206: CEO Series: How J.W. Oliver Built a Global Dental Support Team

We see ourselves as entrepreneurs, but, you know, we're our own worst enemy, right? We cause ourselves to hit our own ceilings because we don't want to grow, we don't want to delegate, we don't want to empower others. And I think that's something that I've become real passionate about in the last few years.

Hi, I'm Emmett Scott, and just like you, I've had my ups and downs in the dental industry, but times are changing. The DEO has built a map of how to succeed in one of the most challenging industries to navigate. On this show, we talk to dental industry leaders, solve problems, and get you the answers you need to these challenging times and thrive. Welcome to DEO's Growth Secrets podcast for dental organizations. Now let's get started.

All right. Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of DEO's Growth Secrets podcast. I'm Jake Boole, the CEO of the DEO. And with me, I have, gosh, one of the most impactful leaders really inside of dental right now, J.W. oliver, the managing partner of Support DDS. And we are going to dig into today how to delegate, how to manage time, how to juggle a lot of priorities. Jw. Well, as a leader, as a CEO. And so maybe we can start out with you giving folks a little bit about yourself and maybe even a little bit about your CEO journey.

Yeah. Well, you're asking me to jump into some big shoes saying I'm an impactful leader. That always catches me a little off guard. But thank you for that, Jake. Yeah, you know, it's hard, and I think being in a leadership role is very difficult. We see ourselves as entrepreneurs, but, you know, we're our own worst enemy. Right? We cause ourselves to hit our own ceilings because we don't want to grow, we don't want to delegate, we don't want to empower others. And I think that's something that I've become real passionate about in the last few years because my journey was I had run a smaller, a very boutique dental equipment company is how I got into the business. And then as. As ZimWorks and support DDS began to scale, I, you know, begin to realize myself, Jake, that you can't. I can't do all this. I can't control things like I used to. To. To be able to control them. So for me, I use a little acronym. I've stolen, politely borrowed some of it, I guess is the right way to say it. But I look at how do you eliminate things you shouldn't be doing? How can you Automate areas that can use automation technology and then how can you empower other people or if you want to use, delegate to other people so that you can really concentrate on those areas that are most important. And I think that's really critical. I was just listening to a podcast about leadership, Craig Groeschel's podcast, and it says you should be evaluating literally at least once a month on things that you no longer should be doing. And I think that's true. You know, it's looking at what we do because we again become the ceiling for that as well.

Yeah, well, let's give folks a little context as to what level kind of you're playing the game at as far as how many people you know are relying on you to lead them.

Right.

So maybe give some folks the different cities so those of you of you that follow along, support DDS folks in the dental industry can hire them to, and their, and their team to work really almost any job inside of the office. And so you have a team JW outside of the US and essentially providing support for those dental offices. So yeah, what give us a rundown of kind of where you guys operate and the size of the operation.

Yeah, we started in 2018 really as a, as a ministry opportunity. My partner and I said hey, he's from Zimbabwe, got a business partner there. And he was like well, let's put people to work. I thought it was going to be a sideline business.

Jake.

No, no idea that you know, it would be a full time job soon. So we're in Harare, Zimbabwe and reason for Africa, the reason is important is not only are they very well educated, about 96% have a college degree, university education, but the level of speaking proficiency of you know, I like to make a little of the English language. They got a little Queen's English and so that became very popular. So Harare, Zimbabwe, we started in 2017 in Zambia, we opened up just in June of this year. And then Costa Rica, we have an office there for our Spanish speaking teams. But you know we've, we're right at 1200. So we've got about 1200 people internally. We also have about a hundred and I think it's 60 that's on our internal staff that lead that team. And, and yeah it's so it's been a, being a, an entrepreneur myself for 30 plus years. This was totally different because it scaled so quickly and a lot of it was some, some on the job training for me. So that's, that's, that's a bit, a lot of pressure.

