Edmonton-based entrepreneur Ziad Kaddoura has launched a branded dental office concept he plans to expand in the Edmonton region and then beyond.
The first Crown Dental Clinic launched early this year in the West Edmonton Mall.
Kaddoura, co-founder of Crown Dental Development Company, said the purpose of the company is to develop the brand Crown Dental Clinic across Canada.
“In the process of opening the brand, we wanted to create an impact with brand exposure and brand availability,” said Kaddoura. “So what better place for us to do it than the West Edmonton Mall.”
He said the brand is in an area of the shopping centre that is quite busy.
“Why there? Because we felt that Crown Dental Clinic brand awareness is very, very important to us. Like other clinics, we are pushing the name of Crown Dental not necessarily the doctor’s name,” said Kaddoura. “And we are already in negotiation with three more clinics now.
“One of them used to be a GP (general practitioner) that we are repurposing into a dental clinic. The idea is twofold. The idea is to take existing locations that were not made as clinics and repurpose them as dental offices. And when you repurpose them, you’re basically taking real estate that is sitting idle and you’re giving it new life basically.
“That requires an investment from us or whoever becomes the operator of that dental clinic. The second thing as well is you’re able to get a clinic started at a much lower price than starting from scratch, which basically gives the chance for new graduates of the dental school to have their own clinic instead of going working for someone else. The idea behind Crown Dental is really to provide the setup, the office, the operational aspect of the clinic, where the dentist will only focus on the clinical aspect of the clinic, because really the biggest, biggest challenge with any dentist is the administration aspect of it. So Crown Dental Development Company wants to become or is becoming the company that is basically giving a platform for these either new owners to a dental clinic, a new graduate that wants to start a dental clinic instead of going and working for someone else, or we have a case that we’re now looking at, an existing dental clinic that is basically not going well because they are not able to advertise and run the administration aspect of the clinic very well.”
Kaddoura said branding an existing dental clinic, that is struggling, to a Crown Dental Clinic, a banner with several locations, would raise awareness and trust of the name rather than having the name of a doctor that no one knows.
He said the company has launched a huge ad at WEM for the Clinic and recently they had a booth in the mall advertising the clinic.
“So we are basically a dental clinic platform that is thinking of the dental industry as a brand and not specifically a doctor,” he added.
Kaddoura said the company is negotiating on three sites – one of them is a repurpose, another is an existing dental clinic and the third is a dental clinic that closed down that they are looking at reopening.
They are all located in the Edmonton region – one in the downtown, one in the south part of the city and another in the north eastern part of the city.
“I think what I’m looking for honestly for 2023 if we’re able to close the year with two locations and then for 2024 if we’re able to close the year with five locations and then grow the brand year to year by two to three locations. That’s the idea,” said Kaddoura.
“Once we get to about five locations in Edmonton I think we’re going to start looking at expanding maybe something in Spruce Grove. We’ll look at the possibility of St. Albert. But that won’t happen probably until the end of 2024. It’s a new build. They got in touch with us and asked if we would be interested. Opening in West Edmonton Mall did exactly what I expected it to do. It got people interested in talking from the brand point of view. That to me was an objective that was met. If we had opened a clinic in West Edmonton Mall, Dr. Ziad, who would care? But when you start thinking about branding, when you put the huge banner on the ice skating rink and you have 25,000, 30,000 people a day seeing that makes a difference.
“Your challenge is not real estate. Your challenge is never equipment. Your challenge is never money. Your challenge seems to always be people based. So you need to find the right associate. You need to find the right dental assistants and you need to find the right administration people. So it’s always people based . . . What we’re trying to do is create a culture and this is why creating the brand to me is very important because you’re trying to create the culture, you’re trying to create not only the know-how and the operating procedures, how to run the clinic, but how to retain people and how to make it an exciting place to be an employee of choice in the dental industry. That’s what we’re trying to work on.”
