Our Story
20 Years in the Making

We Built a GCC for Our Own Dental Business. Now We Build Them for Yours.

The inside story of how Samera Global was born out of one family’s dental group – and why the model we built over two decades is now available to every ambitious dental business that wants to own its own offshore capability.

Every business idea has an origin story. Ours started not in a boardroom, but in the back office of a dental practice – and in the very personal challenge of trying to help a dental group grow without being strangled by the operational complexity that growth brings.

My wife runs The Neem Tree Dental Group, a small private dental group based in London and the South East of England. Over the past two decades, I’ve watched her clinical vision repeatedly bump up against the friction of running a business: the accounting headaches, the marketing black hole, the admin that never stops, the difficulty of finding good people at a cost that doesn’t eat your margin.

Samera Global was built to solve those problems. Not as a product we designed on a whiteboard – but as a living, breathing capability that we built, tested, refined, and scaled inside a real dental business. Our own.

Today, Samera Global is four things: an accounting firm for hundreds of dentists across the UK, the offshore team that runs the back office of Neem Tree Dental Group, a managed service that other dental businesses and DSOs use to access the same capability, and – our newest offering – a GCC setup service that helps ambitious dental groups build and own their own Global Capability Centre in India.

This is the story of how we got here.

Samera wasn’t designed on a whiteboard. It was built, tested, and refined inside a real dental business. Our own.

The Problem We Couldn’t Ignore

Building for Neem Tree First

When The Neem Tree Dental Group started growing beyond a single practice, the cracks appeared almost immediately. Not clinical cracks (the dentistry was excellent), but operational ones.

Dental accounting is deceptively complex. Private fee splits. Lab cost allocation. Treatment mix that shifts month to month. Getting this right consistently and quickly requires people who understand dental finance specifically, not just bookkeeping generally.

Hiring that expertise in the UK, at the level of quality we needed, at a cost that made sense for a growing group practice, was genuinely difficult. The options were: expensive UK employees, expensive UK accountants, or expensive UK agencies. None of them scaled cleanly as the group grew.

So, we looked elsewhere. We started building a team in India – initially focused entirely on the accounting back office for Neem Tree. Not outsourcing to an agency, not buying a managed service. Building our own team, with our own training, embedded in how The Neem Tree actually operated.

What ‘Building’ Actually Meant

The first thing we discovered is that talented people are not the hard part. India has extraordinary accounting talent. The hard part is the domain knowledge – the specific mechanics of how UK dental practices work, how associate agreements translate into monthly pay calculations.

We invested heavily in training. Not just technical accounting training, but dental business education. How does a UDA target work? What’s the difference between a performer and a provider? Why does treatment mix matter for profitability? Team members who understood the ‘why’ – not just the ‘what’ – produced dramatically better work.

Alongside the people, we built the systems. Wherever we found repetitive, rules-based work – like bank feed processing, report formatting, data extraction from practice management software – we automated it. The goal was always to use our people’s time on things that required actual judgement, not on tasks that software could handle in seconds.

The combination worked. Within a few years, The Neem Tree’s accounting back office was running end-to-end from India: management accounts, purchase ledger, reconciliations, associate pay calculations, payroll support. The quality was better than what we’d had before. The cost was significantly lower. And our senior team in Delhi gave The Neem Tree’s UK finance function real strategic bandwidth for the first time.

This saw us achieve:

• Full monthly management accounts across multiple practices
• Associate pay calculations – handled offshore
• Payroll support, bank reconciliations: all running from India
• Smart automation layered in to eliminate repetitive processing
• Senior Delhi-based team owning outcomes, not just completing tasks

That last point matters more than the rest. The difference between outsourcing and building genuine capability is ownership. We weren’t buying task completion. We were building a team that cared about the outcome for The Neem Tree the way an in-house team would – because in every meaningful sense, they were.

Growing What Worked

When Accounting Succeeded, We Got Ambitious

The accounting function proved something important: the model worked. You could build high-quality, specialist, offshore capability for a dental business – if you invested properly in people, training, and systems.

So, we asked the natural next question: what else does The Neem Tree need?

The answer, it turned out, was almost everything that sits outside the surgery door.

Marketing: The Function That Never Stops

Running a dental group – especially one with private and cosmetic ambitions – means running a consumer business. Patients need to find you. They need to trust you before they book. They need to be communicated with throughout their patient journey. This is where marketing takes centre.

But high-quality dental marketing people in the UK are expensive and hard to find. Agencies are generic and costly. Hiring junior in-house staff and hoping they grow into it produces uneven results.

We applied the same approach we’d used in accounting: hire talented people in India, train them specifically on dental marketing involving local SEO, patient psychology, how dental patients search and decide, and build the systems to support them.

The SEO gains were gradual at first, then unmistakable. Practice websites climbed the rankings, organic enquiry volumes increased, and the cost per new patient from organic search fell well below paid advertising. Alongside this, the content matured with condition-specific landing pages, patient education articles, and procedure guides that informed prospective patients rather than reading like digital brochures.

Video editing came next. Practice tours. Clinician profiles. Patient testimonial edits. Before-and-after case presentations. The kind of content that builds trust at scale – produced consistently and cost-effectively by team members who knew Neem Tree’s brand, values, and tone inside out.

The difference between outsourcing and building genuine capability is ownership. We weren’t buying task completion. We were building a team that cared about the outcome.

Engineering: The Newest Chapter

The most recent evolution of what we’ve built is engineering capability – and it’s the one that changes the trajectory most significantly.

