2x Your Orthodontic Practice Without Sacrificing Your Personal Life, Here's How

For me, the game that I'm playing is how can I do excellent patient care, have excellent clinical outcomes, work 3.5 days a week, work hard during those 3.5 days a week, and then turn it off. A lot of that has just been me going out of my way to learn from people like Ben or Chris Feldman or Jesse Karmann or some of these people that I've become friends with through the internet, right? Through groups like Orthopreneurs.

This, this, this is the Orthopreneur Show with Glen Krieger, talking about the things you never learned in school, like like marketing, management, and leadership. Hello there, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Orthopreneurs Podcast. Today, coming straight to us via satellite— I always like to say via satellite— uh, from the Midwest, please put your hands together and welcome Dr. Brian Rochford. Welcome, Brian.

Awesome. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

Yeah, you know, we were talking before we came on, and there are people who are on the show who I know really, really well. There are people who come on to the podcast who I've never met in any way, shape, or form. It could be a physician or a nutritionist or something like that. And then there are people who I feel like I know them because I know their whole life from following them online, but I've never actually spent real meaningful time with them. And so if anybody asks why I do the podcast, it's times like today, Brian, where we've had a chance to connect and I've gotten to know you and I've actually gotten to know the person behind the social media persona, if you will. And so this is truly, genuinely a joy for me to have you here today. So thank you for being here.

Absolutely. Same. I mean, obviously we've known each other-ish for a while, so it's been really fun just chatting with you as well.

So let's start here. If you want to give us a quick 90-second rundown, how did you end up where you are right now doing what you're doing right now?

So I'm from Indianapolis. I was born and raised in Indy, and when I was a kid, I went to an awesome orthodontist and When I decided to go to ortho, I called him up and I was like, hey man, uh, I'm going to Colorado for residency, but my wife and I are going to move back to Indy and I would love to join your practice. And crazy, but that's all it took. And he's like, yeah, uh, that sounds great. And I almost hate telling that story because it, it kind of was a little too easy and it shouldn't be that easy. But for me, I got, I got very lucky.

Yeah, for everybody out there who's listening who's a young orthodontist, just know it really is that easy. So go to your orthodontist who owns the town, basically, and just say, I want to join you, and they'll say okay. Okay. And it's gonna work out for all of you.

Just go do it. Exactly. Now, his son and my brother were friends, so we were a little bit more connected than just random people, but, um, it did work out really well. So went to Colorado for a couple years, loved it, moved back to Indy where family is, and joined my childhood practice in my hometown. So you can't ask for a better setup than that. It was always a 5-year transition. Um, it was his exit strategy. So we worked together for 5 years. It was amazing. Skip Grader, awesome, awesome guy, and I learned a ton. Um, and it was a very bread and butter practice at that point in time. You know, we did metal braces, we did paper charts, we did alginate impressions, which seems like—

it seems so ancient and yet crazy. You've been out of school 7 years now. And in your lifetime, in 7 years, we went from that being the norm—

norm—

to being like a pterodactyl.

I know. It's crazy. No shade to the offices still using other impressions. The idea of doing that, I just can't actually wrap my head around it at all. Like, just at all. I will. So I, at the time, was like, alright, you know, Skip's brought me on, I need to add something to this practice. So he wasn't doing any aligners. So I took all the courses, I took Maz and Jonathan's course, I took Heather Hopkins's course, I took all the courses to learn how to do aligners, really dove in the deep end. And between that and just adding more exams to our schedule, we were able to pretty much double the practice. And that's what we did for the last 5 years. And on the last couple years that Skip was kind of on his way out, I knew I needed a way to manage everything on my own, so I started doing LightForce, um, and now we're 100% digital office between Invisalign, LightForce. We use Motor City for our appliances, and I'm able to delegate a lot to my staff. So I've been able to not only manage the practice on my own but continue to grow, um, and it's been great.

Yeah, it's awesome. And we were talking a little bit about the people we know beforehand and who, you know, we have the same circle of people we all know. If you're active in the online social community, you know pretty much the same circle of people. And one of the people who we were both really giving a true shout out to personally was Chris Feldman. Right.

And we're going to get into that story in just a second about Chris.

But Chris has been a friend of mine. I met him when he was at JU and I came to visit as a resident. Well, he was a resident. I came to go visit the program. And We don't remember meeting, but I think I took him out to lunch because that day I visited, I took, I took the residents out to lunch because I was just hanging out and I was already a dentist. But here's a guy who understandably, where he practices and why he practices, doesn't really do a huge amount of aligners, right? He's very vocal about the fact, you know, aligners and digital technology, it's not his thing, right? But here you are running a similar style practice in terms of numbers and what have you. Yeah. And you're doing it fine. And I think there's a message here for everybody out there. Whether you want to do tons of technology or you want to do no technology. If you're doing alginate and paper charts and that's making you happy, I would contend you could be probably much more efficient. But if it's making you happy, run with it. And if you're doing self-ligating brackets or you're doing LightForce, uh, and you're doing dental monitoring and you're doing OrthoFi and you're doing Remote Response and you're doing everything you can add into your life and you're happy, then good for you too. It comes down to you following the vision that you've created for yourself.

