Episode 2, Season 2: Bitehaus Toronto, Ontario Al visits with Aisling Whitaker and Anand Iyer, owners of Bitehaus Toronto Dental, a contemporary dental clinic in St. Clair West Village. Founded in 2018, Bitehaus prides themselves on offering a thoughtful stress-free dental experience. This year (2022) they opened their second location in uptown Toronto. How was Bitehaus able to, not only survive the pandemic, but actually thrive to the point where they were able to expand while other business’ failed? Listen to find out.
You can learn more about Bitehaus Toronto Dental Clinic at bitehaus.ca.
Al Grego: Hello, everyone, I'm Al Grego, and this is the Yes, We Are Open podcast.
Today I'm in Toronto, more specifically, a neighborhood called St. Clair West Village. Aptly named, this neighborhood runs along St. Clair Avenue West, and depending on who you ask, can run anywhere from Avenue Road to Dufferin Street. It's a mature, established neighborhood offering a slower paced lifestyle in the middle of the hustle and bustle of the city. It's a very walkable neighborhood with plenty of shops and restaurants. Most are small, locally owned. In fact, there's a distinct lack of major franchises represented in this area. You can't help but wonder if it's by design. There's a heavy Pochis and Italian population which gives way to a healthy share of bakeries, cafes, and pizzerias.
It wasn't that long ago that the area was thrown into turmoil over a massive transit project that installed dedicated streetcar lanes along St. Clair Avenue. A project that took over five years to complete and impacted many of the local businesses. It's hard to believe that project was completed back in 2010. Some businesses never recovered from that upheaval, so this area knows adversity well. But now I'm headed to a relatively new business in the area that probably has little knowledge of that history, and in fact, probably benefits from it. I approach a newer looking eight-storey condo building in the south side of St. Clair, just east of Winona Drive. This is where I'll meet the subject of today's episode, Bitehaus Toronto Dental Clinic.
Aisling Whitake...: Hi, Al.
Al Grego: Hi, Aisling. How are you?
Aisling Whitake...: Good. I have your COVID questions for you. In the last 10 days, have you had a cough or sore throat?
Al Grego: Nope.
Upon entering, I'm greeted by Aisling, the owner. She goes to do the COVID screening with me. I pass the test. First thing I'm struck by is the decor. This isn't your parents' dentist office. In fact, if it weren't for the dental chairs and various contraptions surrounding the chairs, you might think this was a spa. The light colors, the soothing music, the gentle mood and decor. There's a noticeable lack of the usual dental charts and posters hanging on the walls, instead, the walls are stark, with a single piece of art hanging in each room. Every aspect of the design seems to be geared towards making you feel as relaxed as possible. It makes great sense. For many people a trip to the dentist can be an anxious time. Aisling leads me into one of the exam rooms for our interview. No, I didn't sit in the chair, that would be weird, instead, we sat around a small desk behind the chair.
Aisling Whitake...: My name is Aisling Whitaker. I am a dentist and business owner in Toronto.
Al Grego: Tell us a little bit about how Bitehaus came to be.
Aisling Whitake...: I grew up in Ireland. I went to dental school after a brief career in psychology, and I met a Canadian in my class and we fell in love. There was a little bit more to it but that's the basics. He lured me over to Canada, not telling me much about the weather, but telling me about this amazing city called Toronto, and we moved, fell in love with the city, decided to stay.
Al Grego: That Canadian who lured Aisling to Canada is Anand.
Anand Iyer: My name is Anand Iyer. I am the owner of Bitehaus Dental. I'm also the principal dentist at this location.
About three and a half years ago, my wife and I were working as associate dentists in Downtown Toronto in different offices. We had always had the plan to construct our own clinic. That was a no-brainer for us. And for us, it was also one that required us to build from scratch, so we never intended to buy out an existing office.
Aisling Whitake...: I always knew that we'd be opening an office pretty early on. I came from a dental family. My dad was a dentist. He had a wonderful clinic in Ireland. I'd been surrounded by dental professionals my whole life who were all very inspiring and played different roles in areas of interest that I have.
