41: Why Are You In Life?

Hey, dental associates and new practice owners. Welcome to the Associates on Fire podcast. Powered by Practice cfo. This is the podcast that teaches you what you never learned in dental school, the financial side of dentistry. We cover topics from planning for ownership, buying a practice, to student loans, taxes and all things financial for the hungry to learn Dental Associate. So let's light it up.

Welcome everybody to a new episode of the formerly known as the Associates on Fire podcast. We have, as I mentioned in my last podcast, just renamed this podcast to be the Dental Boardroom Podcast. And just reiterating a little bit of the reasoning behind that, that we at Practice CFO act as a simulated CFO or Chief Financial officer for dental practices who typically don't have a dedicated full time CFO and are left to make a lot of key business decisions on their own and sometimes without adequate training and background. And dentists are some of the smartest people I know. They are much smarter than me and they can learn to do what I do, but it's just something I've dedicated my life to. And, and our, and our CFO is here, that practice cfo. And so we try to create, create that intelligence, that sort of knowledge set for the CEOs of private dental practices, I.e. the dentists, to make great decisions financially as a CPA and financial planning firm. We integrate those together to help them progress. Well, today we've got another a great episode for you on our Dental Boardroom podcast. I'm going to introduce you to Chuck Blakeman. Chuck, welcome. I'll give you a quick introduction but, but welcome. And just so everybody knows, I was on your podcast. So I'll tell them a little bit about that and glad to have you here.

Great to be here.

All right, so Chuck, a little bit about you. I feel very small next to your resume. I'm just going to say you have an incredible resume and you are a entrepreneur. You are a best selling business author, you have spoke on TED as a TED speaker and you have a. You are a renowned business Advisor. You've built 12 businesses, eight industries, five continents. You've worked with companies and grown companies from 1 million to 100 million. And now you are leading the Craigset Group which is a dental advisory company and a for profit business based in Africa which is very interesting. And you focus on developing local economies to solve poverty is one of the things that I read in your bio. Interested here about that. But you have. The last thing I'll say is you have your own podcast called the Got G O T T Dental Podcast. It's a top three podcast, makes me envious in dental. And you've spoken all over the world, spoken many, many times and been in a lot of major magazines and CNN Money, New York Times. So the list goes on. There's a lot of incredible content there in your history, Chuck, so what an honor.

Let me, let me. Well, I appreciate that. It's an honor. I'd like to comment on this whole bio thing because every time somebody feel reads my bio, I feel like I'm dead. We call these obituaries.

Are usually, oh, they only tell the good stuff and they don't tell you the bad stuff and they don't fill in all the blanks. So yeah, it's, I appreciate all of that stuff but usually it comes down to what have you done for me lately.

It does, it does. But that resume sure can make you capable of helping people in very real time, I'm sure. And it is so true that the, a lot of the sort of glories we like to.

Attain or put, you know, on our, in our mental resume that comes with a lot of hard work and a lot of failures. And so both, you don't get to what you have without, I'm sure some, some stumbling blocks along the way. Well, glad to have you here.

Chuck. Anything else you want to add about that? I am a little bit curious about this Africa thing. Tell me about that. And helping local economy, solving poverty, that.

Could be a PR thing as well. Very quickly, I saw in 1979 and 80 and 81 that, that a commune in China pulled away from the Communist party, rebelled, gave their land back to the people who used to own it 75 years later and pull themselves out of poverty in like a year and a half. Then another farming commune did it and another one. And then the government got involved in 1981 and told them they can't do it. And they both, they all said, well screw you, we're going to do it and you can just shoot us because it's working. And then the government decided to create a, a, a, an act called the Household Responsibility act in 1981 or 82. And it's a Chinese face saving way of saying we thought of this even though they didn't. And so they, the Household Responsibility act was saying, hey, all you, all you people who live in communes, you need to give that money, that land back to all the people who own it seven years ago. What are you doing doing it that way? They need to take responsibility for that one. And China went from, well, something like 600 million people came out of poverty in 14 years. And that was, that wasn't even on purpose. That wasn't even on purpose. Well, what if you build small business? And the key, the key was small business. That's the key. Any great economy in the world does not get there by non profits or by giant corporations or anything else you look at. Any great economy in the world doesn't matter. You name one. 95 of the businesses have more than have 20, 20 or fewer people in them. I'm sorry. Yeah, yeah, 90, 95 plus. It's really closer to 98 of all the businesses in every.

