Talking Nachos with Dr. Paul Goodman

The following transcription was from the Bulletproof Youtube channel. Here is the https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrMrPH8To1o

NOTE: I can’t edit it in the APP I’m using. ☹

0:00:00
People actually don't know what they want. There's a famous quote I love. It's never fool yourself, but remember you're the easiest to fool. People just don't understand enough about what they want. So there's literally thousands of dentists that are listening to a message that says, I'm gonna do all this, I'm gonna do this, and they're on the wrong path. And at least if they are on the right path, this is a pressure test for them to say, what is it that I really want?

0:00:25
What does my career really mean to me? When you say, would I rather deal with dentists or patients, that's one layer to it. I've had people say to me all the time, I want what you have. Well, why? Because I want to make money when I'm not working. I'll say, well, come to my office. 50 people in a box. I love it.

0:00:41
It uniquely suits an extrovert. I'm an energy vampire. I want to suck everybody's energy up. But if you're an introvert and you're going to build a 13,000 square foot dental office with 12 doctors and 50 team, you're gonna be freaking miserable. So know thyself as the first tenant, you know, for our summit. And I mean, obviously you can take your team on an event that's gonna be a lot of fun and maybe a little bit of learning, but I see you can actually have it all.

0:01:09
You can have the three F's. You can actually learn, because learning is fun. It can be in a great event, a great venue like the Wynn Hotel. And it can be beneficial from an ROI standpoint. You don't have to pick and choose. And the ROI here, you guys have great content. ROI to me is relationships, opportunity, and the impact we have on others.

0:01:26
Peter, give us this. And money, though, too. And money. Yeah. Do you waste money by being too cheap to bring your team to CE? Raise your hand if you've done that. I have done that myself. It's Paul, Dr. Nacho Goodman talking with the Bulletproof guys and we're having them introduce themselves to our audience. I know some of you guys know them already.

0:01:55
But I'd like to start off with a spicy question. Have you been too cheap to bring your team to see if you've gone to a course and invested money and you go back to your office and no one knows what you're talking about. No one knows why you're excited. Peter you inspired me to kind of start with this question. So I'd love if you answer the question and then also just orient our audience as to who you are and what you do in this dentisting world. Good. All Well, I can answer some. Peter Bolden. I've been a dentist for 20 years now, Paul. 20 years. I'm an Atlanta-born and raised, and I will get right to your question.

0:02:33
I was that guy for so many years, right? I was a CE junkie, and I'm not sure in hindsight it moved the needle as much as it could have had I looped in some of my key implementers, my agendas, assistants, office managers, right? I would go to a CE that was expensive, be super hyped. And when I got home, I was met with a lot of friction because no one had the experience that I had. No one had the intel that I had. So I felt like, gosh, no one understands.

0:03:02
And it was just a lot of friction getting things implemented. So Craig and I, when we kind of set out on, you know, this will be now the sixth conference that we've had for Bulletproof, we're evolving more and more into encouraging people to bring the team because we've seen the impact that that has, Paul. And before I go to Craig, I'm trying to walk the walk in this moment, this morning, busy Monday morning, I paused both of my companies to then sit and watch Write Global. I've got to introduce you to them, one of our sponsor partners, because they're co-founders here explaining what Write Global does. And what I wanted my team to know is how exciting it is for Dennis to learn more about this.

0:03:42
And I wanted them to feel that energy. And you said, Peter, and we had to pregnant. That's basically, that was some of the missing piece too. You came back excited, just in a normal human emotion, and they kind of had no idea, and they probably had some FOMO about it. Would that be accurate? FOMO, and like, look, what you're trying to do is encourage alignment. I think once you finally figure that out as a business owner and practice owner and getting your team aligned for the goals and the mission that you're on, like that's your leverage as the owner.

0:04:08
It's not like, oh, I came home with tons of new IP for my brain to stay in my brain. Like it's trapped, it's trapped. And so until you unlock that and they incorporate the team, I think it's just, you know, is it helpful? Of course, but is it as impactful as it should or could have been? No. Right, and it's cause it's also, I don't think they haven't invented this yet, they might at some point, people don't live inside your head so when you hear this, maybe come home and say, why aren't you excited about New York City?

0:04:34
So Craig, we've had a chance to connect over the years here, I always admire what you do, you can answer the question of have you been too cheap to bring your team to CE and then also catch our audience up, orient them as to who you are and what you do. Sure, thanks Paul, good to be here. So Craig Spodek, third generation dentist. I've been practicing for 25 years. Holy smokes, that's crazy. Yes, I have been too cheap to enroll my entire team in the CE, but frankly speaking, when I was pressed up against the wall and was seeking out CE, I went more clinical.