I totally agree. I think especially as a younger doctor a couple years ago, I don't know that I knew what that vision was. Like, how could you, right? But I knew what I wanted my life to feel like. I knew that I wanted to be present with my patients and my staff and my family. And I knew doing all of that like analog wasn't going to work for me in the size practice that I had and wanted to continue having.

And the biggest change that you've experienced— I mean, I haven't been practicing a whole lot longer than you, ortho, right? I got out of school for dentistry in '92, right? You were in like third grade at the time. Uh, realistically speaking, you were really in first grade at the time.

It wasn't very good. It's fine, it's fine, it's all good.

My point is, I've only been doing ortho for a decade, right? So I was only a few years older than you. And the real big difference in the time that you and I have been out of school has been the staffing crisis, right?

Yeah.

The staffing crisis. So if you are doing Algenet, if you are doing paper charts, and I think that's a bit an extreme today is paper charts and Algenet. I think the people who are doing that are probably not listening to this podcast, but I think it is fair to say people have a PMS software they're using, but they are using Algenet, or maybe they aren't doing a lot of digital technology and maybe they don't. I mean, at AAO, I had people coming up to me at my remote response booth and they say, well, what do you do? I said, well, we do the the dental monitoring dashboard monitoring for your team. So if you have dental monitoring, your best team members don't need to be, um, focused in front of a computer. Your best team members need to be growing your practice. They need to be— because you're generally short-staffed and you don't need those great team members that you're going to put on your dashboard on your dashboard. And people would look at me at this year's AAO and say, you're mentioning dashboard, what are you talking about? And I said, well, you know, dental monitoring, and they go, I've never heard of dental monitoring. Like, they— it wasn't like they weren't using it. They'd never even heard of the product. And if anybody out there has never heard of dental monitoring and you have a question, reach out to me. I'm happy to. But my point is, when you're running in certain circles, you start hearing about technologies and things, and maybe you're on the leading edge of things. But going back to what we were talking about before, I really want to jump into this a little bit. We were talking about a post I did on, on Facebook, on Orthopreneurs. Where I did a, I did a, I did a podcast, 5 Minute Friday, and the 5 Minute Friday essentially was talking about a $3 million practice that if you want to have a $3 million practice, it's well within your reach. You should be able to get there without really killing yourself to get there. And then I followed it up because I started getting all these people online on the group who were saying $3 million practice is crazy, you know, and making all these assumptions, you know, it's going to have a high overhead and you don't need to work that hard, you know, to make a great living. And And I just wrote, no, it's really not that hard. And I wrote a post that basically said, if you want to have a $3 million practice, if you hear that and it resonates with you and that's what you want and you don't think it's possible, you're running with the wrong group of people. And I know that resonated with you because we're not going to give away numbers. We're not going to talk about— we like to be transparent, but there's a point at which publicly you just don't. I'm just for everybody out there, I'm not letting Brian tell you his numbers because that's not what this is about. But let's just say he has the kind of practice that easily fits into the molds we're talking about here. And, and, you know, my question for you, Brian, is number one, are you killing yourself? Is, is a practice that I'm talking about here just unsustainable? Your family life sucks. You're working 6 days a week. You're killing yourself. I know that's not the case. So you want to talk a little bit about, A, what do you think the secret is of getting there?

Right.

Because you're only at school 7 years and yeah, you did acquire a practice, but you grew it considerably. How did you get there? And number 2, are you really killing yourself to have that kind of practice?

It's so funny you say that. We talked— another mutual friend of ours, Ben Fishbein, has been a huge influence on me and mentor and friend and a lot of the success that we've had in my practice. Has been due to him and his team. And when we first met and became friends in 2017, which— love you, Ben— that was like the middle of him killing himself, right? Like he would, he would tell you how hard he was working and not that he's not working hard right now, but he refers to himself on the podcast that I did with him.

He did 30 years in 7. That's what he refers to himself, 30 years. And for the record, he is fully transparent and he was on the podcast. He got himself in 7 years, people, from 0 to $23 million.

Nuts.

Nuts. Okay, so that's not what we're talking about here. Yeah.

Right? That's not what we're talking about. Apples and oranges. But I met Ben at a meeting. We kind of hit it off and he became a friend. And when I had something come up in my office, I lost a TC and I had a person who I wanted to become TC, but she'd never been a TC. Without anything. He said, "Well, just come down to my office and we'll train her to be a TC." And, that was amazing. And, talk about the people you surround yourself with, he didn't even have Fish Spine Fundamentals yet at the time. That wasn't an option. And, we went down to Pensacola and that's exactly what happened. But, kind of getting back to what you're saying, as he learned more about my practice and what I was doing, a quote he said to me, I'll never forget it, it was that, "Oh, you have a lifestyle practice.". And I kind of thought, shouldn't we all have a lifestyle practice? Like, isn't that why we did this? You know? And so that has— I didn't know that's what I was doing, but that is what I was doing then, what I'm doing now.

