Picking a surfing metaphor for Dr Raymond Shroot’s career would likely make the Scottish-born dentist laugh out loud. Or perhaps he knows that the Surfers’ Bible lists more than four Scottish breaks among the best in the world, making his countrymen accomplished at picking a wave?

It’s an image that fits this story because wherever there’s progress, be it in surfing, ecology, business, or medicine, the excitement happens on the edge and those who pick the place, read the momentum and take a risk on the line are the ones the rest of us read magazine articles about.

Sitting at the helm of three arms of one of Australia’s longest standing family run businesses supplying and manufacturing for the dental industry, Dr Shroot admits to looking back at the path that took him out of fulltime practice and into a substantial international business with interests around the globe, with a mild sense of amazement.

He humbly describes his three decades building three major international companies: W9 wholesaling and manufacturing, CareDent supplying its own brand oral care products into supermarkets and Ark Health supplying dentists directly. All this, as well as developing flagship brands including PerioTape, OnGard and InterBrush seemed, he says, “The right thing to do at the time”.

When you ask him how he went from general practice in Newcastle to developing his own products, establishing major government, corporate and supermarket contracts, overseeing product development and sales around the world, he simply says, “I was lucky I was young enough when I started out not to be scared to death!”

A lovely quip, but it’s clear that while Dr Shroot may indeed have been blessed with a lucky opportunity to be among the first to explore new options to import products out of burgeoning European markets to a stirring Australian industry in the late 1980s, there is more to his success than luck.

Within two months of his first ‘flutter’ at importing dental supplies – a $2000 punt that saw him collect a shipment of X-ray accessories from Newcastle ship yards in the back of the family’s Chrysler Valiant family car he and his wife, Josephine, saw the momentum gathering in dental imports.

They could see demand shifting and pick the products that piqued the Australian market. They decided Australian dentistry was on the brink of immense change and decided to be a part of it and so moved to Sydney in 1988. By 1991 they packed up their Sydney practice to tend the growth of W9 into an independent non-aligned importer and wholesaler of dental and medical supplies that today handles well over 5000 products.

It was a move that might have tested the mettle of a wilier entrepreneur. While telecommunications, computers, email, innovation and manufacturing were booming, opening massive new doors for product design, production and international distribution, the early 1990s was a nervous time of recession, economic anxiety and challenges to the Australian identity in all quarters. It was a time when Dr Shroot says the dental industry was an extremely tight ship that did not welcome new starters – or even dentists, for that matter.

As President of the NSW Dental Industry Association for two years now, he is the first dentist to hold any office with that body which at one stage wouldn’t even send an application form to dentists with the then radical idea of joining their own association. “In 1991 I was rejected because I was a dentist,” Dr Shroot recalls incredulously. “It was not an organization that encouraged people to join and that gives an idea of what the industry was like then,” he says. “It was a lot more narrow minded and served the interests of a few, so if you really look at what is around today we’re living in a very different world to those days of a kind of cartel.” As the momentum of change and innovation has surfed company profiles through the profession and its industry these last three decades, Dr Shroot and his contemporaries have navigated incredible shifts in almost every dimension of dentistry.

Today the industry is vibrant with diversity, eager for innovation and thirsty for new science – a very different world to practice in and to service. At W9 the zest for new ideas and interest in development that created the business has matured into a keen eye for innovation and a sound confidence. They are foundational strengths that continue to nurture growth and success, highlighted by the near doubling of its main warehouse at the Hornsby headquarters

While huge corporations have entered the field and many of the smaller independent enterprises have merged or failed, Dr Shroot and his sons, Noah and Toby who run Ark Health, are still enjoying surfing the edges.