Lab focus
Canada and for nine months for a German company in Antigua. When he came back, he realised I wasn’t the worst person in the world to work for. “Laurie worked in a laboratory in
Arkansas in the US for six months. In fact, Graham was the only one I didn’t farm out to anybody.” Alex’s youngest, Graham, explained
what it was like growing up in the family business. He said: “When we were boys, we started out making plaster cast garden gnomes in the model room because the lab had plenty of plaster of paris. We’d come in on the holidays with rubber moulds that we’d got from the local art store and we’d make tons and tons of plaster cast gnomes and our summer was spent painting them. “I also made shellac bases for the dentures for about three summer holidays running, burning all my fi ngers on the shellac and all my skin fl aking off because that was the job that nobody wanted to do. But, as the son of the owner, you get forced in to all the rubbish jobs – there was no favouritism.” At
first Graham turned away
from dental technology – not, he explained, because he didn’t enjoy it, more because it felt like “the easy route which I felt wasn’t right for me at the time”. He did a degree in microbiology at Glasgow Caledo- nian, graduating in ı995. He spent a few years researching disinfection techniques in dentistry before a stint in the offi ce at Annfi eld Place while looking for a job and, as he puts it, he “never escaped”. He added: “But I still enjoy it and I don’t regret it for a second.”
Graham is now the director
in charge of marketing, admin- istration, customer service and finance, with Sandy running the day-to-day operations of the labo- ratory and Laurie in charge of the company’s digital arm, Core3dcentres. Alex is gradually stepping back from daily workings of the business, although he is still involved in major decisions and providing a sounding board for Graham on the admin side of things. And, with three brothers holding
roughly equal status in the company, doesn’t that cause problems, tensions or even fall-outs? Graham said: “We can have signifi cant
bust ups but we’re a family so, after half an hour it’s forgotten about. We’re a very close family and every one of us knows that we all have the best interests of the company at heart, no matter what. “We’re all very passionate, which can create friction at times, but it’s good
friction because, if one believes the right way is one way and another believes it’s something else, we’ll fi ght about it until we fi nd middle ground.” Or as Alex says: “We have a discussion
and I just keep them talking until they all agree with me.” With the three siblings involved in
the business, it has grown into a multi- national company with several different interests around the world. However, the company’s fi rst major expansion and the one that put the ‘International’ in the name, happened back in ı984 when Alex was the fi rst person to introduce porcelain veneers to the UK market. Having witnessed the technology in America, DTS was soon working with Glasgow, Dundee and Bristol Dental Hospitals as well as other universities
around the UK. In those early days, Alex explained that they were producing as many as 600 porcelain veneers a week. This success enabled them to break into the Scandinavian market, doing work for dentists in Norway and Denmark initially, before expanding into Sweden and then Finland and Iceland. Alex explained: “This was before the Chinese marketplace entered the world of outsourcing so, in Scandinavia, we were the cheap guys. We were a midrange labo- ratory in the UK, but we were inexpensive in Scandinavia because they were fully private. So we could go there and make better margins than in the UK, but we were still cheap to them.” This expansion into northern Europe
provided the launchpad for the company’s next big development: digital dentistry. Graham explained that, as with many
Continued » Scottish Dental magazine 35
“We all have the best interests of the company at heart”
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