Dr. Bill Dorfman joins us to explore his approach to life and business that has allowed him to achieve aspirational levels of success through differentiation and curiosity.
Dr. Bill is a cosmetic dentist responsible for some of the most dazzling smiles in Hollywood. Even more impressive is his work as a NY Times bestselling author, philanthropist, and as co-founder of LEAP, a non-profit motivational and developmental program for high school and college students.
Dr. Bill Dorfman joins us to explore his approach to life and business that has allowed him to achieve aspirational levels of success through differentiation and curiosity.
Dr. Bill is a cosmetic dentist responsible for some of the most dazzling smiles in Hollywood. Even more impressive is his work as a NY Times bestselling author, philanthropist, and as co-founder of LEAP, a non-profit motivational and developmental program for high school and college students.
Dr. Bill joins us to explore his unique brand of creativity and differentiation, and how he's been able to sustain that through the years.
Dr. Bill is the cosmetic dentist responsible for some of the most dazzling smiles in Hollywood. But even more impressive, he's also an inventor, a New York Times bestselling author, TV personality, philanthropist, and co-founder of LEAP, which is a nonprofit motivational and developmental program for high school and college students.
Transcript
Erol Senel:
Hello everyone and welcome to Success Shorts. I'm a Erol Senel. Today we're joined by Dr. Bill Dorfman. Dr. Bill is the cosmetic dentist responsible for some of the most dazzling smiles in Hollywood. But even more impressive, he's also an inventor, a New York Times bestselling author, philanthropist, and co-founder of LEAP, which is a nonprofit motivational and developmental program for high school and college students. Bill and I have some fun exploring his unique brand of creativity and differentiation, and how he's been able to sustain that through the years. So I hope you enjoy our time with Dr. Bill Dorfman. Let's go.
Erol Senel:
Dr. Bill. It's an absolute privilege to have you thank you so much for joining us.
Bill Dorfman:
Yeah, thanks for having me, Erol.
Erol Senel:
So I've always liked to start these chats off with just kind of focusing on curiosity around the things going on around you. And I want to be a little bit sensitive because obviously everyone's going through this period a little bit differently, and especially with you being in the dental industry, and then also having to adapt your LEAP program that you do for the students. But I am curious, what have you learned about yourself and the others around you during this really interesting COVID period?
Bill Dorfman:
Well, one thing I learned is I really hate isolation. I mean, I've never been the kind of person to like to be alone, but I literally hate it. Some people have no problem with it. That's just not me. I grew up in a big family. I shared a room with three other brothers so four of us were in one room. I've always had roommates or kids or spouse or somebody. And this period of just having to be isolated and being alone for so long. I mean, there's nothing about it I like, I hate it.
Bill Dorfman:
What have I learned about people is, yeah I really miss them. Things got a lot better about two weeks ago when we got these rapid COVID tests. So now everybody who comes in the house gets a COVID test.
Erol Senel:
Well, I'm glad it's opened up that opportunity for you. And I appreciate you sharing that. When you agreed to come on, I have to admit I was just thrilled. America's dentist, this is pretty neat. But then I got to start digging into your background and you're just so much more than that. But one theme that really stuck with me as I was kind of peeling back some of the layers was this concept of differentiation. And I kept asking myself as I was learning more and more about you, this thought stuck. We live in a world of a lot of specialists. In some ways we could be a commodity, but you've really do things and look at things a little bit differently that has really set you apart. So I'm curious, when did you first realize the importance of not only differentiating yourself, but how did you start to explore that early on so that it's kind of led you towards this amazing career where you've done so many things?
Bill Dorfman:
Let's go way back, way way back. I was just a weird kid. I really was. There was nothing standard or typical about me from the get go. I was just wired differently. I remember coming home from kindergarten. I was five years old and we had just moved to a new school. And my mom and dad come up to me and said, "Son, how was school?" And I said, "It was fine, but the kids might, the class are so immature." I'm five. Who says that? And I actually felt that way all the way till college. I remember being in classes when I was six, seven, eight, nine, looking at these kids going, oh my gosh. They're so immature.
Bill Dorfman:
It's funny because we have these epiphanies in life where you just get this incredible moment of clarity. And one of the big ones for me was with Oprah. When you do a talk show, like The Tonight Show or Ellen or Rosie or any of these shows, basically what they do is they grab you. They put you in a room with a producer and the producer just drills you for an hour. And they ask you all kinds of stuff. And it's like a shotgun approach. And they just want to see what they can get that's going to be fun and exciting for their audience. And then when you go live on air, they'll ask you those questions again. So they pretty much know what you're going to be talking about.
