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Welcome to the Dental CEO podcast. My name is Scott Leune and I'm excited for today's episode, our interview with Terry Jones. Terry Jones is the founder of travelocity.com, a company that had 3 billion in sales. Then he also co-founded kayak.com, which was sold for $1.8 billion. He's a speaker, he's an author, a venture capitalist. He's an expert on ai. He's written books on disruption and innovation. He is a very accomplished entrepreneur and a seasoned CEO. This is definitely an episode to listen to the dental CEO podcast today with Terry Jones. 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. So Terry, thank you again for joining us on the dental CEO podcast.

Terry Jones: My pleasure to be here.

Scott Leune: Now, before we dive into the business questions and leadership questions and things, I'd like to ask you a dental thing. I'd like to know, when you think of the dental industry from the business standpoint or even from a patient standpoint or if you know people in dentistry, what is your take on it? What's your general view? What do you think about when you think of dentistry?

Terry Jones: Well, I'd say as a patient and also I'm a public speaker and I've spoken to several dental audiences, I'd say a surprising amount of technical advancement. It's an industry that's changing obviously and business changes going on. But to me, we had a new dentist in my town. I live in a small town incline village, Nevada, up in the mountains. And one of the ways when he came in as a new dentist in town, he broke in was by doing scanning and basically 3D printing or CNC of fillings so that you didn't have to come back two or three times and several other things that sort of set 'em apart from the old line dentists. And of course I lecture about innovation and digital disruption and change. So I had him out to coffee and talk to him about it because I was impressed. And that goes along with any industry that's changing, but as a patient, I loved

Scott Leune: It. Yeah, so you mentioned scanning. So there's digital scanning and then we could take that digital scan and either mill a restoration or we can 3D print, we could even 3D print, kind of those clear aligners that you wear to straighten your teeth. There's also AI happening now on x-rays where we've got machine learning, helping diagnose what's there and also helping communicate to patients what's there. So it's easier to understand. We've got AI happening on phones right now, listening to calls, highlighting opportunities, AI happening on even dealing with insurance companies and mining data, patient data so we can get it back.

Terry Jones: Oh, there's tons of it. It's really particularly in the area of scanning and image analysis, very big even in just answering the phone and allowing people to schedule their appointments and providing customer service, it's still pretty terrible in the airline business, which I've been in forever. You're always screaming agent, agent, agent, but you don't have to because the tools are there.

Scott Leune: Yeah. Well, I want to give you a quick couple of statistics for you. Again, dive into the business questions I've got prepared for you. But in dentistry, a lot of growth happens in a individual dental practice depending on how many new patients decide to join that practice in any given month. And when you look at the new patients that come in, almost all new patients come in through a phone call still and out of every a hundred new patient phone calls, a whole lot of those are missed. And then the ones that are answered are mishandled. You only end up with 29 appointments out of a hundred phone calls on average, and that's a massive opportunity. That

Terry Jones: Sounds like a website.

Scott Leune: Yeah, so AI agents or even just AI analysis to help live agents handle those calls is a big opportunity. And that's just one tiny little,

Terry Jones: Well insert them, you have an appointment today and you've got a problem versus you're an inquiry, you're a current patient. Classification is something that's very easy for voice apps to do and make a real difference in terms of providing the right service at the right moment.

Scott Leune: Dentistry is actually bigger than the NBA and the NFL combined and growing at a very high rate and innovating, at least we feel kind of these changes are happening, these positive changes are also happening at a high rate. So it's an interesting time right now in dentistry. Well, I'd like to dive into some questions. Some of these questions, a lot of these questions are about you personally because instead of having you tell kind of the timeline, that story of for example, the Travelocity and the kayak and some of the things like that, I'd really like to peek into your mind a bit more. One question I'd like to start with is if your life is laid out in different chapters, you've got the earlier days, Travelocity days, so forth, these different chapters. What's the title of this next chapter you're on? What's that about? Where do you see?

Terry Jones: Well, I think now it's really about how can I give back. I've been very successful, I've been blessed, and so I give back as a speaker I think in sharing my story and also sharing my views on innovation and digital disruption. And one of the things that's fun about being a speaker is I see so many different industries. So yes, I spoke to the dental industry, but last week I spoke to the Furniture marketing Association, and this week I'm speaking to the mining association. And what's fun is to learn a lot about each industry as you speak. I talk about my speech being a jelly donut. I fill it with different things depending on the audience, but the structure's kind of the same. And then sharing examples from one industry to the other and kind of pollinating their ideas. And I do an awful lot of, I've served on 20 boards of directors, so I do a lot of board work and I think I can be helpful there, but I also do a lot of mentoring of startups. So I had startups to make new mistakes, not the ones I made. And so I do mentoring. I'm a chairman of an AI company with a new CEO and hopefully his mentor in a good way. So it is really about hopefully taking my experience, still learning about new things, speaking to the mining guys, about ai. And I had an AI company 10 years ago, so I know something about it. It is really about giving back today.

