The CAPP Story: Building a Leading Dental Education Platform From Scratch — with Dr. Dobrina Mollova & Tzvetan Deyanov

NATALIIA:  Hello, and welcome to the Next Dental Podcast, where we invite and talk to people who are in the dental industry — experts in the field  and we discuss challenges, changes, and what's coming next. My name is Nataliia Romanova.

With this episode, we're starting a new season — Season 2 — where we talk not just with experts, but with people who have been in this industry for years, or even decades, and have experienced these changes firsthand. I cannot imagine better guests for today's episode. Please give a warm welcome to Dr. Dobrina Mollova, founder, owner, and         Managing Director of the Center for Advanced Professional Practices, better known as CAPP, which she established in 2003. With over 21 years of leadership at CAPP, she has significantly contributed to dental education and professional training in the region.         And also joining us is Tzvetan Deyanov, business leader, Executive Director, and shareholder at CAPP. Welcome, welcome!

DR. MOLLOVA: Thank you so much for the invitation. It's a pleasure to be here.

NATALIIA:  How has the year started so far? How are you today?

DR. MOLLOVA:   It started very excitedly. We have a lot of challenges this year — a lot of programs with CAPP, a lot of participants. After our 20-year company celebration, we feel even more responsibility to deliver knowledge in the dental industry, incorporating new technologies and new programs. And it is not just an informative introduction — we have a responsibility for how this will affect the health of the patient.

NATALIIA:  Wow — through education, you feel this responsibility?

DR. MOLLOVA: Yes, through education. And the hands that will do this work, we have a responsibility to train those people.

TZVETAN: The year started with a big bang. Everyone always thinks that as soon as December comes and you have a little bit of holidays, from a European perspective, things will start a little slow in January. But actually, from the second of January, which was a Friday, and the first working day here in the region, we were immediately back at it from scratch. In our business, in education, the moment you finish your educational year, you start from zero again. You have to improve and get back to where you were the previous year — and then do better. So we've been busy from the very first day of the new year. We're  excited about what's ahead, the challenges we have, and how we're going to perform.

NATALIIA:  I'm sure you will perform at your best. Let me bring a bit more context for those who — I don't believe these people exist — haven't heard of CAPP. CAPP is what I'd call a full training and educational platform. It's not just a center. You have hands-on training, online training, webinars, conferences — so many things going on. CAPP has been on the market for over 20 years. You've educated almost half a million students through your courses — including webinars — and delivered more than 2,400 courses and programs. CAPP is one of the largest CME-certified providers, recognised by ADA CERP, and has operated in the UAE, Singapore, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. Congratulations — these are huge achievements.  And every time I meet Dr. Mollova, I discover new layers of her story.  From what I know, you had a practice in Bulgaria years ago. You were a clinic owner — not just a dentist. And then something happened, and you moved to Dubai in 2005. What was that? What made you make that decision?

DR. MOLLOVA: In my life, everything happens by coincidence. No plan. It was funny — shall I tell the story?

NATALIIA:  Yes, of course! This is why we're here.

DR. MOLLOVA: I opened the first private clinic in Bulgaria after communism, with great excitement — finally, I could do whatever I wanted and grow in the industry with new technologies coming from Western Europe. I was a specialist in periodontal surgery, one of only about ten people in the world doing what I did, performing surgeries outside my own town in the capital. I'd travel with my suitcases of instruments, my assistant alongside me.    One evening, we sat down to have dinner at an open restaurant. I saw two men searching for a table. I thought, no way — nobody's going to want to sit at our table. But unfortunately, they came and sat right beside us. I told my assistant, "Don't speak any English." But the         conversation happened anyway, and it turned out one of the men was the owner of a Swedish dental clinic in Dubai. He was visiting a colleague in Bulgaria, but was also looking to recruit dental assistants to work there.

NATALIIA:  He was looking for personnel — for employees — right there in Bulgaria?

DR. MOLLOVA: Yes. He was sitting right next to us, and I kept nudging my assistant — "Don't talk." But eventually they realised we had been working together for 17 years, and he looked at my assistant with wide eyes. He needed her. She didn't want to go anywhere. She didn't speak English.

