Smile Solutions named 2014 Victorian Medium Business of the Year

At the 2014 Telstra Business Awards, Smile Solutions was named Victorian Medium Business of the Year. Founder and managing director Dr Kia Pajouhesh accepted the award — noting, to the room’s amusement, that he was accepting it from a patient of the practice.

With the patient numbers the practice had at the time, he observed, the odds were reasonable.

He was candid about the competition, naming several fellow finalists he used or admired, and said he had serious doubts about winning. He said as much again in an interview recorded on the night.

What follows is drawn from his speech. The practice took the Victorian Business of the Year award on the same night — see that acceptance speech and what the judging panel cited. Contemporary coverage is under our media.

The central idea: a business as a living thing

His speech asked a single question: what is a truly successful business?

His answer: a great business is a life form — a species, a child, a mother. He then carried the metaphor the whole way, which is what made the speech memorable.

Conception and birth

Smile Solutions was conceived just over twenty years earlier, when he decided the business of dentistry had room to improve — and that a different kind of practice could change things for the better. His view of what that improvement looks like in a clinician is set out at length in what makes a truly great dentist?

Like any parent, he said, he had no idea what he was in for.

The practice opened on the morning of 23 March 1999, on Collins Street, in humble surroundings with hand-me-down dental chairs — in what is now the restored Manchester Unity Building.

He added a detail that the neighbours are unlikely to have forgotten: twenty-four hours earlier, the last nail in a carpenter’s bag — driven in to fix a door stop — ruptured a floor heating pipe and flooded six floors of the building. The neighbours found out a new business had arrived.

Growth, and points of difference

As a parent, he said, his job was to guide her growth.

The practice developed its own particular traits — what businesses call points of difference. Some came from his own vision; some from his team, commercial pressure, and competition. Nature versus nurture.

Those individual habits grew into a business model he describes as unusual in Australian dentistry. What that model actually is — general dentists and registered specialists in one building — is described in Smile Solutions named Telstra Victorian Business of the Year and everything under one roof. He fed the business, he said, at times when he went without himself.

The lesson about control

The part of the speech with the most in it for anyone building something:

As a parent you push hard to make the thing your obsession, your ambition and your legacy. But the child has a mind of its own.

As it grows, your grip diminishes as peers, influences and commercial forces take hold. And you learn, in his framing, two lessons in sequence:

  1. Total control is a myth.
  2. A little later — any control whatsoever is a myth.

What follows from that is practical: you learn to delegate the tasks you care most about to people you trust — a theme he returns to in effective delegation in the workplace — you battle the fear of failure daily, and you eventually accept that your expectations need tempering, because every person beats to a different drum (staff motivation and confidence goes further into that). The staffing side of it is covered under careers, the graduate program and the dental internship.

The turn at the end

The metaphor closes on itself. Looking back, he said, you realise the child has become a mother — nurturing the people within it.

The team who travelled the journey now benefit from her, learn from her, and sometimes find refuge in her. They are listed on our team.

“Can anyone put a price on such a business?”

He thanked Telstra for the recognition, his team of clinicians and managers, his wife and children, and finally the business itself — which was, as he put it, otherwise engaged in the Manchester Unity Building that evening.

Common questions

Does it matter that my dentist and the specialist I am referred to work for the same practice?

It is a reasonable thing to think about, and the answer is that the arrangement is common and lawful — but it does change one thing, and it is worth naming.

An in-house referral removes friction: the records, radiographs and treatment plan move with you rather than being posted, and the two clinicians can discuss the case directly. That is the genuine benefit, and it is why the model exists.

The thing it changes is that the person recommending the referral and the business receiving it are the same business. A 2017 submission to the federal parliamentary inquiry into private health insurance and out-of-pocket costs argued that commercial incentives in dentistry can result in "excessive and unnecessary dental treatment or 'over-servicing'". That submission is one person's argument to an inquiry rather than a measured finding, and it was not about this practice or any practice — but the protection it implies is free and sensible wherever you are referred.

Ask for the referral reason in writing, alongside the itemised plan and quote. A referral that is justified in writing is one you can take to a different practice, and that portability is what keeps the incentive honest. The Dental Board's Code of conduct contains specific sections on providing good care, decisions about access to care, effective communication, informed consent, minimising risks to patients and health records — every one of which supports you asking for the reasoning rather than just the appointment. See Second Opinions & Corrective Dentistry and understanding your treatment.

Does a larger practice cost more?

Nobody measures that, and you should be wary of anyone who tells you it does or does not.

What is measured is the spread between practices, and it is wide. Australia has no national dental fee schedule — no government or professional body sets what any item costs. The only independent published measure is the Australian Dental Association's Dental Fees Survey, whose 2022 edition drew on 3,819 valid responses covering fees as at 1 July 2022 and found considerable variation in the fees charged both within and between states. On average, general practitioners in South Australia and Western Australia charged the lowest fees and those in the ACT and Northern Territory the highest, with the ADA cautioning that the territory samples were small. Across the 122 items surveyed, general practitioner fees rose 3.7% over the two years — the smallest rises in preventive services and periodontics (1.6%), the largest in orthodontics (6.9%).

None of those variables is practice size. The 2017 parliamentary submission quoted above put the consumer problem plainly: there are no consumer guidelines by which to judge whether a dental fee is reasonable, which is why patients can see several dentists and receive differing diagnoses and widely varying quotes.

So the practical answer is that the only meaningful comparison is between two written, itemised quotes for the same described treatment — not between a big practice and a small one. Fees here are on the price guide.

In a practice this size, how do I know who is actually treating me?

By asking, and by checking the name rather than the brand.

The registration that matters is held by an individual, not by a business. Ahpra's public register at ahpra.gov.au shows, free, whether a named practitioner is currently registered, whether that registration is general or specialist, which specialty if any, and whether any conditions have been imposed. A practice name will not tell you any of that; a clinician's name will. Everyone here is listed by name on our team and dentists and registered specialists.

Three questions worth asking when you book, particularly for anything beyond a check-up:

  1. Who will be doing this, by name? Then look that person up before the appointment.
  2. Who does the follow-up or the adjustment if something needs changing afterwards? In a multi-clinician practice this is not always the same person, and it is better to know in advance than to discover it.
  3. If I want to see the same clinician each time, can that be booked? Continuity is usually available if you ask for it at booking rather than on the day.

None of these are awkward questions. They are the ones that make a large practice behave like a small one.

Related reading

Practical details

Smile Solutions, Level 1, 220 Collins Street, Manchester Unity Building, Melbourne VIC 3000. Phone 13 13 96, or theteam@smilesolutions.com.au; full details on the contact page. Monday–Friday 8.00am–6.00pm, Saturday 8.30am–1.30pm, Sunday by appointment.

Published 8 July 2014. Figures referred to are as at the date of the award. This page summarises an acceptance speech and is not clinical information. A business award is not a clinical endorsement, is not issued by a health regulator, and says nothing about the outcome of any individual course of treatment. Third-party fee survey figures are the ADA's, not ours, and relate to the period stated.

Smile Solutions trades under ABN 28 193 514 103.

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