Scott Leune: And if someone wanted to learn about the speaking you're doing, would your website terry jones.com, is that a good place for them?

Terry Jones: Yeah, terry jones.com and it's got all the videos and the various things I speak about innovation, digital disruption, ai or the key ones today. And I also mix those topics, so terry jones.com and you can also there by my books if you want.

Scott Leune: I saw some videos on that site. I encourage everyone to go to that and to watch some of these videos. One thing I saw, I heard you say, and one of your videos was the last 25 years were about building the cheapest where the next 25 years are going to be about building the smartest. Could you talk a little bit on that concept?

Terry Jones: Yeah, I think we've seen offshoring price dropping the China effect, all of that in driving down cost and therefore the ability to drive down price. But now when I talk about AI, for example, to the mining industry next this week, sure, I'll talk about GPT and all those things, but it's really about how do you build AI into your product? As we just talked about in dentistry. How do you make your product smarter? And having had an AI company 10 years ago and now chairman of one, again, to me the most important thing about AI is these are learning systems. They are learning 24 by seven by 365 and getting smarter. And so if your competitor has a learning system in their products or in their business and you don't, how are you going to catch up? How are you going to get there? Certainly some of that is open data, open AI is learning, that's fine.

But the most important solutions are going to be billed. And I just was on a Zoom talking about this with another company where I'm an advisor combining public data like OpenAI, industry data, like the data from the American Dental Association that analyzes all your practices and then corporate data, your own data, your patient data, and your knowledge as a dentist, what have you learned and how do you wrap those together into a new product? John Deere for example's, news tractors are very, very smart. There are all kinds of screens in these tractors now, and it's identifying weeds and micro putting weed killer on them. It's learning where your farm needs more water. It's learning where your farm needs more fertilizer, it's learning how to self-drive on your farm. And once the tractor has learned all that, are you going to go buy a messy Ferguson that doesn't know your farm? I doubt it. And that's true with so many products that are going to personalize and be smarter and be much more helpful to us than products have been in the past.

Scott Leune: Yeah, it kind of makes me think if I'm going back to dental, the scanning of x-rays, there's AI now that is saying, Hey, we're looking at older you took and we find things that you might've missed that you didn't diagnose. We can't see 'em in your software, so maybe you missed this disease over here. And then we're taking that kind of learned moment and now automating the communication with the patient and with the team to bring the patient in and have the team take a look at that, and even the communication back and forth has this kind of machine learning component to it. If we don't answer that phone,

Terry Jones: I'll give you an example from the pet world. So my dog is a wanderer, so he has a GPS collar and fine, it works great, used it for years, I can track him when he takes off. And then they added some detail because of collars on all the time, just like we all wear a smart watch about licking, scratching, drinking, sleeping and eating. It was sort of interesting to me, but I didn't really monitor it. Now they put a wrapper around it and they proactively, the apple come and say, Winston is office food. He's not drinking and he's scratching a lot. Would you like to press a button and talk to a vet? So in real time I can talk to a vet and get a diagnose, probably not the vet I have because the collar is going somewhere else. So the collar just became lead gen for the vet.

If I was a vet, I'd give 'em away. So in doctor meetings that I've had and speaking, physicians are talking about the diagnostic phase is changing dramatically because physiologically I'm wearing a watch that has my heartbeat, my oxygen, my sleep, all kinds of stuff. Now we don't have a dental implant doing that for the health of our teeth yet. But as you say, was is looking at past X-rays at KLM airlines, they're flying a drone over the airplane that's had hail damage. Well, they don't have to have somebody watching it. It's just comparing what is and saying, Hey, here's where you got a hole in the airplane or a dent because of hail. So is on the x-rays, same kind of thing. So there are many ways I think that AI is going to change healthcare.

Scott Leune: Yeah. Now of course we've also got these kind of implants we could put under the skin that are giving us real-time data. Dentists treat a whole lot of patients with sleep apnea through sleep apnea therapy, and that's something that we can start measuring. I really do believe there's going to be this kind of merging a medicine and dentistry together that happens, buying being led through technology. This whole integration of medical data with dental significance is going to change how a dentist, for example, does a standard initial exam on a new patient. So it's exciting.