So you've got three different countries, you're operating out of 1200 team members and then you're serving the United States. So you're traveling. It's got to be some web of matrix of how you're traveling there. So you know, I'd love to dive into. Give me an idea of your schedule like the next like three, four weeks. Just so folks get an idea kind of how much you're juggling here.

Yeah, this is a busy season. I'm actually just got back from, from an event in Florida, a dental, Dental forum event. Got back on Wednesday. The next morning we drove to Austin for a ministry event my wife and I did of ministry here. We're going back tomorrow which is Saturday. Sunday I fly to Atlanta. We've got a three day event there. Come back on Tuesday, Wednesday night. So I get back Tuesday afternoon or late afternoon. Wednesday night I fly to Scotland to meet with a client in, in Edinburgh, the UK and be there for a week actually come back through New York and I've got a meeting at a meeting with some folks from Zimbabwe in New York and then I'll, I'll be home for literally a day. Go back to Seattle to us an accounting group that I'm speaking with, an accounting forum in Seattle. Come back. I actually will get a, get a little bit of a break while I take that back. Got to go to the DSO event Atlanta for one day and then I got a four or five day and then I got, then I'm off to Zimbabwe for, for two weeks and we'll do a Zimbabwe and catch Zambia at the same time. So. So yeah, it's, it's, it's a lot of moving pieces and parts as well.

Yeah. So it's 1200 people and that's kind of the, the schedule that you can go through sometimes. Very curious how you decide what to work on and how you decide what to say no to. Right. There's gotta be dozens or hundreds of things or places you could be or things you could be working on. Do you have any like mental framework or how do you decide that?

Yeah, I would back up a little bit and say on this journey, I recently heard it coined and I think it's right to go up, you have to let go. And what I was doing even a year ago for sure, what I was doing three and four and five years ago I was involved in the finances and the construction and the CapEx spending and human resources and training. But, but now I really have to be focused in on the vision and where is the direction for what we're going? And obviously being somewhat the face of the organization and speaking opportunities as well. But I actually really, really depend on my executive assistants that help me in different areas. Because Jake, you know this too. There's so much that comes up every day that I look up and say, well, man, why am I even doing this today, right? Why am I focused on this? I really, number one, I don't have time to do it. But maybe more importantly, I'm not the best person to do this. There's somebody else that I can empower to do this and they'll help do it better. And I think that's where you start to hit the ceiling. So what I try to do is look at and I'm a little bit spoiled. I've actually got four people that I leverage in different areas.

So you have four executive assistance or four kind of.

Yeah, okay, four. Yeah, for four people. And they're in different roles. One of them has been with me about five years, is really my personal executive assistant. Helps me with travel schedules, helps me with returning phone calls, maybe a little small projects that need to be done, even personal things that can take a load. I've got a strategic project manager and she handles things that may take a week or two weeks that, that need to have a lot of details, maybe even a small event that we're doing as well. I've got one that does brand management. So social media posts, little small videos help my keep my personal website up. Anything that, that is branding. When I go to Zambia as an example, or Zimbabwe, he'll set up events that I'll have going on there. So speaking to different groups or internal roles that we'll do. And then he'll help me put together the content and I'll tweak it with him. And then I've got a young lady that helps me out with. When I'm speaking with a client and I want to be, you know, gets a big, you know, say it's a big deal client. I'll be on that first phone call, right? And I'll make sure we talk and help them. And then I'll hand it off to Nicole who can help me with it. So, and then I meet with each one of those once a week, anywhere between 30 minutes and an hour, and really catch up on the details of what they're working on. So it's not easy. You, you, you also have to train those people, which sometimes that's usually the biggest part. Jake, Most people don't want to do that. They, they're like, ah, it's gonna take too long. I'll just do it myself. That's really not a good solution.

