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So imagine this, a young mother, no college wants to be an entrepreneur, has a concept that's never been done before. She has no experience, and she goes from one location successfully to 150 locations in a decade and sells it for $255 million. Who am I describing? I'm describing Allie Webb, the dynamic founder of Drybar. She's also been now a guest on Shark Tank. She's an author, she's founded other companies such as Squeeze and The Messy Collective, and she's got a website, allie webb.com. What an amazing story. And so many parallels to what it might be like as a dentist or an entrepreneurial CEO that has this vision that starts with it, it works, and now wants to expand. So stick around today after my interview for what I like to call the dental download, where I take lessons from today's interview and I apply them to everyday life as a dentist and as a practice owner. So the things we spoke about in this episode, how do they specifically relate to what we do as a dental CEO? In the second part of this episode, you will hear just exactly that, the dental download. This is definitely a great episode to listen to here on the Dental CEO podcast. And I'm your host, Scott Leune.

All right, Allie. So again, thank you so much for joining us on the Dental CEO podcast, and I've actually been really looking forward to this interview specifically because your journey can mirror a bit of what dentists and really successful entrepreneurial dentists are experiencing as they go to multiple locations. So thank you again for joining us.

Alli Webb: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Scott Leune: So in case there are some listeners that aren't familiar with your story, and I know you get asked this all the time when people talk to you, but could you also give us kind of the really short to the point summary of your journey, your business journey or your life journey? Anything you want to do right now to kind of educate our listeners so that they have an idea of who you are and what you've done?

Alli Webb: Well, my life journey would take a long time, but I can tell you Drybar, which it depends on who's listening to this. I feel like at this point a lot of men know what it is, but it's mostly, obviously it was very targeted towards women, but Dry Bar itself is a chain really of blow dry bars. So we kind of took one piece out of a very traditional hair salon and created an amazing experience from top to bottom for just the blowout. And it was just a real niche and something that women really wanted, maybe didn't know that they wanted. And just creating the experience and the price point made it something that very quickly we kind of realized we weren't just selling blowouts, we were selling the happiness and confidence that you get from a great blowout and just capturing that moment a great experience, which takes so much to do, is kind of how drive art came to be. My parents were entrepreneurs, so I kind of have entrepreneurial blood, also very big on customer service, which is a huge part of the success of Drybar, I believe. But yeah, I mean in a nutshell that's what Drybar was. I sold it when we were at about 150 locations, so I'm no longer involved, but yeah, 10 years it was my baby.

Scott Leune: Did you birth this baby? Was location one, was this whole idea of focusing just on that, was that all your vision?

Alli Webb: Yeah, I mean, I've been a hairstylist since I was in my early twenties and fast forward to, I met my first husband when I lived in New York and we moved to LA and had our first son. My boys are now 17 and 20. So I started, I was a stay at home mom and felt really grateful that I was able to do that, but after about five years of that, I was like, oh God, I have to get back to work. And I just missed doing something for myself. So I started a mobile blowout business because I always loved the blowout portion of doing a haircut when I was working in a traditional salon. And so I started this mobile business, this mobile business in la, and I was only charging $40 because I thought two 20. It was easy and affordable. And what that insight led to was ultimately Drybar because what I realized is there was just this massive hole in the marketplace for women to go to a place for just a blowout at an affordable price because women were already doing it and figuring it out, going to their cotton color salon, but overpaying or going to the discount chain and the experience is bad.

There was just nothing quite drybar. And so I kind of set out to figure this out and really not having any idea it would take off the way it did. It was also in 2009, so it was on the tail end of a recession and it was always just meant to be me and my one little shop. My kids were three and five, and so I thought we were like, maybe this works, maybe it doesn't, but it did.

Scott Leune: Yeah, it kind of reminds me of at one point in the past if you wanted something like Botox, you'd go to maybe a dermatologist or plastic surgeon. People started taking just these certain procedures and making 'em really accessible. Great experience made. Well,

Alli Webb: I think Drybar was really at the forefront of that. And it's interesting because I grew up with a very vain mother and every weekend we were at the hair salon and she would get her nails done, she'd get her color done, you could do 10 things there, and a dry bar was really first of its kind to isolate out a service. And to your point, brow Bar started popping up. I mean, I guess really to be fair, nail salons were the first. It's like there's a nail salon on every corner and you only get a mecu and pedicure and that's it. And Dry Bar came along and did that to hair. Whereas then it started this kind of chain of effect where it was like lashes, brows, like Botox. People started coming up with these more very single services, which I think will change. Again, just like anything else, the pendulum swings back and forth

Scott Leune: In dentistry. We've seen it go from a general dentist doing everything to now you've got dentist focused specifically on cosmetic dentistry or specifically on even Invisalign type therapies, things like that. So if we go back to, okay, location one, you've got location one and you're kind of honing in on the product and the service. I'm assuming you're learning a lot. You're learning how to market it, you're learning how to manage it and operate it, how to make it profitable. Can you talk a little bit about that time that just figuring out location number one?