Terry Jones: Well, and I'd say also when I was working with IBM Watson, there was an example of a woman came in who had lung cancer and never smoked and they're doing an analysis and they asked Watson and Watson came back and said, I think it's this. And they said, gee, we hadn't thought of that. Why do you think of that? And he said, well, I read 150,000 papers and here's the most recent one for the key expert in Switzerland. And Larry down the hall has a copy because you can't keep up. So that's something else that it'll allow us to become sort of worldwide diagnosticians and keep up.

Scott Leune: We worked with IBM Watson about a decade ago or so where we're having millions of phone calls analyzed to try to understand are there certain words or certain order of phrases or certain steps that can happen on a phone call that cause people to schedule versus not? And it was, we didn't, of course back then, I don't think anyone was calling it, at least we didn't know they were calling it artificial intelligence. But it was so interesting to be able to lean into that technology and get what's called best practices, I guess the best practice of how to do something as opposed to some gut feel or some consultant trying to convince you to

Terry Jones: Do it Right. It's almost better with data, isn't it?

Scott Leune: Yeah, of course. Well, I've got a question for you, because you mentor people, you speak to people, you've done all kinds of things in your career. What's a piece of advice that you catch yourself giving to a lot of people? You constantly see yourself repeating this thing, this thing here, this thing there. What's a piece of advice that fits that category?

Terry Jones: Well, I think it's really about team. It is about hiring and about not only looking for A players because they perform so much better than B players and dental practices are usually small and don't have big HR departments at Travelocity. We grew up inside of American Airlines and I had to fight HR to go outside to hire different people. And I think it's about mixing up your team, hiring people who aren't like you, people who compliment you, people who will argue with you because you're going to get in a rut and it's that conflict that can make creativity. Look, I hired a bunch of people from outside for travels outside of the airline industry, and then I had the suits, the people who were inside and said we're fine, and they fought like cats in a bag. But out of that crucible came a $3 billion company.

I had for example, an insurance guy here in town, a big insurance company. He was also in Rotary and the parades and everything, and this is maybe eight or nine years ago, he said, I need to get into social media and YouTube and changed how I attract customers. I know how to do it. I said, hire a kid, you know, need to do it. You don't know how to do it. So he hired his own kids and it totally changed his company and he let them kind of run with that. And now they've got a new division in adventure travel. So you need new blood, you need people from outside and you need people who will challenge you because you're the status quo.

Scott Leune: And as you start changing and pivoting and tweaking, we also have these people on the team that could be almost like what we call a blocker. It's one thing to argue, but it's another thing to almost refuse or to damage or to kind of drip some poison into the culture. How have you dealt with that from a small size to a larger size? What are your views on that?

Terry Jones: Well, negative people or energy vampires, they just sucked the energy out of a room. And there's a great book by the guy who led Pixar, very, very creative company, and he said, we have a phrase at Pixar called Plussing. So we're going around the room talking about a new idea. We want people to say, and we do that and why we might do this, not, wait, let me play devil's advocate for a minute. So you need plusers, and if you have people who are energy vampires, you have to ask 'em to move on and you usually can't train them out of it. It's just sort of a trait that some people have. I mean, you can try and you should give 'em a chance, but there's a phrase that says, I never fired somebody too early. You got to make that decision and then the team will go, wow, what happened around here? It's so different. It changed. So it's painful, particularly in small companies, it's even more painful, but you got to do it

Scott Leune: When you're at this table with your leaders, the companies you work with, they all bring kind of their superpowers, their strengths to the table. But if I were to ask them, what's superpower? What do you think? They would say,

Terry Jones: Well, good and bad. I think I'm an idea person, so I get really excited about new things and I want to try 'em. And I actually had to kind of hold myself back at Travelocity. I kept changing course. We were breaking new snow there. I mean there were no plans for the internet then. And what I ended up doing was actually hiring two guys who worked directly for me who just built prototypes and we'd test them, but they were out of the mainstream. So I wasn't changing. We had a plan, I kept to the plan just like everybody else, but I think that creativity was an exciting spark for the company that kept it moving forward. And I had the ability to change,

Scott Leune: Is it safe for me to say then you were kind of keeping the company stable and healthy, but also had this kind of testing arm that said, Hey, can we build this or do that in case it was going to be a win for the company?

