myself. In fact I was probably the worst person on using that standard. But now it becomes second nature and I always do it, no I shouldn’t say always but I mostly do it, and it makes a lot of difference in my interaction with people.

Tim:

And at the end of the day, you literally sat down with your business family and ask “how did we go on those 7 standards today?”

Paddi:

It wasn’t always me that asked. We did a round-robin and it was always a facilitator who asked “how happy are you today? Why is it not 100%? What happened in your day?” And almost invariably it’s some little human interaction that didn’t go so well. So as we came across each area that was causing a problem, we attempted to make a standard to cover that area and we called this, the overall system, the courtesy system. And I wrote about that. I wrote a book called Building the Happiness-Centered Business, which centers around that story, about how to build a system of communication in a business that makes people happy with each other. And eventually we extended that to our customers and we mandated that our customers must use that with us. We made a binding with each new customer. We will always use the standard with you. We would like you to use the standard in return. If you can’t, well it’s probably better if you find some other business.

Tim:

So Paddi, to that point you did choose to farewell a number of patients. 75% might be the truth getting in the way of a good story.

Paddi:

It could easily have been but it took a long time to do that.

Tim:

But basically from what I understand, you took out the shingle. You didn’t market yourself overtly. You implemented a referral system in which existing patients…what did you call patients?

Paddi:

Customer or guests.

Tim:

Existing guests were asked to refer people like themselves and it was very much a closed practice. I mean you operated off what I would probably call a scarcity model.

Paddi:

That was the early model. That was a long time ago. The later model was what I call “by invitation only” which meant that only a certain of my customers were invited, were given the privilege of inviting their friends. You have to be a special customer to be offered that privilege. It was not all the customers who could refer their friends. No name in the phonebook, silent number, walk to the front door, no signs, and no one could just walk in the door even if they could open it. You had to be invited by one of our privilege customers and they have special invitation cards. It became by invitation only, which is a scarcity model, but that wasn’t the point for me. The point for me was to surround myself with customers who were wonderful.

Tim:

There was a balance here as you’re almost walking a tightrope of “I’m trying to build a happy business” versus people viewing this as an incredible arrogance. Did you get a bit of that?

Paddi:

Did I get that? I didn’t ever get that personally, except from other dentists when I spoke about this concept. I didn’t ever find that from customers. They seem to feel privileged to be able to refer their friends and if they weren’t privileged, they would work hard to be privileged. That was my experience on that but certainly other dentists would think this was an arrogant model. And also probably there were many other people who I didn’t come in contact with – they were not dentists, they’re not customers of mine – who felt the same thing. But it doesn’t matter because I only wanted 1% of the population as my customers. I would sometimes sit at my front window and watch people walk by and I think for every thousand people that walk by, there will only be one person who really wants what I’ve got and that’s fine.

Tim:

Does this all lead to you reducing your hours significantly and putting your prices up significantly, Paddi?

Paddi:

I’m not sure what lead to what but certainly…

Tim:                      

Both happened.

Paddi:

10 years of my practice I only worked 2 ½ days a week in a single person practice or maybe 2 days in the last 5 years, making, in my investigations, quite a lot more money than the average dental practitioner. When you say “putting your prices up”, I’m not sure if that’s true because that denotes that there is a price for a piece of work and I don’t have that.

Tim:

I don’t understand that. Can you explain that a little bit more? You started to work less, you were selective about who you work with and you did earn significantly more. So there must have been a definite decision at some point to say “that filling, it used to cost $100, it’s now going to cost $300.” There must have been some point where you’ve reviewed your pricing.

Paddi:

You say that “there must” but I don’t believe that that is the case. Okay? Can you open your mind a little bit?

Tim:

I’d love to, absolutely. I’m always open to that.

Paddi:

That’s assuming that there is a price for an item.

Tim:

There was no price for an item. There was no menu.

Paddi:

No, I don’t have prices for item. My product was happiness and the mechanism of supplying the product is helping people to be happy about their mouths because they are comfortable, can chew well, look good and they’re healthy. That’s the product. And the price is related to that product, not to an individual item.

Tim:

Okay, I get that. Therefore, I’m guessing, therefore I wouldn’t been an ideal patient, an ideal guest, because I would want to be walking in to this wonderfully happy practice knowing that I’m getting a filling and I’m going to have a healthy mouth but I’d love to know what the budget for that filling.

Paddi:

I understand your point of view. That assumes that after you had gone through the process of invitation and gone through the process of welcoming and education that you still felt the same way that you were filling-centric. Do you understand?