Alli Webb: Well, I mean the Brentwood location, the first location in LA was very strategic to where my mobile business was because I was operating this mobile business between the Palisades and Brentwood and Santa Monica. And where we opened specifically in Brentwood was on San Vicente, which if you know the area, it's quite the thoroughfare. And we thought the branding and everything was so unique with Drybar that we wanted that thoroughfare because we wanted people to be able to see it. But from a marketing perspective, it was such a new idea, even though blowouts have been around forever back to we just were doing this one thing and we were going to focus on it and be the best at it. And it was a new category within a multi-billion dollar industry. And obviously we just focused on blowouts, but it was everything around it that the branding, I always felt like got people in the door.

The customer service was a big part of the overall experience. And then just like every touch point we had in the shops, which it's funny because I know you didn't ask this, but I think it's interesting how behind, and it's fascinating to me that the medical industry hasn't gotten this yet, and some have, but medical dentistry, it's so clinical and you feel so clinical when you're in those places, even if you're getting your teeth redone or you're getting plastic surgery or whatever it is. I've done certain things over the years and I very much choose an aesthetic of an office not so it's interesting to me just in every business, and this is kind of the lens that I looked through when we were developing Drybar, it's like, what do I want it to be? How do I want it to feel and look and smell and all the things?

And I think a lot of businesses that, I think the reason that most businesses actually don't make it is because they don't pay close enough to the detail and they're kind of just doing it the way it's always been done, which was really the case with hair salons in general. When we were concepting dry bar, it was like we looked around to see what do most hair salons do? And I grew up in this industry, so I knew they were all very similar, kind of black and white, dark and smoky, and all the hairstyles brought their own stuff in. And I was like, we're not going to do it, anything like that. We're going to make it bright and sunny and bright and yellow. And I got all the tools and stuff for all the stylists so that there was consistency and it looked and felt a certain way. So I mean, there are so many things and PR and all of that too, but there was just so many things about dry Bar that stood out that no one had really ever done before, which was really just what I wanted as a consumer. And I really led with that kind of vision to turn it into what we did.

Scott Leune: Yeah, you're preaching to the choir right now. We have a huge belief in what we call the patient experience. How can we trust a plastic surgeon who doesn't have a good enough taste to have a beautiful aesthetically pleasing lobby? How can we trust a dentist to be modern when their aesthetic isn't modern? How can we trust them to have even be detail oriented about the patient experience if they haven't taken the time to make sure that a

Alli Webb: Hundred

Scott Leune: Percent everything looks and feels and smells and sounds the right way? So yeah, I totally get it. So you've got this concept and it's your vision, it's your baby. You kind of tested it with the mobile, you put it in an ideal location, got the marketing, got the brand, you've got the pr. You've got this kind of uniformity around the customer experience and it's working and you say, we need to expand to more locations. So talk about that. When we go from one to more, do we go from one to two? Do we go from one to 10?

Alli Webb: Well, I mean, the thing about it is we were busting at the seams, and that was a great problem to have, but nonetheless, a problem. We were like the hot club you couldn't get into. So we really, if we were going to grow this thing, and as it was, we had so many copycats on our tail very quickly, but we knew that we had to open more locations to meet all the demand, which again, an amazing problem to have. So within six months we opened our second location, which by the way felt like a lifetime back then, but we very quickly mobilized because there was so much demand and we just couldn't meet it all in that one age here shop. So we opened the second one and the third one, I mean, we were just like, we couldn't open them fast enough because people wanted a dry bar near them everywhere. So yeah, I mean, it was fast and furious because we just felt like it was exciting. We wanted people wanted them. So we were kind of on this rocket ship just opening more and more.