Terry Jones: Right. And some of them, I mean for example, we started paging people when their flights were late. That's how long ago. This was paging for God's sake, and that was a massive hit. But I also put airfares on a map, and so you could see, well, where's the cheapest place I can go for this weekend? The New York Times love it. The Washington Post loved it. Customers didn't use it, it was too radical. They were still trying to figure out how to put in their credit card. So by prototyping, which I really encourage people to do and testing, and today you can prototype on the web, you can prototype using ai, you can prototype with 3D printers, test small and fail small. You're going to fail most of the time with new things, and that's okay. You have to be open to failure, you have to learn from it and move forward and prototype as if you are right. And then listen as if you were wrong. Don't fall in love with your prototype and say, this is great. Nobody else likes it. So I think experimentation is key, particularly in this new world in terms of trying things and experimenting with 'em and do it small, see if it works, then scale it up.

Scott Leune: So that reminds me of what I see. So I'm someone that educates entrepreneurs and dentists on how to build and manage companies and grow them. And what I see is all these aha moments that can happen from them learning something new, just the knowledge. The knowledge isn't enough, but the knowledge can create a spark that gets them to then change or experiment with something. How do you feel about that kind of aspect of learning? How do you learn, how do you try to stay up with what's happening and the changes so that you can take advantage of these opportunities?

Terry Jones: I'm a reader. I thank my mom for that. Took me to the library a lot when I was a kid and I just read voraciously and I read across a whole lot of industries in terms of what's going on. I have to as a speaker, but also it just prompts so much thinking about what could be done. I mean, they use different tools. They use a tool called Flipboard where you can flip through articles and you just tell what topics you want. And I read on a wide range of topics. I listen to podcasts, I watch videos, and I end up doing a lot of research. And of course now I use AI as well. It's a little easier to ask penetrating questions and learn about what's happening not only in my industry but in others. And as a speaker going to this mining speech, I'm not going to talk about mining, I don't know much about mining, but I'm going to give them a lot of adjacent examples of how people are using drones or AI or 3D printing, whatever in other industries, not only because not the mining expert, but I want them to connect the dots in their head. So they say, oh, that's how they're using it with pipelines, we could do that. But if I tell 'em how a mining company is using they'll, that'll never work. So it is easier to do adjacencies with people and then let them connect the dots.

Scott Leune: When you think through your story, there's this testing, there's this kind of creativity there, experimentation, there's successes, there's failures. But what about some of those moments that were, it was a bigger failure, a bigger hardship, a bigger kind of turn left when it should have been a turn. Can you think of some of an example of that or what you might've learned?

Terry Jones: Yeah, I'll give you one again, this is from tra, so it's 20 years ago. In those days, you couldn't send video over the web and we wanted video of exciting destinations to excite people. So I did a joint venture with IBM, we put videos on DVDs and we distributed them through game stores in all kinds of places for people to add on to Travelocity. And I spent a million bucks and I lost a million bucks. It was a total failure, and I had to go to my boss who at the time was the CFO at American Airlines, very fiscally responsible dude. I thought I'm going to get fired. And you know what he said? He said, what did you learn? And of course, right away people said, wow, Terry didn't get fired. But also he really changed the culture by not focusing on the failure, by focusing on the learning. Now I knew I couldn't lose a million bucks again, I was going to have to have smaller failures, but that really was tremendously encouraging to say, okay, yeah, you had this problem, but let's move on. We're in a new area now. A lot of American airlines of course is never fail. You can't lose an airplane. So that's a different part of the culture. And it was, but in the web where you fail all the time in the internet or in any kind of experimentation, so you have to learn where to experiment. You don't want to try your latest technique on a patient first.

Scott Leune: Well, dentists are typically very analytical people, very educated. They like to think a whole lot. We're actually trained to try to achieve perfection. There's best practices, there's clinical protocols, there's down to the millimeter of what we should do. But all of that thinking, while it might give a great result clinically doing common procedures, it also takes away from kind of an entrepreneurial drive that some dentists have. They overthink the next step and they know they're not quite happy, they're stuck in mediocrity, but it just feels too risky or there's too much unknown to go start my own practice or go grow to 10 locations, go take on 3D printing and AI, and they can just get stuck. What are your thoughts or what would you tell someone that is struggling to get unstuck because they're worried or they're overthinking what success might be?

Terry Jones: I suppose listen to Scott would be good, but I think you need somebody in your life who challenges you, who pushes you. Maybe you go to some organization, I mean, I don't know if Dennis go to YPO or some organization peers or find some mentor in the business who is willing to take you on and help you look outside, hire an office manager will kick you in the butt who isn't a dentist who isn't that analytical. It says, Hey, look what's happening. Get your head up, get out of somebody's mouth and about it how you can change. I think you need somebody to spark that. And wherever you find 'em in your life, you need to embrace that.