Anand Iyer: So we had a vision and both of us were prealigned in that vision.
Aisling Whitake...: I really wanted to have a little bit of myself, a little bit of slice of my personality and Anand's personality in our office, with a little bit of like a European feel, and maybe a little bit more of a European approach to dentistry, which we've tried to achieve here and I think we've done a decent job.
Anand Iyer: We reached out to various different companies, Cirrus being one of them. They are a dental lease negotiation company. We did some courses with them and it kind of got the ball rolling.
Aisling Whitake...: And that's kind of how Bitehaus came along. We named it after Bauhaus design, and we tried to have some nice features of European design in our logo, and in our waiting area, and just in the general feel of the office, even the music that we choose and things like that to give kind of a sense of who we are when you step in the door basically.
Al Grego: It's a stunning looking space. It's hard to believe it's a dentist office. It looks like it'd be a lounge.
Aisling Whitake...: That's kind of what we wanted. We wanted a bit of ambiguity. Advice was coming at us from all different angles when we were first opening. So they were saying things like, "Slap a picture on the outside with somebody smiling and the word dentist and a toothbrush, and people will come to you," and we were like, "That doesn't make sense." We want to have a space that we want to love and work in. And we make an effort to not have a single poster about dentistry in the office. There's not a single brochure. There's not a single flyer.
Al Grego: These walls are very bare.
Aisling Whitake...: Yeah. We wanted it more like a gallery space. The art is a local artist. She puts her art up almost using it as a gallery. We're trying to avoid like the dental feel, except that, of course, we have to have dental chairs and things like that. If we could have avoided it, we would have.
Al Grego: If they could be a little more...
Aisling Whitake...: Like a lounge chair...
Al Grego: Lounge chair.
Aisling Whitake...: ... we would've done it but we probably would have ended up in physiotherapy every day. That's what we were going for. Kind of the sense of when you come into our waiting space that you're just coming to come and have a coffee with me and Anand and have a chat, and then on the side get a little bit of dental work done.
Al Grego: You opened your doors in fall of 2018, is that right?
Aisling Whitake...: I did, and then I had a baby in January 2019.
Al Grego: Wow.
Aisling Whitake...: So that was a bit nuts.
Al Grego: Poorly planned.
Aisling Whitake...: Oh, yeah. You can't plan things in life. It turns out they just... Anything goes haywire.
Al Grego: So talk about those first couple of years. How was it?
Aisling Whitake...: So it was great. We were really received really well. Back at the beginning it was super nice. We had so much time. We would sit down with patients and have a coffee, and we would get to know people in the neighborhood. We were really building strong relationships.
Anand Iyer: We see incredible growth. We broke even within three months, which is quite amazing in this industry. I think our style was quite different within our area. There were a few dental offices in our neighborhood, which we didn't view as competition necessarily, just colleagues and things like that, but we offered a different experience, I think.
Al Grego: So let's talk about that. What makes Bitehaus different from your standard dentist office?
Anand Iyer: For us it's more about our personalities trying to create a very calm and relaxing environment in an inherently very anxiety driven-
Al Grego: Setting.
Anand Iyer: ... setting, for sure.
Al Grego: So you're focusing a lot on customer experience.
Anand Iyer: Absolutely.
Al Grego: In terms of services, are you offering all of the kind of standard services that a dentist office would offer or is there anything extra or special that-
Anand Iyer: I mean, for the most part, yes. Most your bread and butter things. You know, your fillings, and your cleanings, and all that stuff typically. You know, your crowns. Invisalign is a big thing in our office. Implants as well are things that we do but we tend to do some of it ourselves, some of it in conjunction with other specialists in the city. And now we've gotten into, and this is a very relatively new thing, into sort of more myofunctional therapy. So it's a lot of individuals that come in with a lot of jaw related dysfunction. We have staff now that are trained in that.
Al Grego: What was it like working with Aisling?