Yeah, no, I love, I love the detail there. And see if four people that kind of report directly to you that are, they're really there to support you directly. They're not really in the org chart as like an operations manager or like managing a team or anything like that. They're. They're really there to kind of expand your influence. Um, and so, I mean, how often are you interfacing with them even? That's a lot because then you have your whole company to manage too. Right? So you have your four people. I mean, are you talking to them every day? Are they, are you getting. Is your phone getting just blown up all the time? Like, how is the communication go?

Oh, they're, they're really pretty good. They come in usually a couple hours before I get up or about the time I do. And so they'll have some things that may be asking for the day, but really they've gotten really good. Unless it's urgent, they can keep those questions to our weekly meeting. And so that's very helpful. And I'll tell them, look, you don't need to email or message me if it's something we can talk about on Monday or Tuesday, whichever day the meetings are. And so I think it's important that you do that. Now you mentioned that as well. Yes. We have a large organization, but I've really limited myself to, to working with our CEO. We've got an amazing chief Operating officer and, and I meet with him. Matter of fact, I met with him this morning. We meet every Friday, usually between an hour, an hour and a half. And we just kind of discuss really not a lot of issues, but a lot of direction and vision to where we are going. And then I do. We operate on the EOS system, so I do, I do go to that meeting once a week as well. So regular cadence meetings is down to. And this is key. I'm telling you, if you want to be an effective leader, get rid of meetings. You just, you can't be in meetings all day unless it has to do with something that's going to develop or enhance or grow your business. And I've only got really about six, seven weekly meetings that I'm required to attend on. And Jake, that's another thing. I want to point that out. If you want to see how impactful you are as a leader, look and see what happens when you're not at A meeting. Because if those meetings will go on without you and good things will come out of them and progress, then you're a good leader. If you have to be at every single meeting, you're probably not a very effective leader.

So I love that. So you're, you're down about six or seven meetings a week, and you're really interfacing with your CEO and they're interfacing with the whole rest of the company. And then it sounds like you've is a kind of visionary, right? You have really concentrated your time on growing the business. So all the stuff that you mentioned, all the places you're traveling, is that how you think about it? You know, when something comes across your desk, is this something that's going to grow the business? Is this like, like very high leverage for our future and you say yes to it, and then if it's, if it doesn't hit that threshold, you say no. Or how do you decide, you know, what actually gets on your calendar?

Yeah, that's a, that's a really, really good point. And it is one of those mental tick boxes that I do kind of in a flowchart, you know, is, is it, is it going to. I think it does two things. Is it going to advance me? And I'm getting away from personal life, right? Not, not my wife, my kids, all that. That's a separate deal. But in business, if, if it's. Somebody invites me to be at something. I literally just got an email yesterday, somebody who asked me to, to be at an event at the DSO leadership event and asked me would I be on this panel? And I have to ask myself, is it, is it worth my time? Does it help build the business? Or can somebody else do that just as well as I could? We have some people in the organization, but that, that's a, that's a really, really good point. And whether it's, it's travel or whether it's a meeting, does it take me closer to my vision? You know, if you have a vision and you've got a goal and you have some direction, you can look at everything you do and decide if that's going to get you closer. And if it doesn't, you really got to say no. And some, some people just don't like to say no. And look, I like to be places. I love to talk and be places and. But you just can't do it all. It's not possible. So you're right. If all this travel, every single thing that I mentioned as far as all my travel Coming up. It's something that is advancing the business as well.

Yeah, yeah. So, okay. And so you grew really fast and you had run kind of a small business before, but the game you're in now is a completely different game.

Right.

Like hyperscale, fast scale. What. Do you have any coaches or like organization? Like, where do you get your information? Where. How do you keep your mind right? I know where the religion's a big part of your. Maybe that's, that's your coaching. Where are you finding resources and where are you getting like downloading the information you need to understand how to run the next phase of your business?

Yeah, I've got a. I would highly recommend if you don't have a, if you don't have a business or a life coach, that. First of all, that's just insanity, honestly, that you have a community.

You have.

