65: Entrepreneur through the Crisis

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When I was working as an associate rat at a school, I never imagined I could own these many practices with this amount of support. So thank you.

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You have this natural talent, this unique ability. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of DSO Secrets. I'm your fearless host, Emmett Scott, and I hope you enjoyed the last podcast, Navigating as a Leader Through Crises. I appreciate all the feedback that I have gotten. I'm glad that it's helpful as each of us every day have some kind of crisis. At least we emotionally feel so. Sometimes our team is emotionally feeling so and so. How do you lead through that? And we talked about a couple of principles. Just to reiterate. You've got to determine how you want to show up. Who do you want to be? If the crises are going to happen on a regular basis, if financials aren't going to be where you want them to be, if team members you're going to have turn, they're not executing as well as you want. If there are global things or macroeconomic things going on, patient issues going on, if every day that's going to happen because that at its heart is part of business development, is part of business growth, who do you want to be? Are you going to constantly be in a place of panic and frantic, or are you going to show up as the calm amidst the storm? Who do you want to be? And that's the aspirational goal we talked about. How you want to solve problems. Are you going to utilize process and systems, or are you going to sting and zap and point in a thousand different directions? And if you haven't listened to the podcast on Dope, if you haven't listened to the podcast on the anxiety cycle versus the success cycle, I'd strongly encourage that. And then number three, determining how you will communicate, figuring out the right process and the timing and the voice and the confidence and ensuring that you're that person that they need, providing that support, not sticking your head in the sand, but communicating with confidence and clarity. Now that's all about leadership. Today we're going to talk about entrepreneurship. How do you entrepreneur through a crisis. And I want to use specifically like a macro situation, not just the minor things that. Well, I say minor, of course, for us, emotionally, they feel much bigger than that. But when things are like macro, when they're really big. Let me give you some examples I've experienced. One is the economic collapse between 2000, let's say 7 through2011, where, you know, I was in the heart there in Las Vegas, had multiple homes, and you see valuations. We had one home that went from 250,000 to $50,000 in value. How do you lead through macro economic issues like that? How do you lead through an unemployment rate reaches 25% or greater? Or I should say, even better, how do you entrepreneur through that? How do you not just survive it, but thrive during those situations? And that's really what this podcast is going to be about, is not just making it through, but really taking advantage of the opportunity to bring value to the world. If you think about entrepreneurship as the skill set and the ability to find where people need value and bring them value, well, nothing opens that door quite like a crisis. People are hungry for leadership, they're hungry for solutions. They're hungry for someone to bring value. And what's interesting is oftentimes it's creating so much paralysis because it's so global, because it feels so big, because it feels so much out of our control that people don't step back and say, within my circle of influence, what could I do? What could I entrepreneur that would solve this for the people that I serve, that the people I'm supposed to be a hero for, you know, and if we go back in time to that 2008 housing crisis, one of my favorite examp examples of someone who stepped into that, not away from it, not paralyzed by it, was Alex Charfen who looked at macro, what was going on? And he said, okay, so the realtors now have a problem because they have been selling homes and making great income, and that has completely gone away. You've got mortgage brokers who, you know, I had individuals around me making 300,000 right out of school, just doing one loan after another, and all of a sudden that market's gone. And they look at their education, they look at their capability, and they realize that they don't have another skill set. What are they supposed to do? And Alex Charfen stepped back, looked at the situation, and said, well, we're going to have massive amounts of banks foreclosing on homes and not knowing what to do next, not knowing how to offload these off their balance sheet. Not knowing how to solve this issue, you've got individuals who aren't going to know how to work with the banks to get their problem solved. And so Alex Charfen stepped in and created a certification program for realtors to be able to become certified in helping sell distressed properties and helping banks offload these assets and created a huge business network, a huge support system for Realtors. During a time of crisis, where other businesses were failing, his was thriving. See, I think entrepreneur mindset is where others see destitution, where others see scarcity, where others see failure. Entrepreneurs see opportunity, see the ability to bring abundance to solve problems. Again, clearly if there's a crisis, there's a problem to be solved. And the question is, who's going to solve it? And how do you, how do you get out of paralysis and break away from kind of that mob of fear and really step into it and go beyond even leadership and go into entrepreneurship? I remember the second big macro crisis that happened for us was here in Texas where the OIG decided that the orthodontists had all colluded together and they were taking advantage of the state and so they just started freezing the assets of large growing multi practice dentists. And since our dental practices were large growing, all the assets got frozen. We had to lay off over 120 people in a weekend just to try to help the company survive. What do you do during something like that? How do you navigate