You know, we are a lifestyle practice.

Yeah. Like, shouldn't we all have a lifestyle practice? You know, we all worked really, really hard to get here, right? I mean, Glenn, especially you. My God, you had a whole life before you decided to do ortho.

So I like to think I still have a life.

You do, you know, right? But like some of us can't turn that off and it's like we work so hard to get here and now we're still working too hard and I'm not gonna do that. So my office is open 3.5 days a week. We start at 10 on Mondays, we run at 1 on Thursdays. And I was telling you, Glenn, I'm on the computer I'm on right now is my wife's computer. Why am I on my wife's computer? I don't have a computer at home. And that's not some like flex. It just is what it is. I do zero work from home. None. From Thursday at 1 until Monday at 10, no work gets done. If you email me, I'm not getting back to you till Monday, you know, because I, I'm with my kids. I have a 2 and a 4-year-old at home. And, you know, they, they say work hard, play hard, or play harder. I say work hard, play harder with your family, because that's why I'm doing this, so that I can do the good things and the fun things with my family. That doesn't mean I want to play— don't want to play hard, um, at work, and doesn't mean that I'm not going to play the game at work, and I don't do you enjoy the competitive nature of owning a business? I do. And so for me, the game that I'm playing is how can I do excellent patient care, have excellent clinical outcomes, work 3.5 days a week, work hard during those 3.5 days a week, and then turn it off and walk away and be done with it either at night or on those weekends. And a lot of that has just been me going out of my way to learn from people like Ben, or Chris Feldman or Jesse Karman or some of these people that I've become friends with through the internet, right? Through groups like OrthoPreneurs who are doing the things that I wanna do and think, okay, how can I learn from them? How can I take things from their practice? You know, Ben Fishbein and I have completely different practices, but I've learned so much from him. Chris Feldman and I have completely different practices, right? But I continue to learn so much from him. And create this practice that I didn't know this is what I wanted to do. But that's where we're at.

It's so nice to hear you say that because all too often I say to people, you know, you don't have to kill yourself to get to that $3 million practice. You don't. I'm not— and for the record, we spoke about this beforehand and we want to make— I'm speaking for both of us right now. If you've got a million and a half dollar practice and that's what you want, Amazing, right? It— you have to get what you want. And I want to ask you the follow-up, which, which we haven't gotten to yet, is what do you see as the reason you can do that kind of number and turn off on Thursday at 1 and not even think about work? Yeah, because right now there's somebody out there who's doing— and no shame— there's somebody out there doing $1.5 million a year on 4 days a week. And they're staying late and they're working hard on the weekend and they're not enjoying the life the way they could. And their assumption is, which you and I both know to be untrue, I would never get to $2 million or $2.5 or $3 or $4 without sacrificing a significant portion of my life. And I have small kids and I could never do this. And we know all the excuses that people will make because the mindset is not open. What is the, the, the one biggest key would you say that allows you to do what you're doing?

Yeah, well, God, the one biggest key is gonna be—

I know, I know, teach me the whole Bible while you stand on one foot, will ya?

Exactly right.

It's not easy, I get it, but if you want to throw a couple of things in there, be my guest.

Well, I think just kind of before I even answer that, for those doctors that are in that situation, being a solo doctor in ortho practice can be very isolating and very lonely, and talking numbers And talking all that stuff can feel really awkward and feel weird. So what maybe was in your group, someone posted recently about like, how do I know what to ask for a per diem? This is like, you know, an associate. I'm like, just ask your friends. Like, just ask them, you know. We're all in this together, I like to think at least. And I'm not saying the guy next door to you, but like, we all went to residency. Seemingly you have ortho friends from all over the country, and if you don't, hop on one of these Facebook groups and make some friends, you know.

Oh, which is— which, let's be honest, um, let's just agree that you and I maybe are a little more outgoing than a lot of people that are out there. So us making friends is really simple. But I do think there's a lot of people out there in orthopreneurs who practice by themselves, who are living lives of— the old term, lives of quiet desperation. I wouldn't quite go that bad, but I think there are people who they see Brian, you know, pose, or Glenn or Kyle or Chris or Jim Stork or Jesse Carner, any number of people. I mean, I was on— I recorded a podcast with BMAC Lockhart the other day, right? Like, there's all these people that we just know, but they're sitting here watching us and go, God, I feel so alone. I don't know anybody. I'm afraid to. And I think the takeaway from this, which we're going to segue into in a second, is reach out. Reach out to people because one of the ways I really got to meet Brian, like conversationally, was that my little, little sib from ortho residency, Joseph Ryan, who practices on the border of Mexico and Texas, right? He's like Texaco down there. He had a question and he reached out to Brian, right? Hey, I saw something. I don't know exactly how it worked. And what did you say to him?

Come to Indianapolis. We'll show you what we do. And he came to Indianapolis and it was great.