Scott Leune: And who owned the locations that were opened? Were they owned by a local stylist? Were they all owned by you or the company or

Alli Webb: How? Oh no, they were all ours. Yeah. I mean, we would lease out the locations, but it was all our company. Oh God, yeah. I can't imagine another side was owned them. But yeah, no, was we formed a company and was all of them are ours. We did get into early conversations about franchising them, which I was actually pretty against in the early days. And my brother, who's my business partner, we wanted to open as many locations as we could and we didn't really have the capital to do it. We actually had to raise money. We did friends and friends and family around. There was about 3 million. And then we raised about 26 million in private equity, about seven or eight stores in maybe, but we were really bootlegging it, but it was the first 10 or so were ours. But then we had a good friend who lived in Dallas and they opened the first franchisees and we were very, very, very particular about who we would award a franchise to because the experience was so special and had to be kept intact.

And I can really make the argument for both sides. I mean, franchisees can be great, they can be horrific. So it's like you're giving your baby over to somebody who is an entrepreneur in their own, and they have their own ideas and thoughts of things that they want to do. And for me, it was very important that the brand stayed very intact, and I felt like we had built this love brand and I didn't want someone to be like, oh, let's try this and let's try this. And you only have so much control over franchisees. So it was interesting, but it did get us to more s stores more quickly and helped us grow our footprint quicker. We could have organically.

Scott Leune: So when you sold, it was 250 plus million, 150 locations, but of those 150 locations, how many ended up being franchise stores versus corporate stores?

Alli Webb: Yeah, it was probably 70, 70 ish were company owned and the rest were franchised. And we franchised in smaller cities like Louisville and Arizona, but we owned New York, la, Boston, Chicago, the big cities. We owned those. And again, I can make the argument for both because it was one thing to own LA and there was probably 25, and that's where I live. And so it was easier to control when we were in Boston and New York and DC and it was so hard really, if you don't have an owner operator on the ground, you have a manager who you're hoping is going to do what needs to be done. And we had district managers and regional managers and all that, but it's hard to run a company from afar. It's a lot of oversight and a lot, whereas if you have a great franchisee owner operator in that market, they have skin in the game. So it's interesting. What's better or worse, it's hard to say.

Scott Leune: So the 3 million friends and family round, how many locations did that get you to?

Alli Webb: Oh gosh, probably four. Four-ish, five.

Scott Leune: Those locations, were you kind of the regional manager yourself or did you start

Alli Webb: Pretty much, yeah, I mean we started to bring on people. I mean, I think really we brought on more marketing people before we brought on, I hired a manager in our first shop in Brentwood, and then we had two or three stores that I was kind of overseeing that had managers, and I was kind of the district manager. And again, it was like LA so I could pop around to all the stores when we realized this is going to be much harder to operate. It was when we started to go outside of LA and we were like, we need a lot more help to really not screw this thing up.

Scott Leune: So if we focus on before PE money, so you've got four or five locations, of course you were needing capital before that you got friends and family to put money in. So there's all that pressure too, of it's their money and you're having to do something that's never been done before and open these stores. And you haven't spent a whole career opening stores for other companies. So this was also new to you. What was life like popping into four or five different brand new stores trying to manage this growth?

Alli Webb: And also we were open seven days a week, so it was like it never shut off. And no, I mean, my kids were so young at the time too, and I was traveling to up the stores once we started to do that, but I guess that was actually before. But yeah, God, I felt like I was traveling a lot, but that probably happened later. But yeah, I mean there was not much of a life outside of Drybar. I mean, it was so all encompassing. I mean because like I said, the stores were open seven days a week, so it was never like, oh, the store's closed. I can take a day. I didn't take a day for many, many years. And it was going from Drybar to home to my kids and then back from my kids to the stores. And I would say for the first six months even, I don't think even I took one day off.

And also I didn't want to, which I don't recommend, but I loved, it was so intoxicating and it was just so crazy and awesome at what was happening. And so I really wanted to be there every second. It was so exciting. And then not to mention all the cool PR and TV stuff we were doing, it was just, it was really exciting. And yeah, I mean I don't think I really took much of a break in those days. I was just on pure adrenaline for so long as we were opening them up. I'm not recommending that. I don't know that that was overall great for me, but it was exciting nonetheless.