Scott Leune: And so as you have gone through these phases, some of these phases I'm sure involved a lot of pressures on time, on money, on just mental stability, but you also have a life outside of those pressures. How have you looked at building boundaries on what say yes or no to or discipline or how have you set yourself up to be able to have the grit and the longevity to get through some of these harder moments but also not lose too much on the personal side, for example?

Terry Jones: Yeah, it is very hard. I mean, it was extremely hard when I was CIO at American Airlines, one of the largest IT system of the world, that's when I lost my hair. And it was tough at Travelocity because we were working so hard, but I did have boundaries on weekends and time for kids, and I'm so blessed that my kids are both entrepreneurs and my daughter of all things became a travel agent after I tried to put 'em out of business for years. And she has her own company and my son is now a senior gaming executive with Microsoft. So they turned out well. And I think as I've gotten older and over the last 25 years I've worked for myself, it's easier to create boundaries when you're doing that and just say, look, this is what I'm going to do and this is when I'm going to work and this is when I'm not going to work and I'm performing well. I'm earning enough. What else do I want to do?

Scott Leune: And I imagine that if you're in these communities like YPO or peer organization, you have mentors after establishing this vision or establishing these boundaries, those people are kind of holding you a little bit accountable in the lane of that, right? They're continuous reminder of where you need to be going. Would you agree with that statement?

Terry Jones: Yeah, absolutely. And I've had lots of mentors and serving on all these boards and met some incredibly talented people and they all teach me different things, but it's being open to learn not only about your business, but about your life. My brother, for example, is a National Geographic photographer who lectures on creativity and sometimes we lecture together. And I've learned so much from him and his visual perspective on life because he is a world-class photographer. So you have to learn from different people. And that's why surrounding yourself with people who aren't like you, not only sparks conversation, but it's such a great learning opportunity to understand people of different backgrounds, different cultures, different countries, geography, all that's really important in I think rounding you as an individual.

Scott Leune: So I'd like to ask you, I switch gears a little bit. I want to paint a picture for you and I want to ask, what would you tell this person? What would you advise this person who owns their own business, but they have mediocre profits, they've got a small team, they've got hard days, employee issues, inflation seems to be creeping in. There's just ups and downs, and instead of being driven to grow and do something of significance, they're just trying to make it through the end of the day so they can have a break from this environment. That's not what they want. They want something significant, more wealth, more control of their time. What would you say to someone that is kind of in this moment of realization that what they have here needs to change?

Terry Jones: Well, I think maybe you go back to why did I get into this? What is my passion? What is it that I want to do? I want to help patients and be successful, I would assume are the two things and be creative in dentistry. And it's not about the next filling or the next cleaning. It's stepping back from that and saying, what's in my way? What are the barriers? I mean, as a leader, it's all about empowering your team and getting barriers out of the way. And so as a corporate leader, that's what you should be doing. But if you own your own business, maybe getting you out of the way and stepping back and saying, well, why don't I have that time? I have the right team. Do I need different dental assistants? Do I need a different process? Do I need a different office manager?

What the heck is in the way of me being happy and successful instead of grinding through this stuff every day? And that probably takes discussion with peers and other dentists listening to podcasts and learning, but it's really taking the time to assess what's going on. So maybe it's in the shower, maybe it's get out of the woods, go fishing something else, get out of there and take the time to think about what is in the way of you being happy and successful. And I think you already know the answers probably and maybe you haven't wanted to face, that's the hard part. I got to let this person go, or I really have to invest in that new system that's going to make my office flow better. What is it that's causing the problem? You probably know the answer.

Scott Leune: Yeah. So you alluded like sometimes what is it is a person, sometimes what is it could be the operating system or maybe the insurances that we accept or the location we're in, or sometimes it could be the schedule that we've just kept adding to our schedule, but now it's

Terry Jones: Right, you just buried yourself with more and more, but they're not very profitable things that you're doing.