And that's what I do it all the time. Somebody wants to come visit my practice, get on a plane and come visit. Now, somebody would say, well, I have young kids, I can't get on a plane, I don't have support, it's difficult for me to— I get that. And I don't want to disclose too much about this, Brian, but you belong to a group of orthodontists that hang out and travel and have fun and they're like-minded. I started OrthoPreneurs RD specifically for doctors who practice by themselves and want to be part of a group where they can be part of a mastermind. And before me, there was ProOrtho FE. And before me there was Ortho Exchange, which we both belong to. Shout out to David Butler right now. Just want to give a huge shout out because but for him, yeah, what we're doing today may not even exist. Totally. But for Ben Burris.

Yeah.

Holy crap, dude. This, this could be the only podcast episode ever that has a shout out to Ben Burris and Chris Feldman at the same time.

At the same time, which is like, what a time to be alive.

You know what happened? Anybody who knows, what was the name of that? Was that Ortho—

what, what was the name? Uh, 1.0 or something like that. Ortho 101.

101. Ortho 101. I said that somebody said I was wrong the other day, but it was Ortho 101. The whole reason why Ortho 101— which again, but for Ortho 101, yeah, Orthopreneurs doesn't exist. And so, um, the two of them basically shut down Ortho 101 because of a fight one day, which is epic. Epic fight. You were probably still a resident at the time.

I was in residency watching this all happen from my resident room, like eating popcorn. Like, what's happening?

Like that old Michael Jackson, you know, eating popcorn was literally Brian Rochford at that one. And so the takeaway from this message that we wanted— we agreed beforehand and we wanted to talk about this was we need to be paying things forward to people. One of the—

like, yeah.

One of the reasons I do the podcast, one of the reasons I have Orthopreneurs is just because I want to see people do better in life. And yeah, and that's why I have Summit. That's why I started RD. Yeah. You know, Summit, I make some money. RD, I make some money. But that's not the reason you do it. You do it because you love doing it and you love helping people.

Thank you.

Yeah. Yeah.

That sounds like an annoying thing to say, but yeah.

And, and what we're saying to everybody out there is you have friends because if you've sat at a barbecue in your neighborhood with your non-ortho friends or you've gone to a fantasy football draft, right, where you, a broad section of people you know, but they're not orthodontists usually. Nobody gets us like us. Yeah. No, nobody understands. You could have a friend who runs their own business. You could have a friend who works in corporate America. You could have someone who's an attorney, or a physician, they don't have a clue what we do on a day-to-day, right?

And that's how, like, you're probably saying, wait, my best friends are these orthodontists who live all over the country who I get to see maybe a couple times a year if I'm lucky. Thankfully for meetings like yours, you know. Um, and you're right, you know, going back to the, your posts and the practice that age, you know, part of it is just getting out of your own box. We create these boxes that we're in and we don't even know we put ourselves in this box, but we have. And a lot of people don't know what they don't know. So I have a friend who's in a practice. He bought a practice that was not doing what that post, you know, suggested that you could do. Yeah. And yet, and I'm asking some questions about how they're running things, and eventually it comes out that they were requiring, and he inherited this, a requirement of a down payment of $1,750. Was their, their only down payment option. And I was like, what? Today? Like, yeah, today this just happened, Glenn. And I was like, well, I wouldn't want to pay that. Like, who— our patients don't have $1,750. So you want to become a $3 million practice? Drop that. Eliminate barriers to entry so patients can say yes. Still do excellent work. You're still going to collect your money. You know, you're still going to be able to do the things you want to do, but make it easy for patients to say yes. And having a $1,750 down payment is a huge barrier. Now that probably is really extreme, but even $1,000, John, I mean, when I started, we were still requiring a 25% down payment. That's nuts.

That's nuts. I know, I know. The world, it's a different, and again, just a simple debate. How many times have you, we don't see this much anymore, but how many times about the time you came out of residency, maybe for the first 3 or 4 years after, Did you see the post on Orthopreneurs that said, hey, what's the down payment you require for Invisalign? Yeah, right. We saw that all day long because everybody was at that time, I don't think so much anymore, but everybody was like, if you're going to do Invisalign, you need to get 20% down, right? If you don't get 20% down. And then Jamie Reynolds, who many of us know, started OrthoFi. He would show the numbers and go, no, you don't need to worry about it.

It's— that's what— this is not an original idea. None of my ideas are original. Again, I have these friends, I learned from them, I take bits and pieces here and there. A great thing I learned from Ben Fishbein and his group, Amanda, and shout out to all of them, was let's make financing really easy for our patients. Let's charge a monthly payment, it's gonna be really easy for them, and let's charge a down payment, it's gonna be really easy for them, and let's not worry about how long it's gonna take us to collect that money. You know, with, uh, Invisalign and LightForce, you know, my average patient time is 15-18 months. That is not my average financing term, you know. And so people like, oh my God, but, but they're gonna stop paying. They're not gonna stop paying. The patients that are gonna stop paying are gonna stop paying the first 6 months. And we have a default rate that's still under 2%. So we can't go into this with emotion. That's another big thing. There's too much emotions in orthodontics, right? Like, no emotions out of here, right? Let's make our business decisions based on data. And let's run our businesses like a business. I used to say that we were running a multimillion dollar lemonade stand. We should not be running lemonade stands. We should be running companies because that's what we are, you know? So let's do that.