NATALIIA:  And you hadn't been to Dubai at that moment?

DR. MOLLOVA: I had come once for a dental exhibition — found it by coincidence somewhere. I came for the exhibition and never planned to move there or do anything further. 

NATALIIA: Dubai was very different at the time. 

DR. MOLLOVA: Burj Khalifa was still under construction at that time. Eventually, my assistant went to Dubai and joined his clinic. The other dentists working there — mostly Western Europeans — saw how she worked and told the owner: "The dentist has to come here."

NATALIIA:  So your assistant went, not you, and they called for you?

DR. MOLLOVA: Yes. And when this man started calling me persistently — every night at 11 o'clock — "You have to come, you have to come..." For other reasons which I don't want to mention here, I needed to move somewhere. And that's why I came. When I arrived, I had to pass examinations before I could practice. There were six examining dentists — Swedish, German — and they didn't pass the exam, but I had prepared for it. And that's the story.

This clinic was not for me — it wasn't operated properly, there were very wrong treatments, and bad things had happened there from previous dentists. And then one day, I was reading Gulf News, and I saw a small square notice: "CME will soon be required in the UAE."

NATALIIA:  Were you already aware of what CME was?

DR. MOLLOVA: I knew it from Europe, but it didn't exist yet here. It was an advertisement in the newspaper — it was coming. And I told my husband. He said, "When I see your eyes shining like this, I think I should not say no."

TZVETAN:  If I can add one thing, because I've heard this story many times, and she leaves out one of the most impressive parts. Her English was not strong at the time, and she had to essentially learn the entire dental vocabulary to pass the practice examination.

DR. MOLLOVA: I was told about a library — go to the lower level, the lower shelf. There was one orange book — an Oxford dental dictionary. Nobody had moved it because everybody thought it was just a regular dictionary.

 But it was the Oxford Dentistry reference — every speciality, everything covered with detailed terminology.

NATALIIA:  And you just read it and read it?

DR. MOLLOVA: I hired a young man for the summer — told him, "What are you doing this summer? Nothing? Let's make some money." I closed the clinic, pretending I was out of the city. Every day we read this book. I put notes on the words I wasn't sure about. No internet. Nothing. And  I passed the exam.

TZVETAN:   That's the most impressive part.

NATALIIA:  Great story. And what happened next?

DR. MOLLOVA: I started working at the clinic, but I was not satisfied — it was not operated properly. Then I saw that Gulf News advertisement about CME and thought — This is interesting. And I told my husband I wanted to pursue it. By coincidence, a friend of mine was based in Internet City. She told me, "Why don't you open in the free zone? No local partner needed." And in Knowledge Village — at that time it was new — I opened an office, and this is how it started.

NATALIIA:  Very interesting. So as I understand it, the authorities were pushing the market toward a higher standard. Was the market ready for it? Did you feel you were taking a risk?

DR. MOLLOVA: I don't think too much. I just do it. I feel it — intuition. I didn't even know how to approach Abu Dhabi or the right people. I said, "Okay, I'll go." When I went to Knowledge Village, rather than having a local partner elsewhere, the name itself gave me a sense of responsibility — "knowledge village" — to deliver knowledge. And that is the story.

We started with small courses. And then I called one speaker I knew from before — the director of a master dental technician school in Munich. I said, "Do you want to come to Dubai and do a training for dental technicians?" He said, "Oh, Dobrina — why not?" He came. I  found a dental technician who had studied in Germany and could translate. That was our first course.

After the course, we had breakfast at the Jumeirah Beach Hotel terrace, and he said, "Dobrina, make a CAD/CAM conference." I said, "I don't know anything about CAD/CAM — I'm a periodontal surgeon." He said, "Make a CAD/CAM conference." It was new in the world. He was connected to all the materials manufacturers. He gave me four companies to call.

 I called people. There was one older gentleman from a large company — he asked me on the telephone: "Dr. Mollova, have you ever organised a conference before?" Silence. "Yes." When he left the call, I said to myself: "I have to confess something to you one day — I lied."