I have a. Yeah, I have a coach. He actually lives in Cape Town, South Africa. I was introduced to him by my business partner back in 2017. I meet with him now once a month for an hour to an hour and a half. And Jake, we actually have 20 or 22 of our team members that meet with him on a once a month basis as well. I wanted to really have our teams, our leadership also be able to get the benefit of coaching. So coaching is to me is critical. He's, for me, he's a Christian based coach. So we are able to intertwine the faith as well as the business life. So that gets your personal and, and I think that's important to find your coaches, not just hammering about business, but will help you get some of that, you know, we love to call it work life balance. How do you get that work life balance in there? A little bit as well, I would think. The second thing is I don't watch a lot of television. I just, I'm not saying people had to stop watching tv, but to me it's just a waste of time. You know, I could do something better. I could go to the gym or I could. I just love a great podcast or read. I love to read. I can read a book. I do try to read daily if I can for sure. Weekly and yeah, I think if you can find that. And then lastly would be good podcast. Podcasts are great if you're at the gym, if you're traveling. I mentioned Craig Groeschel podcast. Hands down, I think he has the best leadership podcast in the world. He's just amazing. So if you haven't heard of him, he's definitely worth looking up as well, okay.

Any other podcasts you like while we're at it? I mean, sounds like that.

That's probably the one I would just pop out. Podcast. Well, that's not. Well, hello. That's a. That's a given. Yeah, that's right. That's right.

So just. Just to pronounce that as Craig Rochelle, or how do you pronounce that?

It's Craig. It's C, R, A, I, G, and then G, R, O, E, S, C, H, E, L, R, O, E, S, C, H, N. He's. I'm telling you, it's the best leadership podcast I've ever come across. Or tidbits. 20, 30 minutes and literally, I get these ideas all the time. Listen to one just early this morning. It's. It's really, really good.

Nice. You know, I actually have seen that before where an entrepreneur or leader will meet with a coach, a business coach, life coach. It really does all kind of merge together at some point. Right. And. And then was so successful that, you know, a great strategy is actually to have your team meet with that same person. There's so many synergies that come with that. Right. I mean, that. That coach now has a flavor. I mean, there's obviously a lot that they're talking with the. With your team. That's probably. They wouldn't. You know, it's. They would. They would keep the privacy confidential.

Yeah. Evidential.

But like, they have a flavor for what's going on in your business, and that's going to help them coach you a lot better.

Yeah, no, it's been a big help. I can tell you many times names Jeremy, and many times Jeremy will say, hey, you, You. You know, you might want to visit with so and so. You know, I think they've got a lot of potential. And really, you know, they're. I think. I think you. And he won't say anything negative. You should spend some. And I know immediately, like, all right, I need to set a meeting with that person and take them to lunch or something.

Right.

And. And you're right. It's very helpful when she could.

Okay, so last. Last kind of topic or question is how do you think about the team around you and the quality of the team around you? Like, how do you know that? Well, I mean, I have a few questions like, how do you know that you have the right person in the seat? And then how do you just kind of trust all these different parts of the business? For example, you have massive construction going on. Right. You can't be in that. A mistake. There Some, some people might feel like would be a big deal, right? Or be costly or whatever. There's, there's dozens of those examples. How do you, how do you know you have the right person and how do you kind of, you know, deal with the emotions of not being involved with a lot of that stuff?

I actually, I heard this on Craig's podcast is talk about making sure to, not to get too close to people into the business because sometimes you have to make a purely a business decision, right? Is it the right person? And look, you probably had this happen as well. It happened to us all. We've had the right person. They were just doing the wrong job, right? We, we thought, hey, man, Jake is a great guy. You know what, I'm going to make him my cfo. And Jake's going, I don't like accounting, but okay. And then he fails. And then we say, man, Jake's an idiot. What's wrong with him? He's like, I didn't want to be the accountant. So I think, you know, that old right person, wrong seed, et cetera. I think that really works. But, but also it. This list literally just happened this morning. I was on McCall with COO and he, he was, we were talking about one of our team members who we'd had some problems with. And, and he wasn't. He's very important role in our company. And, and Rick called me this morning. We were talking. He said, hey, I want to tell you what happened with so. And so I was like, what? He goes, oh, man, he's, he's, he's going through a divorce. He's had some financial issues. He's having some other family problems, some problems with his kids.