Yeah, absolutely. It, and, and yeah, you know, it's just, it's funny how this whole, this whole narrative, right, of like what we should, shouldn't be doing, how things should run, it's changed so radically, so fast. In terms of it's evolving so quickly. And like, and just a shout out to Ben Fishbein because you've said his name a few times. Yeah. Ben is one of these guys that I think anybody— and if you don't know Ben Fishbein, you should get to know Ben Fishbein and you should get to the Fishbein Fundamentals, which isn't really Ben, it's more his team.

The man powers his team. Yeah.

To run it. And happily he does it. But if you're down there, you should definitely go to Ben's bagel shop. But Ben is one of these guys, if you know him, who is so humble that if you sat next to him for dinner for 3 hours, you would never know what he accomplished. You would never know. He would just be this amazingly humble, giving, kind— he's so deferential when you talk to him. Hey, dude, you're looking great. No, no, man, you look— you look like he's just that guy. And he is kind of the model personally of what I hope I can be, right? Like, just accomplish more than anybody in the room has accomplished and nobody knows it. Yeah, right.

You know, you mentioned— I totally agree— you mentioned how am I able to turn it off at the end of the day. And something that I learned from being in this group is the power of delegation and giving your staff, your team members, having there be leadership positions, delegating those duties to that leadership, and then being able to walk away from it. I'm able to walk away because I have a practice director and we have different leadership positions within the office that are taking care of the stuff. That I'm not gonna take care of. So I'm able to walk away. Now, not everyone has that luxury day one, right? If you are doing a startup or you're buying a small practice that the systems are all over the place, like it takes time to work your way up there. But when you have the systems, you have the leadership, you put the people in the positions where they can really thrive, that allows me to turn it off at 1 o'clock on Thursday and not think about anything until 10 o'clock on Monday morning.

Yeah, it's absolutely true. And so for folks out there, here's a lesson. He just gave you some gold here. Number one, if you're micromanaging your practice, stop. That could very well be the main reason you're not getting the results you want. Yeah, because you can't be everywhere. You can't be at the front desk listening to the phone calls and telling them how to answer the phone, and then in your TC room telling them how they should be presenting care every day. But don't confuse that with what he said afterwards, which is Delegate it, but it needs to be controlled delegation. It means that if I'm going to turn this over to my TC and let him or her manage everything perfectly, we're going to go through training. We're going to make sure they know what they're doing all the time. Right? All the time.

Right? That's right. All the time.

There's a lot of people here. You say, don't, you know, just delegate. Right. And there are people out there who are just going to, okay, cool. So Susie, you know what you're doing. I got faith in you, girl.

Go get it. How we've modeled the practice. Is, and this is a very, you know, EOS-based thing, you know, where I have my implementers, I have my people that are going to actually do it, but I'm up here on all the things and I have my eye on all the things and we're tracking things and we're doing the secret shopper calls and we have systems and checklists for everything because, you know, they have to have that accountability. You can't, you're right, you can't just be like, all right, that's yours now, walk away, because it's never going to get done the way it needs to get done.

The takeaway from all of this, folks, is you can have the dream practice you want if it's a bigger practice with— by the way, the part we haven't talked about, which I just want to throw in real quickly, is whenever I talk about bigger practices, if I said, who wants a $3 million practice? There's going to be those inevitable people in the room who are going to raise their hand and go, well, and the narration, the narrative always changes from the $3 million practice. It all of a sudden becomes, well, you know, I'd rather have a smaller practice with low overhead than a bigger practice. And nobody said you're gonna have a high overhead. Yeah, right. Like, nobody said to you, you have to have a $3 million practice with a 70% overhead. Nobody said that.

Yeah.

And the more money you produce, your fixed expenses don't go up, so your overhead will naturally drop as you get bigger if you're smart about what you do, right?

You're absolutely right. A transition that we've been going through that I think is important to acknowledge if you are considering switching things— as an example, your financing. We switched our financing. We made it much more easy for patients to say yes, which has allowed my production to go way up, right? And in a time where nationally offices aren't maybe doing as well as they would like to, we're doing great. The caveat is because we're requiring less down payments and we're stretching out that financing, my short-term collections has gone down, right? So when I'm looking at my overhead as a percent of collections, it's fixed, right? It costs me a certain amount of money to to produce what I'm producing. It's gonna take some time for me to catch up because there's that gap now between what I'm producing and what I'm collecting. But I'm playing the long game here and I know it's gonna work out great. And you don't have to have 70% overhead. Like it's just, there's no need for that.

Yeah. And again, if your overhead is too high, again, there are probably reasons for that. And again, we've just covered so much ground and so many things and I know we're starting to get shorter on time and I wanna go through a couple of other things with you.

Yeah, please.