Bill Dorfman:
So Oprah doesn't do that. She wants your raw unfiltered answer. And when Oprah said, "Dr. Bill, your career has been so unusual and you think so far outside the box. No other dentist in the history of dentistry has had a career like yours." First of all, that phrase was not common. This was in 2005, I had never even heard that phrase, think outside the box, right?
Erol Senel:
Right.
Bill Dorfman:
I just really looked at her and I said, "What box?" And we cracked up and that pretty much defines my life whole life. I didn't do things the way other people did it. For instance, when I finished doing my residency program in Switzerland and I moved back to LA, I sat down and I said, "Wat do successful dentists do?" So I did some research and back then there was no internet so it wasn't that easy. I made a bunch of phone calls and I found the five most successful dentists in Beverly Hills. And I called them up and I asked if I could come in and observe them.
Bill Dorfman:
That was not a common practice, but then to even differentiate more, the few dentists or students that did come in and shadow these guys, they just kind of came in. They went into the treatment room, they watched them drill some teeth and then they left. That's not what I did. I walked in. I wanted to see how they greeted the patient. I wanted to see the intake forms. I wanted to see what they told the patient. I wanted to see how they seated the patient in the room, how they introduce them to the doctor, how the doctor reviewed the treatment and the X rays, and then how the doctor delivered the treatment. And then I wanted to see how they brought the patient to the front desk, how they scheduled their next appointment, how they got the patient to pay for the treatment.
Bill Dorfman:
I wanted to see everything, the whole ball of wax. And in every office that I went to, the dentist literally looked at me and said, "I've never seen a student do this before." And I go, "Yeah." I don't know. It makes sense to me, right? So I guess I've always been just a very free thinker and I really always kind of looked at a situation I was in and thought, okay what makes sense? How am I going to get the best out of this? So when you say I differentiate and I've done things differently, I don't just do what everybody else does. I mean, unless I think it really makes good sense to do it, but most of the time, it doesn't.
Erol Senel:
In that base that you've kind of established for yourself, that you were just laying out how you wanted to see all these things, I'm assuming that there were some commonalities between that and what you ended up doing in some of your practice.
Bill Dorfman:
Yeah. I mean, this is the thing. What I did is I hung out with these five dentists. I basically sat there like a sponge and soaked it all up, and then I took the best part of every one of these practices and put them all in one practice.
Erol Senel:
Yeah. So it's almost like a child's mentality. You're just treating it as you know nothing. You're just there to see and observe.
Bill Dorfman:
Yeah.
Erol Senel:
And see what's happening as opposed to having a bias as to what you want to see.
Bill Dorfman:
Yeah. I mean, one of the main principles of LEAP is copy genius, and we haven't really gotten into LEAP yet, but LEAP is a motivational leadership program for high school and college students that we put on. It's a nonprofit and every year we get over 400 students at UCLA. They live in the dorm for a week long program and it's phenomenal.
Bill Dorfman:
We get amazing speakers. I mean, one of the things that's really impressed me is how much the community supports a program like this. I've had amazing speakers like Mark Wahlberg, Anthony Hopkins, Eva Longoria, Michael Strahan, Usher, Apollo Ono, Kathy Bates. I mean, I can go on and on and on. And these people all come and they speak for free. We don't pay them anything to be there and they share their success stories with these students. And we get tons of great business men and women, and it's just a phenomenal program.
Bill Dorfman:
So I kind of created my own little LEAP when I started my dental practice and I really spent time getting great mentors and following them. One of my greatest mentors was Jeff Golub-Evans. We lost him a few years ago, but he was such an amazing dentist and father and renaissance man and past president of the American Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry. He taught me PR. He taught me how to work with a publicist in a time when dentists just didn't do that. By watching him and kind of emulating what he had done to grow his practice, I started doing TV and I started working with a publicist to put out articles and educate the public and really kind of make a name for myself.
Erol Senel:
I mean, it's a completely different approach. And you actually remind me in many ways, your buddies in the wine industry, Dave Phinney, if you ever heard of Orin Swift, which is a really phenomenal winery, and he very much had somewhat of a same mentality, where wine is a little bit of a not heavily creative PR industry where it's more based off a tradition and doing what you do well, but very few people think of how do you do things differently. And he was able to kind of do the same type of thing where you look at this and what can you do that is just special and makes what you're doing and bringing into the world different than everyone else.
