Scaling Dental Practices: Lessons in Growth and Leadership with Todd King

I'm awesome. I'm so excited to be here because you are like the Bill Belichick of Rules for Success. You wrote the playbook, you wrote the rule book on this, and you always bring so many people. I love being on this podcast and just listening to all your episodes of everybody amazing that you've brought on and some of the rules that they've shared. Wow, this is a really great honor. Thank you, brother.

So I'm at West Virginia University. I'm in college. I'm sitting in my junior year. I'm sitting in a journalism building in Morgantown, West Virginia, and I'm going to school for public relations. And I'm sitting there thinking, 'You know, is this going to be the career I really wanted to be in?' And I'm sitting there like, 'Wow, am I...' thinking, looking up the average income. I remember sitting there, the average income for a public relations person. I'm already two and a half years into school. I'm like, 'This is really not what I want to do.' So then instantly, I worked at a bar part-time on the weekends and different times during college. I'm gonna buy that. So at 21, still when I was still in school, I went and bought my first business. I bought a sports bar in Morgantown. Had that, and that's how I started in the hospitality business. Things were pretty easy there, just because it was a college town, business was easy. But I learned so much about people and leadership and just so much throughout that whole process. I made the decision to still finish my undergrad at WVU, but during that whole time I never stopped being an entrepreneur since I was 21. And my parents, as much as I love them, were like, 'You're crazy. You can't be going and buying a bar at 21. You're going to drink all your profits. You're going to... it's never going to be the right thing.' And it ended up being probably the best thing that's ever happened and made some great decisions from there. And then that just kind of led me on to my own self-development. I started with Robert Kiyosaki's Rich Dad Poor Dad. I went to a class that he did in Pittsburgh. I was like, 'Man, I want to work for this guy. I want to work for Rich Dad.' And at that point, I flew down to Florida. There was a company called Wealth Intelligence Academy that he was set up with. And I wouldn't leave until they hired me as a coach. Went to this three-day class and I saw these coaches there, and that's kind of how I started my coaching career. The whole time I was doing real estate investments. We were flipping houses, buying apartment buildings. I still do some of those types of things. I focus more now on the private lending side of real estate. But I loved coaching and learning that and giving back. And that was going great all the way up until, I don't know, 2017, 2018. My beautiful wife looks at me and she goes, 'Todd, you need to make a choice. You are spending over 200 nights a year in a hotel traveling, helping everybody else. Do you want to do that, or do you want to stay home and be a father and do your own business and help yourself too and help this family?' So that's when I quit traveling around the country, around the world. We did some of the coachings all the way in Australia, all over Europe, everywhere. It was an amazing run. I loved it, nothing I'd give back for it. But then when I came back home, that's when I started finding different organizations, and that's kind of how I found my little niche in dental coaching.

That's a great question because when you look at, do I start my own business or do I build my own business? I've done both. When I found out that Fortune, which helps physicians and dental practice owners across the country, was founded by Tony Robbins 35 years ago with a gentleman by the name of Dr. Paul Bass, that was what drew me. I knew the core principles and the values, and for me to replicate that would have been difficult. Plus, I'm a real estate investor. What do I know about dental offices in particular? But I knew I needed to have a niche. I knew I could do the coaching side of it, but there's a whole other side, a whole other practice management side that you need. We always say we wear three hats: we're an executive coach, a practice management specialist, and a key business strategist, key business adviser. That's helping our dentists with transition plans, mergers, acquisitions, all those types of things. But the practice management specialist is, 'Hey, we got to know how the dental office...' For anybody listening, the specialty side: how are they answering the phones? How is the team doing handoffs? When somebody calls in and they need to be transferred to somebody else, what does that handoff look like? That should be done seamlessly. These are the things we work on a lot with our clients. And then obviously the executive life coaching side of it, which we share a lot of the state management principles that I'm sure anybody listening to this podcast knows about the Triad and the basic state management principles. So that's really how I got into it. And then the franchise model just worked out really well for me because how it's set up is it's owned by basically states or territories, sometimes cities. It really depends on the number of dentists. We started just in Western Pennsylvania and we've expanded out from there: Ohio, West Virginia, we're doing stuff in Indianapolis now, Indiana, Michigan, Chicago. We've grown extensively. And I'm just thankful for the support from the franchise side of it. And I still do some of my own real estate business, my real estate lending and everything on the side as well.