Growing economy in the world has that. And that is the key to getting people out of poverty. That is the key to education, that is the key to medical wealth. You know all these other things we've tried education and medicine and trying to deal with poverty, none of those have changed thing. And in fact.

South or Africa as a whole is worse off. 125 years later after we started doing all these poverty and non profit programs, we exponentially worse off than it was 125 years ago. We got to stop all that nonsense, get over there and, and start building tons of small businesses in very dense, very, very small areas so they get a life of their own and then go do it again in another city and eventually there'll be a tipping point. And that's how you build, get people out of, out of poverty. And that's what happened in China.

Cool.

I just wanted on purpose.

Yeah. And you know Denta Dental, the private practice, the dental space are small businesses. And, and you, at what point did you merge and start working a lot with dental? Have you been doing that for most of your career?

No, I haven't. It was, it was one of the things that you know, you just pay attention, keep your antenna up. Somebody was reading my first book making money is killing your business in a, in a, a, in a. Waiting for an airplane in the terminal and she looked up and she took a picture of an empty terminal. The plane had left an hour early. She took a picture of the terminal with my book in the picture and she said this blanket blank book made me not only just miss my plane, but I was so absorbed in it I didn't even know that everybody was gone. I looked up and hour later it's a, it's an empty concourse. And she was well known in dental and, and so other people were following her on Facebook. They saw that, they read the book. I got invited to do a few things and that just Accelerated into me being largely full time in the dental industry. Personally, we, there are other people in our business who, who deal with other companies and I have, I'll, I'll do something crazy like work with Google or other people for a month or two until I get frustrated and then get back working with people who actually pay attention. So my life is with dentists more than anybody because I think we, it's a great marriage. I, I think dentists are everything I always wanted to be. They're, they're smart, educated, really detail oriented, organized, driven, caring. They're all these things and I'm kind of this wild eyed raging entrepreneur who's, you know that that resume is already out of date. You know that bio. It's like 13 businesses in 10 industries on five, four continents. I just can't help myself. But dental is my love because it, I can't think of a better place structurally in the structure of dental businesses. They are so well set up to reclaim work and rehumanize the workplace probably as well or better than any other thing with the, maybe the exception of veterinary, which is pretty much the same structure.

Let's talk about what's getting in the way of that and I'm going to play off your book title if you don't mind. Why making money is getting in the is destroying your business. Was that the name of the book.

Making money is killing your business? It's a statement. Making money is killing your business.

How does that apply to dental? Or maybe if you want to be more broad, what are the challenges that the private practice dental space is seeing today that you're experiencing?

Well, dentists, owners and associates both suffer from the same exact process problems that any other business in America suffers from. And that is that the owners and the people with a lot of responsibility are hostages to their business. They go home on Friday and they worry about it all weekend and then they come back on Monday and worry about it and then they get ready to go on vacation. They spend the week before vacation torturing themselves and everybody around them. And then they go on vacation and decompress for three days. They have one day vacation, then they worry for three days before they come back, and then they spend the next week after they come back repairing all the crap that happened when they're gone. And we call that vacation. So that is the experience of Anyone in dentistry, 90 plus percent of the people in dentistry as well as in any other business. And that was my experience for the first six businesses. Every time I built a business, the bigger it went. The faster it went, the faster I went. And my treadmill just went faster and faster and faster and I could not figure out how to get off the treadmill. So I learned that there's some simple questions that we got to ask ourselves on that and a major change in our belief system. We need a new slide in our head in order to make this stuff work. And if you get the new slide, it's like being an alcoholic. You can't help an alcoholic unless they say I'm an alcoholic. That's a new slide in their head. And we need a new slide in our head as business owners to jumpstart this.