Tim:

I do.

Paddi:

Rather than wellbeing-centric or happiness-centric.

Tim:

Yeah, transaction versus transformation. You’re more into transformation.

Paddi:                  

Thanks. That’s a good way of putting it.

Tim:

Thank you.

Paddi:

You’re welcome. It’s not just me that has good ideas.

Tim:

No, absolutely not. Okay, I’m clear on the way you went about charging. I’m not 100% cleared. I’m not going to push much further on this but I do think it is interesting because pricing is one of those areas of many small business owners listening that troubles them. Was there one guest who came in for a filling and paid $100 and another one who paid $500 on the same day? Or did the menu say, I don’t know. I don’t even know what the question is here. Help me, Paddi.

Paddi:

Okay, you’re still filling-centric. You’re still filling-centric. It’s an interesting way of thinking. We tend to have particular ways of thinking about particular businesses and the people who are in the business tend to be the most standardized, thinking about their own business. We can be a little more creative when we think about businesses that we don’t own, a way of thinking about their business, but when we’re in a business, it’s very hard to get out of the standardize way of thinking about the business. I have a friend, [42:59], who was in the beginning of organizing FedEx. And if you read the FedEx story, you’ll start to see that this guy is looking at the transport and communication and packaging and parceling business in a completely different way. He’s got a completely paradigm. And this is very useful sometimes when we want to build a different kind of business, to develop a different paradigm for that business. And it’s only when you ask me these questions about my filling or the cost that I start to realize I don’t even think about the business that I had in this way. It’s not even part of my mindset anymore. It certainly has been in the past, 30 or 40 years ago in the past. That’s how I thought about dentistry. But it’s completely different now. I have a completely different mindset. The interesting thing about that is anybody can do it. You don’t have to run the same generic kind of business as everybody else.

Tim:

Good point.

Paddi:

It is possible. There’s no angel watching over your shoulder saying “that’s not standard chiropractic. Chiropractors shouldn’t think like that. That’s not standard pharmacy.” Pharmacists give drugs out and take money. That’s the model. Well it’s changed a little a little bit in recent days. They give advice. They, to a certain extent, provide a safety net for the doctor these days. It’s different. And in different countries you’ll see different models. In fact it’s worth going around the world and seeing the different models of business that you can see. Here in Thailand I’m fascinated by the different ways that people do things. We think that we in the west have the ultimate way of doing everything. That’s not true.

Tim:

Your point, Paddi, your point is there are different ways of cutting the cloth and often, particularly in the west, we just do what is expected within our industry and what every other plumber or dentist or chiropractor or business owner has done forever and a day but in actual fact there are other ways of doing it.

Paddi:

You’ve hit the nail right on the head.

Tim:

Thank you very much. Hey Paddi, I’d love to…we could go on forever. This should have been a one day workshop, not a 35-minute podcast interview. Again, guilt is asking me not to ask this question but I am interested in smell and it is a rational question following such a philosophical discussion, but again smell is one of those things I haven’t had the conversation on this show about and it’s an important marketing play in your practice. You spend a little bit of time trying to get rid of the smell of Novocain. What did you actually do to address that?

Paddi:

Smell is very important in the dental practice because many people are fearful of the smell of dental practice. Unlike vision and sound, we can’t easily block out smell. It comes in with the air. We got to breathe. And it’s a very primitive sense. One of the more primitive senses and it’s very deeply connected to our emotions, so it’s very hard to block out. Once you have an unpleasant association with a smell or once you have a pleasant association with a smell, you might remember back to some lady that you knew wore a particular perfume and smelling that perfume will bring her back at the age that she was looking as lovely as she was. Can you sympathize with that?

Tim:

Yeah, I can. Well I was actually thinking more about the sour milk at kindergarten, which brings back wonderful memories, but I could also reflect on some wonderful ladies that I met that smelled wonderful.

Paddi:

And chalk. Chalk. Chalk. Chalk.

Tim:

And chalk, yeah absolutely.

Paddi:

Many people seem to have this thing about the smell of dentist, so I thought I’m going to get over it. I built a new building and I designed the air conditioning so that it sucked the air from the outer parts of the building thru to the inner part of the building where the operator ward is, where like the surgery area is, and out thru the top of the building. It’s a bit like in a bacteriological laboratory, the air always sucks inwards so you don’t get the bacteria going out. Here it was the smell. I didn’t want the smell going out into the lounge areas. So that was the first thing I did. The second thing I did, there were a number of steps, we became a dental [48:03] and we started baking good smelling [49:11] in our business.