0:05:07
And I thought the answers to everything was just to learn more better clinical dentistry. really didn't fit my business objective, which was to scale an operation, have multiple dentists, a team that was here to support the mission that I was trying to accomplish. So for me, I realized quickly that knowledge is not power, execution's power. And you can gobble up all the CE you want, but if it doesn't get implemented, it doesn't move the needle on the who gives a crap meter.

0:05:35
So our mission- I have a straight meter. I'm sorry? I like the name of that meter. I'm going to make one here. Yeah. Yeah. So at the end of the day, that's really what matters. And patients, although your CE, your clinical CE is a necessary portion of a well-balanced dental diet, it is not the only thing.

0:05:52
You need to understand how to lead, manage, and advance a team. And that does not exist at the level that I wish it did in the CE world. So my hope is that people come to our summit, learn from it, and it inspires more providers and more educational components to actually learn how to lead your team and invest in your team and get your practice to where you want it to be because that's the secret sauce. For many years of my practice, I walked around believing that I was the only person that cared and it almost ruined my business, almost ruined my life.

0:06:28
And it doesn't inspire people when you feel that way. So- I love that answer. And I mean, I'll interject, you know, I love the already give, who gives a crap to me and other things. And that, I think when you also bring your team, it's about their morale and your morale, not just their money. Dennis, you can be overly focused on the ROI, which I call not necessarily money, but relationships, opportunities and impact.

0:06:51
It also elevates your team into meeting people that they would never meet otherwise without bringing them there. And I'm just like incredibly proud that I get to do that inside my dental office and also in my dental nachos world. So there's so many things that don't show up on that proverbial stat sheet of basketball, right, that you get to do. So I will share before we move on to the summit. I've done this a lot, guys, and maybe since you're like dental celebrities, that was the first aha moment of our podcast and show. And I would love if aha would sponsor us sometime. I've done this many times, Peter and Craig, and not once has aha reached out to sponsor. But maybe you guys take a screenshot with these celebrities on.

0:07:26
This could be the moment, the aha moment. Don't be too cheap to bring your team to CE. So I appreciate that, guys, you get to speak to that. So while we're going to dig into a lot of things and reveal your story, I want to talk about the thing, and the thing is your summit, and you've been kind enough to ask me to participate as a speaker. And just tell us now some details. Like, you know, when is this summit? What happens during the summit?

0:07:50
And, you know, to use a classic question, what was your why in creating it? So either you guys could take that, or each of you could go for it, Pete. Yeah, so the summit, this summit is, like I think I mentioned, this is probably the sixth one. We make this joke that six years ago we wanted to have our first summit. We were like, look, we don't know if this is going to work or not. We were in a little small room in St. Regis, and that was our first one. This was probably 2017.

0:08:18
Craig and I had really kind of just met each other, I mean, a year before. And then we kind of launched off on this journey. And it was our contention, Paul, that summits were still very valuable and meetings because people seem to educate themselves. They need to get away from their environment. Like Zooms are great and all, but we're all sick and tired of them after COVID. And you need to transpose your position. You need to get out of your own environment. You really need to sit and be intentional with the time away from your practice, right? To think about the next levels of what you want to do.

0:08:51
And we just, and so Craig and I saw a lot of value in that, but we also saw a lot of value in going to really nice places. We could have done these in Holiday Inns, Double Trees, and third-grade hotels, but they're not transformative in their nature. So we said, what if we could have, you know, like-minded dentists in a room wanting to learn how to level up their practice in a really kind of vacation-level style practice, something that looks really spectacular. It's treating you and you feel like you're kind of at your deserve level.

0:09:19
I love that deserve level comment. I want to interject a couple things there. And that one, it's really important to get away from your practice, to work on your practice. I'll use this example. It'd be like trying to teach me how to be a better parent while my four year old was having a meltdown. And I'd probably be like, not now, I'm bribing her, right? This is my four year old who negotiates better than a DSO in our office, in my house, and there's two ways, two outcomes.

0:09:42
You either give her her way or everybody loses. So if I went to a parenting CA, it should be done the way- Domestic terrorism. Yes, and I also want to share, you brought up something. So I did this thing, I did this thing called Super Dentist Boost, which I want to tell you guys about. I did it in person, but I said, I don't want to miss out when there's the pandemic.

0:10:00
So I did it in 2021 in February online. Two full days, might've been three full days, lineups of speakers, but I was standing behind the screen and I'm not joking, when it was done on Sunday, I was kind of mildly depressed, right? Because I was like, there's nobody here to hang out with, there's nobody here to get a margarita with, there's nobody here to get nachos. My wife went with me, she was nice. And it was a very weird energy.