Anand Iyer: We actually don't work that closely together in the office. The odd day here or there we'll work together, but no, in 365 days a year, we're probably in the office together maybe five days. It's very minimal. Of course, a lot of the background stuff we collaborate, and most of that actually happens at home, as it tends to, I guess, for most business owners, I would think, but no, clinically we tend to have different schedules. Part of that is actually just to take care of our son.
Al Grego: I mean, St. Clair West, it's a close knit neighborhood. Did you guys find that you were accepted right away? Were you welcome?
Anand Iyer: Yes, very much so. It was very good. It's the kind of neighborhood that likes very local boutiquey type places, so yeah, we thrived there. It was perfect.
Al Grego: Excellent.
Anand Iyer: And then we actually moved into the neighborhood as well.
Al Grego: Oh, perfect.
Anand Iyer: Soon after, yeah.
Al Grego: You liked it so much you-
Anand Iyer: Yeah. I live about seven minute walk away from our first office. It's just awesome.
Aisling Whitake...: I don't want to brag about the community too much because I don't want everybody to find out about it. It's so great. And I know this community has been through a lot. When they were building the streetcar, it really affected all of the local businesses-
Al Grego: I remember it well.
Aisling Whitake...: ... and lots of people shut down. So when this building was coming in, and this is one of the newer condo buildings, and there's always an apprehension because they are building condo buildings but they maybe don't have enough places in childcare, and maybe they don't... Like how are we going to support these buildings coming in? But other than those aspects and full respect for the people who have been here since the beginning, obviously changes happen over time, and most people have embraced how this community is growing. Like the restaurants are amazing, the schools are amazing.
When we bought this house in this area, and it's the smallest house on the street, because Toronto's expensive, somebody said, "Oh. We heard a dentist bought this and we were hoping it was you." We had multiple people we knew at the door within seconds, and we were like, "Oh my goodness. This is kind of crazy." Everybody knows everybody. It is such a good feel. People are so supportive of each other. And there are so many places to shop locally that are personally owned businesses as opposed to chains. Like a couple of bigger chain coffee shops were here for a bit, and they didn't last long because people want to support smaller businesses, and I love that. That's a great feeling for me. I love supporting locals, so it was a natural fit for us to live here as well as work here.
Of course, what, 18 months in or so, that's when the pandemic started. So that January before the pandemic, that was our month where we were like, "Yes, we're a business. Look at us. We're doing great." We felt proud of ourselves. We had a sort of a bit of a sense of calm and relief that we weren't a startup anymore, and then obviously the pandemic hit the world and gave everybody a kind of a crazy reality. It was like we were all at the start of a race where we're all kneeled down and ready to sprint, and then it was like, "Oh, the race is over."
Al Grego: Up next. What happens when you're only months into your new business venture and then you're forced to close your doors to all clients for an undetermined period of time. Stay tuned to find out.
You're listening to Yes, We Are Open. Aisling Whitaker and Anand Iyer built what they hoped would become a new kind of dental clinic. A clinic focused on customer experience designed to provide a common relaxing environment in what has traditionally been an anxious setting. And they succeeded. Business was going well. They'd been accepted by the locals in their community and actually made that community their home. It seemed everything was going according to plan, but you know what they say about best laid plans.
If I were to ask you about a time during your existence, this is your fourth year, a time where you faced a challenge that maybe threatened to close you down.
Anand Iyer: For us, the first time that happened was the start of the pandemic. There was about three months where everything was largely unknown and where we had to fully close our doors. Insurance coverage was not covering any of that stuff, kind of on our own, and just living off our savings essentially.
Aisling Whitake...: I think my biggest struggle, like there was COVID, but I feel like as healthcare professionals we always anticipate a big medical event. You know what I mean? I kind of see that happening throughout my career multiple times, I know that sounds terrible, but you know like there's going to be. For me the biggest struggle was staffing and that side of things as opposed to-
Al Grego: But a lot of that was brought on because of the pandemic, right? The staffing issues.
Aisling Whitake...: No, actually it's always been an issue. There's a shortage. I think a lot of people moved out of Toronto during this time because financially it wasn't viable if they weren't getting as much direct work, but obviously we were able to stay open to an extent. So that for me as a business owner was the biggest struggle from that standpoint. And then on a personal level my biggest struggle was, I haven't been able to go home.
