Design, Design, Design......

The importance of design is so important in society today. We buy Apple computers because of design (and functionality), we buy cars, houses and just about everything because of the design. In addition, patients buy dentistry because of design, of chair, surgery, reception, website.....the importance of design is essential in dental practice today.

When we set up our first wandsworth practice i was quite hesitant in getting a designer involved, I perceived it to be expensive, however, we made the right decision by getting the right design agency involved. Any notions that i could do the job of a designer were quickly dispelled by realising these guys were excellent at their job.

From the way the light comes in to the practice, to the position of the reception desk, they all need to be considered in creating an ambiance that customers want to experience. Getting the right designers is essential in doing this

Well what is a right designer?

From my experience, i know there are a few designers/architects etc in dentistry, but from what i have seen, most of their work is pretty much the same, just badged a little differently each time, no great consideration of brand and ethos has been considered, but most importantly addressing customer needs has not been considered.

When we chose our original designers/architects, we chose a firm that had little knowledge of dental practice technology (they learnt quickly) but they certainly understood what customers wanted. In my opinion, that is the essential aspect that so many dentists forget, what do customers want and to experience? Designing a practice around brand and customer experience is essential in today's private dental age, any good designer and architect can learn about the dental aspects they need to.

Just a few pictures of current plans for The Neem Tree 3 show above. All in development at the moment but pretty exciting when you see it on paper. Lots of decisions to be made.

If you want to get involved in detail to see The Neem Tree 3 develop from a concept to a final practice then don't miss out on our "Hands- On" Setting Up In Practice Programme starting 12th March 2010...more details here.

Week one - New Dental and Office Site

2010 has started off with a bang! New Site for Samera offices and The Neem Tree!

I plan on blogging about our progress in developing a new Neem Tree and Samera offices over the next few months at our new site in Surrey. I hope this will prove to be an interesting read for anyone interested in the trials and tribulations of opening a new dental practice plus offices for Samera.

Week One

This has been a really interesting and exciting week after Xmas, although i was supposed to be away, my trip was cancelled due to a few family reasons, i have been in constant discussion with designers, contractors and all manner of sorts of people who will help us achieve our objectives.

The first person we have taken on to deal with the project is Pete, he is our designer and also our project manager. We have learnt from previous experiences always hire a team that can do a much better job than we could. Pay the professionals for their expertise, don't try and do everything yourself, as it will rarely be as good as a professional!

He has drafted concept drawings for the offices and also is in the process of putting the drawings together for the dental practice too. Since the building is a grade 2 listed building, it is pretty old, we also have employed russell to be our structural engineer, design is important, but so is structure, so we don't have a failing building!

Problems we have encountered....

Such projects are fraught with issues and problems, just in week one we have experienced:

1. Problematic structure - since the building is 17th Century, trying to get the drawings of the building right, from under all the existing buildings has not been easy

2. Snow - No show of builders due to snow (kind of expected)

3. Police - A visit by the police.....more on this later!!!

4. Budget Management - Keeping the costs as low as possible! already some hidden unknown costs are appearing, so we will have to manage costs accordingly, keeping to a tight budget will be key here.

As I write the builders have already taken alot of the old debris off the walls away, tomorrow is a site visit, lets see how this goes!!

Winning NHS Contracts

Through his company Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett has averaged a return of 20.3% per annum since 1965. This may not sound like much, but when compounded (if you are not sure what compounding is, read about it here) over the years he has been actively investing, this is HUGE, in fact this is a return of 336,000% - yes you read that correctly. This phenomenal growth in his company made him the world's richest man in 2008, in 2009 he is now second, only to his mate Bill Gates. You can see Warren Buffet's performance in investing in detail here, in his famous annual letter to shareholders.

Warren Buffett's number one rule is "Never Lose Money". His second rule is, "Never forget rule number one!". Through such an approach to investing and buying businesses he has managed to beat Wall Street.

To read and learn about his other rules click here, they make interesting reading and watching.

But what does he do with his money? Well he appears to live a pretty frugal existence, going to the local diners, and playing online bridge, but also one of capitalisms most successful men, gives much of his money away. He has bequeathed around £19bn to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

If you look at his website for Berkshire Hathaway, interestingly it is very simple indeed. No fancy graphics or flash animation, just blue writing on a white background. You could call it pretty unimaginative or dreary, but from his perspective, he feels he does not need to spend unnecessary money on such detail, when he can deliver returns of over 20% per annum to his investors.

Now this is an interesting point that perhaps we could all learn from. Rather than making ourselves look nice and paint a nice veneer, perhaps we should all, myself included, look at how we manage our costs.

