From founder-led to scalable: how Dr Rez Dental is using data to support its next stage of growth

How better data, stronger systems, and a repeatable patient experience are helping Dr Rez Dental scale beyond its founder

When Reza Dilmahomed started Dr Rez Dental in 2015, the business consisted of one rented surgery operating for a couple of evenings a week.

Reza had already spent years working as a dentist across Merseyside, building strong relationships with patients who would often follow him from one practice to another. Eventually, one of those patients posed a simple question: why not open somewhere of his own?

That suggestion helped spark what would become Dr Rez Dental. Five years later, Reza moved into a purpose-built practice on Dale Street in Liverpool city centre. Since then, the business has grown from a single practitioner and a handful of staff to around 32 people and multiple surgeries.

At the heart of that growth has been a clear philosophy: combine clinical excellence with a more human, patient-focused experience.

‘Our philosophy in patient care was more human-focused,’ Reza says. ‘It was more patient-experience based, as well as excellent dentistry itself. I think that’s what really drove the growth of the practice.’

But as Dr Rez Dental prepares for its next stage of expansion, Reza has faced a challenge familiar to many successful SME founders: how do you scale a business that has been built so closely around you?

Turning a personal reputation into a business

Dr Rez Dental’s early growth was closely linked to Reza’s personal reputation. Patients had followed him between practices for years because they trusted both his clinical work and the way he treated them.

That gave the new business an invaluable starting point. But over time, Reza recognised that long-term growth meant turning that individual reputation into something the whole team could deliver.

‘We’ve been trying to position the Dr Rez brand as an experience rather than as me,’ he explains.

Today, Reza spends around two or three days a week providing clinical treatment, with more of his time focused on running and developing the business. Other clinicians increasingly manage patient relationships, supported by systems and processes designed to ensure the same standard of service throughout the practice.

‘What you come to love about seeing me is what we do as a practice and as a team,’ Reza says. ‘Whoever you see in the practice, you’ll get the same experience.’

This shift reflects ideas within module 7 Help to Grow: Management Course, Organisational Design, around work hierarchy, centralisation, and decentralisation. As organisations grow, responsibility cannot continue sitting with one founder. Processes, expertise, and decision-making need to spread across the organisation without compromising standards.

For Dr Rez Dental, that means making its philosophy repeatable. The patient journey is mapped across the team, with each person responsible for delivering their part of the experience.

Measuring what matters

Another major change has been the way Dr Rez Dental uses data.

Reza admits that earlier in the business’s development, measurement was limited.

‘We didn’t have any KPIs,’ he says. ‘We weren’t tracking numbers and we didn’t have any data on how the business was running.’

That has changed considerably. The practice now monitors metrics across the business, including incoming enquiries, telephone calls, missed calls, treatment-plan conversions, social media performance, marketing activity, financial performance, and patient satisfaction.

The challenge, Reza says, is not collecting as much data as possible. It is identifying the information that helps the business make better decisions.

‘You can measure everything,’ he explains. ‘It’s working out the things that you need to measure that impact the business to help drive it forward.’

His approach starts with the desired outcome and works backwards:

1. establish what the business wants to achieve,
2. identify what needs to happen to reach that goal,
3. and then determine which measurables will show whether it is working.

This reflects the Help to Grow: Management Course’s focus on the use of financial metrics and performance measurement. Numbers become useful when they inform decisions rather than simply appearing on a dashboard.

Reza compares the process to finding holes in a ‘leaky bucket’. If the business can identify where potential patients are dropping out of the journey, the team can investigate why and make changes.

But the work never really stops.

‘Someone keeps puncturing holes in your bucket and you’re trying to play whack-a-mole with it,’ he says.

Customer behaviour changes. Marketing channels evolve. The way people consume social media transforms. The important thing is having enough visibility to recognise those changes early.

Building a marketing machine

In Dr Rez Dental’s early days, Reza remembers putting around £50 behind a social media advert. Today, the practice has a much more sophisticated approach incorporating external marketing partners, websites, CRM technology, Google Ads, social campaigns, and an internal social media manager producing content.

The business has also developed detailed brand guidelines covering everything from colours and fonts to imagery and the wider customer experience.

That is important because Dr Rez Dental operates entirely privately in a highly competitive market. Unlike a practice supported by an NHS contract, every new patient has to actively choose it.

Reza therefore sees reputation, brand, and patient experience as commercially inseparable.

The practice has won more than 14 national dentistry awards during its first five years on Dale Street, including Best Practice Overall UK, alongside recognition for areas including patient care, website, and brand design.

But acquiring a patient is only the beginning.

‘Our main priority, if someone does come on board with us, is keeping them, maintaining them and looking after them for the long term,’ Reza says.

That focus also connects with the Brand Identity Prism explored in the Help to Grow: Management Course. Dr Rez Dental’s brand is not simply its logo or visual appearance. Its culture, relationships, personality, and patient experience all contribute to what the brand represents.

Using the Help to Grow: Management Course to make better decisions

Reza joined the Help to Grow: Management Course at Edge Hill University having already completed other business development programmes. What attracted him was the opportunity to revisit different areas of the business while developing his understanding of AI and its potential role in growth.

For a dental practice handling sensitive patient information, that meant considering not only what AI could do, but how it could be introduced safely and appropriately.

One of the most valuable outcomes has been connecting that thinking with the data infrastructure the business had already been developing.

With clearer information about financial performance, conversions, marketing, and the patient journey, Reza says the leadership team now has a much stronger understanding of how the business is performing and where action is required.

That confidence matters because Dr Rez Dental is preparing to expand significantly, roughly doubling its surgery capacity and recruiting additional team members.

‘We now understand really well where we are with all aspects of the business,’ Reza says. ‘Comfortably enough to make that decision of where we need to go and grow.’

Scaling the experience, not just the business

Dr Rez Dental’s next challenge is therefore not simply to become bigger. It is to make sure that the qualities responsible for its growth, such as patient relationships, clinical standards, customer service, and attention to detail, survive that growth .

For Reza, moving from dentist to business leader has meant accepting that he cannot personally deliver every part of the experience.

Instead, his role is increasingly about creating the systems, culture, and information that allow other people to deliver it.

For other SME leaders, there is a useful lesson in that transition. A founder’s personality and reputation can be an enormous asset in building a business. But sustainable growth depends on turning what the founder does instinctively into something the organisation can consistently reproduce.

At Dr Rez Dental, better data, stronger systems, and a clearly defined patient experience are helping to make that transition possible.

 

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