that? What's the mindset you have to show up with and how in the world do you entrepreneur through something that aggressive? Again, you're not putting your head in the sand, you're not saying, hey, this isn't really happening. You've got to step into it though and say, okay, where do we go from here? And one of the things that we realized was with this type of crises happening that competitors would struggle to survive. And so if we could outlast the problem, which eventually, and I think that's one part of all of this, is knowing that the crises will end. I think starting with that mindset has always been helpful to me. And as I talk to other entrepreneurs, their head is already at the place where they say, so where do I want to be when this is over? Because once you get a little bit of age underneath you, you realize that no crises last forever. If that's going to be true, where do I want to be when this is over? And does this open up opportunities for the strong to survive and the weak will be eliminated from the market? One of the things we know is that capitalism really thrives on both the ups and downs of the market. Oftentimes when we see a down happening, when we see these crisis, whether they're economic or some other kind of outside influence that are putting economic pressures, we have the tendency, or we grow a business and it implodes, etc. Or we see businesses go out of business, we think of that as capitalism kind of failing, but really it's doing its job to continue to make the economy more lean and mean. So again, as these macroeconomic things happen, starting to say immediately, as quickly as you can emotionally handle, all right, where do I want to be when this is over? And how can I use this situation to position myself to be in a stronger position once the crisis is over? Which kind of leads to number two, which is if I'm an entrepreneur and people are having a lot of fear and concern, they're also looking for someone to step up and provide a solution. I've seen some hilarious memes around on Facebook around all this activity with the coronavirus that people are buying water and toilet paper and the amount of water and toilet paper that has been gobbled up here so that people just in their daily routines aren't able to get access to water bottles and to toilet paper. The memes have joked and poked at the fact that neither of those items have been encouraged by the cdc. There's not really any direct corre to those and what you would do to solve the coronavirus. There's been no communication that says our water supply is going to get turned off, or even if people were on lockdown, that the water supply would get locked down. But I think that what it represents is people's hunger to take action, people's desire to have a leader come in and give them a solution. And we can see that through history that when people feel a crisis in their life that they get even more hungry to have leadership and to have solution. And I think as an entrepreneur, we can utilize this to bring our products and services into greater priority into the consumer's life. I mean, let's be honest, the dentistry market has been completely deprioritized with everything else that's happened since 2000 with the Internet and with the amount of marketing dollars that are going in to get access to people's mental bandwidth. And I've said this before, but dentistry is not competing with itself, is competing against multibillion dollar marketing firms outside of dentistry that is trying to take the time priority of the consumer's life, which deprioritizes other goods and services. And dental has been one that has been pushed to the bottom. And I've argued in the past that part of the reason is because we are terrible at the marketing piece and really articulating our value and we have to get better at that. Well, what does a crisis like the coronavirus, for example, what does that do for something like the dental market? And what it does is it allows us as entrepreneurs to say, in what ways could we help to solve this problem? In what ways can we strengthen and help people either physically, mentally or emotionally? And how could our messaging help to put in to gain another slot in their brain that we're here for them and that we're leaders in the community. And you can see this mentality is so different than maybe that scarcity fear mentality, right? So you've got this leadership concept where you're kind of stepping in and you're staying strong, but entrepreneurship's so much bigger than that. Now you're going to create solutions. You know, for us, during the OIG crisis was really when we buckled down and we thought even bigger and we created a DSO platform that said, listen, what's going to happen through this is a lot of people are going to struggle. They're going to go bankrupt. They're going to need more resources and services. We're going to get involved on the lobbying side. We're going to support the government to get solutions to. What are they really trying to solve? Obviously they had budget issues and media issues that they were feeling pressure around, and they responded dramatically and I think inappropriately, they would even say today, but they didn't know what to do. And so we actually stepped into the lobbying effort and helped create the bills that were necessary for legislation to have the right rules and regulations that they were looking for, but not react so inappropriately to a dental market. It was our opportunity to step up as leaders and it created this connection now that we have with the government, with insurance providers, and with other DSOs in the market that see us as someone who can help solve that level problems. Now, bringing this back to kind of a current backdrop of this coronavirus, which again, I will tell you, eventually will pass, what are you as an entrepreneur doing to solve the concerns, the fears that people have? Have you stepped back and thought through the fact that people are probably reassessing their immune system more than ever, Whether they're doing that consciously or unconsciously, the messaging that media has been pushing out there is definitely been that those with compromised immune systems are at greater risk. So is your messaging