Triodent

The CEO was guest speaker at Tauranga’s Chamber of Commerce Young Professionals Rocket event in June and some of the Locus Research team went along to hear him talk about how Triodent has grown to a multi award-winning business, manufacturer and exporter in just eight years

As an experienced dentist McDonald started Triodent in 2003 with an aim to improve the vast dentistry product landscape with simple, low-tech solutions. Leaving his day-job in 2009 the Katikati operation on New Zealand’s North Island has grown to 115 people with a 20 strong sales force in the US.

The young audience were treated to an insightful and light-hearted talk about business lessons learnt through raising Triodent and pragmatic advice for starting a business.

With striking similarities to the UK’s James Dyson, McDonald revealed it took 180 prototypes to deliver the first successful product and he put ‘fantastic products’ at the core of any successful business offering. He is innovation driven with 20% of the workforce committed to Product Development and all manufacture in-house.

Speed to market was an underlying theme extending the 80:20 rule to an 80:20:20 – deliver 80% of the result in 20% of the time at 20% of the cost and ‘do the numbers’ advocating financial modelling at regular intervals during Product Development.

The creative approach went beyond Product Development into Sales and Marketing. They have successfully utilised dental social-networking sites to market their products for seven years and the sales team pay for consultation slots in dental practises to get in front of key purchasers.

It was clear from the talk that dentistry is the Formula One of product ranges with many premium cost, consumable items.

McDonald outlined Triodents 'Big Hairy Audacious Goal'  of hitting $200 million in sales within 5 years. Triodent are also looking to how they remunerate their staff, 12% of their profit goes into a bonus pool, of a projected $100 million in 5 years and looking to extend the value they derive from each procedure.

McDonald was honest and proud about 80% margins and goals of $200M sales in five years and so he should; it takes conviction to commit to the model of simple, low-tech products in a data-driven, high-tech world. 

Inspirational talk and great to see product centric success in New Zealand. Well done Triodent!