One of the things you and I have in common is the importance of fitness in our lives, right? And again, we talked about this beforehand. My recent health changes— I was never sick, thank God. I haven't faced a life-changing illness or anything like that. But about a year and a half ago, I went to Charlotte to see my really good friend who I reconnected with, who was a college buddy of mine, former Air Force doc, concierge medicine. And we did 2-day deep dive with him. Where really at age 55, I said, you know what, I'm gonna take pretty decent health and make myself exceptionally healthier, exceptionally healthier. And I've talked about everything from red light therapy to nutrition to NMN, resveratrol. I mean, every single supplement we can put out there. But the thing that's always been in my life, and I know it's really important to you, is fitness. But you have two young kids, two and four. And it would be really, really easy. And might I add, understandable if you were to say, you know what, I used to play college whatever, and I was always been in good shape. And my wife, she was a personal trainer and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And right now it's really hard. And so I've gained some weight and it's understandable, right? Even though it's not your life. Number one, how have you maintained your fitness level because I was like, dude, do you run? You're like, I do some running. I remember you used to run with your dogs, but you're always so fit. And I was like, how do you do that? How does it happen? And now I know you have a 2-year-old and a 4-year-old.

I'm like, yeah. First of all, thank you for asking me this. The idea that you're asking me about fitness is funny to me. You know, some of my best friends are Trevor Nichols or Chris Feldman, who just casually runs 12 miles every day, or Ben Fishvine, who is jacked. So, for me to be talking about this, you're asking the wrong guy. But, you're right. My wife is really into fitness. That's helpful. But, as life got busier, what I knew is that I wasn't going to let the fitness part of my life slip. And, for any of those people who have small kids, you know how hard it can be. Our life is kind of a mess. And, the idea for me of getting done with work, I got to go home and take care of those babies and see the kids. So, anything after work is just not gonna happen. We start seeing patients at 7:30. So, that only leaves before work for me to actually get a workout in, which means I wake up at 4:00 AM. So, I wake up at 4:00. People freak out when I tell them that. I'm not a morning person. I don't like that. That's not a fun thing for me, but if it's going to be important in my life, I have to make it a part of my everyday routine. And so, that's what I do. I don't wake up in the morning and decide, "Am I going to brush my teeth?" Of course I'm gonna brush my teeth. So I had to mentally switch it, right? 'Cause working out is an easy thing to be like, "Ah, I'm fine, I'm not gonna do that." You're not gonna say, "I'm not gonna brush my teeth today." So now working out has become like that. Now that doesn't mean I'm doing an hour and a half every day. I mean, love you Trevor Nichols and all of you people who do that. That's not me, right? But I'm gonna be intentionally active or do something fitness-wise every single day and just be intentional about it. It can be 20 minutes, you know? I see a trainer a couple of times a week. Sometimes I go to his gym, sometimes we do it on Zoom or FaceTime or whatever. But, I wake up before, I have my coffee, I have the only piece of quiet that I get the whole day. I'm working out by 5:00. I'm in the shower and at the office by 6:30. I have an hour from 6:30 to 7:30 to either do my digital stuff or catch up with my practice director or just, again, prep myself mentally to see the patients I'm gonna see, and then we're ready to go. And when the day's over, I'm tired, uh, but I get to go home and put on the next show for my kids. And the kids are in bed by 7, 7:30, and my wife and I get about an hour to just like be adults together, and then I'm in bed by 9 or 9:30, and we just kind of do the same thing all over again. But being really intentional with every chunk of my time, you have to be, because otherwise it's so easy for that just not to happen.

Yeah. You know, the interesting thing is a couple of days ago, and it'll drop at some point around the time of this podcast, I, I interviewed Tony Horton.

Okay.

Yeah. A guy who I just love to death. I, I feel like I already knew him because of P90X, P90X2, P90X3. Like, that was like, for me, that was like, that got me out of triathlons and into indoor working out. Mm-hmm. And I told him on the podcast, but for him, I don't know where my fitness would be today because here I was doing outdoor, you know, like Chris, you know, my, my, when my twins were born, I had to get home that day and I forget why I didn't have my car. I, but I was in pajama pants and so I put on my running shoes and ran 13 miles from the, the hospital to my home to go get something while my wife was resting and the kids were in the, and it was just part of running, right? It was like, yeah, if you can run 10 miles, you could run 20 miles.

Yeah.

If you can run 20 miles, you could run 100 miles. And Tony Horton got me out of that into indoor fitness and, and he said something during the interview. That it echoes what you just said, which was he wants— I asked him, how did you become into fitness? How did you get into fitness? And he said he was in high school and he was doing stuff he shouldn't have been doing. He was probably drinking and having too much fun. And he had a coach who basically said, I don't need you to set a personal record every day. I don't need you to come here and lift a million pounds of weights. I just need you to do something every day. Commit to doing something. And you said it best, it could be 20 minutes, it could be 5 minutes, people. Yeah. How many times have we all gotten up, maybe a problem popped into our head, there was a water main that broke or a heater wasn't working and you want to go fix it and you took your pre-workout and all of a sudden you look and you got 7 minutes before you're supposed to get in the shower. So what are you going to do with those 7 minutes, people? Are you going to take those 7 minutes and say, well, screw it, lost my— are you going to get on the Peloton or are you going to jump rope for 7 minutes? Or you're gonna go stretch for 7 minutes, or you're just gonna do something. But it's easy in those moments to say, well, today, but just do, and then you set it best. Maybe you just have 20 minutes, do something. 'Cause a body in motion stays in motion.

