Kiera compares the stages of a business to the stages of the human life cycle, from the infancy of a startup, to the chaos of money flow without systems, to the growing profitability of early adulthood, and so on. The goal is, of course, to reach maturity, where the business can run on its own, there's work-life balance, money flow, and more.

Kiera gives listeners the common factors for each "age group," and what needs to be done for practices to reach their prime.

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Transcript:

Kiera Dent (00:00 )

Hello, Dental A Team listeners. This is Kiera and I hope you are having an amazing day. I hope it's an epic day. I hope you're loving your life. I hope you're having just so much fun. ⁓ I love dentistry. I love podcasting. I love connecting with so many of you. I just met people this week that are Dental A Team fanatics and it's always fun. And it's funny on calls when I get to chat with you in real life, people are like, Kiera, you sound just like you do on the podcast. And I'm like, that's great because guess what? It is me.

 

So I am so excited to podcast with you guys today. Welcome. If you're new to Dental A Team podcast. Hello, I'm Kiera Dent. Dent really is my last name. And it's because I love all things dental. ⁓ I love my husband, even though he's not a dentist. ⁓ I love, I just love life. I love helping people. We had a, in our consulting, we have what we call our doctor mastermind. It's a doctor only mastermind and it's on ⁓ Tuesday, the first Tuesday of the month. And we call it Think Tank Tuesday for our doctor mastermind.

 

We had all of our doctors there this week and we had several doctors come. It was just a really, really fun time. And as I was sitting there, I tell everybody that this think tank is supposed to feel like you're sitting in my living room, hanging out with me. We're all just here having like a good time. I love to see there's one doctor pushing her daughter on a swing. There was another doctor making dinner. There's another doctor sitting at the office, another doctor driving home.

 

It truly is a like, let your hair down, come be, let's come hang out, let's all be together, let's all work together. Cause honestly, dentistry can be super hard and challenging. And ⁓ as I walked away from that, we were talking about the life cycle of a business and people were just talking about where they were and here's where I am and how do I get to the next phase of my business? What are some easy moves? And it was crazy because it's actually not that hard to move from one part of the business to the next part. ⁓ A lot of times it's just having somebody pointed out to you.

 

⁓ giving you the confidence that you can do that. ⁓ And then having a group of people around you that are just like you. And as I walked out of that meeting and that just fun hangout time, there's always Kiera's after party, which is not recorded. It is Kiera unfiltered. I just thought, I'm so blessed to get to know these human beings, these people that we get to work alongside with, that we get to collaborate with. I get to see them go through all the phases of business from where they were to where they are.

 

working with us, get to see their production increase, I get to see their ROI ⁓ tenfold, I get to see how happy they are in life, I get to see when they were once stressed to where now they're exuberant and happy and fulfilled and that is why Dental A Team exists. That is why the podcast exists is because I want all of you to feel like you have ⁓ someone in your corner, someone who is rooting for you, someone who has answers where you feel like there are none, someone who sees the path more clearly than you can.

 

someone who's created a community of like-minded doctors that are either where you are or have been where you are and can help you get to the next step. We have doctors who mentor each other. have ⁓ masterminds in person. have where we come to your practice. So if you're listening to this podcast and you're feeling like, gosh, I just don't even know what to do. The answer is there's actually always the what's next to do. There's always somebody who can help you. It's just you having the courage to book the call to

 

⁓ invest in your practice in yourself and decide that you're worth having the life and the practice that you know, you're capable of having. And so if that resonates with you, reach out, come join our doctor mastermind, come meet us in person, come hang out with me in real life. I would love to have you be a part of it. ⁓ my mission truly is to change people's lives. and that's luckily I get this amazing platform of dentistry. So, reach out, Hello@TheDentalATeam.com because honestly, I believe that it is so fun and so powerful. ⁓

 

to go from that. And so I teased out a little bit of a life cycle of a business. This came from Tony Robbins. I really love Tony. I love a lot of things that he teaches and ⁓ there's a lot of wisdom. so just to kind of to take this on for the podcast today, I feel like, hey, we talked about this in our Dr. Mastermind, but I think it'd be very beneficial for all of you to hear. And this is my adaptation of it to take it to dental offices and kind of then giving you some of the things that I see in a practice so you can kind of understand.

 

But basically we have kind of like think about the life cycle of human beings. It's where we start out as infancy. We're born into this world and then we're infants and then we're toddlers. And then we go into this like middle life, like middle school. And then we go into high school and then we go into young adults. So college or young adult. Then we go into maturity or our prime of our life. Then we go into this kind of midlife evaluation. That's right before we retire. Then we go into aging. Then we go into institutionalization and then we go to death.

 

So we think about how people go around and it's interesting because there could be say a 25 year old, 30 year old, 40 year old who actually could be on the aging path even though their age is not where you would think that they would be. And so the idea of this is to kind of look to see based on like a life cycle of us where your business is and what maybe is like the pain point. So when we look at a business and we look at like children, so an infant,

 

They're screaming, right? They're screaming all the time. Yes, they're alive. Yes, they're there, but they're screaming and they're hungry and they don't know how to make money and they always have all these problems and it just feels like it's problem after problem after problem. That's like when you first start a business and it is chaos and it is exuberant and it is blissful and it is terrifying. Like Tiff and I were actually joking about it when we were on our doctor mastermind and we were talking about how like Dental A Team when it was in its infancy stage.

 

I literally was paying Tiffanie via Venmo. I did not have any payroll set up. I don't know why Tiff stayed with me. So Spiffy Tiffy shout out to her today. ⁓ But I really truly was such a naive business owner. I did not have protocols. I did not have a lawyer. I didn't have HR. I just said, I want to be here in this world and put something together, but no processes, no systems. It was screaming mayhem all the time. And then you go from that infancy stage to toddler, right? Toddlers, they can sleep through the night.

 

They're more independent. They can reason on certain things, but they're not this middle schooler, right? ⁓ And so when we look at that toddler that like they're going to elementary school, they're kind of in that middle stage. This is now where a business has elevated. It's not like paying people via Venmo, ⁓ but you still don't have the cash flow to be able to hire great people. It's still this like very new. You probably have one or two people. Practices that are in this realm are more the

 

the startup phase. So startup is like your very infancy, whether you're buying it or if it's a scratch start or you already have it. But it's kind of that screaming and then you move into toddler where like we can