Scott Leune: Well, I'd love to ask some kind of deeper questions about you, if that's okay. Sure. This might be an easy one, but when you've worked with, you've now been exposed to very successful people. You had a private equity group fund, you, I'm sure you had to build out a management or leadership team, and you now are probably approached by other opportunities. And when you're in these rooms with other successful people and they look at you, what strength or superpower do you think that you are known for in their eyes? Why do they want to work with you? Why are you at the table? What superpower do you feel like you have having gone through this experience?

Alli Webb: Yeah, I mean, I think that it's not an easy task and certainly not lost on me Taking something from an idea to inception to execution and success and selling it. That's really hard to do. And I think, so I think that gets me in the room a lot because I took this idea that was relatively simple and I mentioned the copycats because there really was a secret sauce with dry bar. And I think that when you look at what, it wasn't just me, it was my partners and the team, and I get all the credit for it, but certainly it was a team effort for sure. But you look at something like dry bar and the success and the love and how amazing it was. And I imagine that my thought would be that people look at that, wow, that's not an easy thing to do that we did.

It doesn't happen every day. And I believe that that was mean. Probably the most humbling and best title or I guess superpower is someone could say about me is being a visionary. Because I do think that there are so many touch points that I could rattle off to you that I really believe made Drybar successful. And there wasn't one, it was many things that had to so many details that went into making it successful. And I think that if you didn't have any of those, the whole thing doesn't work. So it's being able to look at something and see the greatness in it and how you make it great. And again, going back to my earlier example, it's like when I look at a lot of businesses and I see so many things missing, whether it's their customer service or the cleanliness of the shopper, how they operate, there's just so many things.

And I think that that's a superpower that I have is so detail oriented. So I'm able to look at something and say it's like a blessing and a curse because I can't go into any place and not be like, oh my God, that this could be so much better. Why isn't anybody paying attention to this? So I think that's what probably gets me in the room and probably why I get asked to be advisor, to be an advisor on different boards and things like that because, and I am not afraid to say what I think. I'm a pretty bold person. I'm super decisive. I say what I think and this is what it is, and sometimes I'm wrong. But I would say that that is having probably more than visionaries is probably that intense attention to detail.

Scott Leune: Yeah. Would I be correct in describing the situation a bit here where you had this vision of something that hadn't been done before and you could see where it might end up, but not until you started with one with four, with 10 with franchisees. Did you start understanding what might've been an unending list of riddles you had to solve as you went forward and forward? And because you stayed visionary, because you're so detail oriented and super decisive, that meant that you were solving riddles quickly to stay on that vision?

Alli Webb: Yeah, I mean, I think that you have to enjoy as an entrepreneur, I think you have to enjoy what we would've affectionately referred to as whack-a-mole that you are constantly putting out fires, to your point, constantly solving problems, constantly having to be nimble and move and figure things out. And frankly, I think that's why after I was doing an interview earlier saying somebody asked me if I was ready to be done, I was like, yeah, I was ready to be done because it was very much rinse and repeat and I felt like I had kind of done what I needed to do because of course there's all these new problems, but in those first couple of years, it was much figuring out and every time we opened a new store, there was learning from the previous store of like, oh, we should do this different next assignment.

Oh, we should do this. So it was constantly learning those first. I mean, you're always learning for sure, but Drybar did kind of become rinse and repeat. It's like we knew it was a very simple concept, but it was a lot of execution for it to feel and look really simple. But I think as an entrepreneur, you have to enjoy, and not everybody does the constant barrage and parade of people. Something's always coming to you. I mean, it's like you're constantly bracing yourself for what's the next problem, and you kind have to enjoy that to be able to be successful, I think. Yeah, I mean I am glad I'm not in that as much as I was anymore. It was really like, holy shit, what's coming next?

Scott Leune: So I've got another question for you. In our industry, there's a lot of very educated, very analytical people. They have this dream though of entrepreneurship and wealth, but they get stuck in this kind of over analysis, so intellectual, this over analysis, and they don't seem to take this kind of uncomfortable leap forward to do the next thing. What might you say to someone that's like that they want this entrepreneurial journey to start, but they're so analytical and educated that they just don't seem to take that first step?

Alli Webb: Oh man. I mean, listen, being an entrepreneur isn't for everyone. And I know that I have had many people on my team like that who get stuck in analysis paralysis and they can't make a decision, which I think is why I brought up my decisiveness because for me, it is just my kind of natural, let's just jump and see what happens. And I am not afraid of failure, I'm not afraid of risk. And I think if you can't get yourself to that and listen, not everybody should be an entrepreneur. I mean, I think it's like I actually like having people on my team who get really geek out on the data because you need that too, for that person to become an entrepreneur and to throw caution to the wind, it's a real choice. And you have to really get yourself to that place knowing that you might fail, knowing you might lose money, and it's part of how much risk can you stomach?