So one of the things that I always tell myself, and one of my rules for success, we can mark this as number one for Todd, is 'stay in your lane.' I know I'm not clinical. I never try to be clinical. But having that outside perspective on how they're answering the calls, how that doctor is talking to their patients, how they're enrolling them, explaining the treatment to them, that's really where a good coach comes in. Most dentists and doctors don't have business training, and they don't have hospitality training. There's a great book by Will Guidara called Unreasonable Hospitality. He owns a Michelin restaurant up in New York, close to you, Joseph. I don't know if you've ever read the book, but it's a great book for anybody on here. It really just talks about doing unreasonable things for people. You don't think about that in a medical facility. Most of us as business owners don't think about that: what can we do above and beyond to provide the best satisfaction for our customers? What can we teach our team members to do? This is an example from the book, and I have to share it because it's one of my core principles: go above and beyond. He talks about a couple, maybe two or four people, I can't remember exactly, but they're dining at his Michelin restaurant in New York City, and they made a joke. One of his team members, his servers, heard it. They said, 'We've been to all the finest restaurants in New York, but we have not had a New York street hot dog.' He went back and they told Will in the kitchen, kind of joking about this. And he goes, 'Go find a hot dog. Go to the street, close the street vendor, and get a hot dog.' They go out to the street, they get a New York City hot dog, they bring it back, they chop it up into four different ways and put it on this big fancy plate at this Michelin restaurant. They come and they provide this unreasonable hospitality. They give the diners a little treat from New York, but they did the hot dog at the Michelin restaurant. It's an amazing story. So I'm always, another one of my little rules: what can we do that's above and beyond for our clients that makes them more successful? I always teach my teams and their team members how they can provide a better experience.

Yeah, it all goes into proper planning. One of the things I do every year, and we're coming up in the time of year where I start working with my dentists on this, is how many days do you feel you're going to be working clinically? What are your goals? Let's work that backwards so we know what they're going to be making clinically. But they all should be making money as the business owner. They also should be making money as the owner, the CEO of the business, and make all those decisions. So I think one of my biggest rules around that is a little saying that I've kind of come up with over the years: 'Proactive people are wealthy, reactive people are poor.' And when I say poor, I don't just mean financially poor: mentally, physically, financially. People that are working out of the rearview mirror instead of looking forward are never going to have the success because they're working backwards. You can't really drive a car looking out the rearview mirror. So I think that's something I tell my doctors, and that's why we spend so much time over planning. They're like, 'Why do we have to do this? Why do you need to know how many clinical days I want to work next July? Why is this important?' But it's the same way with us. I know what... when I say 'us' and my family, we plan everything out. We know where I'm going to be, when I'm speaking, which conferences I'm speaking at, and plan that all out in advance so I know what my year is going to be like. Try to be as proactive as possible.

Yes, we're going to be launching a podcast here really soon. Basically, it is a podcast for dental entrepreneurs. I call them 'dentopreneurs'—people that are dentists that really want to be entrepreneurial—about how to buy practices. Dental practices trade just like a real estate transaction or any other business. There are a lot of really good opportunities there. One thing about Fortune I do want to mention is we're all about the preservation of private practice. What that means is we are all about the owners keeping their business. It's not about selling out to the big hospital chains or the big block store dental offices that you see beside your Best Buys and different things like this. You've probably seen what I'm talking about. We really care about the private practice owners and trying to keep dental, and medical has changed a little bit, trying to keep dental where it is: the private practice doctor can still own their own practice, thrive, and buy multiple practices. So I really want to raise awareness around that, and it's kind of the mission of the podcast, to really help people understand the deals. There are so many challenges that come into it. Some of the statistics I could show you... but the amount of dentists that are baby boomers that are shutting their doors down—they've worked their whole entire career, Joseph, 30, 40 years building this practice—and now they're struggling with technology like the AIs, the 3D printers that are coming in now, the intraoral cameras and all the different technologies. They get intimidated. They don't want to invest in that, and they just decide they're going to shut their doors. And now they thought this was going to be their retirement for so long. What I love to do with my clients is really structure what we call mergers and acquisitions. There are different things like earn-outs where we help those people that were shutting their doors and getting nothing—these dentists that have built something—help them preserve that legacy, and then help our private practice as well. So that is kind of the mission behind that: to bring awareness around the opportunities that are out there because there's no MLS for dental offices like there is for real estate. There's no LoopNet like there is for a lot of businesses. You might find a dental office here and there on LoopNet, but there are just a few individual brokers, and most of them don't even go into there because of the extensive contracts they have to sign to go into a brokerage relationship.