Tim:

Dental buns I think you call them.

Paddi:

Yes, we call them buns. I try to get away from that word because last week in America it evokes too much laughter. I just get tired, it is blinding. So I just say [48:27]; dental buns, especially if you have a lot of dental assistants and the audience goes crazy for about 5 minutes. Yes, that’s exactly right. This changed the smell of my business from a smell that caused people to have fear in their hearts to a place where people smelled something that made them think about their mouths not as a place of fear but as a place of pleasure. And I engineered this situation where almost inevitably people will taste these buns as a first process and there’s a way you can do that. It’s not easy.

Tim:                      

What do you mean that you engineered a way? What do you mean by that?

Paddi:

Okay, well if you say to somebody “would you like a cup of tea?” Almost invariably most people will be [49:26], the word here in Thailand is [49:28] and it means you don’t want to trouble people. “No, no, no. It’s okay. No, I don’t want a cup of tea.” However, in my business I want people to have a cup of tea because I want them to feel cared for and I know that sharing tea breaks down barriers and I know that sharing dental [49:46] breaks down barrier. It’s a way of getting closer to people. I have a form of words. So the tea, which I gradually developed, worked really well. And it is “oh, it’s nice to see you. I’m glad you come. I’ll just put the tea pot on. I’ll just have a cup of tea but I hate to drink tea alone. Would you join me? Would you join me? Otherwise I’m going to feel really bad.” Of course 100% of people will join me.

Tim:

And have a bun while you’re at it.

Paddi:

There’s another way for doing that. There are systems. Systems are terribly important. It’s like introspection. We introspect about our life and we think about our business from a systems point of view as a way of making the business run more efficiently and easily and with more quality. I’m a very systems person, especially in terms of communication. That’s one of the examples of a communication system so that people will do what you want them to do.

Tim:

You must have drunk a lot of tea and ate a lot of buns.

Paddi:

Ah yes, that why I have to do it [51:06] so that I can release some of the calories.

Tim:

Paddi, I really appreciate this chat. It kind of went where I thought it would and it went in some very unusual directions, which I love and I know my listeners will love to. I think we got some marketing gold in there, as well as some philosophy and some world according to Paddi, so thank you so much for sharing all that.

Paddi:

You’re very welcome, Tim.

Tim:

Lots of questions left, maybe for another time. If people wanted to find out a little bit more about you, I know they can head over to paddilund.com. There is a book as well. What was it called?

Paddi:

There’s a number of books. The one I was referring to is called Building the Happiness-Centered Business.

Tim:                      

Love it.

Paddi:

And the website is paddilund.com. I think it’s .au too. Thank you for that.

Tim:

Absolute pleasure, Paddi. Thanks so much mate. Bye.

Paddi:                  

Bye.

Tim:

What about that folks. Hope you enjoyed it. Before I give you my top 3 learnings, let me quickly tell you about Swifly.com I think you’re going to want to hear. I say quickly because that’s exactly what Swiftly is all about – small design fixes fast. Swiftly is ideal for altering your business card details, logo alterations, banner ad updates, even photo touchups and we all love a good touchup. You simply upload the artwork that needs fixing. Tell them what needs doing and boom within one hour, often much less let me tell you, it’s done. All for just $19. Check them out, swiftly.com.

Alright. I would love to hear what you thought about that fireside chat with dentist Paddi Lund. I found it an incredibly interesting interview. It could have gone on for much longer, always conscious of how long these interviews go for, so I kept it to that kind of magical 40 or 50 minutes or whatever we end up running to. 3 tips that I took from that chat with Paddi – #1 put aside time for introspection. Yeah. What would make you happy? What would make for a happy business? What would make for a happy business owner like yourself? Interesting. As I said, I tried to do it in China. I kind of decided to go and walk the tourist tracks instead. #2 create systems and processes. Got to do. This is a future topic. It is actually a future topic that will be covered inside the Small Business Big Marketing forum. I have found a systems expert and she is going to share exactly how to set up systems so that you’re not always recreating, reinventing the wheel. That would be interesting and Paddi agrees with that. #3 consider what you’re doing in your business just because that’s how the industry does it. I supposed it’s to my editorial at the top of the show “get what you’ve always got.” I think we do need to look outside our industry to see how we could be doing things better. Our industry doesn’t always get it right and there are different ways of cutting the cloth. Hope you enjoyed that interview. Head over to smallbusinessbigmarketing.com. This was episode 183. I would love you to leave a comment, some feedback, your thoughts in the show notes.