Heard a quote today and said this. Maybe you've heard it before. I had never heard of it. But top line is vanity and bottom line is sanity. Let's talk about your financial statements. Top line being your collections and bottom line being what do you keep after all of your overhead, that's your net profit. Top line, vanity, bottom line, sanity. I do see a lot of practices with three and a half million dollar top lines, but their bottom line is a 7% profit margin and they would be better off running an $800,000 practice with a 40% profit margin and working two days a week. And so that comment you made earlier about as the business gets bigger and goes faster, you're only getting.

Going faster and busier and you're worrying about it more and more. But I mean to, to sympathize with the plight of dentists. I look at my business as a business owner. I have my set of challeng. I think you're right. Every business has its own set of challenges. We're up to 40 people now at practice CFO and my challenge has been creating flow, sort of common flow and energy throughout the firm, maintaining vision while also dealing with the cracks that emerge and making sure that people are able to work through those cracks and not lose that inspiration behind it. Dentists have very unique challenges, one of them being Delta Dental and some of the insurance carriers. The insurance providers can continue to reduce their rates come January here in California. There's, there won't be. There used to be people grandfathered into the Delta Premier rates and so they got let's say 1200, 1300 for the reimbursement on a standard crown. That's now, that's now dropping. Everybody's being forced to Delta ppo which is much lower. Even though they have the same expenses going into it, it directly erodes their profit from say $500 per crown down to say $100 per crown. So that's a, that's a big thing. That's one chall challenge is of course, a lot of staffing issues right now. You know, it'd be nice if there was kind of a common sort of. Indeed. Or zip recruiter or something specific to dental that could kind of ease this burden of finding good people. And then the third thing that I often bring up is just large group practices on the rise, private equity coming into the dental space saying, wow, look at the profit margins in this still cottage, cottage industry of dental. Let's get in there, apply great business to it, roll up, consolidate, get, get the benefits of scale, cheaper, everything, and let's essentially convert the cottage industry to a corporate industry. And so there's a lot of pressures there now. There are also some advantages there and that a lot of dentists coming out of school are able to get quick jobs, get a lot of experience, that kind of thing. But practice owner, it can feel like a little bit of, of a pressure. All right, so you, you talk a lot about leadership. So what specifically when you are working with a dentist, how are you helping them address these, these issues?

Yeah, we deal with only on the business side of dentistry. So we're in that wheelhouse. We don't pretend to know anything about the, the clinical side and the operatory. We deal with the business side. And we do that because my anecdotal, after working with hundreds of dentists and hundreds and hundreds of businesses and my own 13 businesses, somewhere around anecdotally, 75% of business is generic, which means what you think is actually making you the money has almost nothing to do with it. I know dentists who are very frustrated because they know they are twice as good a dentist as the guy down the road. And the guy down the road has a line out his door and they don't. And it's because he's figured out the 75% and the other guy's relying on his incredible dental skills. Sorry, I wish it was that way, that you could be a great chair maker and just sell chairs. But your chairs are going to pile up in the basement if you don't have the 75% of business that has nothing to do with chair making figured out. So we help them with that side of it and in the context of helping that, a lot of people do that, but we do it with this objective in mind on a regular basis. The question is a business, a practice owner's question is very different than what we, we would call a, an income producer's. Question. Most people who own a dental practice actually don't. Only by IRS regulations they do. The practice owns them and they are actually income producers. You know you're an income producer if when you leave on a regular basis, you can't leave for a week or two or three weeks without the thing beginning to decay in some way, shape or form on a fairly rapid basis, you are the income producer. Whether you're even making it directly, if they're relying on you to be there in order to make it happen, you don't own a Business owners have one question that they ask on a rabid basis. We call it the business owners or practice owners game. How do I make more money in less time? If you're not consumed by that question on a daily, weekly, quarterly, monthly, yearly basis, you're not a business owner, you're a practice. You're you're a. Or I'm not. You're not a practice owner, you're a an income producer. Because an income producer is going to say, how do I cover my mortgage this month? How do I cover my lease? How do I pay my people? How do I get more people? And how do I create more revenue? All bad questions. Richard Branson lives on an Island. He owns 460 some businesses. He has asked himself, how do I make more money in less time?