Warren has certainly mastered the art of how to manage his costs, not just on his website but across his entire organisation. He still answers the phone in his office and has no computer in his office. What could you do in your life? �

Winning NHS Contracts �

To win an NHS Contract is no easy feat. In principle, one would think it would be a matter of filling a few forms and then hey a few meetings later and then you will have been awarded a contract. But sadly, in this competitive world this is no longer the case. The process is extensive, with a significant amount of time and resources required to even submit a worthy submission.

Even after you have gone through the PQQ, ITT etc stages, there is still no guarantee that you will be awarded the contract. In fact, i have seen many dentists who have submitted such tenders fail. Their submissions usually look pretty good, with all the clinical and patient centred activities well thought through and argued. However, it is usually the pricing of the UDA's where i have seen them lose at the last hurdle. Either pricing the UDA's too high, putting them out of the game in the early stages, or alternatively pricing them too lowly, making the venture pretty unfeasible over the long term. Although PCT's want to ensure they are looking for good value for money, my gut feel is they are looking for the most, for the cheapest, wouldn't you?

Many a times, i feel this is not necessarily good business sense for dentists, yet they continue with the contract, until further down the line certain problems arise such as cashflow and cost management problems or the claw back of UDA's. Many a time claw back has meant the final nail in the coffin for the practitioner, but do the PCT really care? Probably not.

So what is the solution? Well in my opinion the answer lies in understanding your cost base in detail before entering such PCT tenders (If Warren Buffett was a dentist i reckon he certainly would understand his projected costs!). By understanding your cost model, you can then determine a break even point, which can then translate into a break even point per UDA. Any price above the break even UDA value is then profit. However, when financial modelling such scenarios, one must take into many assumptions in the model, such as:

• Probable private income. If you price your UDA low, to be very competitive, could you earn a good amount from private dentistry?
• Expected opening hours. If they require an emergency service have you factored in paying more for dentists working sunday evenings?
• Dental Healthcare Promotion. What do the PCT require? How much will this cost you in terms of time and money? ...

Winning an NHS contract is very possible, but in my experience, one must be very careful as to what you sign up to. It may look like a good deal in the beginning, with big figures, but if you have not considered all the financial implications and considered all of your costs and appropriately priced this into your tender, you could be asking for trouble. For those who do the math up front, we usually see a successful NHS practice.

At Samera, we have a team, who not only understand the full cost base of dentistry but also can help with the financial models you require to assess if the venture is right for you. For more information about how the Samera team can help you win the right NHS tenders for you visit here. We can help with the full submission process, or alternatively with building a realistic financial model for your needs.

Give a Little Love 2009

The momentum is gathering, the gifts are slowly beginning to trickle in, we just now need you to help us put as a many smiles on disadvantaged kids faces this Christmas. To get involved, inspire your team and community and find out more how this all works, visit www.givealittlelove.org.uk.

Why Get Involved? Simply, to help others less fortunate, BUT also help your team forge even stronger alliances amongst themselves and your patients. You can read and watch how our team greatly benefitted from this campaign in 2008 here! Go on get involved, and have a laugh at me make a fool of myself online with my kick off video!

Master your Wealth- 4th December 2009- 100% Money Back Guarantee

Finally, this is your last chance this year to learn about how to take control of your own financial investments and destiny in my "Master your Wealth" course. From 2010, i will be increasing the fee significantly from £250+VAT to well over £1000+VAT in 2010, and i will only be doing it once in 2010. Why? Well I know the content is priceless, but ultimately it is about stepping up in your own life and implementing change to grow your wealth. A few have already started off on this journey, if you want to come along for the ride, book your space, before the big price rise in 2010. Take a look at this recent blog post of mine which details some of the tools and techniques i personally use to manage my own money.

To make your booking click here. I am so certain you will find such value, that i am happy to even offer a 100% money back guarantee if after the morning session you feel you are not on the right course. At the lunchtime break you just need to hand your course notes back and we will offer you a full refund there and then if you wish for a full refund. Go on step up, you will not regret it!

Can't make it fairer than that!

Have a brilliant weekend!

Arun Mehra FCA

P.S . Not downloaded our latest Full Incorporation Study?...Then get it here!

The Tools I Use To Invest

I thought it would be useful for readers to understand how I manage my own money, from a practical point of view. All too often one does not know what tools to use to manage one's own money as there are so many to look at, and so many that can confuse.

I outline below some of the low cost tools I use to help me invest and trade. However, it is well worth spending a little bit of money so you have these key tools to make smart and quick decisions. I use these tools regularly and now are integrated into my lifestyle of growing my own wealth.