0:10:22
I'd put this entire thing on, I helped dentistry and I love Zoom for awareness but to take action you still have to go face-to-face and I really applaud you to just keep on doing the work of the Lord G.B. Black of trying to get dentists together in person. So Craig, why don't you add to that with the Summit Y. And just for details, I know my team has it and they're dropping there, this Summit is August 11th and 12th in Las Vegas. You're picking another iconic spot. Before we get to your MBG money back guarantee, Frank, tell us a little bit about your watch. I want to fix something before I correct something. So we went, that was going down the evolution pathway. Oh, gotcha. Okay. So now, so just like you mentioned, we have the wind now. It started off in the St. Regis in an equally great hotel, but it started off in a little tiny room. Now we actually have the ballroom of the St. Regis, of the wind. And we've got this incredible rate for people and we can kind of talk about the one later, but it's really, we wanted to make it affordable and possible and transformative and put you in a cool place that everyone wants to go.

0:11:22
And that was kind of the, the, the emphasis of when, all right, Craig, now you jump in. Yeah. I mean, um, for Peter and I, it started off as like, let's just see how it goes. And I remember the, after the first day we saw all the dentists hanging out afterwards and Peter and I like stood back and like reflected, like, look at what we created. Look at this community. And, um, we have several, you know, potentially hundreds of people that have gone to, you know, two or three summits. And it's just great to see people in the community, having them come now after six years and saying, Hey, implemented this from the first time.

0:11:53
And I mean, I had a guy, I sat next to him at one of our recent summits. He's like, look, I've implemented everything you've ever told me. You're one of my favorite people." I'm like, oh shit, you better not get to know me more because I'm going to disappoint you. I'm like, tell me a little bit about your practice. He's like, yeah, $26 million top line, $6 million EBITDA. I'm like, what did you just say? I'm like, so he's like, it's cool to see what's been created and the spirit of serving dentistry. Peter and I love dentistry. We feel like the bulletproof analogy comes from this idea that there are bullets raining in on dentistry, whether it's corporate pressure or different things.

0:12:29
We need to stand together, lock arms as brothers and sisters. And what we try to create, and I think we do a good job, is creating a sense of community so that the lasting effects of the summit go well beyond just what to achieve there. And it is important that it's in a transformational, inspiring space like the WIND or Terene in Los Angeles that we had, because if you really, you need to get inspired. If you're going to recreate your practice, you're going to recreate what you want, your game plan for your practice, your leadership's team.

0:12:58
This is a great environment, because it's inspiring and beautiful, and it's very important to us. I mean, this is kind of part of the bulletproof value proposition for us. We feel very strong. I love that. I want to get this next. You know, I do a few things well. You know, a lot of things not well.

0:13:12
Opportunities for improvement, my wife would say. A lot of opportunities for improvement. But I actually am very good at shooting a basketball. I can walk onto a court and hit NBA length threes. I was good in high school, I'd broken down the form, I'd gone to basketball camps. So I walk the shooting walk. If there's a senior NBA, I'm trying out for it. I don't think there is one, but I love it. Senator, you guys- Senior NBA.

0:13:33
Yeah. Between the two of you, you walk the walk with your practices. So, tell us a little bit about the revenue of your practice group, EBITDA, if you're comfortable. Spectacular EBITDA. It's real and spectacular. And why you think that that matters when you role model it. And it doesn't mean coaches are bad and don't play the game all the time. We're not saying that. But more just to inspire my audience to say this is why I should go see these guys.

0:14:02
They walk this three-point shooting walk every day Craig. Go ahead you'd get it Yeah, so I think it you know and listen maybe it's born out of a bias on my own head So I want to be careful how I say it But I've always you know I want to learn from people who have actually been there and done that and maybe that bias is not serving me as well But but it does Peter and I got into this because we're like, you know He hired this one guy and I heard this other lady and we were both lamenting how expensive it was and how it didn't do anything for us and the commonality between two of these coaches, but they had never actually built something that we wanted to create.

0:14:34
And I'm not saying that that is not possible. You brought the analogy of coach and I love the idea that Tiger Woods' golf coach may not play as good of golf as Tiger, but he's still a great coach. So you don't need to have done it. But Peter and I both feel fairly strongly that we have the chops, we have the ground game, we have a $40 million of top line revenue which we actually built ourselves. We had the breakdowns, the scars, the same common problems. And funny enough, before Peter and I formally met each other, we were following each other. This guy's got cool things he's doing at Lennon. Peter felt the same way.

0:15:05
It was like an online bromance that was hatching. And when we got together, it was our common- Paul Rudd can play you in the movie, Peter. You're Paul Rudd. I'll think of someone for you, Craig, along the way. But in the dental romance movie, I'll think of someone for you. Or someone could pop in who could play Justin Verlander. Justin Verlander is going to play me in my meat for TV movie. I'm going to get him for that one. I like this.

0:15:25
I don't even remember what I was saying. But anyway. You were saying that you guys were using – and this is where the power of online comes in. And I actually remember your first summit and seeing that in the very origins of Facebook, I think was Miami or maybe where's was I just remember, you know, you were saying you're aware of each other online, you think this person's doing something cool and it inspired. But it was our common, it was our common like frailties are common missteps like shit that happened to you too, dude. I'm like, oh, that happened. Not only that happened, but this happened.