NATALIIA:  Fake it until you make it!

DR. MOLLOVA: And this is how we started. Four companies made that conference happen. We invited the president of a dental association in Saudi Arabia. Everything happened by coincidence. The database of dentists in Saudi Arabia — we found it by coincidence, too. And the president who said he wouldn't come... called me at midnight: "The president of the association is coming. It is your conference." I said, "I don't know  any other conference." There was no other conference.

NATALIIA:  How many people attended the first conference?

DR. MOLLOVA: 250. It was a big achievement.

NATALIIA: I believe the lesson comes to the student when they're ready. You may feel it was all a coincidence — but sometimes life gives you these opportunities precisely because you're ready to take them. And I think that's exactly your case.

So it all started with those first 250 participants at the conference — and the scaling began. How many people did you have on the team at that moment?

DR. MOLLOVA: At first, one Filipino girl. Then another. But before the events, I would bring in more people — friends, acquaintances — to come to the office part-time. They'd come after their regular jobs, six in the evening until midnight, calling people about the conferences.

NATALIIA: And when did you feel things were truly scaling — that you needed a different approach, not just part-timers, but reliable full-time people? Was that already when Svetan came in, or earlier?

DR. MOLLOVA: Tzvetan came later.

TZETAN: You had Laura first, right?

DR. MOLLOVA: Yes, first there was a British lady, then her sister joined as well. The sister was... enough said. But honestly, I never struggled to find people. They always came with passion.

NATALIA: I can believe that.

DR. MOLLOVA: My office back then was about this size. Even smaller, actually.

NATALIIA:  Tzvetan, tell us about yourself. You had a totally different career — you were in Europe, working in a different field entirely. How did you end up in Dubai and at CAPP?

TZVETAN: It's a difficult question to put into perspective, but I'll try to make a long story short.

I'm originally from Bulgaria — just like Dr. Mollova — born in Switzerland, but I grew up in the Netherlands, where I spent 18 years. There, I studied together with Petter and Kinga, who are now our colleagues, partners, and family. We all attended The Hague University of Applied Sciences and graduated from the Business Administration programme.

After university, I worked for three and a half years — and looking back now, there are a lot of similarities between what I did then and what we do at CAPP today. The industry is different, of course — dentistry is its own world — but when it comes to organising, operations, sales, business development, and most importantly, the way you connect with people — your contacts, your network — it's very much the same.

And I think that's actually what defines CAPP. It's not just about who we know — it's about who knows us. Because at the end of the day, that's what matters most.

That's a big similarity. After those three and a half years in the Netherlands, there was one particular week I still remember vividly. A colleague fell ill, and I had to step in and take over their work at very short notice. Within that single week, I had to prepare 11 subsidy proposals for the Dutch government — grants that supported Dutch companies in attending international exhibitions by funding their pavilions abroad.

All 11 proposals had to be submitted in Dutch, which was my second language. English is probably closer to my first, since I didn't live in Bulgaria for very long. It was challenging, but I managed to submit all 11 within that one week, working 14 to 17 hours a day. In the end, we received seven approvals out of eleven.

One of them was particularly interesting. Our company operated in the niche world of security and IT — we helped businesses break into international markets, with member companies paying us to help them promote their products across borders. One of the grants we received was for Qatar. As it turned out, due to a scheduling mix-up I can no longer fully recall, the application had been submitted for the wrong year — the show only happens every two years, and we'd got the date wrong. When the approval came through, the government essentially said: "We've already issued the grant — let's find the closest available exhibition." That exhibition was in Dubai. It was Intersec — the international security show.

NATALIIA: It's still happening, isn't it?

TZVETAN: It is — in fact, I believe it was on just last week, or possibly even today. In any case, once we had the grant confirmed, I had to organise our entire participation. We had around 18 companies signed up to the Dutch pavilion — coordinating the booth layout, selling participation packages, managing who would attend and in what capacity.