For somebody that's my client, we absolutely do that. It's all part of being proactive. We just call it the five business engines. One of the five business engines that we look at every single year is clinical and technology: what are you going to invest in next year that's going to provide the biggest ROI for you? Is it going to be that new special camera, that scanner that's going to be able to show everybody what actually is going on in their mouth? I don't know if you've ever heard of VAK: visual, auditory, kinesthetic learners. It's the same. A lot of these dentists, they go in and they explain things one way, auditory, but that's not how everybody learns. If somebody says something to you, sometimes you don't understand it, and a confused mind never does. Typically, they go home and try to explain it to their wife, and maybe they have some bigger issues. So we love the technology and how it can provide the learning of the full VAK model: come to people and talk to people how they want to be treated and talked to, not how you want to be talked to.

First one, I have a perfect example. He's become a great friend of mine. He is a dentist that was out of school. He partnered in his practice with his mom. His mom was a dentist. It is here in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They had a practice. He was working five days a week, working very, very hard. He comes to us and goes... We never teach somebody our vision. I never coach somebody. A true coach should never be about their vision. Never tell somebody what to do. You listen, you absorb, and you help them make sure that they're maintaining their vision. I knew his vision was to have multiple locations but always stay private practice. What he's been able to do in the last five years—we just opened location number five. It's all happened in the last five years. It's done extensive growth. I think the average growth is about 120-some percent per location per year, year-over-year growth. It's been phenomenal. But having those systems in place that are replicable, and also mergers and acquisitions. One of the things is what we call synergies. By expanding, you need to evaluate what synergies you can bring. So it's not always the top line; it's the bottom line too. Bringing in these synergies, how can we help increase the bottom line? How can we make this work? That dentist that's selling, or that dentist that maybe doesn't think he can sell because his expenses are so high, he's showing no money, so most people won't even list it or be interested in it. Well, we can bring our systems in that we already have in place, our synergies. Now we look at that, we create our new pro forma. Now we know that we're able to make this profitable. Especially too, let's get him trained a little bit on some of the practice management stuff. We can take this practice that was about ready to shut the doors—all five of his were very close to shutting their doors—and they've all expanded. I think I can say this: all of them are over a million dollars in production per year now.

Yeah, he'd be a great guest. He's great, and he's actually going to be one of the guys that I'll have on my podcast. But he works three days a week clinically. He really likes certain procedures. He really likes doing the implants and the bigger procedures. So all five of the locations have kind of been where he can pick and choose the days he works, but he does the bigger surgeries and the bigger procedures. He has people set up in each one. The way I've watched him become a leader and an inspiration... we'll talk about, you know my big 'why,' but because you've helped me develop it, it's all about being inspiration for me.

So it's so funny. I was having a conversation the other day, and somebody asked me, 'Todd, what's your magic number?' A lot of people in business say your magic number, or what's it going to take for you to sell your business or to shut your doors or for you to go live on an island and do whatever. I was sitting there thinking, and this kind of goes into legacy, but I was like, 'There's no magic number for me. I love what I do.' Unfortunately, some of my dentists, they're bent over and they're inside somebody's necks. They get neck trouble, shoulder trouble, arm trouble. Being a coach, luckily I don't have those kinds of restraints. So to me, there's no real magic number. I love what I'm doing. And the legacy part of this is going to be able to help everybody else extend their legacy. These older dentists that think that they're up, and some of them are in really bad shape. I don't know if you've ever heard this before, but dentists have some of the highest suicide rates of any profession. So for them to be able to preserve their legacy in some shape or form is a huge win. Seeing them when everything gets done—a lot of times it takes a lot to get there because some of the stuff is more complicated, the paperwork, everything involved in buying a business, and some of that can be intimidating—once you get through a lot of those things, seeing that and seeing other people pass on their legacy. And I would say that, and just to keep doing, I do something called Youth Mastering Entrepreneurship. What this is, we do a lot of classes for urban areas, different areas. I work with a nonprofit sometimes. I do a class once or twice a year. I'm actually going and speaking at my daughter's high school here next week on an entrepreneurship class. So I think it's just really teaching people that you don't have to go and do that 9-to-5 job. There are so many other options.