0:15:53
So really, it was it was the spirit behind it was like, can we just pay this forward? Can we help other people not get their ass kicked like we had to get it kicked. So if we could just wave a magic wand, we'd want to transfer the pain that we went through to other people that are up and coming so that they don't have to have the scars that we did. That's I mean, in essence, that's what to be a bulletproof practice. I like we have some spice things here. I think the next kind of takeaway is smart people learn from the ass kickings of others. Right. You know, so you don't get your own ass. That's way different. That brings up a lot of emotions. So this is a great story, and I really want, I talk about awareness, attention, just find out momentum.

0:16:32
People are aware that this, we're putting attention and awareness on this. Deepen our understanding for my dental people, what happens at this summit? What's the content? Who are some of the speakers? Why, if they go there, are they gonna be worth the investment? And I'll let you guys tell me about your 10x money back guarantee.

0:16:53
I'll talk about some of the curriculum, and then Craig, you can jump in on the. So Paul, years ago, I remember hearing someone, I forget who was speaking, but he was talking about dentistry being this massive complexity. And if you get it right, it's like lightning striking and all this shit. And I'm sitting here thinking, that is not true. That is not true. Yes, running a dental practice is hard.

0:17:16
So I kind of spent a long time developing this, something called the Bulletproof Pathway, which Craig has now augmented by filling in. And it's really, I said, look, it's really not that complex. Not saying it's not hard, but it's not that complex. And so we reverse engineered kind of what we think everyone should be going through at all phases of the life cycle of a dentist, meaning the same as a startup, the same as a 20 year practice. It's going through the same methodologies, just a little bit different, a little bit different variations. And so we start kind of with with the human, the dentist, that's going to be the one who's implementing this. And Craig is really gifted in kind of pulling the vision out of people, right? Pulling their their authentic vision, not the copy and paste, not the copy and paste one that they heard someone say at a conference is like only three practices in this net.

0:18:04
It's getting to like authentic, authentic happiness. So we start kind of in the vision. We then talk about how you how you actually build. When I say build, I mean, maybe it's the infrastructure. Maybe it's building a team culture. Maybe it's maybe it's building the facilities, whatever you want to do. Then we kind of get into the marketing aspects and kind of talk about new and current marketing. And we talk about even enrolling people, right? And like phone call verbiage, things like this, the first visit, and how do you retain the patient?

0:18:30
How do you recapture the patient? How do you get referrals? And then how do you measure all the shit, all the stuff you've done before that, right? And then at the very bottom, we talk a lot about the master KPI, which Craig says is fulfillment. None of this matters if you're not happy, if you're not, if it's not working. I love this, I want to interject for a minute, Craig, a couple of things.

0:18:50
The next movie I'll bring up is Varsity Blues because maybe you don't want someone else's EBITDA life. I don't want that EBITDA life. What I want to share with this is I think a lot of workout places embody a lot of positivity and acceptance. I went to Barry's Boot Camp recently, Oren's Theory. What I think is pretty amazing about those places is you literally have people who are like Olympic-style athletes working out next to me, a new mom, and everyone's cheering each other on, and nobody makes anyone feel less than. And the things that you do is, it's not about who has the best or highest deed, but is it for you, and do you want to work on making it better?

0:19:27
I think it's cool. You probably championed people with a hundred grand a year. Go ahead. Let me interject one more story, and then, Craig, I want you to jump in. But like, Paul, we have also, throughout each year, we do a year-long mastermind course. So it's the people who come and they go to the summit, and then it changes their mind, and then they really want to dive deep. So we have 25 to 30 dentists that we coach all year long. And what we found is that what someone invariably, when someone starts and says, this is my vision, this is my goals, these are the things, by the time we break it down, it becomes something completely different.

0:19:58
And now it's an authentic vision, one that's essentially bulletproof. It was the copy and paste. I went three locations. Well, why? Well, blah, blah, blah. And they try to defend it. And then ultimately, by the end, by midway through the year of our curriculum, it's like, well, I really just want one.

0:20:13
I want more time and freedom. And I just want to really want to help people. Great, Kelsey. I think one of the things that happens that day to day people, I'm a huge Gary Vee fan, is people don't even know what their dreams feel like. And then they feel them and they're like, I don't enjoy this feeling of my journey. And he's the one that says, I got friends who do companies, do 5 million, they were happy. Someone told them to go to 15 million and now they're miserable.

0:20:31
And why they do that. And there's depression that sets in at that point because you're like, oh my gosh, is this it? And all you were doing was going with what someone, it's not. And that's what I was saying. Craig is really gifted at just really extracting the authentic one in that. And that's when, that's when life just takes off, in my opinion. Yeah. And I think we're fighting a current, there's a current in dentistry that's unfortunate. It's this, you should do this, leave the chair, be CEO, have five locations. Here's the four easy steps to $7 million or whatever the new thing is. And I think that for an impressionable young dentist out there, they see that and they just hijack that vision.