And if you can't, then you don't want to be an entrepreneur. I mean, for me, I always felt like if this whole thing doesn't work, no one's going to die. We'll all pick ourselves back up and go get jobs or go do whatever. But there's a famous, I think it's a Kobe Bryant or some basketball player. I know I should know this, but you don't get the shots. You don't take something like that. I'm butchering this, but you know what I mean? It's like you just never know if you don't try. And I think there's the fun in that. I mean, again, that's just my risk level is pretty high.

Scott Leune: And if you're a dentist and the entrepreneurial venture doesn't work out, your fallback plan is you make at least $200,000 a year as dentist. So yeah, walk, I've got another question for you. And now maybe this comes from your operational experiences running locations, but if you were a business coach, if you were coaching a small business owner, like a dentist who was struggling with mediocre profits but hard days, they got employee issues, they got the ups and downs of running the company, it is just they're stuck in this mediocre kind of profit world. What might you tell them or if you were to buy a business like that? So it's stressful, they're trying, just struggling to get enough money coming in and there's a little bit of profit there, but everything's kind of hard. They just feel stuck. They feel stuck on being this owner of a practice or an owner of a salon that's just not taking off. They thought, what might you tell them?

Alli Webb: Well, I think it's taking, bringing somebody to help you take a real hard look at your company, your business, what's working and what's not working. And in a situation like that, I would bet that there's a lot of things that aren't working. I mean, if you are not making much of a profit, the customer or the employees aren't really happy. There's so many things wrong. I guarantee there's so many things wrong with whatever's. Of course we're talking in hypotheticals, but when all these things aren't working together, it means that somebody's not focusing on the right thing. They don't have down what people really want. The employees are disgruntled not happy, the experience is off. The customer service probably sucks. It, it's again, I'm sure it's everything, not one thing. You know what I mean? And being able to isolate out what is it that makes us unique and special, which is always the advice I give to budding entrepreneurs or people on mentoring.

It's like, you could open a coffee shop, but why am I more compelled to go to yours than the one down the street? And I don't know the answer to that, but that's what you have to figure out. And so it's the same thing in this scenario. If there's, chances are there's many things going wrong and nobody is looking at it with a discerning enough eye and especially the owner because it's so personal to the owner. And if you can't, a lot of people cannot take negative feedback. I am very good at taking negative feedback. Wasn't always, but I learned that feedback is a gift. And if I were in that situation, I'd be digging in to see what's working, what's not working, and I'd be analyzing the shit out of this to see why. Because there's definitely a reason if you can figure it out.

But again, my hunch and my instinct on something like that scenario is that there's a lot of things going wrong and nobody's ballsy enough to say what it is, and everyone's kind of hiding from the truth of what's going on and someone needs to step up and say, Hey, this and this isn't working. There's always a reason even when you're successful. I mean even with Drybar, I mean I was so crazy about if there was one person who complained about something and that was it, I was like, where there smoke, there's fire. And if there's one person who's upset about this, chances are there's at least 10 other people who are too. And if my team ever tried to protect me from a negative response or feedback, I'd be like, no, no, no. I hate surrounding myself with yes people. I'm like, no, no, tell me. I want to know because that's how you get better. And a lot of owners or entrepreneurs will kind of hide themselves in this bubble of, I don't want to know and just let my team deal with it. And then you never get better and you never improve. So you have to also have a very tough skin, which again, I didn't always have, but I learned very quickly that I had to know what was working and what wasn't, so I could be really intentional about the overall experience.

Scott Leune: In the last little bit of time we have left, well, maybe we can make this the last question just out of out of time sake here. Maybe a deeper question. Let's say one of your kids said, I want to be an entrepreneur. I want to be an entrepreneur and have lots of locations of this kind of idea I have. And you know how it is with our kids. Not every day the door opens. They will listen to us and listen to our advice, but you have a day where your child opens the door and says, could you give me some advice about this journey? I know that's a deep question, but what might be one or two things you would tell your child that said, I think I want to do this too?

