Fuzail Jamall Fuzail Jamall qualified from Liverpool University in 1999 and during 2000 completed his Vocational Training in Coventry. He bought his first practice in 2001 from his VT trainer. Located in Warwickshire, Kenilworth Dental Centre was originally a single surgery set up, which Fuzail has since expanded to 3 surgeries and a thriving business that has enabled him to support three successful NHS tenders.
Now renamed Pennington Dental, Fuzail’s group of practices has enjoyed rapid growth in the last 12 months and now comprises 2 additional sites also based in Warwickshire. Pennington Dental Southam is a mixed practice that opened its doors to patients in the summer of 2009, and was closely followed by Pennington Dental Stratford–which will open in January 2010. Despite the success of his embryonic dental empire, Fuzail, by his own admission, feels he needs a little more in his life than “just dentistry” and this feeling has led to a number of additional areas of interest some of which are blossoming into business ventures in their own right.
Fuzail doesn’t consider practising dentistry to be his long term future and to put his business skills into practice he recently bought a small business based in Spain which distributes fertility and contraceptive monitors.
Fuzail saw this business as an opportunity to combine his dental knowledge with his entrepreneurial skills and spurred on by the experience, he has subsequently developed a web presence working with companies whose products he uses in clinical practice.
The office administration and web presence of his business, RDO, is organised from Spain, whilst the order taking and management is run from the UK – logistically Fuzail finds this works very well “The sophistication of communications and facilities for logistics mean that a geographical separation of different strands of the business really has no impact and in fact can bea great cost saving.”
Finding the time to run 2 companies as well as coping with the day to day management of a group of dental practices is something of a juggling act for Fuzail, but he is managing the process by working one day per week in practice, with the remainder of the time covered by Associates and using the rest of the week to manage the practices and related business interests. Fuzail is a great advocate of modern communications and uses Facebook and Twitter to great effect.
He finds each fulfils a different role for his businesses: “Facebook is great, because you can get your message to a huge number of people very quickly, Twitter on the other hand is a much more specific media – you have to give people a compelling reason to follow you – but when this works it can become a tool with significant impact."
Fuzail’s use of the web to drive patients to his practices has also been a useful tool, - when they opened their NHS practice in Southam, patients were asked to register purely on-line, - they received 1500 registrations in 2 months. “The internet and new technology needs to focus more on quality rather than quantity, - some people are only interested in statistics, how many people are following you, how many hits you get on your website, - for me, I would much rather work on the quality of those people in terms of their interest in what I am doing.”
Despite his extremely busy business life Fuzail has also found time in the past several years to work as a dental volunteer for Crisis Open Christmas. He first became involved with Crisis because he wanted to use his skills as a dentist to help homeless people who have been unfortunate to find themselves in a dire situation, often simply through circumstances: “The statistics on homelessness are unbelievable, - each of us could be a victim of homelessness simply through a series of uncontrollable events, - it could happen to me, so that’s why I wanted to help. In India and Pakistan homelessness is often normalised and having worked with the homeless here in the UK. I hope I can find time in the future to travel abroad and contribute to similar charity work over there.”
In the future, like all entrepreneurs Fuzail would like to operate his business interests on a part time basis, having established solid foundations and systems for them to grow, being there more to direct and guide. But he also has 3 busy practices and a desire to expand into other business interests.
Using his organisational set up and experience of day-to-day dental practice, he, in conjunction with an ex dental commissioner has started offering tendering services to dentists, including help and advice in tendering for NHS contracts – he is currently busier than ever writing tender documents and coaching dentists to succeed in acquiring tenders.
Fuzail can be reached through several routes Email fuzail.jamal@gmail.com Phone: 07958 749 687 Skype: Fuzail.Jamall Twitter: FuzJamall Facebook: Fuzail Jamall Websites: www.PenningtonDental.co.uk www.NHSDentalTenders.co.uk
www.RDO-dental.co.uk