Al Grego: Right.
How long has it been?
Aisling Whitake...: Since the December before the pandemic. And for someone who used to visit their family three times a year and my parents used to come here twice a year... We've raised a toddler who hasn't really remember... Like, they meet on FaceTime and things like that but they haven't had that connection the way that I wanted, so that's for me a bigger personal struggle than the COVID business struggles that I feel like everybody else will have had. We all thought it was going to be two weeks, and then six weeks, and then eight weeks, and then we're all getting a little bit scared like, what does this even look like? Everyone's putting all their personal money into their businesses, and everyone's trying to pull out loans, and everyone's trying to do all these things to say like, "If this keeps going on until August, we won't have a business anymore. That's it. We'll close."
Anand Iyer: At the time it was largely the unknown. If it had continued that way for three or four more months, perhaps, it's something that we would have had to face. And then more recently with our second office, we are constructing an office currently that's nearly open, we've dealt with just so many delays.
Al Grego: And do you think those are pandemic related as well?
Anand Iyer: Many of them are. Many of them are pandemic related and then all the knock on effects. So we're talking supply chain stuff. We thought we were being on top of things by ordering stuff early, early, early, but stuff that was expected that we'd ordered in, let's say, May or June of last year expecting to arrive in August didn't arrive till December.
Aisling Whitake...: And then, thank goodness for us dentistry reopened, I think, it was mid-June or something along those lines.
Al Grego: And never shut down again.
Aisling Whitake...: And didn't shut down again. We've been open in different types of capacities.
Anand Iyer: The restrictions were one thing but the absolute increase in costs was another thing.
Aisling Whitake...: A box of gloves used to be $8 and then it was $80.
Al Grego: Wow.
Aisling Whitake...: Costs are up 10 times for most dental materials and basic supplies, and they still are.
Anand Iyer: About 80% of offices in dentistry in Ontario have sort of an open layout, and by design. When you're walking out of a room, if you've got "dirty" things in your hand, you don't want to be opening and touching other things, so it's designed for that kind of workflow. And so as a result of that, now we're talking about a potential airborne illness that you want to isolate, keep it in a room, if it's even in there. We're talking about our air turnover, our air conditioning systems, our air filtrations. Like we're all becoming experts in all of these items that we're not necessarily prior to this.
Aisling Whitake...: Like hand sanitizer, that was incredible to find. Some of our hand sanitizer was smelling like gin and tequila for a bit because that's what was happening.
Anand Iyer: We ended up actually spending about $30,000 in glass.
Al Grego: Wow.
Anand Iyer: There was no way we were going with the sort of isolation plastic barriers. It was about 30K in glass that we fit at each door, each room, and then of course, all the ceiling, height that we had to kind of fill as well. So those kind of challenges existed as well.
Aisling Whitake...: We couldn't get face shields. Initially when we came back to work we were wearing face shields for welders, like with sparks and stuff coming. Like a welder's face shield from Home Depot or something. And it was a cool kind of sense of dental community because people who I really respect, who are top of their game, were driving all around Canada collecting welder shields and then selling them to us at normal cost price. There was just like, "Okay, who can rally? Who can find this? Let's supply it to everybody else." Let's get together. I joined a ton of dental communities when I first moved to Canada and these have become almost like family members in some ways.
These are the people who have been hustling and we've been sharing staff members sometimes if somebody got stuck. We've been helping with PPEs. Some of us got trained how to mask fit N95s and then went from office to office and did it for free because no one has any money. It's been a nice humanitarian type thing that has come out of it in some ways, so that's been really the good aspect of it. So it was kind of a crazy hustle.
And I think for all of our patients, some of them have lost their jobs. Some of them have taken massive pay cuts. There's been all of that type of thing, so then they are coming in and they are like, "Why aren't you reducing costs?" And we're like, "We haven't made a profit in years." The costs are relative. They set them from our dental professional... Dental offices don't set them, we get given our fees every year, and so they stay static and they represent kind of the current costs of running an office in different areas. So nothing has changed there. Anyway, it's been a whirlwind obviously, as it has been for many businesses.