Alli Webb: Yeah, I mean that is my children, they're very entrepreneurial in spirit, especially my older son. What I've told my kids, which I guess is somewhat my path, they're so young that I'm like, go learn as much as you can about the things that you're interested in. One of my sons is getting, I mean, he's had so many ideas and he's always trying different things, which I really encourage. I'm like, go do that. Go learn about that. Go learn about this. I mean, it was very much my path. I mean, I didn't go to college. I moved to New York City when I was 18 and I worked at different jobs and I tried different things and I felt like that was my college and that was my figuring out what I wanted to do, which changed a lot. There was definitely a lot of scrutiny on me for that.

Like, oh, what's Allie doing now? I was kind of like, everybody was very worried about me landing on my feet, but I think just instinctively knew that I wanted to get out in the world and try new things. So that is always my advice to my kids is go try stuff. Especially when you're young, and this may not be a popular opinion, but my kids are actually both. Well, my 17-year-old is finishing high school, but my 20-year-old went away to college for a year. He came back and just decided it wasn't for him, and he's living at home right now kind of trying to figure it out. And I'm like, listen, this is a very, very small time in your life where you don't have to really pay for anything. You can live at home and go try stuff out and go figure out what you like and kind of keep doing that.

And there'll always be time to be an entrepreneur. There'll always be time to go and start the thing that you like, but I so firmly believe our twenties are so important to learning different things and trying different things out and figuring out what you like and what you don't like and the kind of boss that you might end up being. And again, that was my path and I think it really served me well because when I started Drybar, I mean all the experience that I had from years of, I was a publicist for a while, I worked in fashion, I did all sorts of things, and I think it all really served me. So that's my advice to my kids. Just go learn and absorb as much as you can in the world and the things that you're interested in and let it kind of naturally happen and make connections and make relationships and build all that. And then I think that it'll start to make sense as you get older.

Scott Leune: Awesome. Well, Ali, thank you so much for your time today and for giving this kind of experience to dentistry. I think we're going to get a whole lot out of the things you said. I've been, I dunno if you've seen me, I've been writing a whole bunch of notes.

Alli Webb: Oh, amazing.

Scott Leune: So again, I really appreciate and it's so cool to hear about what you've done, hear what you've done when it was difficult. You were a younger mom, you didn't have the experiences and you didn't go to school for this and you had to raise money and bring private equity and have a vision to do something no one's done before. I mean, it's a truly remarkable story.

Alli Webb: Thank you. I feel like it was like a business degree on the job. I know it's crazy how much stuff I know now that I don't even know that I know until somebody asks me a question, I'm like, oh, that's how you do this. Just because we learned it all as we went, which was also really exciting. So thank you.

Scott Leune: If you like what you're hearing on the dental CEO podcast, please take a few moments to leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform and also of course, please make sure that you've subscribed so that you will be notified every time we release a new weekly episode. Thank you. Here's some of the stuff that stood out to me. One thing about Drybar is it's basically building an entire company specializing in one product or procedure. So she came from the salon world where they had a lot of different products, a lot of different procedures services they did, and she picked one and said, we're going to make an entire business around this one thing. And by doing that, she was able to create a different kind of patient experience or customer experience for that one product. She created branding for it. She created a great product, and so obviously correlating that to dentistry is easy.

As general dentists, we have all of these procedures that we know how to do, but we have seen examples in dentistry of people specializing or focusing on just a small subset of dentistry. And if we did that, if we focused on, for example, ectomies for babies or sleep apnea therapy for the elderly or full arch cases, we can be that full arch practice that does it better, does it better clinically, does it better from technology, does it better from the patient experience side and also of course can be branded as such and market well, we've seen earlier in dentistry a couple of decades ago, we saw people specializing in just short-term orthodontics and they built practices and processes and patient experiences just around that one thing. Now, that's one way to do it, but also, and I've kind of talked about this in other episodes, we could also be that kind of one type of procedure, dentist having a micro practice inside of multiple locations that we own.

We could have our own process, our own patient experience, our own technology within the realm of general dentistry, so it kind of reminds me a little bit about that as well. That's obviously not exactly what she did, but there is power in becoming amazing and branding and marketing around this one specific type of procedure, that strategy. Another thing that stood out to me is that she talked a bit about there being uniformity across multiple locations when it came to this very important customer experience and she was even laughing about how bad businesses are at customer experience and at that uniformity, what that means to me in dentistry is maybe we should pause, we should look at the patient experience room by room. How does it look? How does it feel? How does it smell? What's the technology being used? What does it sound like? What are we doing?