Running The Neem Tree’s accounting back office for two decades gave us an unusually deep understanding of one of the most persistent headaches in UK dental group finance: the monthly associate pay run. Pulling clinical data from practice management systems. Applying complex fee splits. Handling adjustments, recalls, lab cost deductions. Reconciling everything before a payment goes out. Doing it accurately, on time, every month, across multiple associates and multiple practices.

We had been doing this – first manually, then semi-automatically – for years. We understood the problem better than almost anyone in the sector.

That understanding became Samera.ai: a SaaS product that automates associate pay calculations for dental practices, integrating directly with systems like Dentally and Xero. It could only have been built by people who had lived the problem at scale. The engineers we’ve added to the India team sit alongside the accounting team, who are the domain experts – able to understand edge cases, clinical logic, and the specific ways dental finance data behaves in the real world.

This is the GCC model at its best: multiple disciplines compounding on each other’s knowledge, producing something that none of them could have built alone.

What We Built for Ourselves, We Can Build For You

From Internal Asset to Industry Offering

At some point we realised that what we had built for Neem Tree was something other dental businesses desperately needed and couldn’t easily access.

Most dental groups that want offshore capability face the same frustrating options: outsource to a generic BPO that doesn’t understand dentistry, hire an agency that’s really just a staffing firm with a markup, or try to figure out India entity setup and recruitment on their own with no playbook to follow.

None of those options give you what we had built for Neem Tree: a team that genuinely understands dental operations, embedded in your business, producing work to a standard you’d expect from an in-house hire.

So we decided to open up Samera’s expertise to the wider industrial cause. The same capability we had spent years refining for Neem Tree – the accounting functions, the marketing support, the admin, the creative, and now the engineering – is available to other dental businesses through Samera’s managed service offering. Other practices and DSOs could access a team that already knew the domain, already had the systems, already had the senior oversight in place.

That has been the second chapter of Samera’s story: becoming the offshore partner of choice for dental businesses that want genuine capability, not just cheap task completion.

The Third Chapter: Building GCCs You Own

But we’ve been watching the market, and something is shifting. The most sophisticated dental groups – particularlyPE-backed DSOs scaling across multiple markets – don’t just want access to an offshore team. They want to own one.

And they’re right to want that. There is a fundamental difference between using a managed service and owning your own Global Capability Centre. When you own the entity, you own the team. The institutional knowledge stays with you. The culture is yours to shape. The people are hired against your values, not a generic agency brief. And as the entity grows, the economic case becomes significantly stronger – you’re not paying a service margin forever.

The challenge has always been: how do you actually build one? Setting up an Indian entity involves navigating company incorporation, employment law, payroll compliance, office infrastructure, recruitment pipelines, and management structures – none of which is intuitive if you’ve never done it before.

We have done it. For two decades, inside Samera and for Neem Tree. And we can now guide other dental groups and DSOs through the same process – helping them establish their own GCC in India, with their own staff, their own entity, and their own long-term capability.

• Entity setup and incorporation in India – navigating the legal and structural requirements
• Role design and recruitment – building the right team for your specific operational needs
• Training frameworks – embedding your domain knowledge into your India team from day one
• Systems and automation – building the infrastructure that makes offshore teams genuinely productive
• Management structure – establishing senior oversight that keeps quality high as the team scales
• Ongoing advisory – drawing on two decades of learning so you don’t have to make the mistakes we made

You get the benefit of twenty years of learning compressed into your setup journey. And at the end of it, you own the asset, not us.

The most sophisticated dental groups don’t just want access to an offshore team. They want to own one. We can show them how.

What Two Decades Taught Us

The Principles That Made It Work

Follow the problem

We didn’t build Samera by reading a GCC framework. We built it by looking at what The Neem Tree needed and finding the best possible solution for each challenge. Every function we added followed the same logic: what problem are we actually solving, and can we solve it better by building genuine offshore capability?

Training is the investment that compounds

Every function we’ve built has required deep upfront investment in domain education – not just ‘here’s the software’ onboarding, but genuine understanding of how UK dental businesses work. Team members who understand the ‘why’ consistently outperform those who only know the ‘what’. That investment pays back over years, not months.

Automate the scaffolding, free up the judgement

The biggest waste in offshore teams is expensive human time spent on work that rules-based automation could handle in seconds. We’ve always built the automation first – data extraction, formatting, processing – so our people can focus on the things that actually require a brain.

Integration produces compound returns

Functions that talk to each other produce better outcomes than siloed teams. The accountant who understands the SEO data, the admin team member who knows the financial context, the engineer who can talk to the accountants and understand a clinical edge case – that integrated knowledge is where the real value lives.

Ownership beats access

This is the lesson that drives everything we now offer. There is a ceiling on what a managed service can do for you. When you own your offshore team – the entity, the people, the culture – you are building a genuine long-term competitive advantage. The institutional knowledge stays. The team grows with your business. The economics improve with every passing year.

What Could Your GCC Look Like?

If you’re running a dental group or DSO and you’re dealing with the operational friction that comes with growth – the accounting complexity, the marketing gap, the admin that never ends, the technology that doesn’t quite connect – you’re living the same problem we solved for The Neem Tree.

We know what the solution looks like. We’ve been running it for twenty years.

Whether you want to access Samera’s existing offshore capability through our managed service, or whether you’re ready to build and own your own GCC in India, we can help you get there faster, with fewer mistakes, and with a team that will genuinely understand your business from day one.

The model we built for our own dental business is now yours to use. Or yours to own.

— Arun Mehra, CEO, Samera Global