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So I'm going to ask you that question. Then, Chuck, I want you to reveal to the extent we can, in 10, 15 minutes, give us, give us an intro. What is the magic answer to that question? Because I, I'm curious myself.

Yeah, so the first thing is to change the slide in your head as we talked about earlier. And the slide in most people's head is I need to make money and if I make money. The second part of that slide is if I make money, life will be good. Well, boy, I can laugh at that one because I've made some money and my life was a mess and I know a lot of people who've made money and that didn't seem to do anything. And the research says anything over $125,000 a year doesn't do anything for your happiness. Nothing but get zero. So that doesn't work. So we got to change the slide in our head that says I need to make money and if I make money, I'll be happy. And the new slide has to sound like this.

What do I want out of life?

Now I leave that pause there because this sounds like a woo woo crap question. I was a recovering John Wayne rugged individualist. I get the whole hardcore, you know, eat dragons kind of thing. I'm, I'm all over it. The reality of it is you will make the reason I call my my first book making money is killing your business is because if you are trying to make money, you are in trouble.

People who try and make money rarely make what they want out of it. And even if they do, they're Unhappy people who have a reason to make money that is bigger than making money almost always make more money than the other people, and they're happy. And it has nothing to do with dentistry directly. I'm not saying why, you know, what do you want out of dentistry? I'm saying, what do you want out of life? Take yourself for a walk and write your obituary and say, here's what it looks like, 10, 15, 70 years from now. Here's what I want to have my life count for. Here's the relationships. What impact are you going to make in the world around you? And I'll give you a hint. The happiest people are solving other people's problems. So that should be part of your. What we call the big why. Why are you in business? Is not a good enough why. Why are you in life? Your lifetime goals. And the answer to that question is in principle. You will come up with an answer you can never check off as complete.

What's the one? What are the one or two, three things that motivate you to get. To get out of bed and go do dentistry and play with your kids and be a community member and fill in the blank. What is it? It's already in there, by the way. This is not something new. It's already in there. You just need to give yourself the permission to dredge it up, write it down, and then chase it like crazy and watch what happens. So we don't have that permission. Why is the most human of questions, Wes. And what's the one question we haven't been allowed to ask since we're 10 years old at work? For sure not, you know, why? I mean, it's just crazy. We have dehumanized life because we say, well, that's a fuzzy wuzzy question. Oh, my gosh. That is the most important question you have never answered. And once you figure out why you are in life, then you can say, here's the second piece. Then you can ask yourself, how much time, money, and energy do I need in order to live out that lifetime goal? So if I want to solve poverty in Africa, I need a lot of time, a lot of money, and a lot of energy if I want to be a great mom, which is something else you can never check off as complete, by the way. You can't make your kids, your big wife, though, so there has to be more than that, because you can't make goals dependent on other people. They'll. They'll disappoint you because they'll want their own goals. So we need time, money and energy. And how much time, money and energy do I need this business to give me? So all of a sudden I got a reason to be in dentistry that I never had before. I look at my dental world and I say, okay, how do I redesign this to get me the time, the money and the energy I need to do that to live out that lifetime goal. So Dr. Brown in Chicago, we worked, started working with Dr. Brown. He was working five days a week. One day was non clinical businessy stuff and he was making $300,000 a year take home. And he was in his early 60s and.

All kinds of other things going on. And today, two years later, he's working one to two days a week. We're trying to convince him to go down to one and he's making $500,000 plus take home. And last year he went on his first vacation ever without shutting down his practice. And he made more money that week than he ever did in the 52 weeks prior, the week that he was gone. Because he had changed the slide in his head. We were helping him figure out how do I make more money in less time, how do I make more money in less time? And it's not, that's not a good enough game because that's just chasing money. It has to be in the context of how do I make more money in less time so I can live a significant life. So those are the first two of them of maybe three or four things that people have to do to, to make this happen.