Can we become obsessed actually about the patient experience and if we've done that and if we've kind of elevated it above and beyond what is normal, how do we make that uniform across multiple locations? Can we it so that it is repeatable? That is one of the ingredients in her success is being obsessed about the customer experience and down to the aesthetic of it and then making it repeatable, so it was uniform across multiple locations. She talked a bit about, it was so successful that she opened location number two at six months and she had location three, four, and five from raising money from friends and family, but to get beyond that, she ran out of money. She had to go to private equity and raised 20 million, and then not only did she have to go raise money, she had to change her model. She had to introduce a franchise concept for the smaller kind of markets so that number one, it didn't take as much money, but number two, she had an operator with skin in the game and that the franchise model, while it brings other types of risks, it relieved her of as much management time per location.

That reminded me in dentistry of when we expand locations, sometimes we might have a partner model, a model that says, if I'm going to have a bunch of locations, I want to have an owner dentist on site so that someone is there managing with skin in the game. I get consistency, I don't get turnover, and that owner dentist could also help fund that location. I think there's great parallels there. Also, if I do own a location that's in a small market, man, it's hard to find new dentists in the middle of nowhere. If I am looking at a potential market or potential practice that is a smaller market, I might choose the partner path for those types of practices. Maybe you're listening to this and you have one of those practices where it's far away from any big city and it's hard to just find the next dentist and you just struggle.

Every time you lose a dentist, you end up having to be the dentist forever. Maybe that's a practice that should be on a partner model, so you have that consistency. Something else that stood out to me is when I asked her about the workload, she basically said the locations were open seven days a week, and she worked basically every day, four years, and while it was exhausting, she was also kind of passionate about it and she kind of got a high off of it. It was in a way thrilling, but she has this personality profile that says she's not scared of putting out fires, she's not scared of complaints, she is also super decisive, and so she fixes things quickly. She makes decisions quickly. That really stood out to me because I think a lot of us are in situations right now that is not invigorating.

It's not passion for us. It doesn't bring us excitement and therefore when we get bogged down by work, it crushes us. It feels stressful. It's not something we want to do. We're working for someone else, and that work is just stress, but when we're doing something new, that's like a passion project for us. It's our vision. It's an extension of kind of our thoughts and what we want. Then work doesn't feel as much like work. Work feels like passion work feels like it could fuel us and we might become obsessed about it in a positive way so that those early days of paying dues feel really good and productive, and it doesn't mean it's easy, but it's just a lot different when we're putting a lot of hours in for something we're passionate about compared to putting a lot of hours into something we're not.

That stood out to me and back to her kind of personality makeup, she used words and she said things like she was a visionary, she was detail oriented but also super decisive and doesn't mind putting out fires, and she said, you have to be decisive to be an entrepreneur. You just have to jump and see what happens. The way I took that is there's only so much we can know ahead of time. There's only so much we can prepare for, but the best entrepreneurs maybe just move without knowing everything and they're decisive enough that they're figuring it out along the way. They move and then there's the first riddle to solve and they solve it, and then there's the next riddle to solve and they solve it and it's almost like this not big emotional kind of train wreck that can happen. Instead, it's an invigorating puzzle, and so if we wait until we have all the answers, we'll never move forward.

She said, jump, see what happens and then be decisive and don't mind putting out fires. She also said constantly be learning. That stands out to me because as we are moving forward and putting out these fires and growing every phase of growth requires us as a CEO to be a new version of ourselves, and so we got to learn. We got to learn what is needed of ourselves, how to solve these riddles and how to be the next version of ourselves. The person we are as an associate is different than the person we have to become as an owner, which is different than the person we have to become as a profitable owner, which is different than the person we have to become as an owner of two or three or four or 10 locations and we just keep having to learn and learn and elevate who we've become.

She talked about, I asked her what advice would you give someone that's kind of stuck, that's kind of stuck. Maybe they own the practice, the practice is wearing them down, they're having staffing issues, they're having profit issues. What advice would you give someone? She could have said cut expenses. She could have said, get more patients or customers or get better employees. No, what she said instead, which was a really cool thing to hear her say is she said in that situation, when you're stuck, you need to bring someone in from the outside to take a look at what you're doing, a hard look and help you find new solutions, help you see what's actually not working and give you the solutions on how to change that. Because she said, as an owner we kind of have tunnel vision. This is our baby and we don't see everything we need to see.