0:21:09
And like, that's what I want, what Peter's speaking to when we had our mastermind retreat in salt like three weeks ago, finally there's an emotional thing with that doctor. And he's like, you know guys, I just want a lake house. I'm like, great, how much is a lake house? I don't know, 700 grand. I want a lake house so I can give my kids the experience that I had. So you don't want the six practices and 27 associates? Okay, because you just want a lake house? Wonderful.

0:21:31
And that's what Peter and I love about dentistry is it can be exactly what you want it to be. And unfortunately, there's a very strong narrative to say it should be this and it should be exactly what you want. So at Bulletproof, we just focus on it's okay. It's not about an EBITDA game. You know, it's not at all. I've got some of my worst years and my lowest fulfilled years were years I made the most money at. And we talk about this all the time.

0:21:55
Life's ultimate bottom line is your happiness and we have to be very intentional about that. And unfortunately, the narrative is so strong. Most dentists, when you really start pulling back the questions and peeling back the onion, you realize they actually don't want what they're telling you they want. And we are helping them get to something that they don't even want. So it's a stripping down process. Figure out what you want. If you have a spiritual identity, maybe you can incorporate that into your practice game plan.

0:22:22
If you have a philanthropic background, or you with a basketball background, you could be that coach. Dentistry can be what you want it to be. And we- Can I jump, take on this? Please, please. Paul, do we have a second? Yeah, sure. So this is something that we've kind of developed here recently, which, you know, because Craig and I both feel very passionate about dentistry being probably the best profession you could ever ask for.

0:22:39
And the reason I say this is because it allows you the freedom of direction. And when I say direction, I mean, if you want more time, you can build your practice to create more time. If you want to optimize for scale or real estate, then you can optimize your practice for real estate and scaling up. If you want more, if you want to optimize for just profits and driving EBITDA and having something that's a little more careful, you can.

0:23:03
So it's all these things. If you want to optimize for leadership, if you want to optimize for philanthropy, you have a vehicle that gives you the freedom of the direction of you want. You are never trapped in dentistry. I love that, Peter. I mean, this is why I changed the job. And I go, I'll talk to a solo GP who makes $627,000 a year. And they say, my family says I never see them, but I can't take Fridays off.

0:23:24
I'll make less money. I go, would you rather make $510,000 a year and have Fridays off? They go, yes. I go, well, just get an associate. And it's just this race that there's no winning to the end. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater that you always see. It's going from 100 miles an hour to they want to make this solution to zero.

0:23:42
Yeah, screw it, let me sell the whole thing. That's the problem. I also want to share in this moment, my wife has better friends than me, because this morning we sat down for coffee and she goes, I got invited to the Bruce Springsteen concert by my friend. I go, I don't get invited to these things myself, right? So she's going to go see Springsteen, typical New Jersey guy, and I immediately thought, you know, what songs is he going to play if I was going?

0:24:00
Right? So let's talk a little about the summit. So we go to a lot of these summits, and I know they're filled with awesome content, but tell me a little bit about, and I'm personally curious, like what are some of the songs that get played there from the vision? Is there stuff, I'm just curious, overhead reduction born to run?

0:24:17
I don't know if I'm allowed to say that for Bruce Springsteen. Go ahead, this is Greg. What are some of the songs? It's definitely a little bit more hardcore hip hop, a lot of profanity. We get complaints about that. Who are some of the people that have presented, not for name dropping, more just a weird context of like, who's here talking?

0:24:36
Last year we had our moderator, which was Karissa Kuchis. She's the right-hand person to Tony Robbins. So if you go to like Unleash the Power of the Inter, Date with Destiny, she's the one that's up on the big stage. So literally as she exited the stage, Peter looks at me, he's like, dude, I wouldn't wanna be going up after her. Good luck, buddy. You wanna go to the bathroom and go? He was like just taunting me the whole time. It was so funny, I'm like, bro, are you freaking serious?

0:24:57
He's like, yeah, just being honest. Like, she just crushed it. Are you ready to go up there? I'm like, I guess. But we have, obviously, she was our moderator. We had, last year, we had Andy Miro, did a photography course from Aposthetic. Yogi Dennis, Jenny Perna, we had Uchi Uriyatu, who's like, seems to be everywhere at the same time. I don't, you know, but Ritter Rance.

0:25:19
Even from a financial aspect, we've had Peter Malouf who's speak, who runs the biggest, biggest, 210 billion under management. So I think what you guys do well there, and I really like this, is you bring people from outside of dentistry and also people inside dentistry, and create this narrative that people can bring back there. But now let's just get to what Dennis really like, and that's worrying about wasting money.