Erol Senel:
And you were able to do that in a very unique way by looking at yourself, not necessarily just as someone in your specialty, but you're looking at yourself as what do I have to offer the world that's beyond that, that connects to it, but it's also more than that. And I think there's something really neat there. And he did the same thing, how do you market a wine label and how do you create a lifestyle brand around something that is somewhat every day? So I think that's really neat to see how you've done that in this world and with such tremendous success.
Erol Senel:
Now, I did want to ask you one thing, because actually like Dave as I was referencing, you had to deal with a non-compete about an idea that you cultivated and brought to market and eventually sold. So when you come up with such a great idea that you're forced with selling it and then having to not do it for a while, what was your mindset in that space? How did you begin to think about what could I do next?
Bill Dorfman:
Okay. So here's the thing. I invented Zoom. The wrong Zoom. Not video conferencing, Zoom tooth whitening, right? But the other thing is, you have to understand, most people of my generation did a job. If you were a dentist, you drilled teeth. If you were a lawyer, you did law. If you were a builder, you built. That's never been me. While I was running a full time dental practice, I was also on ABC's Extreme Makeover. I was also helping to run a multimillion dollar company called Discus Dental, where we made NiteWhite and DayWhite and Zoom and BrightSmile and all these different products, as also a full time dad.
Bill Dorfman:
So when you say, how did I survive this non-compete? That wasn't my whole life. That was just a small piece of the pie. So when we sold Discus Dental and I had a non-compete in the whitening space, that didn't even affect me. I never even thought about it. When that expired seven years later I was approached by another, and in fact we're launching a huge whitening product this year 2021. You're going to see a brand new product that we're putting out that will be a category killer. It's going to be an over the counter, take home tooth whitening product that will blow people's mind. That's how excited I am about it.
Bill Dorfman:
But my non-compete expired several years ago and I've just been so busy with other things that the noncompete never really held me back. I will tell you this though. Now, when students ask me what do I think are the most fundamental qualities or traits or things that I had to really pay attention to throughout my career, there's two that I really try to get students to embrace when they come to LEAP.
Bill Dorfman:
And the first one is don't wait for opportunities in life. Make them. If I meet another student who tells me that they're waiting for the universe to show them something, I just want to scream and say, "Look outside." The universe is really busy and doesn't care about you, period.
Erol Senel:
Hundred percent.
Bill Dorfman:
It just doesn't, right. You need to create your own opportunities. You need to go out there and make stuff happen. And when you do get an opportunity, don't take it. Master it. There's a big difference. When ABC put me on Extreme Makeover, I was not born for TV, period. I just wasn't. Dentistry, yes. TV, no. If you watch the first few episodes of Extreme Makeover, I can honestly tell you I stunk. They should've fired me. But when I saw what a huge impact it made on Discus Dental and sales of NiteWhite and DayWhite and Zoom, I'm like, I better get good at this.
Bill Dorfman:
So what did I do? I took acting classes, hosting classes, teleprompting classes. I worked with media trainers. I worked with the woman who trains all the kids on American Idol. She was amazing and she taught me how to sit. She taught me how to look. She taught me what to wear, what not to wear. We did mock interviews. It was a phenomenal, phenomenal course, private course that I paid for. But as you watch through the season, you could see that I became more and more comfortable with what I was doing. And that resulted in me having more and more airtime, and me having more and more airtime gave people an opportunity to see more and more Zoom. And it goes on and on and on and on.
Bill Dorfman:
When we started Discus Dental, our first year in business we did $2 million. The next year we did $4 million, then $8 million, then $16 million and $32 million. And we kept growing and growing and growing. And we kind of plateaued at about $76 million in sales. Then right around the time of Extreme Makeover, we got a huge break. The first season I was on Extreme Makeover, our sales went from $76 million to $101 million. The next year from $101 million to $134 million. And the following year, almost $200 million in sales.
Erol Senel:
That is some extreme growth really quick.
Bill Dorfman:
Yeah.
Erol Senel:
But it came from that initial diversification that you kind of set out to do. So I mean, and that's one of the reasons why I asked that question for you is because you're not one to just kind of sit, have a great idea and then just ride that wave. Because I think one of the things that we learned, especially during this COVID phase, is that you need to be diversified in what you do.
Bill Dorfman:
Yeah. Well, Oh my gosh. You have to pivot. I mean, look. Look at LEAP. This would have been our 13th year at UCLA doing this program, which I love and I spend a whole year with my team planning, but we couldn't. So what we did is we did it virtually and it ended up being phenomenal. We shot the whole thing. I mean, the owner of my building was so sweet. They gave us an empty 4,000 square foot suite on the top of my building, which has been vacant. And they let us set up a beautiful studio there with a beautiful backdrop and we basically did the whole program virtually.