Yeah, you know, it's been a struggle a little bit working with clients to park everything else in their sort of busy life, financially speaking, because you got all these things coming up. You got taxes coming up, you've got payroll coming up, you've got your lease payment coming up, you got student loans you're trying to deal with, you've got all these things coming at you. You may be kids, college education, you know, all that stuff coming up. And you're always stuck in that sort of. Stephen Covey Quadrant one, you know, like it feels urgent but at the end of the day it isn't terribly important to the satisfaction of your life. And then you got a quadrant number two which is what isn't urgent but extremely important. And those people who get to quadrant two are the ones who truly find success and joy out of life. Reminds me a little bit of, of that.

But I like that starting with the end in mind. Do you find that a lot of dentists end up as their income rises, that their spending Rises equally.

As fast as the income rises, so does the spending. And they're never in a place where there's enough breathing room to sort of not be in panic mode and step back, define life, and then go from there.

Yeah, it's. I learned this in Africa. Coming home in Africa, I was imagining 100 kids I saw in this, in one of the worst slums, America, in the world. And I lined those 100 kids up in my head against one wall, and then. Or those hundred families up against one wall, and they're making a dollar a day. And then I lined up 100 families from my town, one of the wealthier towns in Colorado, and aligned those families up in my head on the other wall. And there was so much joy in the Africa on the African wall, and so much discontentment and bitterness. And the. The. The really surprising thing is, I analyze this in my head was the African people had more money.

Now figure that one out. Well, you know, they had no debt. They. They were at zero. They lived hand to mouth. Every day. They made a dollar, they spent a dollar, they made a dollar, they spent a dollar. And lined up against the other wall where all these families with credit card debt piling up and mortgages that were too big for whatever they're doing and too many boats and too many helicopters and. And they're just barely scraping by, and there are millions, or if not, you know, tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands in debt. How did we get there? I go right back to the big why. The reason we do that is we don't have any other reason to live. If I get a house that has 2,000 square feet and I can pay for it, and I start to get a little extra money, Wes, do I put that away? You've experienced this. What do I do? I go buy another bigger house so I have a place to put that extra 500 or $3,000 a month, and then I get more money. I go buy a bigger house, and then I buy a boat, then I buy a hot tub, then I buy a helicopter. And somehow, no matter how much money I have, I'm always living in poverty. So poverty. One of the things I learned in Africa, poverty is a mindset. And if you have a big why, if you have a desire to do something with your life and make an impact and leave a legacy, all of a sudden you realize, yeah, of course I got to pay my mortgage. That's just a stopover. That's just a waypoint on the way to. I got so many more things I need to do. So I'm not going to pay. Just make just enough to pay my mortgage. And I'm not just going to get another mortgage. I'm going to have resources. So the operative principle here, Wes, you probably heard this, maybe not, but give from your root, not from your fruit. I'm sorry. Give from your root. I'm sorry. Give from your fruit, not from your root. Give from your fruit, not from your root. How do I have more impact in the world around me? I build a bigger root system. If you don't have financial reserves, you don't have X amount of months of, you know, money in the bank and. And other financial reserves, you're running on emotional and physical and maybe spiritual empty, and it's killing you. So if you want to have a great impact in the world around you, the first thing you do is build up a great root system, save some money, figure out how to level off your spending, get a reason to have a bunch of money in the bank, and then begin to, once you have a reserve, then begin to use that on something more meaningful than buying a bigger house.