In no particular order, these are some of the tools you will require:

On line Broker

I use on line broker TD Waterhouse to buy and sell my shares. www.tdwaterhouse.co.uk. They are a pretty large broker (known as a a Ameritrade in the US) and have access to most well known markets including the US. They normally charge £12.50 per trade (buying or selling) irrespective of the size of trade, whether it is £1000 in value or £100000! However, if you trade regularly the charge does fall to £9.95 per trade.

I don't use them for any advice, they are my execution broker online. In addition, i subscribe to their live pricing feed for the London Stock Exchange which costs me around £50 a quarter. If however, you do a lot of trades you can even get this free of charge. Is it worth having live prices? Absolutely, as sometimes on a trade you may get in and out within minutes after taking your profit! There are some other good companies out there too, such as e-trade, self trade etc.

However, for the US markets (which open at 2.30pm UK time at the moment), you do not need to subscribe to live pricing as this is free on sites such as www.google.com/finance (see below), but bear in mind if you want more detailed information about US market trading activity then it maybe best to subscribe accordingly to a site. However, a site like Options Express (see below) will provide usually enough information free.

Although i use TD Waterhouse for most of my trades including US trades, i also have a separate US broker known as Options Express. I have not used them much but they seem pretty good too.


Technology

I have a separate netbook which is just used to getting my live pricing on. I find having a separate PC, with this live data, much easier to us. I have a Dell netbook which costs me around £20 a month (for 2 years) from Vodafone which includes a good 3G allowance too ( you can get them even cheaper now). This can connect to a wi-fi connection too, where i can log on and get my live pricing if necessary.

I have an Iphone too, which has prices of shares that come directly via bloomberg. Pretty good too, but there is a 15 min delay in UK pricing.

Key Websites

Most of my research comes from the web. I use the following free websites:

1. www.google.com/finance - for US and International company information
2. www.google.co.uk/finance - for UK company information and news
3. www.yahoo.com/finance - for US and International company information

The above 3 websites are free and excellent. They act as an aggregator of information which then you can read as you wish. In addition, each stock you maybe following usually has a discussion board....which usually are pretty interesting to read. However beware, some postings are dubious at the best of times!

In particular I use the google sites for charting. They have a great free facility to be able to see the charts of the shares but also allow you to see key technical analysis too.

I also use:

1. www.iii.co.uk - for more information about UK companies and associated discussion boards
2. www.bloomberg.com - for breaking and up to date financial news
3. www.ft.com - for UK and international news

So what next?

Ok you have the account, the technology and know where to find information about companies, then you need to start choosing stocks and shares to invest in!

Most people never get to this stage as they feel that it is too difficult or they think it is easier to get their financial advisor to manage their finances. But my experience has shown that if you can get the above set up for yourself, then you can actively start trading and investing for you! If I can do it, so can you! And i would strongly suggest you take control of your own investment strategy. A good individual investor can usually beat the Professional Fund Manager!

How To Beat The Market!

The last six months have been a great six months for both active and passive investors. I had every intention of blogging about my investment strategies and sharing my thoughts with all. However, rather than blog, i decided, i would just get on with making some brilliant returns, and they have been brilliant. Therefore no time for blogging. Sorry.

I am sort of the person that believes rather than talk a good story, the best way to show to others is actually do it. Whether it is dental practices or trading shares, i would only expect others to do what i say if i have actually done it myself. Far too often, i hear and read of people doing what experts tell them, yet the expert has never actually done what they are suggesting. My brief time as a Management Consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers and an analyst in the City taught me how to be a master of consultancy and analysis, however, i have only become a strong investor in business and shares by doing it myself (and of course by making plenty of mistakes!).

In this edition of our newsletter, you can read my piece about "How to beat the market! - Passive vs Active vs DIY Investing". In particular I highlight the benefits of DIY investing (assuming you know what you are doing) as opposed to investing in managed of tracker funds. I genuinely believe and feel that most individuals can manage their own funds and grow their own weatlh smartly, as opposed to using funds that charge and take away a lot of the returns. If you like what i say in this piece, and want to know more then i would suggest you then join us on our "Master your Wealth" day on the 30th October 2009. If you want to take control of your own financial well being, and not leave it to so-called experts, this day will be the impetus for you to do it! This will be a very small group, for more details and to book click here.

Passive vs Active vs DIY Investing

I personally don’t understand why people invest in ‘tracker’ funds. Why pay someone just to replicate the performance of the index?

A friend I was talking to the other day was singing the praises of this kind of ‘passive’ investing. He made the point that you may as well go passive since few active fund managers can beat the index over a sustained period. And that’s fair enough.