Anand Iyer: So one of the big things that has been a game changer for us, and it's definitely one big thing that's kept us with Moneris is the vault, Gateway Vault. We've been utilizing that for a lot of cases. It also has reduced the level of manpower required to deal with all of that stuff. We have a lot of revolving payments every month, especially with things like Invisalign, and anyone that's on payment plans and things like that for larger treatments, that's been a huge, huge help for us.
Al Grego: It sounds like the community rallied around each other to support each other during that.
Aisling Whitake...: Yeah. The professional community, and I hope this has been the case for other professionals within their communities, that has been something that has been unbelievable, in terms of nobody was like, "Hey. I found all this hand sanitizer, I'm going to hoard it." That didn't happen. We were donating PPE to hospitals. We were donating you to sick kids and Sinai. We were like, "Okay, we got this." We were ordering things and things would show up six months later when supply chain had kind of returned, so instead of being like, "Hey, I'm going to keep this," it was like, "No, let's donate this. Let's give it to who..." I was driving around this neighborhood and dropping off boxes of PPE to my patients who are like above the age of 80 so that they would have stuff for their home. It was a great sense of community. Everyone's going through it together. It's not just affecting one industry. It was kind of an interesting time.
Al Grego: Coming up after the break, we find out what the future holds for Bitehaus Dental.
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Al Grego: Welcome back to Yes, We Are Open. Bitehaus Dental was able to stay open after the initial lockdown. And after many measures were put in place to keep their clients safe, they were able to not only get back to business, they also expanded their business, opening a second location in uptown Toronto. Aisling continues to run the St. Clair location, and Anand is heading up their new location on Hillsdale Avenue. So what does the future look like for Bitehaus? Could there be further expansion? We'll find out next.
All the measures that you guys took, did it work? You guys are obviously still around. How's it going? How's business?
Aisling Whitake...: Things are going well now. We're still in the pandemic, obviously we're in kind of a more relaxed part of the pandemic, if you can say that. It's still happening. I think we all know it's going to be happening for years to come in different shapes and forms, and you constantly have to be changing, and you're on the edge of your seat all the time wondering what's going to be the next step and trying to plan for that. We kind of have our eye on years out. We're aiming for that.
Al Grego: So you mentioned a new location. We're sitting in your new location right now. We're sitting in your staff room. And new location isn't open yet.
Anand Iyer: Nope. Within the next few days we hope.
Al Grego: Oh, that's great. Congratulations. That says something about your growth, that you're that confident that you are opening a new location. So how did that come about?
Anand Iyer: As we touched on earlier, it was the growth of our first office. We were turning away a lot more people than expected, which is not that typical in Toronto.
Felicia Sprague: My name is Felicia Sprague. I'm regional manager, so I manage both Bitehaus offices.
Al Grego: When did you start at Bitehaus?
Felicia Sprague: I started just after COVID hit, so about March, 2020. I was actually on mat leave still, but I met Aisling at a previous office.
Al Grego: Are you working in both locations or are you staying here?
Felicia Sprague: I am. So no, I'm at both locations. Always having multiple clinics has been like a huge aspiration of Aisling's and Anand's, and just including me as getting to manage multiple clinics, that was such growth for me and I appreciate them giving me that opportunity.
Al Grego: So what does the future look like for Bitehaus? Do you think there might be other locations?
Anand Iyer: These are great questions. It's obviously been three years and everything you look through rosy-tinted glasses, I think. It seemed like a much simpler time. It's become a challenge and so we are now tired and fatigued by this whole process.
Al Grego: The idea of starting a new one would be-
Anand Iyer: Yeah, exactly. I think it's having a young boy... Everyone has to have that level of time to have amnesia before you think about having a second kid. It's like that with opening another business. All the challenging times, you just need to forget about it and remember the good stuff to then be like, "Okay. I'm in that mindset." So at the moment, no, but we have other ventures as well that we started primarily, especially with Felicia, and my wife, Aisling.