We also needed mission leaders, and I'm very proud of who we had. One was a Prince of Orange — one of the three sons of the Queen of the Netherlands at the time. The second was General Dick Berlijn, one of the most celebrated figures in the European defence world, who also served as our advisor. These two names alone gave the Dutch companies enormous confidence — they knew that by attending, they would gain access to serious networks and be taken seriously in return.

When we arrived in Dubai, I needed to set up key meetings for our companies. I reached out to Peter — Dr. Mollova's son and now our partner — and asked if he knew anyone here. He said, "Actually, by chance, my mother works in Dubai. Give her a ring — I'm sure she knows people." And so I called Dr. Mollova, during the Christmas period. Sure enough, she knew exactly the right person in the security industry — a close friend of hers, and now of ours, to this day. I actually spoke to him just this morning, funny enough. He was very interested in what we were bringing, and he promised to arrange meetings with senior figures — police, government, and defence.

And then — perhaps the best coincidence of all — the person I had been coordinating with at Intersec, the one managing the exhibition on their side, is now my wife. The very first contact I had at Intersec was Alessia.

We met through phone calls and business emails, and then in person when we arrived in Dubai. The event itself was spectacular. The show was a great success, everyone was happy — but what stayed with me was something else entirely. The energy of the city. The people, the positivity, the sense that anything was possible. I had travelled across Europe, been to America, to Asia — and I had never felt anything quite like what I felt that week in Dubai.

On the flight back to the Netherlands, I remember it as though it were yesterday. I'd arranged for a friend to pick me up from the airport and drive me straight to the football pitch — I was playing at a fairly high level at the time, semi-professional. It was December. Twenty-five degrees and sunshine when I left Dubai. Then straight off the plane and onto a snow-covered pitch in minus four. I sat on the bench the entire match because I hadn't trained all week and hadn't been picked. And sitting there, freezing, I thought: what am I doing here?

That was the moment. I said to myself: I'm going back to Dubai next week.

And I did. Within a week, I flew back for the weekend — partly business, partly because I wanted to see Alessia. While I was there, I met with Dr. Mollova, who happened to be looking to bring someone on at the time. And — coincidence again — a mutual friend from our group had already joined CAP just before me.

NATALIIA: Another coincidence.

TZVETAN: Always. And this is where the long story becomes short. I flew back to the Netherlands after that weekend, and within one month, I had quit my job, stopped playing football — which I had been taking very seriously — and sorted out my apartment, which I still had six months left on the lease and continued to pay regardless. I simply didn't care. I was moving to Dubai.

Dr. Mollova gave me the opportunity to join CAPP. I loved it from the very first day — and I haven't looked back since.

That was 2012. Fourteen years ago.

DR. MOLLOVA: Tzvetan came to my office and stood in the corner. I had just hired another person from their friend group. I said, "Svetan, no — not possible." He said, "I need only one pillow and somewhere to sleep." I said, "Okay, I'll give you one foldable bed with one pillow." And he stayed — because Alessia still didn't want him living in her house.

TZVETAN:   Of course — we had just met. She thought: "Who is this crazy guy leaving his entire life behind to come to Dubai?"

DR. MOLLOVA: And the funny thing was, before Tzvetan came, I was doing conferences in Iraq with a beautiful British colleague, Laura. When we'd walk into the conference, everybody would run after her. She entertained everyone. When she left, and Tzvetan arrived, I thought: "Tzvetan, now what do I do with you?" He said: "I'll talk to them about football." In Iraq, football is very important.

TZVETAN:   I remember calling my parents from the Radisson Blue here and saying, "I'm planning to move to Dubai." I was 23 or 24. They said, "What?

 You're crazy." Dubai wasn't what it is now — it was still upcoming.

 And then a month and a half later, I called my mum again and said, "Next week we're going to Kurdistan — to Erbil — a year after the war ended." She said, "What are you doing?" But it was fun. We had good times.

NATALIIA:  You were a woman — a European woman — in the Arab world. Was it harder? Did being different open doors, or was it an obstacle?

NATALIIA:  How did CAPP look in 2012 when you joined, Tzvetan? How did you perceive it as a company?