0:25:38
It's literally what keeps them up. So you're going to give them a 10X money back guarantee. We've always had that. So we've always had this since day one, 10X guarantee. If I spend $5,200 bringing my team or $700, who would say? Let me get my calculator. It goes slow. 5,200. 5,200. And you're saying we are so confident in the impact of this summit that if this doesn't happen, we will give you your money back.

0:26:02
100%, yeah, so it's a 10x guarantee. So over the year of the summit, if you don't collect 10x what you spent, we'd gladly give you your money back. Over the next, the information that you gain from the summit in the next 12 months, if you don't recoup that by 10 times of what you, you know, because we give you a big, there's a big manual that comes with it and there's a lot of worksheets and there's actions. So if you implement the things we're talking about, right? It's not just going to be fairy dust that's going to go on you if you don't go home and do the work. You go home and put in the work and implement the things that we've talked about. We have guaranteed that kind of return.

0:26:35
Sorry to cut you, but we've actually had people like Brandon Mack of Tampa sent his high genist in his front administrative team without him. Yeah. I was like, holy smokes, that was freaking crazy. The genesis of that though, Paul, was Craig and I again, kind of going back to what we were talking about before, you know, in the beginnings of us going by ourselves, was that it was neat, it was interesting, but so many times either it's been a pamphlet for, you know, for some company, let's just call it, right? There wasn't much to do. It was hearing a lot of just promotional stuff for a company, or it wasn't really things that like you could hit the ground with day one and make money on the investment that you took from time and physical capital that you'd spent on that trip.

0:27:20
And so we said if we're going to do this, let's A, give a guarantee and B, give people tangible stuff to take home to actually go and do it. Yeah, take action. I love that. And that just sort of removes the excuse syndrome of Dennis of saying, hey, if I don't do this, and Dennis loved games too and Dennis loved competitions and even created one that's totally awesome because it's the competition with themselves that prevents them from losing money if they don't do it and it makes them make money and then they get to use these skills over and over and over again indefinitely. I want to ask next for you guys, we'll spend about another ten minutes here, and I want to kind of ask a few questions that would help my audience.

0:28:04
You don't know what it's like to be a parent before you become a parent. People can't explain it to you. They can explain it to you rationally, but they cannot explain how it feels until you become a parent. So maybe I would share that. I didn't quite totally know how worried I'd be about my kids before I became a parent, right? I didn't quite know that.

0:28:21
Gary Vee talks to some people, when do I stop worrying about my business? He goes, easy, when do you stop worrying about your kids never so I didn't tell you what do you think dental school or the process doesn't really share with dentists before we become a practice owner what would you say I'll ask Peter Craig e-pills what would you say you wish they knew or I should watch out for this or be aware of this I would just say I think they prepare you adequately to be a clinician I think they prepare you the highly inadequately for the other 50% of your job, which is going to be leading and conflict resolution and how to grow and market and scale and read P&Ls and run an actual business that is predicated on decisions that you are going to make as a business owner.

0:29:04
So again, I know the old joke is we never got any business courses, but beyond that, we didn't get any public speaking, we didn't get any enrollment courses, we didn't get a whole lot of things. And so, you know, I wish that there was a lot more comprehensive and I wish there had been less, you know, less how to do a crown, you know, a class one crown prep and or class one class one filling and more on like, all right, now go and try to enroll this and let's see how you do to the to Mrs. John. I want to share for her. It goes, it's such great. It's outside the operatory activities.

0:29:40
So, what you bec- your dentistry becomes predictable. Sometimes it's predictably annoying when people don't know the meaning of the word open, and you're looking at a 70-year-old saying, open like an alligator, but I'm totally ready for that, right? I'm ready for that. But when your assistant calls out because their family's sick and it's a difficult situation, those things are unpredictable. And just to tell you guys, people want to know what's going- when you- if you guys come to Philadelphia to our event, just want to let you know, in a certain part of Philadelphia, people park in the middle of the street.

0:30:08
Totally normal. It's going to blow your mind. You drive through Philadelphia, they literally park their car down the center of the street. Okay, my team will say that's totally normal. So if you saw that, you're going to say, Paul told me that would happen. And I love what you said. Dental school should say, you're going to get texts at 7 a.m.

0:30:23
that make you want to cry inside about your team, and you're going to have to move forward anyway. And you don't know what they're going to be right now, but you're going to have to figure it out. Craig, how about you? What should we tell dentists who are about to be practice owners to give them more context, awareness? Maybe it's to not even be a practice owner sometimes. Maybe it's better to stay outside of practice ownership, not that that's a judgment. What are some of the things you would share with our audience? Well, I like what you and Peter said. I mean, Peter obviously hit the nail on the head that, you know, there's 50 plus percentage of what we do that if you don't learn, we'll have you literally go out of business. And then I think that there's another narrative that's very endemic in our schooling of that you're supposed to own a practice.