Scott Leune: Yeah, I think it's so simple and so profound for you to have said that because it can be so obvious what's in the way. Yet we could be so blinded by all the loud things that just pull us in, suck us into the day, and we never take the time

Terry Jones: To look the next thing. You've got to have time to plan. For example, at the company where I'm chairman, we're just completing the CEO's goals and we're going back and forth, and some of them are monetary and some of them are developmental and some of them are team, and most dentists don't have a chairman of the board who's going to help with that? Do you sit down and make your goals for the year and are they more than just number of patients or profitability? They am. I still learning, yeah, you're in continuing ed, but am I really learning cutting edge stuff? Do I want to be the breakout dentist here or do I want to just be the most efficient? What do I want to be? And write 'em down and evaluate yourself and not just at the end of the year, every month, have I done those things the year I'll get away from you. I didn't go to that conference, I didn't get any more training. I didn't learn about new systems. One of the things that I do when I go to a conference to speak is if they have a trade show, I'll always try to go to the trade show and I always walk around the edges because that's where the cheap booths are with the guys who can't afford the big booth in the center. And that's where the interesting things are generally. And you learn and listen about what's new in the industry and what's coming. And if you're kind of a what's coming person and you want to get on the leading edge, then do that, go to those sessions and then come home and actually implement something new.

Scott Leune: So you're reminding me of a process we call quarterly strategic planning. So what happens is we go out to learn to seminars and events, and we're part of groups where we have continuous learning. Once a quarter we go through this exercise says, okay, where do we want to be? What does that mean for this year and what does that mean for this quarter? And sometimes what that means is something new we learned. And once we have the quarterly goals, we break 'em down into months. So kind of a monthly implementation project, which gets a daily morning huddle comment. So remember everyone today, which is a random Tuesday of the month, remember we're integrating this new AI agent on the phone. Remember, we have to do these things. And this kind of structured very rigid discipline approach kind of causes us to always stay on this journey of reevaluating where we're at, learning, trying to implement new things to where we're never caught flatfooted falling back into the trap of just the same old thing. That's what reminds me of when I hear you speak on

Terry Jones: This stuff. Well, and that daily huddle is so great because it is not only a daily huddle to get people focused on today's thing or this month's thing, it's to listen because your people know what's going on maybe more than you do, and you need to listen and they're going to tell you what the bottlenecks are. They're going to tell you their own problems, and you got to deal with those anyway. So you may as well hear 'em and check in, and maybe it's not daily, but certainly a couple times a week, check in with the team, have him stand up and get 'em fired up. That's the other thing you can do. I mean, hey, Trevor lost. You used to stand on the desk in front of the 30 people. We had a bell that would ring if we sold a million dollars that day. We were selling a lot. And then it started ringing all the time. People were fired up.

Scott Leune: When I think through this, a dentist sometimes falls in the trap of they're kind of like the guy that owns a restaurant, but he's got to make every meal too. And so dentists sometimes fall in the trap of just filling their day with cutting just more teeth, and they never carve out time to communicate, to plan, to audit, to have accountability, to have rest, to have focus. They just fill their day with more of the dentistry. And it's kind of counterintuitive because the more dentistry we do, maybe the more money we make and the more successful we feel. But of course, the lack of accountability and the lack of innovation and the lack of communication with a team results in a company that's really struggling.

Terry Jones: Well, look, you're leading an organization. I mean, I guess there are dentists who are the receptionist and the dental cleaner and the filling person and all one man band, but they're pretty darn rare. You're leading a team and leading a team doesn't mean doing it all yourself. How can you delegate to make more money? How you've got marketing, who's doing marketing, who's bringing people in the door, who's answering the phone? How is all that working? You got to have time to manage that. You can't do that if you're an ic. Now, unlike the CEO and a corporation, you are also an individual contributor, right? So you've got time for that, but that can't be all your time because you're the leader of a team and you've got to make time for that, make time for your team and make time for your whole practice, not just the next filling.

Scott Leune: I hope everyone listening to this took that to heart because I think a lot of people know they need time, but they just don't create it. They just don't carve it. They just don't

Terry Jones: Get the red tin. Well, and what's nice for a dentist is you can actually schedule it. Your time is scheduled very closely. And I'll tell you what, I now use one of these calendar apps you can book me where people can book me. And I found that I was giving it to people, but people were keeping it. And then they were barging into my day and I wasn't blocking enough time on my day where people couldn't book. And so now I've stepped back. I used to have an assistant and now I don't. So I stepped back from that and my afternoon today is blocked for speech writing and nobody can book into it. And he's very easy for Dennis since they're so highly scheduled to schedule themselves some

Scott Leune: Time. Yeah. Excellent. Well, I want to be respectful of your time. We're a few minutes over right now, so I'd like to wrap this up, but I'd like to ask you two things. One, what's the best way to connect with you or get ahold of you? If someone's listening to this, they say, you know what? I would love to hire Terry or speak at a conference. So that's the first question. And the second

Terry Jones: Question, again, it's terry jones.com. So there you can connect, you can ask about speeches, you can watch videos, you can buy a book. And my books are kind of unusual. There's a book on innovation, a book on disruption. Both of 'em are 72 4 page chapters, so they're more like a manual than a book. And you can read 'em front to back or back to front. Oh, I need help on team, I need help on whatever. They're very, very quick and they're available through my website or on Amazon as well.