Erol Senel:
That's amazing. Now, do you think that because you were able to do it so well this year that that could open up the opportunity to include more students in years to come?
Bill Dorfman:
That's a great question. And the answer's yes. So typically we have about 400 students who come to LEAP. This year we had over a thousand. Next year, provided we're allowed to meet in person. I think we'll have 400 students again, but we'll probably have close to 10,000 virtually.
Erol Senel:
That's phenomenal. I absolutely love that. Thank you for doing that for them. I was looking at the program online and just trying to put myself in the seat of a high school or college student and thinking about having that opportunity to absorb that knowledge that early in life, it's beyond beneficial. And I think it's going to really change many of their trajectories by going through an experience like that, just because of awareness and being able to see and gain that knowledge that early on is really something else.
Erol Senel:
So if you were to think about the audience as those students who are sitting out there watching this program, and you were going to give them just a couple of bits of advice that they can really take today and start to apply to their lives, maybe around what we were talking about, or maybe something else, what would that be?
Bill Dorfman:
There's so many that we go over with LEAP. I mean, probably the two biggest are the ones I just gave you. Don't wait for opportunities. Make them. And when you get them, master them. But there's a lot of other important things, copy genius. I mean, look. Instead of trying to reinvent mediocrity, when I opened my dental practice, I copied genius. If you want to do something professionally, look for other people that are very successful in that field and see what they're doing. You don't have to start from scratch. So that's always a big one, copy genius.
Bill Dorfman:
Another one that I really try to get students to embrace is that you never have to fail in life, ever. I never fail and you'll never have to fail again when you listen to what I'm going to tell you. Listen, if you do something and it doesn't come out the way you wanted it to, that's not failure. That's practice. Then you try it again and again and again and again and again if you have to because you really only fail when you quit.
Erol Senel:
Right.
Bill Dorfman:
So if you don't quit, you don't fail. You're basically practicing. And one of the other things that we have to kind of change our mindset on, we've all heard the phrase, practice makes what?
Erol Senel:
Perfect.
Bill Dorfman:
Wrong practice makes permanent.
Erol Senel:
I like that.
Bill Dorfman:
So it's not just a matter of practicing. Practice the right way. If you keep doing something wrong, you're not perfecting it. You're actually making it indelibly wrong.
Erol Senel:
Right.
Bill Dorfman:
Don't do that.
Erol Senel:
And that's why it's so important to check in, see how things are working out. Do a really good retrospective on things. Get outside opinions.
Bill Dorfman:
One of the most powerful things that any student in life can do, in my opinion, it's something that you may enjoy as well, is join a mastermind group. A mastermind group is so powerful. My first mastermind group was with YPO, it's Young Presidents Organization. And that organization has some really high powered people in it. And in my group of 50 people, they put us in mastermind groups, they call them forums, of 10. And we would meet once a month for four hours in a restaurant where we'd have a private room and we'd have dinner and basically talk about life and marriage and relationships and kids and business and whatever it is. I mean, there's a real format that you go through, but it is such a powerful, powerful group.
Bill Dorfman:
Here's the thing. There's so much noise out there today, especially with social media and all this stuff happening and it's hard for us to really find direction or to really know who to listen to. If some yo-yo writes a mean comment on my Instagram, am I actually going to care about that? Does it matter? But you know, if your best friend comes up and says, "Hey, what are you doing?" Then you pay attention. So having a great sounding board of people who you know and respect who also know and respect you is literally invaluable.
Erol Senel:
It really is. And I appreciate you sharing all that. And just to reiterate, to wrap things up, the whole concept of the mastermind group and copy genius, by leaning on these different things to create a really strong foundation, it really opens you up to allow your uniqueness to come through and do the differentiating thereafter. It frees up that energy that you don't have to waste trying to recreate or trying to figure out what are the best quality inputs that I should be paying attention to.
Erol Senel:
So I mean, that's just invaluable advice, Dr. Bill. So I really appreciate you sharing that and thank you so much for taking the time to do this with us. It's really been a blessing.
Bill Dorfman:
Oh well thanks, Erol. It's fun.
Erol Senel:
Oh, excellent. And that's all we have for this episode of Success Shorts. Hopefully you found today's topic useful and remember, have fun, stay curious and keep it short.