I have this rule where I'll say, if 4 o'clock in the morning alarm goes off and I'm like, oh God, I didn't sleep well last night. I don't wanna do it. I don't allow myself to do that. I have to get outta bed, I have to go downstairs and I have to have my coffee. And if after all those 3 things, I'm still like, I can't do it. Fine. That never happens. Because by the time you get to all that, you're like, all right, well, I'm up. Let's do it.

Yeah. And I'm a little different than you. I wake up a little later. I wake up at like 4:15-ish. And people right now are listening going, these guys are out of their minds.

Nuts. Nuts.

But just tell me, Brian, we haven't asked about this personally. Is waking up that early like the greatest thing in the world?

Well, I mean, you definitely feel like an elite human when you've gotten all that stuff done and you're like, I'm done. I'm done for the day.

It's great to watch. You're like, It's 7:30. I've already been up at 3:30.

I've lived a whole life already.

Yeah. Yeah. But for those of us who wake up that early, what time do you go to bed? Because people are curious, I'm sure.

I know. 9:30. So I probably don't get as many hours of sleep as I would love to.

But, you know, and there'll be haters will say sleep, whatever. Let them say what they say. I track all my sleep with my Whoop, and I try to get to bed 10-ish, 10:15, 10:30. And I just recently learned something really weird about myself. Do you wear one of these things?

I don't.

I learned something really strange that I didn't know, right? Like, you know, you only know what you know. You don't really know what everybody else is doing. I realized that the amount of restorative sleep I get per night in somewhere between 5 and 5.5 hours is the same as what most people get in 8 or 9 hours. And Brad, I'm going to say his last name wrong. Just like, you know, if I didn't know you, I'd call you Brian Rochford instead of Rochford. You know, Brad Shvatal. I don't know how he pronounces his name. Okay. How does— you know how Brad pronounces his last name? Brad, sorry, man. We love you so much. Some West Coast love coming your way. But, you know, he sent me a link on Orthobraces. Said it's called something sleep syndrome, like, and it's like 3 S's, I think, where there are people who don't need 8 hours of sleep a night. And I'm blessed that I— short sleep syndrome. I get 3 hours of restorative sleep every night. Even when I— like, last night I got 3 hours, but I only slept 4 hours and 28 minutes, which I didn't realize is different than most people. And I'm 56 years old. So people are like, no, you need to sleep more. You need to sleep more. I'm like, I got 60% of my sleep last night was deep and REM.. And that's typical for me, whereas most people, like, it's like 25%, 30%. So we all need what we need. But my point here is track what you got, people. And if you can get yourself up at 4:00 or 4:30 in the morning, you are going to feel like a Superman or Superwoman. Because my favorite time of the day, every day— I don't drink coffee. My favorite time of the day is— I just— does it look like I need it?

This is me all day long.

I wake up at 4:15, 4:30, usually without an alarm, and I'll take a nice hot cup of turmeric because it's such a good anti-inflammatory. And there's a company called Pique, P-I-Q-U-E, that comes in these packs you rip open and put in hot water and cold. And I'll sit in front of a red light therapy machine while I do work for 30, 40 minutes. So I'm getting my red light, I'm drinking my turmeric, and then and only then do I drink my pre-workout. And go work out. But the point everybody should be learning from this is that morning routine that Brian does, the morning routine that I do, if you dare try to take that away, my life would be nowhere near as fulfilling as it is today.

Would you agree with that?

Yeah.

I mean, yeah, 1000%.

I don't know if you want to expand on it or not.

Yeah. I mean, you just— again, we want to do hard things in life, right? And we can't be the best— for me, father, husband, practice owner, orthodontist, if your body isn't at its best. And for me, you know, that includes working out, that includes eating well, that includes just taking care of yourself so you can be the best of those other things you want to be good at.

Amen. And before I let you go, the last thing I want to bring up here, because I have to talk about it, is anybody who's followed, followed you on social media has seen what I want to refer to as a freaking spectacular example of an older home that is just, like, amazing. Your remodel of your home and what you've done with it. And for everybody out there who may not know what I'm talking about, I'm not talking about the money put into it. I'm not talking— I'm just talking about the bones of that home, like, speak to me. It's so gorgeous.

Thank you.

When was your home originally built? What year is that from originally?