Scott Leune: That's wonderful. And then the final question here is any last words to the dentists listening to this? These are anywhere from people right out of school, half a million dollars in debt, contemplating getting another million in debt to own their own thing, all the way to entrepreneurial dentists to don't do any kind of clinical work, but they manage lots of locations and they're trying to achieve their goals and be happy and feel successful. Any kind of last words to this group of people?

Terry Jones: Well, I think it's about continuous learning. AI is going to accelerate change at a pace that we're probably not ready for and you have to get ready for it. And so I think it's about taking the time in your practice to run your practice as we've just discussed, but also what do we need to learn? Some of these people were out at dental school 30 years ago and yeah, there's continuing education, but what am I learning about marketing and AI and how to run a phone system and how to run a practice and am I learning from the lawyer in my town, the insurance guy in my town and other people? How am I learning how to accelerate my medium-sized business in ways more than just fixing teeth, but really running a company?

Scott Leune: Okay. Well, Terry, I cannot thank you enough for giving your time to our little part of the world in dentistry. What you've accomplished and what you've led is tremendously inspiring to all of us, and the fact that you're willing to open up and talk so freely about things like this is just very valuable to our listeners.

Terry Jones: Well, I'm happy to do it and hope they find it useful. Terry jones.com.

Scott Leune: Terry jones.com. Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Terry. We really appreciate your time today.

Terry Jones: Thanks, ed.

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. What a cool interview. To talk to someone that's built and sold multiple billion dollar companies and has kind of really connected with AI and is a venture capitalist. It gives a great outside perspective of lessons that we can try to learn and apply to dentistry. Some of the things that stood out to me, he said, set yourself apart with innovation and change in dentistry. Sometimes it's hard to think about how we can set ourselves apart, where dental practices have been doing and recall exams and crowns and fillings and extractions for years, and how is that something that can be set apart?

When I heard him talk about that, I thought about, well, on one hand we could be set apart because of how we treat the new patient experience. Can we integrate smile simulations before and after? Can we integrate AI on the x-rays? What about more medical screenings? What about scanning technology? Can a patient sit in our office and experience this very thought out choreographed experience of these different steps, steps that they've never experienced elsewhere that sets us apart immediately? Or what about how we market ourselves? Can we take those differences and create reels and videos about them? Can we highlight them on social media? Can we tell stories about them or be on the news about them? All of those things set us apart, but those things come from learning, from continuous learning, from being focused on innovation inside and outside of dentistry, and always asking ourselves, can this new wave or new technology be applied inside of my dental practice?

Another thing that stood out is he said, what so many people say the team is so important. We need to hire A players. We need to get rid of negative people who he calls the energy vampires. Think about our team today. Do we have a players? I know from my experience when I have an A player, I mean they do more work than two or three B or C players sometimes it's also a players that have this kind of healthy skepticism. When we want to do something new, they give us kind of the debate we need and they teach us more details about what's going on, but they're not negative. They're not the blockers. They're not killing what we want to do. So many of us are victims of a blocker in our practice almost holding us hostage because they don't want to do the new next thing.

He said that when we introduce new things, we need to do what he called plusing. We need plusers. Those are people that are going to add new ideas to the new thing as opposed to the people that are playing devil's advocate saying why it won't work, what's wrong with it, why we shouldn't do it. He says, those people, the devil advocate, those negative people need to go away. And that in a small business, it's difficult. It's painful to have people go away because we're so shorthanded temporarily, but in the long term, it's what we have to do so that we have a team of A players. And I talked to him about what should someone do that's struggling, someone that's stuck in mediocrity that doesn't have the practice situation they want or the income they want that CEO that's really getting burnout. And he said in a very simple way, we have to see what's blocking us from what we want.

We have to just be thoughtful and focused and identify what's getting in our way. Is the area we're practicing getting in our way is the treatment coordinator we have or the office manager we have getting in our way is is it the fact that we're in network with all these insurance plans or that we haven't learned how to do dentistry that brings us passion and interest? We're just kind of doing the more simple stuff. Is that getting in our way is a lack of marketing or systems or lack of business knowledge getting in our way? We need to define what that is, and instead of accepting it, we need to get rid of that friction, which of course is easier said than done, but it's so easy to do if we decide to. So that kind of stood out to me as a big challenge to all of us listening to this, what is getting in our way of having the dental life we want?