I think it really comes down to what I always call the six areas of life mastery. But if I had to tone down the six levels of life mastery into one, it's your emotions. Understanding your emotions and not letting them get the best of you. I think that's absolutely the biggest thing. Even when I was 21, everything was emotional. All decisions were emotion-based decisions. It's taking the emotion out of things. I would say emotional mastery would be my number one tip. Even in my Youth Mastering Entrepreneurship, I give them an abbreviated Triad, as many of the Tony Robbins people know here. I always start out with emotional intelligence and start out with the Triad: how you know what questions you are asking yourself and what's great about this. That really kind of goes into emotional intelligence because when you're 18 years old, you're not thinking about that. You know everything, at least I did. I thought I knew everything. I had good people around me. I knew you're a faith-based entrepreneur too, and I had a lot of those experiences growing up that caused me to stay in line, make better decisions, but not perfect decisions. So that's really extraordinary.

No, I think having your emotions and really having your 'why.' Why do you want to do this? It's not just monetary. You've got to do something that you're going to love doing. I love coaching. To have a successful, fulfilled life, it was not in the bar business for me. I'm so glad I did that, but that wasn't my 'why.' I was able to find my 'why' and I was able to get educated, good and bad, lost money, made money, everything else along the way. But I think understanding and having that 'why'... I mentioned this earlier, but I'll mention it again. I've read Simon Sinek's stuff on the 'why,' but I really never took the time to really develop that 'why,' and I think that is very important. Having that 'why,' why are you doing what you're doing? Develop that real reason. What do you want? I know it's hard at 18 years old or 21 years old to figure that out, but what do you really want in life?

Yeah, it's great. So we teach something in Fortune called The Bold Statement. The Bold Statement is when you're not in the best state, what can you say or what can you do to get yourself into a good state? My big 'why' is I'm an inspiration as a husband, as a father, as a coach, and as a son of God for all those around me. So my Bold Statement is, 'Am I being an inspiration? Is what I'm about to do being an inspiration?' So it's a habit that I've developed. When I get into a state, I ask myself good questions because we're always communicating with ourselves first. We're always asking ourselves questions constantly. So I always ask myself, 'Is what I'm asking myself leading me to be an inspiration for somebody else? Is this leading me to be the best self for how I want to lead myself in front of my kids, my family, my clients, as a coach?' And most importantly, like you said earlier, God.

Yeah, JTKingIV is kind of my main site that I use for my personal branding. That's where I also run a lot of my private lending deals. If somebody has a single-family home that a traditional bank will not lend on, we come in and we will do that bridge financing. A lot of times we'll be the one that allows that real estate investor to have that money to be able to go get traditional finance. They refinance us and pay us out, or they turn around and flip the home. But we never do long-term. But if any real estate investors are listening, that's something that we do. But yeah, JTKingIV.com, you can find a little bit of information about that. We also buy notes, private mortgages, and stuff as well. But that website is www.JTKingIV.com. And if there are any dentists listening, I would highly recommend going to FortuneMgmt.com. It's Fortune Management. We're the largest executive coaching company for dentists. We provide a lot of CE events all across the country. I think we have 150 coaches like myself throughout the country. Not all are franchisees like me. I work with a lot of people on my team that are coaches. So yeah, we have a lot of great resources there.

I think the biggest thing is Kaizen, right? Constant never-ending improvement. You've heard that. Don't get funneled into just learning one way to do things. I've done tons of education with Rich Dad, tons of education with Tony Robbins. I recently started going back to getting more formal education. I got a certificate from Columbia Business School in mergers and acquisitions. But I would always just say one of the big rules for success is diversify your education. Learn all the different ways. There's not just one right way to do it. Find as many good sources to get educated as possible in whatever you're trying to learn in your business.