Coming out of your practices about strengthening people's immune systems. You know, we say that we are the medical providers where, where we're protecting the, the entry system, if you will, where all systemic health happens or all systemic degradation happens, it's through the mouth. We know that there are many people out there swallowing bacteria every day that is lowering their ability to fight other disease. Are we taking this opportunity to educate people on the importance in upgrading their health and the opportunity that we have to help them? I mean, let's just be honest here. If someone was going to get a disease, are they better off having toilet paper and water or having visited your practice and making sure their oral health is top notch is really optimized the best it can, which one is going to help them be in the right position? And I want to be careful here because I'm not encouraging some kind of snake oil presentation like you need to be grounded as an entrepreneur, that you truly believe that you have some value to bring to the problem at hand. So if in your mind you think buying water and toilet paper is much more effective then going into your dentist and removing bacteria and ensuring that your mouth is clean and your immune system is strengthened, well, if you think the water and toilet paper is better, then don't do that presentation. But if you could get on board with me and say, yeah, I think that's much better use of time, energy and financial resources, well then why aren't we out there giving that message? Because people are looking for a message somewhere every day. In a dental practice, we are practicing OSHA requirements to ensure a very healthy environment. Washing hands is something that we train on regularly. We've created an environment that's probably one of the cleanest environments out there in the economy. Right? In our dental practices. Do patients know that all these things coming out of the CDC are things that we do every day to ensure that they're protected from disease, that coming into a dental practice is going to be much safer than going to Costco, buying a bunch of things, being around people there, trying the samples, etc. Or going into a Walmart, et cetera. If we're competing against them for marketing purposes, then we need to step into that as entrepreneurs and say, listen, if given a choice of being in a box, our boxes are way cleaner and way more prepared for this crisis that you might be perceiving than walking into one of these other retailers. To me, this is that entrepreneur mindset. Now you don't have to think, and I think this becomes somewhat of the paralysis and problem is you go into this entrepreneur mindset and you say, how do I solve the world's problems, including solving this in China and solving this in some US State that I'm not anywhere close to? And that's not how entrepreneurs began. Entrepreneur mindset is who are the people that I'm a hero for every day? Who are the patients and customers that I'm already serving, and what do I need to do to help them during this time? Now, listen, I'm giving these examples based on a couple of my experiences, a couple of things that I've seen entrepreneurs do. Obviously, the current media is really focused on the coronavirus, so I'm using that as an example. But here's what I can promise you. Even if you're listening to this podcast 10 years from now, where the coronavirus is a thing of the past and the vaccine makes it really obsolete, etcetera, There will always be another crisis around the door. If we're going to continue to grow as a civilization. Growth always creates problems and catastrophes. And there's ones that are going to happen because of weather, there's going to be ones that happen because of economics, there's going to be minor ones, there's going to be macro ones, all different things. And the question is going to always be, how do you want to show up, how do you want to serve, how do you want to support? And what opportunities does that open for you? I hope you take away the principles of this mindset game, because this truly is a vaccine against any future crises. And listen, it doesn't mean that you'll avoid pain. It doesn't mean that you will avoid hard times. When the OIG froze everyone's assets, we still had to do a layoff process. There wasn't a way that the math could work to not go through that. But I can tell you that within six weeks later, we had done so much momentum at a legislative level that we were hiring everybody back. So the mindset will help you get through the storm faster. And that, by the way, was with a backdrop of attorneys saying, we've had people, you know, with frozen assets for 18 months that are going bankrupt. So no one was telling us, hey, here's the path. Hey, it's been really good, you know, here's the secret sauce to get through this crisis. In fact, it was the opposite. There is no way around, you know, you're totally screwed. Good luck, keep paying our bills, right? So no one is going to solve this for you, which is why you have to have an entrepreneur mindset. You have to figure out your way around the 10 foot wall and stepping back, collaborating with other entrepreneurs, being optimistic, being realistic about the fact that this isn't going to last forever, and knowing where you want to position yourself at the end will all put you in the right mindset. Where others are freaking out, you're getting very strategic. Where everyone else is paralyzed, you're taking action, and where everyone else is falling behind, you're stepping to the front and positioning yourself as a leader. And let me just end with saying that if you've got this kind of mindset and this kind of fortitude, that people are going to want to follow you. And so you're going to have team members with that same type of personality, that same type of grit, and that creates an unstoppable team. So I hope this is helpful. I'd love your feedback. Any ideas that you're doing to stepping into the crises, to being entrepreneur, to working your way around this, to kind of taking things at another level, come share it with us over on our Facebook site, DSO Secrets. And until next time, keep smiling.

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