We Don't Change The Name

Steven Lynch nearly studied dentistry instead of accountancy. He chose the numbers, trained at BDO in Dublin, turned down a Sydney secondment for the colleague who became his wife, and spent four years in a German bank before a pint with his brother-in-law turned into the UK and Ireland agency for a US tooth-whitening brand. When that distributorship ended overnight, the dentists he'd met asked him to do their accounts, and MedAccount Services was born: a specialist firm that grew to look after around 35% of the dentists in Ireland over the next twenty years.

Two years ago a former colleague introduced him to Ross Finnigan of Lonsdale, the investor behind Today's Dental in the UK, who wanted to enter the Irish market and asked Steven to lead it. He finished the tax season for his clients, extracted himself from MedAccount, and had his first clinic within weeks. Total Dental Ireland now has ten practices, five more in exclusivity and a central team of eleven, almost all of whom have worked as dental nurses, practice managers or practice consultants. Steven's rule of thumb, borrowed from being a father of four: one to five was hard, seven to ten was easy.

The conversation digs into what he learned from watching other groups fail (meetings about meetings, and pulling everything into the centre), why he never changes a practice's name, why compliance and regulation is the first thing he fixes and the first item on every board agenda, and why he won't force a cloud PMS on a dentist who would rather keep theirs. On AI he is clear: it is a second opinion, never the first, and its best use right now is making sure a ringing phone never pulls the front desk away from the patient standing in front of them.