TZVETAN:   It was interesting — even then, such a small group of people was capable of doing something so big. When the first conference came, I was pleasantly surprised by how large an event we could organise with such a lean team. We wouldn't be successful without all the partners and supporters who believe in education and in each other. The dental community here in the region has been extraordinary in that way.

DR. MOLLOVA: There was curiosity. Something new was happening, and people came because they were curious.

NATALIIA:  That's exactly what I notice at CAPP  conferences today. Your audience is eager to learn. They want to improve, to be advanced, to find something new. They're not just attending for the sake of it. How did you cultivate that?

DR. MOLLOVA: Everything we do — every event, every conference — we make the people feel like family. Ninety per cent of the people who come to our events feel they belong to a family. They stop Svetan, they stop Peter, they stop Kinga — they know everyone at registration. It's like a family celebration.

NATALIIA:  Doing business with family can be tricky. Do you have rules — like no business talk at family celebrations?

DR. MOLLOVA: I keep the border. At family celebrations, we never open our mouths about business — we don't even think about it. With Tzvetan, I'm more open — we can talk business even in private moments. But with Pete and Kinga, it's forbidden.

TZVETAN:   Like any marriage — if you have a good ability to forgive and forget quickly, you will manage. By forgiving and forgetting fast, you can continue working together. Arguments and disagreements are normal when  you see each other every day. But if you can move past it quickly, that's the most important thing.

DR. MOLLOVA: And honestly, I cooperate better with Svetan than with the family. He's more like me — five-four-three-two-one, boom, done. Peter is very organised. When he comes to the office, everything is structured: finances, operations, everything in order. He came from a corporate environment in the Netherlands. Sometimes I don't like the restrictions, but we need them. We need them. He found his place and helps us a lot — someone has to slap us from time to time.

TZVETAN:   In any company, you need different schools of thought, different characters, so you complement each other and make the company stronger.          Kinga — Peter's wife, and Dr. Mollova's daughter-in-law — actually joined us first, back in 2013 or 2014. She helped enormously with  graphic design and marketing. She joined full-time and worked from the Netherlands. Then it took a few years to persuade Peter to come out. Kinga helped a lot in bringing him here.

 He joined at the end of 2015 or the beginning of 2016, and immediately we started many new projects — the restorative and aesthetic programme, the implant certificate and diploma programmes. That was when the family really came together.

NATALIIA:  And how do you divide responsibilities?

TZVETAN:   We've all learned what our strengths are. Peter is strongest on administration and operations. Business development and networking is

more my strength. And Dr. Mollova — she's a bit of everything, but most importantly, she brings the dental expertise. She's a periodontal surgeon at the end of the day. That's the skeleton of the organisation.

NATALIIA:  Dr. Mollova — I think you're the visionary. I'm sure that sometimes the team says, "Oh my god, not another idea..." but then it works.

TZVETAN:   When I read Steve Jobs' biography by Walter Isaacson, I found so many references that looked just like Dr. Mollova — the way she talks to people, the way she has these ideas. Like Steve Jobs said: "People don't know what they want until they see it." Before the iPhone, nobody knew they wanted one. That's a little bit of a reference. I always joke that she's the female Steve Jobs of dentistry.

DR. MOLLOVA: I have feelings that come to me at three or four in the morning, I wake up and say, "Let's do this." The round table presentation at our exhibitions — it doesn't exist anywhere else in the world. We still do it. I dreamed about that idea. Many of our best ideas came that way.

TZVETAN: Coming back to the point you raised earlier — about everyone feeling like they're dealing with family. I think that's actually at the heart of why CAP is successful.

People trust us. The companies trust us. The dentists trust us. When they work with us, they know we are people of our word — that we will deliver what we promise. And that's rarer than it should be. There are still too many organisations out there where employees are simply not happy, where they don't feel genuinely connected to what they do. For them, it's a nine-to-five. They show up, they leave, and that's the end of it.