Yeah, so it was built in 1925. Uh, we live in a historic neighborhood in Indianapolis called Meridian Kessler, and my wife and I found the house, um, during COVID We got a 3-month-old, we were still, you know, locked in our house not doing anything. This house became available. Um, as with all things like this happen, it was probably a little earlier than we should have been buying a house like this and probably had a little more work than we really needed. And we didn't really have much experience doing what we have a lot of experience doing now, but, um, We bought the house and we did a 2.5-year renovation to really restore the home. I mean, it's a gorgeous historic home, um, and I am really annoying online, so I shared a lot of that and it was really fun for us. My wife—

I got some great ideas from what you were doing.

Well, I got to give my wife credit, she crushed it. Um, it was really fun for us. Uh, another one of our mutual friends, uh, Kyle Fagulay, he also just did an amazing house project, so that That's been really fun thing for my ortho friends to watch the house stuff they're doing as well, because we're psychopaths in a lot of ways. Our houses are not— are still in that genre. And I feel bad for all the contractors that have to work with orthodontists, because I would walk into the house and I would look, you know, our lives are in millimeters, right? And I think, that's not where it's supposed to be. And they'd be, oh yeah, it is. Yeah, it is. I'm like, get the laser out right now. And we get the laser out and it'd be off 2 2 inches, fix it like you're fixing it right now.

Not like an eighth of an inch. An eighth of an inch would annoy us. It's off by 2 inches.

Yeah, like, no, no, and I can see it from this far away. I get it. You can't, can't lie to me. Like, I know what's going on. So, um, I don't envy the contractors have to work for Orthodontics because we're nuts. Uh, but thank you, it was really fun to do the house. We're still working on it, as all things in a 100-year-old house, nothing's ever actually done.. But it's been really good.

Yeah. Nothing in a 100-year-old house matches modern code. So distances, beams, it, yeah. But all the things, you know, I used to love, I used to love doing remodeling myself. Like it was one of, one of my passions and I love the bones of old houses. Did your house have the window weights in it?

All the things. We have leaded glass windows, which we still have all the original windows. You, you, we were talking about that earlier off air. Yeah. Talk about inefficient. The, the wind just goes right through it, but we don't care. We're just dealing with it.

So you can't modernize that, huh? You can't modernize the leaded windows.

I mean, you could. I mean, here's what we're looking at, but like, they're beautiful. So we're just gonna, we deal with it. It's fine.

And so what I'll ask here, just one parting question for you related to it, for those people out there who are considering doing a remodel, you know, which there are many, right? And like I said, nobody knows us like us. So, you know, my partner Doug Shaw, in his house, legitimately years to find somebody who could stain cabinets the way they need to be stained. Right. Because he's looking at it and going, this is not right.

Not right.

Yeah, it's not right. Like, those are the words that orthodontists say. This is not right. Like, in my office, I wasn't there one day and we had all these beautiful pictures of people smiling that are like 2.5 foot by 3.5 foot. Like 30 of them throughout the whole office. And they installed it on a day I wasn't there. And my team, in our morning meeting, there's one woman who's always standing at the end, and I look past her, and it's down a long hallway. And at the end of the hallway, there's two photos. And every morning, it drives me crazy that the one on the right needs, like, 2 degrees mesial root tip. It's literally off by, like, 2 degrees. And every time I stand there in the morning meeting, I look at her. Nobody will ever see it because it's in a hallway that nobody ever goes in, but it's in this one sight line. And I'm like, I just turned to my assistant yesterday. I go, do you see that too? She's like, yeah, it top needs to come this way a little bit. I'm like, yeah, like 2 degrees.

Yeah.

What advice would you give to somebody who's looking to do a major remodel in their home?

Yeah.

What, what, what lesson or lessons have you learned that you wanna share with them?

Oh my God. You know, we are experts in moving teeth. We are not experts in doing home renovations. However, we're pretty damn smart. And so if something feels off or you're not getting the answer that you want, don't just accept it because it can probably get done or look the way you need to get done. Like Doug and his cabinets, right? And we had a lot of that. We were pretty young when we did a project this scale and we had a lot of these guys come in and kind of want to pinch us on the cheeks like, oh, this is how it needs to be done. And we were like, no. And so we learned some of the, the hard way when things didn't get done the right way. And then we finally had to redo it and do it the right way. And we said, had we just stuck out for ourselves, it would, it would have been done the right way. When you're doing a major project, you have to micromanage everything and that sucks. And you can love your contractor and you can love your designer and you can love everybody, but it's going to take a lot of work on your part. I mean, I had to be here in this house every single day for 2 and a half years on my way home from work. Thankfully, our, the house we were living in was on the way. And stop in and almost every day I would find something that was wrong. So it is what it is. But you can't delegate that either, really.

Yeah, there's no quick way. Just like ortho, there's one way to do it right and you got to do it right. And so I just want to say you're a guy who's doing it right, Brian, and I appreciate— I appreciate everything you do. And this has been such a joy getting to know you and having fun with you. And hopefully this is the beginning of something where we get to spend more time with each other and Yeah, just thanks so much for doing this and for all you're doing for the profession and helping people.

You're just amazing. Again, thank you for having me. This is really fun. I really enjoyed it.

Well, thank you. Have a wonderful day, okay?

You too.