Al Grego: And then do you want to talk a little bit about the side project you're working on with Felicia?
Aisling Whitake...: I can. Yeah. During the pandemic, during the first lockdown, I had some time to look at what other aspects of my career I was interested in pursuing. I've always been into computers. I got through dental school supporting myself building websites for dental offices in Ireland. And prior to dentistry, when I had been in psychology, I had coded for MRI scans, so I'm very familiar with coding and website design and that type of thing.
So one of my projects that I have wanted to have time to work on was the building this dental app, like a dental networking app, a dental recruitment app. And at the moment it's a dental job matching app with other expansions that I have plans for down the line. Myself and Felicia sort of planned to work on this together for a while and this was our time to do it and we started working on it. It was a project that we wanted to work on and see if it would work. We've released it now and it's in its early form and it's going well. There's about 600 people on it in the last month sort of thing, or six weeks. And it'll hopefully grow and help with the hiring process like on a professional level. People are verified and all this type of thing. And then also hopefully turn into something bigger like that networking type of thing that we talked about, how crucial that was for me during the pandemic and building a virtual network of people. Maybe this can turn into something like that.
Al Grego: How do you feel about the future of Bitehaus?
Felicia Sprague: Yeah, no, I'm so excited. I think that this office, especially its location, is going to be so successful, especially because a lot of our employees here, like you met Mylene and Casey, they came from Bitehaus house St. Clair, just like I did, so a lot of our values and how we think a dental office should be run is being directly implemented to this location as well. And we do hope for Bitehaus three one day. And we have huge goals and hopefully we're all around to see those come.
Aisling Whitake...: Other than financial success for us, that's only one part of it, the other part is personal satisfaction, like personal successes. And for me that's like, we've been able to continue to grow our team. We had to because we couldn't all work at the same time. We had to change our hours. So we've been in growing our team. We've been adding more people to our work family. That's a success in itself. It's been really cool to have some new interesting faces around here, although for the most part I haven't seen what their faces look like yet, so that's kind of interesting. They've got great eyes. Businesswise, things are growing, and I think maybe in five years you can come back and we'll say, "Yeah, financially things are doing well," but for now there's other big key measures of success that we can say that we are proud of.
Al Grego: Thank you very much, Aisling, for your time today.
Aisling Whitake...: No problem. Thank you so much.
Al Grego: So, is Bitehaus open?
Aisling Whitake...: Yes, we are open.
Al Grego: Beautiful.
That's the story of Bitehaus Dental. I'm sure that when they were planning the launch of their business, Aisling and Anand received a lot of advice, and maybe even a little pressure to follow convention, to do things the same way everyone else does them. And you know what, had they done that, I'm sure they would have done just fine. I mean, I don't know much about dental clinics but I don't think I've ever heard of one going out of business.
And here's the thing, it's okay to just be okay, but if you want to really succeed, if you want to be a leader in your field, you need to stand out. You need to set yourself apart from the competition. From the moment Bitehaus opened their doors, they set themselves apart from the competition. They did this by challenging the status quo, a value that's highly sought after in leaders in the business world. A value that both Aisling and Anand certainly share. They didn't follow convention. They did things their own way. It was a risk they took but it certainly paid off. I believe that was the key to their success. With values like that, I'm confident Bitehaus will set a standard that others will follow.
Yes, We Are Open is a Moneris Podcast Production. I'd like to thank Aisling, Anand, and Felicia for taking time to share their story. You can learn more about Bitehaus Toronto Dental Clinic at bitehaus.ca. Follow them on Facebook and Instagram at bitehaushouse.ca, and on YouTube they're Bitehaus Dental. For more information about this podcast, visit our site, yesweareopenpodcast.com. If you'd like to support us, rate us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get at your podcasts. If you're a Canadian small business owner or know of one with an interesting story of perseverance to tell, I'd love to help tell it. You can contact me at podcast@moneris.com. Tune in next week for another story of small business struggle and survival on the Yes, We Are Open podcast. I'm Al Grego, thank you for listening.