For us, it's entirely different. We genuinely enjoy what we do — and more than that, we never lose sight of the bigger purpose. At the end of the day, everything we do is in service of better patient care. By educating dentists, by giving them the knowledge and the tools to do their work better, you are indirectly improving someone's life. A real patient, in a real chair, receiving better treatment because of what they learned with us.

That's a fulfilling thing. And I think people feel it — the companies, the dentists — whether they can articulate it or not. They sense that when they work with CAP, they're part of something that actually matters.

And I think that's precisely why people enjoy working with us — and keep coming back. They enjoy seeing us, talking with us, and being around us. But it goes beyond just good relationships.

We genuinely try to see things from their perspective. We put ourselves in their shoes — because if we don't truly understand what they need, we can't help them in the right way. And we always want them to come back next year. That's not just a business goal — it's a reflection of whether we've done our job properly. If they return, it means we've listened, we've delivered, and we've earned their trust again. That, to us, is what matters most.

DR. MOLLOVA: Our staff doesn't leave either. They feel family. Whatever they need — it's immediate. We celebrate. We make parties. They stay because they feel at home.

NATALIIA:  Let's talk about challenges. I can imagine it hasn't always been easy. Tell me about the hardest periods.

DR. MOLLOVA: COVID. I was in Bulgaria when it started. We immediately had a meeting — Peter said, "Let's make an online conference." We prepared in under a month. All speakers were on board, all companies agreed.

TZVETAN:   At the time, we thought — let's try having people pay. We set a very nominal fee: 200 dirhams for a full-day conference. We had a good number of registrations. But then, later that year, in November, we opened our two major annual conferences — the CAD/CAM Digital Dentistry Congress and the Dental Facial Cosmetics conference — running back to back online, each over four days, free to attend. From nine in the morning until nine in the evening, to cover multiple time zones.

Over those eight days, we had over 60,000 unique registrations from every country you can think of. Speakers would log on and say, "Are there really 7,000 people online right now?" The chat was non-stop. It was unbelievable.

NATALIIA:  People were bored, people wanted to network — and they found a way.

TZVETAN:   Exactly. And managing that was enormous. Ten lectures a day, 40 per conference, 80 speakers total across two conferences — all in different time zones, different setups. The only technical problem we had was a power cut — in Germany, of all places.

DR. MOLLOVA: We had no obstacles. COVID, whatever — it's worth doing.

NATALIIA:  You changed, and you adapted. That flexibility is exactly what this podcast is about.

TZVETAN:   For the hands-on courses, that was the biggest challenge. In June 2020, we ran the first hybrid hands-on courses — a four-hour lecture followed by a four-hour live demonstration. We even sent materials to doctors so they could practice in their own clinics. And then we brought speakers into Dubai — one of the first cities in the world to reopen — and had a room full of masked, socially distanced doctors while streaming the  entire session on Zoom to hundreds more around the world. One morning, a speaker landed at Dubai airport at six. By seven, he tested positive for COVID. We had a room full of doctors waiting for him downstairs. We had to walk in and say: "The speaker is in the building, in his hotel room upstairs — but he can't come down." Within hours, we had set up a workstation for him in his room: cameras, microphones, a TV showing him the doctors, a TV showing the work, and another showing all the cameras. We went station to station — one of us as cameraman, talking to each doctor, relaying their work to the speaker upstairs — and the speaker gave each one a one-on-one consultation.

Doctors told us it was actually a better experience than a regular course, because the instructor could go to each person individually.

NATALIIA:  You cannot scare people who've worked in events.

DR. MOLLOVA: We deliver our passion. We deliver so many things — it is crazy stories, yes. But all of them are stories of us delivering what we promised.

TZVETAN:   Another big challenge — even before COVID — is that as a training

  company in Dubai, we are constantly navigating ever-changing regulations. We always strive to have every permit in place, every box checked. The city develops fast, which is positive. But sometimes things change so quickly that gaps appear.

One prime example: a week before our conference in 2015 or 2016, the hotel informed us they could no longer accept free zone company licenses for events. We needed an events permit issued through the DED. Within less than three days, we opened an entirely new company.