Another thing he said is we have to have the time to lead. We have to carve out the time in our schedule. We're running an organization, multimillion dollar organization with a team, and we can't have our head down the whole time cutting teeth. We have to carve out time to think about the business, to plan new things, to bring accountability, to train people to communicate. I call this on our seminar events. I call this CEO time. I actually have a whole checklist of what a CEO should do and what an office manager should do, what a regional manager of multiple locations should do, and I teach to carve out this time every day to work on the checklist that the half hour we spend on that is going to make so much more money and bring so much more peace to us than using that half hour on cutting another tooth instead.

So he kind of confirmed that we have to have that time set aside to lead. We are leaders, we are owners of practices, we are CEOs. We aren't just cutting teeth. We have to do the job of A CEO as well. And he also said, we need someone in our lives to challenge us. He talked about it could be an actual person, but it could also be being part of a peer group or having mentors or being part of masterminds or going to seminars. He mentioned a business group called YPO. There's a smaller version of that called eo. What I've noticed in coaching people, I coach people one-on-one, is that I become that person for them sometimes where I'm the one kind of challenging them or maybe nudging them or bringing them structure or accountability, sometimes just a little bit of accountability is what we need to slowly but surely achieve really big things like what a personal trainer does for us. Just holding us accountable to showing up or what a peer group does where we're constantly inspired and elevated and fired up by their stories. And sometimes we just need someone to say, you can do it and you need to start now, and that's enough to tip us into doing what we know we're late doing, what we know we should do. Maybe it's the hard thing we need to do sometimes if we just have the right people around us, that's enough to completely change where we end up years later. That really stood out to me.

Another common thing that he said, and in some of my other interviews, I interviewed Josh Linker who said this Linkner, excuse me, Josh Linkner who said this. I also interviewed Damon John from Shark Tank. He also said this, continuous learning is one very important component to maintaining success and being the best entrepreneur you can be. Things change so much, and if we learn continuously, we keep up with it. We understand what we have to do, we have the knowledge to make the right decisions, and that learning isn't just in dentistry, but it's outside of dentistry as well. Sometimes what separates us from happiness or frustration or what separates us from wealth versus mediocrity is just one thing we need to learn and to learn those one things means we're continuously seeking them. Terry talked about the fact that he's an avid reader and so did Josh Linkner, for example.

Damon talked about the fact that he surrounds himself with people in environments where he's continuously learning. And Damon talked about when he learned about licensing, it completely changed how FUBU went to market and became more of a worldwide brand worth billions compared to what it was doing before. These little nuggets, they're little hinges that can swing a big door of opportunity, and it's important that we continuously learn. I feel that in dentistry, we need to spend time learning on the clinical side. We have this ethical obligation to our patients and to our profession to always stay on top of the clinical side, but equally as important, I feel, is the obligation to learn on the business side so that we're not just taking care of patients, we're taking care of our careers, we're taking care of our companies, and of course, we can continue that with learning on the health and the relationship side as well outside of our practice, but at least let's commit to continuously learning on the clinical side and continuously learning on the business side.

Can you schedule that? Can you put that commitment on paper, schedule it, commit to it, and do it. And I think if you do, you'll be very happy you did. I know that I have been, and that of course, the people that I see, they're also just completely changed. Their lives are changed when they continuously learn to do new things. The difference between a dental student being a half a million dollars in debt and working as an associate for 10 years versus a dentist graduating, doing a startup, and taking home a million dollars every single year, the difference between those two many times starts with the first step, one learned and one didn't. And that first step of learning caused the next step of analysis and the next step of deciding and the next step of acting. And finally, when you fast forward, where they end up in life looks so different, but that first domino so often is a moment of learning.

So let this podcast challenge us to have a great team around us to get rid of the negative things and negative people, the friction that's blocking us to commit to learning, to challenging ourselves and each other to be the best we can be, so that we are effective, we're happy, we're accomplishing more as a dental CEO. I hope this was a valuable moment for you. I hope someone listening to this is going to be different because of this episode. I want to thank Terry for doing this episode for us and all of you for listening. Please subscribe if you haven't because we've got many more episodes coming up. Some are outside of dentistry, some are all about dentistry. And all of 'em, I've made a commitment to trying to make 'em as interesting or as valuable as possible as you drive to work or as you're working out right now, as you are ingesting this content to better your life. Alright, I'll see you next time on the Dental CEO Podcast.