0:31:05
And when we weed through the P&Ls of friends and masterminders and beloved people, we oftentimes see that when you really extract all the numbers, you see a dentist that thinks they're doing really well, but they'd be better working for someone else at 26 to 35% of their collections than actually owning a practice. So it's like, do you love owning a practice like as much as skiing? Because they're actually making you money.

0:31:28
And also, if you just make the money part, one of the things that's happened, I sell practices, you know, when we were younger, you immediately made more money if you bought a practice, right? People make like 120 as an associate, $150,000, they buy a practice, they make $250,000. This is, let's say, back in the early 2000s. Now people come to me and say, Paul, I want to look at that practice in Montgomery County that does $600,000 a year. How much money will I make? I say $200,000.

0:31:52
They go, I make $350,000 at a DSO. I go, yeah, it's a problem. Like if you switch here. Now you could, of course, build it up and you could turn it into a million-dollar practice, I just think that awareness of the reality of what happens inside the business of dentistry should just be shared more with our community because it impacts their family, it impacts their friends. It impacts, I mean, you know, like some of these spouses are very successful that dentists are married to.

0:32:16
So if a spouse is earning seven figures running their own business, like you said, Craig, maybe being an associate and not having to worry about your practice outside hours is the right treat and plan for you. So I think those are both awesome. And there's something beautiful about being able to just practice. If you wanted to, let's say that like you love the business, you love dentistry and something, be able to being hanging the handpiece up and not thinking about it.

0:32:36
Because like you said to the Gary Vee comment, I don't think I've had a day off in 20 years. Mentally, mentally. Yeah. Right. I am constantly thinking about ways to innovate and market and next level and train and these things. And so you never mentally, you never get a day off. It would have been nice to you know the times in my life been like wow that was a great case. I'm going home and not thinking about that. And also Peter you're talking about mentally exercising the fun part of practice ownership but it's also your day off where the person at the office goes the sterilizer is making a funny noise. I'm like is it doing gaffigan jokes? Like nope it's running out of sterilizer energy and we have to buy a new one. And I go oh geez I was just having my day off.

0:33:15
So sometimes your practice taps you on the shoulder when you want to be tapped. I think actually, you know, go ahead, Craig, you can interject. I just wanted to say one thing, that the factors that you're all, that the both of you are talking about lead to a major problem in dentistry, which is we're leading in suicide, depression, drug abuse, divorce, like it's incumbent upon the dental schools to start paying attention to say okay We have to at least broach these subjects because we're not doing well Holistically as dentists because we're ill-trained for the positions that we find ourselves in we're being told we should all be CEOs and do all this crazy stuff which doesn't suit some of our unique personalities, and there's it's fairly binary There's either like go off and become like CEO of multi location DSO or you suck.

0:34:03
And that's not true. You know, my father was a dentist and he worked four days a week and made a great living and he had a great work-life integration. You know, even at 81, he's still in the office and there should be no shame in loving clinical dentistry and having one office and you're, you know, don't feel bad that you have one job because you have a very well-compensated job. Some people making three, four, five hundred, six hundred thousand dollars a year having this job. That's like, that's an amazing life. And that's why I ask these questions that put people down paths with implant dentistry. I look someone in the face and say, hey Peter, is it important for your teeth to stay in all the time or is it okay if you snap them in and out? And in that moment from the look on your face, I know exactly what your answer is, right? That's a good question.

0:34:48
That's a really good question. It's not, it's not a sales tactic. It's a no, I just want to know. I don't want to disappoint them. So if I was talking to a dentist who's three years out of school and they say, Paul, I want to own five practice, I go, well, how about you start with one job? But I'll say, OK, I've got a question for you. Do you want to deal with patients more or your fellow dentists more? And I'll pause. And if they don't say fellow dentist, they should not be a multi-practice owner, because the second you own more than one practice, the dentist is now what you're thinking about all the time. Not necessarily a crown prep on number 20. And I don't think people teach you that either, because I don't know, you know, dentist, the dental school hunger games doesn't make us the best of friends.

0:35:28
And then you go and go, oh, I'll just hire associates. You go, who, who likes you? Like, nobody likes me. I go, well, you're going to have to up that likability factor. Well, I want to add in our ending point, I always do this. If people just pop by right now, I talk about the three F's to C events that we do, fun, food and friends. Okay, fun, food and friends. And then the three L's, learn, laugh and be less annoyed together.

0:35:48
So with the Bulletproof Summit, I'll let you guys wrap up, just inspire my audience why they should get on a plane, go to Las Vegas, hang out with the three of us, learn, laugh and be less annoyed together. Craig? Isn't that enough right there? Yeah, I know. Get on a plane and go to Vegas with three of us. You three do, Charles. Yeah, yeah. Well, for the aforementioned reasons that you were talking about, people actually don't know what they want.