DR. MOLLOVA: I was in Malaysia for a conference. Less than three days. I called and said, "Go and find an office — anywhere in Dubai." We registered a company in three days, and the conference happened.

TZVETAN:   And the positive is — you can't do that anywhere else in the world.

But until today, many companies come to Dubai thinking they can book a hotel, organise a course, and be compliant. They're wrong. You must have a DHA no-objection certificate. You must have an academy authorised by the KHDA. These regulations maintain quality, and they also create a natural barrier. The threshold to enter this business properly is high.

NATALIIA:  So why have so many tried and failed, while CAPP is still here after more than 20 years?

TZVETAN:   The biggest reason is that we do this full-time, with full commitment.

Many competitors — dentists included, with great respect — try to run educational events part-time, while still managing a clinic. It's hard to do it that way. Events management is an art on its own. It's not as demanding as being a dental professional, but it has its own rules,  regulations, and standards. You have to adhere to them fully. And when people deal with us, they know we will do what we promise. Because we enjoy what we do, and the end goal is better patient care.

By educating dentists, you're indirectly helping patients live better lives. The job is fulfilled. People feel that — and they come back.

NATALIIA:  What role does technology play at CAPP — both in what you teach and in how you operate?

DR. MOLLOVA: I've loved new technology since I was born. It challenges me. In dentistry, education doesn't end at five years of school — you have to study and develop every single day. Everything coming to market now is moving in this direction. Artificial intelligence is my favourite topic — our next conference has AI front and centre. AI allows dentists to deliver more precise work — in the mouth, on the teeth — and saves the dentist's time. It reduces the  margin for error. That's why I was so excited when I started the CAD/CAM conference. Seeing a bridge come from a machine and fitting perfectly in the patient's mouth — no dental technician involved, no manual grinding — that was extraordinary.

Robot-assisted surgery is already here. I recently attended a lecture by a professor from the UK who was performing complex implant surgeries with a robotic system. And navigation — understanding exactly where to position the implant before the robot even moves — is already being mandated in certain markets. In Saudi Arabia, navigation is now a requirement.

TZVETAN:   In terms of our own operations, the reason we stay so flexible is that we have worked closely with our own in-house programmers to build software that works for us specifically — software we can update and change as needed. We've never been locked into a large ERP or CRM system that requires months of reconfiguration. Flexibility is core to how we operate.

 In terms of educational technology trends, AI agents are already helping with efficiency — but we're also careful. The information isn't always accurate. We triple check. We're still yet to see the full wave of AI take over in education, but we're watching closely. We've also been looking at phantom head systems that use AI to monitor a student's posture, hand position, and technique in real time — showing errors to the millimetre on a screen. That's something we're actively exploring for our training programmes.

DR. MOLLOVA: I'm currently negotiating with some exciting new companies. There are some new developments coming to CAP's training — but I can't say more than that yet.

TZVETAN:   Yes, secrets.

NATALIIA:  One last question to wrap up — what would you recommend to entrepreneurs who are starting a business, or trying to scale one, which is even harder than starting?

DR. MOLLOVA: Honesty, consistency — and passion. And don't think too much. Feel it, and do it.

TZVETAN:   If there's a will, there's a way. That's the mentality you need. If you truly want to achieve something and you put in the right amount of effort and work, eventually it will happen. Of course, you need a bit of luck along the way — but luck favours the brave.

NATALIIA:  So many great quotes today. You should write a book.

TZVETAN:   Far from it. Dr. Mollova is the one who needs to write the book.

NATALIIA:  Thank you so much for this conversation. I felt like part of the family. The story behind CAPP is very human, very honest, and very inspiring. And if you feel this is your life, your path — of course you will succeed.

Thank you for opening Season 2. It's been an amazing conversation.

DR. MOLLOVA: Thank you. Always a pleasure.

TZVETAN:   Thank you for having us.

NATALIIA:  That was the Next Dental Podcast. My name is Natalia — your host. Please subscribe to our channel, leave your comments and thoughts, and let us know who you'd like to see as future guests.

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