I am. I'm actually taking notes here, Chuck, and I rarely do that on a podcast. I'm too busy thinking about what I want to say right now. I just want to write it down because what you are saying is, for me, it's the essence of why I started practice cfo. But in some, because I'm a financial planner. I'm a certified financial planner and a cpa. But in some ways, I myself have got lost in the whole mix of it all because I find as my advisors and I meet with clients and that we're still talking 95%, sometimes 99%, and some clients, it's 100% about the here and now. And all the traffic of data and numbers and taxes, financial debt, all that stuff, and not finding that space to lift our heads and look at it from the top down. But one thing I really want to emphasize, too, is I do think that spending has a big factor here. And you're talking about impoverished parts of the world and wealthy parts of the world, and it doesn't dictate who's happier. Maybe even there's an inverse relationship at times. But the problem with overspending is two things. Number one, when you go and spend money on personal consumption, you're having to pay taxes on that money because most dentists are s corporations and the profits flow out to them on a K1 and they pay taxes on that K1, and that somewhat maps to that they're pulling money out of the practice and then they're spending that. And you got to pay taxes on that. You can't really go buy a second home and call that a business tax deduction. Now, there's some things we do here and there to try to convert sort of quasi personal expenses to business expenses. But as a general concept, you got to send money through the tax screen in order to go spend it personally. And so that's going to cost you probably somewhere around on the very low end, 25% on the high end, somewhere around 50% in order to take it out of the, out of the business to, to, to, to spend personally. Which means that a, you have less to reinvest into resources that could produce income in your practice without you having to be there to constantly do the work. So you can hire, say, a good business operator, you could hire some better technology, you could hire an associate and get them trained up. That, that takes an investment. Sometimes you lose money when you hire an associate, sometimes for six to 12 months. And if you have that reinvestment now, all of that becomes tax deductible. You're not paying taxes on that now because it's a bit, because it's a business expense. And so you get that, yeah, you get that 25% to 50% back. And you're putting that into now an asset which is going to generate more income later. The second thing is that money that comes out and goes to the tax screen could have gone into a retirement plan that gets you tax savings, which you can then pay for yourself later. Now there's a whole separate conversation on that, but this, what I call the spending to income ratio, this is a totally west made up word. The spending to consumption ratio is how much are you spending? How much are you. I'm sorry, it is the consumption to income ratio. That's a chuck, the consumption to income ratio. How much are you personally consuming relative to your income in the practice? And when that ratio gets too high and you're not setting aside money for your rainy day fund, your emergency reserve, you're not creating enough buffer in your practice checking account to weather some poor months. It just hamstrings you and you feel like you gotta be doing the work, you gotta be, more mouths, more mouths, more mouths. And maybe you're taking on bad patients. Bad patients. You're barely getting any money on some of these patients based on their insurance reimbursements, and you're just forced into that scenario, which never lets you really answer that key question that you brought up, which is, why are we in life? And, you know, I struggle. I think about this every day and I struggle to make room for that, you know, with my three kids and my house and college coming up for my oldest kid and the company here and sometimes running really fast. And I get that. I really do. So a lot of great comments there, Chuck. Anything you want to add to that?

Yeah, I think this stuff does. It doesn't. It starts in our heads, but it has to come out our hands. So we have to believe that the world should look different than it does today. It's like, I gotta be at the end of myself. I work with dentists when they come to the end of themselves and say, you know, I've tried everything and I'm still on the treadmill. And so that's the. That's the place we have to start, is I'm really done with trying to make things work by repeating insanity, doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. So we have to come to that place ourselves and then come to a clear understanding of what we want out of life. And we can help them do that as well. But that's the starting place. And then we have to be absolutely, relentlessly committed to it. No turning back, no holds barred. It's about how relentless you will be in pursuing the answer to that question. How much time, money, and energy do I need out of my practice to live out my lifetime goals?

Love it. I think we're going to finish with that one, Chuck. I'm going to label this podcast something about.

Maybe I'll even label it.

Why are you in life with Chuck Blakeman? I think that'd be a great title for this. And sometimes we do just need to stop everything and think about what matters the absolute most in our life. So thank you for a lot of really inspiring content there. Tell us how people can get in touch with you and what you specifically do when somebody engages you.

Yes. So they can get in touch with me@chuckblakeman.com Try and keep it simple, because I'm simple. So. Chuckblakeman.com Blake, there's no C in there. Sometimes people stick a C in there. And we help. We work with practice owners to help them get off the treadmill. We work with their teams to help them get into the highest and best use of their time, money, and energy so that that further enables the practice leader and the. The associates to get off the treadmill. We work with teams to help them figure out how to get better engaged and in general, we work to rehumanize dentistry by giving everybody their brain back. So we teach the dental community how to engage everybody as responsible adults instead of as underlings.

Chuck, thank you for being on the show today.

Great to be here. Wes, Keep going.

Appreciate that.