He's.

And actually, he's actually having some now maybe some alcohol abuse problems. So we realized it wasn't the person, it was some circumstances around, and so we quickly jumped in to be able to help. So get to know your team and find out. We were both like, I wish you caught this earlier. You know, we should have, we should have been more forthright and upfront with him about how we could help him. So I think it's important to, yes, you have to make changes. And I think the early mistakes I made as a leader was not quickly making changes. Say, hey, Jake, I love you, you're a great guy, but you know what? You can't work here. We're going to help you find another job. We're going to give you 30 days to do it. That's okay, right? There's nothing wrong with that. It's probably beneficial to both parties at that point. So yeah, just, just making sure you have the right people and don't continue with the wrong person too long, but also make sure you're leading them. Well, Jake Wigan, that happened all the time. Oh, so and so is just not working out for us. It's like, well, how much time have you trained them? How much time have you cast the vision for what your expectations do? They have some KPIs and reporting and some measurements and many times you'll find that they don't.

Yeah. Dude, last question. Do you, do you feel pressure? Like, do you all, you know, all these people you got, all these things happen. I mean you got construction happened in different countries in the world, you got clients in Europe and the US and you're traveling and does it, does it feel like pressure or you know, is the business kind of right, like, you know, changing and growing so quickly that, you know, I'm trying to think about that or does the growth maybe provide some, some confidence? Like, you know, we're growing. So like things are great.

Well, you circle back to, you talked about your coach, what you like listen to. I think from a, from a faith based background, I do turn it over to God when it comes to getting worried and fear and anxiety and all those things. And, and, and I do think that because we are moving fast and because you're having to keep your eye on the ball and I mean literally we're building two buildings in two different countries right now and we've got a lot going on. We're so it's, it's, you are constantly trying to be in moving forward. I think what really inspires me every day is that we do operate. You know, people say win, wins and they win, win, win. But our win is we, we know that every time somebody fires a person, it's affecting that team member's life and that is a win because they have a job. So that inspires me knowing now we've got 1200 people with jobs, they're probably taking care of four to five people in their family. When you look at how it works there with taking care of grandparents, etc. So you know, you look at me, we may be helping 6,000 people eat every day, right? The second part of that is we win for our clients, just like the clients and being able to provide them with amazing people. But Also we take 51% of our profits and give it back to ministries worldwide. I'm at one of the groups we sponsor now here in Austin and It's. It's amazing to see that impact. So, yeah, it was a long answer to your question, but do I feel pressure? Yeah, you know, I think, but I feel pressure sometimes to do what the vision God gave us that we're going to. I don't. I didn't mention this early, but the vision is 20,000 team members at 2032. So we're eight years away from really having to spin it up. And we're growing in some other verticals now besides dental. So maybe it's just the pressure of gearing up and running faster is probably some of the pressure.

Yeah. Different kind of pressure. The pressure of are you living your life mission and are you able, you know, are you able to kind of fulfill your life mission? A whole different level there. Well, thank you so much, jw. It's been amazing watching your journey, and I love hearing that 20,000 you said. I mean, you're well on your way and it's cool to know that goal because now we can watch. And there's no doubt in my mind you're going to hit that.

Hey, I appreciate it, man. I think. And by the way, I love working with. You know how much we love working with DEO and excited about finishing up this year and next year, and we just appreciate all you're doing for the industry as well. It's making an impact. The new coaching is making an impact. So we're looking forward to partnering with you guys next year as well.

It's a great partnership. Well, thanks so much. We'll see you at the next event.

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