But to me it misses an even more important point. You don’t need to settle for market-tracking returns. It’s perfectly possible for individual investors like you and me to beat both passive and active funds by picking suitable stocks.

Let me show you what I mean...

There’s little doubt that index, or passive funds are a much better bet than actively managed funds. John Bogle, who founded the well-regarded Vanguard Group of index tracking funds in the US, has done a detailed comparison. The arguments in favour of index funds over actively managed funds are convincing.

Most actively managed funds don't beat the market in the long run

For example, he followed all 355 equity funds existing in 1970 over the period from 1970 to 2005. Of these, 223 did not survive to 2005. Only 24 of the remaining 132 beat the market by at least 1% per year. Just nine of those 24 beat the market by at least 2% per year and two beat it by 3% or more.

Choosing one of the few outperforming funds also proved to be difficult. Bogle looked at the 20 top performing funds in each year from 1995 to 2005. He found that the average rank of these top 20 funds in each following year was 619! In other words, if you bought one of the best funds one year, it often ended up being among the worst funds the following year.

One of the reasons the funds did so badly is their high costs, which are compounded over the years. Another reason is that funds advertise most heavily when the markets are reaching a peak. That means most investors invest more when shares are expensive rather than cheap.

Finally, large funds find it hard to invest in the stocks that are most likely to show the best share price growth. This is one area where smart individual investors have a serious advantage over fund managers. Here’s why. Let’s assume that a fund manager has 50 stocks in a £1bn fund. That is £20m per company on average. Now the manager will probably not want to own too large a percentage of any one company’s shares. This means that for a £20m holding that's worth, say, 3% of a company, he is limited to stocks with market caps over £660m. This figure will be even higher for a larger fund.

This means the fund must concentrate mainly on larger companies – the FTSE 100 if it is a UK fund. Indeed, many so-called active funds are just ‘closet’ trackers but with charges much higher than those of any tracker.

Every investor looking to beat the market consistently should avoid these funds - they can be dangerous.

The Best Way to Consistently Beat the Market

So we can see that index trackers are a smarter play than actively managed funds. However, there’s no need for you to settle for simply tracking the market. Because you have several advantages over the average fund manager that should enable you to beat the market. These advantages include the freedom to pick stocks from any sector and any market, right down to the smallest micro-cap. And you do not charge yourself any initial or annual fund charges.

You also have an advantage over the index fund because you can decide how much you invest in any single company. The index fund has to invest in proportion to the company’s market cap.

But of course, these advantages only give you better performance if you pick stocks wisely. There are a few simple rules to follow that will help in this. Of course, a company’s valuation needs to be reasonable to start with. But there are other important things to consider.

The first rule is to select companies with financial strength – look at the balance sheet and cash carefully. Secondly, make sure the company is growing profitably and has a leading market position in its niche. And thirdly, make sure that it is doing well in overseas markets as well as the UK – there is much more risk if a company is limited to the UK market.

But perhaps most importantly, the company also needs to have a sustainable edge in its market. This usually means it re-invests in its own future. Put another way, it is sufficiently profitable to be able to invest a sizeable chunk of its revenues in new products and services coming out of research and development. This kind of re-investment can have a dramatic positive impact on the share price down the line.

If you want to know more and learn about some of the keys to successful investment plus my investment allocation strategy come along on the 30th October. For more details and to book click here. I will share with you in detail how big my returns have been in the last 6 months, plus all the strategies i employ to grow my own wealth as a DIY investor.

Happy Investing and Reading!

Arun Mehra FCA �

How to add £100k to your top line

My latest Samera Newsletter....i hope you enjoy it. Click here to read it!

Has the market peaked?

Has the market peaked?

As an active personal investor in the stock market, this recent unprecedented rally is looking rather top heavy in my humble opinion. The markets have taken some good profits reported by most of the banks and used this as an impetus for rising. In addition, certain key data regarding unemployment in the US was more positive than expected. However, as a keen observer, markets always over-react to news - in a good and bad way.

My feeling it is doing this now too, and that the market is due some sort of correction soon. When? I have no crystal ball, but fundamentally the US and UK commercial and residential property market plus their economies are still weak, no matter how much money is pumped into the economy the fundamentals are still weak.

Unemployment is rising, banks are still hesitant to lend to small businesses, public spending is high...so fundamentally still many problems do exist. This rapid growth in the markets will no doubt come down with a bang very soon, in my humble opinion.

However, you can still make money in a downturn too - you just need to short the stocks or indices!

Happy investing and trading