We need to bring someone in from the outside. That of course made me happy as someone that coaches people. I'm that person that's brought in from the outside for people. It's also connected with me in my own career. It's why I've almost always had business partners or at least consultants because that outside view is in my career at least, is more valuable than any inside thing. I try to do more of that outside view can completely change the direction I'm pointing and can make the path a lot easier than anything. I just try to do myself more of. See, success for me sometimes comes from doing something different instead of doing the regular thing faster or more of it, having more profit doesn't mean doing what we do quicker or more often. Having more profit so often means a new thing, a shift, a fundamental shift, and it's hard to see those shifts without the perspective of someone coming in from the outside.

Another thing that she mentioned is that when there is a complaint, she loves negative feedback, that it's a gift. She called it that when one person is complaining it might represent 10 or more other people feeling that same thing. Those complaints are gifts to lead us to the riddles we need to solve to go to the next step and emotionally though I know at least I don't necessarily like hearing a complaint. I think it's natural for our team when they hear a complaint to kind of justify their position to try to almost minimize a complaint or try to make it seem like it's unreasonable, but there's truth behind those complaints. Somewhere in there, there's a truth that likely applies to a lot of other patients or a lot of other employees and we need to be very mindful and have an open ear to those complaints in a positive way and look at them as a gift.

I talked to her about her company and she kept bringing up this kind of view that says, we need to know what makes us unique and special. That was at the foundation of introducing dry bar and maybe it's easy to talk about what makes you unique and special when you're doing something that's brand new that no one's ever done before, but how do we talk about that if we're a general dental practice, what makes us unique and special? If we don't force ourselves to passionately communicate that, then we get maybe commoditized with the rest of the general dentistry world and now choices have more to do with insurance or convenience of hours or things like that, but if we can somehow force ourselves to identify and then label what makes us unique and special and that label, that identification becomes the foundation of a huge communications push, a huge marketing push, it becomes kind of our personality.

I believe that we will attract the people we need and wants and we will be free of a commoditization that can happen in dentistry. Lastly, I asked at the very end about what advice she would give or what she would tell her kids if her kids said they wanted to be an entrepreneur and where I was hoping she would go is a parallel that we could then use for ourselves. What would we tell a young dentist or what would we tell any dentist actually that hasn't started their entrepreneurial journey yet? What would we tell them to do? She said, learn as much as you can, have as many outside experiences and learning moments as you can because in her path, all of those learning moments served her well for her company. For Drybar. What I've noticed is that the more we learn, the more clearly we can see how to take a path forward and the more confidence we get to leap and to jump and see what happens without learning, without having at least a fundamental amount of knowledge, then it can seem overwhelming.

It can see daunting. It can seem so scary and risky, the unknown, the fear of the unknown. It's a lot of fear because there's a lot of unknown, but if we can go to seminars and events and be mentored or have a coach, if we can read and listen, if we can learn every moment, every ounce of learning adds up to pounds of information and maybe tons of confidence, we then gain to take that next leap without knowing where we're going to land without quite knowing exactly what's going to be required of us. Of course, that learning also condenses the timeline of success. That learning and all those experiences take this really windy, crazy path of success that we might have to take and straightens it out a bit and loops it around a bit so that we get to the end faster. Learning to me is one of the core foundations of successful entrepreneurs.

They never stop learning. You heard other people I interviewed such as Terry Jones and Josh Linkner talk about learning. You heard Damon John talk about learning. They're all mentioning learning the constant path of knowledge. I hope that if you're listening to this as a dentist, that you go become a master of learning on the business side and on the clinical side because we better have great patient care and we better have great profit. Otherwise, this whole thing we're calling a dental career is just not working, so let's become masters of learning on the clinical side and masters of learning on the business side, and it's amazing how many problems are solved in our life when we are proud of the dentistry we're doing and we are fulfilled with the profit margins we're bringing in. It's amazing how we start becoming free to make great decisions inside and outside of dentistry when we have the foundation of great clinical care and great profit.

That brings me to the end of this episode with Ally Webb, founder of Drybar here with the Dental CEO podcast. Please subscribe if you haven't already. Please post a comment or a review about this episode so we can help get the word out. We want to tell it like it is. We want to bring people within and outside of dentistry to help us get to the laws and the truths of business and becoming a great CEO. Help me on this mission, help us spread the word with this podcast. I'm your host Scott Leune, and I'll see you next time on the Dental CEO Podcast.