THE ENTREPRENEUR
‘We realised fairly fast that people thought whitening was something it wasn’t, that if you got your teeth whitened you’d look like Britney Spears, which of course wasn’t the reality’
out with orthodontist Hugh Bradley. “I asked him about the whole teeth whitening thing, and expressedmy dismay at the cost, and then thought little more about it. Two weeks later, while holidaying in Thailand my mum rang me and told me Hugh had booked the two of us on flights to Florida the following week to check out a dental show! He thought it was a brilliant idea.” O’Neill admits he was reticent at first. “There was I thinking ‘I
don’t even know this guy, I’m not going anywhere with him’, but my mumconvinced me how serious she was about him, and off I went to the States. “We immediately saw what a huge market it is over there and growing fast, and I thought ‘Let’s bring this home’. That’s pretty much how it started as an idea.We set up a tooth whitening clinic on St Anne’s Street in 2005 and that was the birth of Smiles Dental.”
Born to business Just 26 at the time, it wasn’t O’Neill’s first foray into business, and its many challenges. While at UCD he set up a business, Coffee Stop. “I thought it was going to be an amazing success, selling coffee to commuters in Donnybrook traffic during rush hour. That didn’t go so well. I think we sold about 12 cups of coffee in a week, and realised we’d run through our seed capital,” he laughs. “But from an early age I was into business. I had a power-hose company at one stage, and ran a radio station in school, and I was exposed to business within my own family. I guess I always knew I wasn’t going to be a doctor or an accountant or anything like that. It was never onmy agenda.” O’Neill did, however, consider a career as a banker, but fate some-
what took over – not for the last time. On graduating from his BComm in 2001, as the dotcom bubble burst, he got a call from the bank he was due to start work with, telling him there was no longer a job there. Undaunted he was soon working in the aviation team at Anglo Irish Bank, but again fate played a hand. “I started work the day after 9/11, so I was told I wouldn’t be working in aviation for long!” he explains. In fact, he worked there for six months while they wound down the book, and then moved to a customer of Anglo, a small company that leased aircraft to second-world countries. Here he travelled extensively and picked up a lot of experience in business and in raising finance, he says. “It was just a great experience, hustling and trading, and being
given so much responsibility at a young age, because it was a small company with a big turnover. It was brilliant, I really enjoyed that couple of years. “At this stage I realised that I couldn’t seemyself progressing within
a bank environment. It just wasn’t for me. The big company view on things, the sorts of procedures involved were just the opposite tomy
24 UCD BUSINESS CONNECTIONS view of decision-making and action, if you like.”
Learning curve It was timely then that a friend introduced O’Neill to Caroline Regan, the woman who had brought the Curves gym concept to Ireland from the US. “She had a popular busy gym in Bray but she was making no money, and felt she didn’t have the experience of managing finances, etc. I did, so I was soon giving her a hand on an ad hoc basis. I slowly got more involved, and we eventually grew that to six gyms. There were 100 in total in Ireland of which we owned six, and then we sold that business. “It was brilliant,” he recalls. “I mean it was the weirdest thing working in an all-women company, the only guy. I’d never managed anyone before that, so that was a pretty steep learning curve, but I thoroughly enjoyed it and I’m still in contact with many of the peo- ple involved.” It was with all this experience under his belt that O’Neill found himself in the teeth whitening business in 2005, but the road was far from smooth, he explains. “We had a pretty slow start to be quite honest. We realised fairly fast that people thought whitening was something it wasn’t, that if you got your teeth whitened you’d look like Britney Spears, which of course wasn’t the reality. Soon we found ourselves sending our customers back to their own dentist for more serious procedures or for general cleaning before we could touch them. And by the time they got back to their own dentist, they weren’t likely to ever let them go again.” It was time for a change in strategy. “Given that we had dentists in
place within our own clinic, we thought, ‘Well, why don’t we start off offering more services?’ We started offering cleanings, then some cosmetic services and then it pretty much evolved into general den- tal treatment.”
New-model dentistry By mid-2006, Smiles Dental had three clinics on the go, all offering general dental services. “Today our mix would be be 99pc general dentistry and 1pc or less tooth whitening. If we had stuck to the whitening, we’d be finished now.” So, with no shortage of dental practices in Ireland, what has made
Smiles Dental a success? “Well obviously it’s not run by a dentist. I’m not a dentist and my approach to the business and the team around us has always been ‘what do consumers want?’ “If you’re going to get your hair done in, say, PeterMarks there’s a
system there to make it suitable for you – it’s priced to suit, you get an appointment at a time that suits you, everyone’s very clear about what it’s going to cost. I’ve kind of adapted that idea, so our tagline
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