‘I was taken aback by Lord Sugar rejecting my request on The Apprentice'
The Apprentice's Dr Paul Midha was fired during the interviews episode
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The Apprentice's Dr Paul Midha was fired on the show after the interviews stage. Initially he had proposed he wanted the £250,000 investment for a new business selling scrubs for dentists. Having found out Lord Alan Sugar was more interested in his current business, he had to hatch a new plan.
After a sleepless night and with only 12 hours until the boardroom, the dentist come up with a new business proposal which suggested splitting a second or third dentist practice with Lord Sugar. The Apprentice star told Yahoo of his surprise when he was turned down because Lord Sugar wanted to have 50% of his current practice.
After the interviews, I didn’t sleep that night before the boardroom. What you don’t see in The Apprentice boardroom is I did a full pitch for the second business proposal I offered.
My interview journey was very unique. I had to lose a battle in order to try and win the war. Everything I had prepared for with the Scrubs business idea wasn’t going to go down so I wanted to try to formulate a new format to my existing business. I wanted to make sure that the pitch was very on point. When you create these business plans, you have months which is plenty of time to prepare. In 12 hours, I had to make sure I could use those hours effectively.
I gave Lord Alan Sugar a fair offer when I was in the boardroom. I said, ‘You know what? I’ve got a second dental practice, at the time I was about to get, we got it now. We can go into that together or I even said we can get a third practice together which is a squat one where you build it from scratch.’ It costs about £200,000-£250,000 to create. He said, ‘Oh so I’ve got options.’ I was like, ‘Yeah you’ve got options.’ I thought I was in a good position.
Obviously we came out and when we came back in, Lord Alan Sugar said, ‘Just to be clear I want everything for 50%.’ I was surprised and that was probably the longest second of my life. At that moment, I thought my family had seen me on my journey. When I took on my first dental practice, I had £100 left in the bank account. I’ve worked so hard to build it to where it is now. To almost devalue everything I’ve done in that moment, it would have been very disappointing and heartbreaking to them.
I wanted to win and I would want nothing more than Lord Sugar's mentorship because I respect him so much. He's one of the most successful people in the UK in my eyes. It wasn't an easy decision but I felt like I made the right one for myself.
It didn’t cross my mind at all that Lord Sugar would ask for 50%. I was taken aback but I'm glad that they clarified that. One thing I’d say about Baroness Karren Brady, Lord Sugar and Tim Campbell is that they are very fair. I respect them all.
In a weird way, I felt really relieved I didn’t make the final. What was interesting was when I was in my interview with Claude Littner. He talked to me on a really deep level and really cared about what I was doing - not just in business but in life and he gave me really good advice.
He said, ‘You worked really hard to try and be the best dentist you can be. Why don't you try and just put all your energy into that? Stick to that? Because that's what you do best if you try and enter this. Yes, yes, you could be successful, but you're going to end up splitting your time. You're not going to be able to concentrate as much on your dentistry.’
And I thought you know what I have gone through five years of undergraduate education, two years of postgraduate education, a foundation training year. So eight years in total after school and Claude was right. He was the kindest interviewer I had.
At our dentist practices, we champion the experience. We've got TVs on the ceiling. Watch Netflix, BBC - even The Apprentice if you want while you get your teeth done because a lot of the treatments we do are long treatments. People will forget what you tell them, people will forget what you did but they'll never forget how you made them feel that we really try to do.
One thing that is really close to my heart, that I’m developing at the moment, is there’s a lot of medical tourism unfortunately happening. People are not aware of the consequences of getting these treatments done abroad. It is a reversible decision and can have a huge effect on people. The problem is it might be cheaper initially but in the long term you are going to be spending way more trying to fix everything.
For example, if you were to get veneers in the UK we would probably need to remove 10% or even 0% of the tooth. In another country, they can remove about 50% to 60% of your tooth tissue which then can eventually lead to infection and the teeth may need taking out or root canal treatment. You end up with people who are very young that have implants or dentures to try to replace those missing teeth. This app will pair people from the UK to go to safe qualified clinicians that will go through all that consent with you.
It’s very, very exciting and I really hope it solves a problem that is rife at the moment.
The Apprentice's Dr Paul Midha told his story to Lily Waddell.
