ENTREPRENEUR STARTUP SPECIAL (7) Smile, we're in
the Hinterland
A troika of entrepreneurs wants to go where no
dental chain has gone before
The city of textiles and a hub for the powerloom
business in India, Bhiwandi is an unlikely location to seed a dental
servicesstartup.However, that's just what Rushi Trivedi, Alpesh Chaudhari, and
CM Pandey, dentists by training, did when they founded Smile Merchants, a
dental services provider for the hinterland. The troika took small steps to
build the business. The first was a misstep -an overambitious move to provide
dental s e r v i c e s t o v i l l a ge s flopped. Doctors didn't want to
travel so deep into the hinterland to provide dental services (they yet don't
want to). Instead, the trio retooled the startup's focus, shifted away from
villages and decided to focus on the yawning demand gap in small towns.
According to a recommendation from the World
Health Organization, the ideal patient to dentist ratio is around 1 to 7,500.
In the top five or six cities in India, there is an oversupply, according to
estimates, with one per 5,000 residents. On the contrary, in smaller towns it
is closer to one per 10,000 and in villages far more skewed at one dentist for
every 2.5 lakh residents.
If Smile's founders had to rejig their business
plans due to travel-wary dentists, they are fortunate to have a large talent
pool to target. According to government estimates, over 3,000 dentists graduate
annually from Maharashtra alone. Other states such as Karnataka graduate an
even larger number, around 5,000, annually.
“There are a huge number of graduates and not
all of them can afford to work in a Mumbai or Delhi,“ says Trivedi. “We think
there's a pressing opportunity to provide quality, affordable dental care in
smaller towns.“ Smile Merchants' approach then is to hire young dentists (fresh
from medical college or with a couple of years of experience) and help them set
up a branded practice in small towns.
Smile pays dentists more than the market rate
and also helps re train them to be medical entrepreneurs and not just doctors
alone. “Con vincing patients to pay for quality dental care in the hinterland
is a chal lenge...they prefer to trav el 50 to 100 km to a larger city and then
wait in line to see a dentist there,“ admits Trivedi.
Smile, then, is taking a more measured road to
success. Its first few clinics are in places such as Ulhasnagar and Bhiwandi on
Mumbai's outskirts, which will be used as prototypes to gauge the feasibility
of this model and make tweaks as required.However, there are signs that most
pieces of this model are already in place and Trivedi is already plotting an
ambitious expansion plan.
“We already have eight clinics operational and
we want to reach 60 clinics in the next 12 months,“ he says. “We raised our
first round of funding from Unitus, but we're already talking to investors
again to back this expansion.“ While towns such as Nashik, Amravati and Akola
are on Smiles's radar, Trivedi is considering expanding Smile's focus beyond
Maharashtra. “Most other chains [Smile Kraft, Vasan Dental Care, Alliance
Dental Care] are based in metro cities,“ he adds.“We want to bring a dental
revolution to the hinterland.“
|
Rahul Sachitanand
|
ETM31MAY15
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