0:36:09
There's a famous quote I love. It's never fool yourself, but remember you're the easiest to fool. People just don't understand enough about what they want. So there's literally thousands of dentists that are listening to a message that says, I'm gonna do all this, I'm gonna do this, and they're on the wrong path. And at least if they are on the right path, this is a pressure test for them to say, what is it that I really want?

0:36:33
What does my career really mean to me? You know, when you say, would I rather deal with dentists or patients, that's one layer to it. You know, I've had people say to me all the time, I want what you have. Well, why? Because I wanna make money when I'm not working. I'll say, well, come to my office. 50 people in a box, I love it.

0:36:49
It uniquely suits an extrovert. I'm an energy vampire. I want to suck everybody's energy up. But if you're an introvert and you're going to build a 13,000 square foot dental office with 12 doctors and 50 team, you're going to be freaking miserable. So know thyself as the first tenant for our summit. And I mean, obviously, you can take your team on an event that's going to be a lot of fun and maybe a little bit of learning, but I see you can actually have it all. You can have the three Fs. You can actually learn, because learning is fun.

0:37:21
It can be in a great event, a great venue like the Wynn Hotel, and it can be beneficial from an ROI standpoint. You don't have to pick and choose. And the ROI here, like you guys, you guys have great, ROI to me is relationships, opportunity, and the impact we have on others. Peter, I give a pass. And money though too.

0:37:36
I mean, and money. Yeah. Yeah, I think the last thing I would say on this is there's, and we've seen it time and time again, is that there's such power in the proximity, getting in an approximate location with other teams who are striving, right? If you're bringing a team or other dentists or putting yourself in that kind of that petri dish of just everyone wanting to go next level.

0:37:57
And like you said, maybe locally, dentist, maybe locally the dental firing squad is a circle, I always say. But I think when you expand that, and like no different than Craig and I, right? Craig and my relationship beyond our friendship has been invaluable because I bounce things off of him. He wants the best for my practice, just like I want the best for him. And we have connected hundreds, if not thousands, of people to do the same thing.

0:38:22
So getting yourself in a position to have proximate relationships is just invaluable. I would say it's like a battery, right? You're starting to connect all these 12 volt batteries together before you know it. You have this kilowatt machine that you're leaving there just energized. And with a plan- You should do a visual of that with some of the people who've done it and have them all like connected.

0:38:40
Yeah, it's connected to batteries, right? For power to be like. And you're just leaving empowered and it's not gonna lose momentum because hopefully and luckily you probably brought some of the team members. So now you're going home with this ultimate leverage and excitement, and now you're crystal clear, you're aligned on the next 12 months of your life, and it feels inspiring.

0:39:00
One of the things I'll wrap up, well, people can go to dentalnachos.com and visit us. We'll connect you with the Bulletproof guys for their podcast. The best website, info at bulletproofpractice.com. You can text BP to 215-543-6454. We just said the website, that was the email. Email, what's the best one for the summit? Same one? The email's info at bulletproofdentalpractice.com, but the summit is bulletproofsummit.com.

0:39:24
Oh, bulletproofsummit.com, perfect. Thanks for sharing that, and people are driving listening to this. But when I brought a coach in in 2010, and my team wrote me some nice notes, they said, Paul, this really helped me in the dental office, but what you gave to us helped me in my personal life, it made me a better sister, it made me a better wife, and I really appreciate you putting this in front of me back in 2010 for sure. So, when you bring your team to these things and give them exposure to things that they might not think of, you get to transform a person while they work for you and after they work for you and other people, and I really applaud you guys for doing that.

0:39:58
So thanks so much for being on here. Thank you. I got so many good comments on my podcast. My last thing, how do people listen to your podcast? You mean you got so many comments when you were on? Comments on the one I was on with you guys. People were texting me all over the country. We published it on our, yeah. So people that were listening to ours, they heard you as a guest.

0:40:13
Yeah. It was, so really, I guess you can just download it. I mean, the easiest way to kind of check out all the things, Craig and I have a book, it's called The Bulletproof Practice. But there's a book on Amazon. It's a quick read, but it's definitely tactical information you could take away. So a lot of this information, all the things we do and the events and stuff are on just go to bulletproofdentalpractice.com on our website, and it'll show you kind of how to listen to the pod, how to engage with our online community.

0:40:45
We have basically a private network that you can just engage with for free, no different than it's like Facebook, but we wanted to get away from the distractions of Facebook. You know, not that, not that, uh, you know, I totally get it. Well, there's, it's not easy. Facebook, I have a lot of those and I'm going to share. I get it. The last thing I'm going to say, the Bulletproof Bromance starring Paul Rudd and Ryan Reynolds playing Craig's Bodock and Peter Baldwin. Thanks so much, guys.

0:41:11
Thank you, buddy.

Transcribed with Cockatoo