Ep #173: Salena Kulkarni - How Practice Owners Can Build Long-Term Wealth and Freedom

In this episode of the Dental Business Mastery Podcast, Julie Parker sits down with accountant, investor and financial mentor Salena Kulkarni from Freedom Warrior to explore one of the most important - and often overlooked - aspects of practice ownership: wealth creation beyond the dental practice.

Salena shares why so many dentists, despite earning strong incomes, still feel financially trapped, stressed, and unable to step away from the chair. Salena unpacks the difference between running a successful practice and building genuine long-term wealth.

This conversation explores the psychology of money, the “golden handcuffs” many practice owners experience, and why financial freedom is ultimately about creating choice, flexibility, and purpose - not simply accumulating more income.

Links to discover more about Salena:

Salena Kulkarni
Website: https://freedomwarrior.com.au/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/salenakulkarni/

Interested in taking your personal, team, and dental practice to the next level? Contact Julie and Ameena today to explore the possibilities for growth and success!

Visit our website, Dental Business Mastery, at https://dentalbusinessmastery.com.au/, and book a complimentary, obligation-free Discovery Call to discuss your specific needs and goals. Schedule your call here: https://tidycal.com/3l298p1/30-minute-meeting

If you have any questions or would like more information, feel free to contact us via email at info@dentalbusinessmastery.com.au.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

You are listening to the Dental Business Mastery Podcast, where you discover management insights and strategies for your successful dental practice. There are also interviews with key people in the industry who have advice and services to help you and your team achieve great success. Welcome to this episode of the Dental Business Mastery Podcast. And today we have a returning guest, Selena Kulkani, who has become quite a good buddy and she does a lot of work with dentists in the space of wealth. She is a chartered accountant, long-time investor, and works as a financial co-pilot to dental practice owners. Selena helps dental practice owners make and keep more money and build wealth outside of their practice. Thank you so much for joining me again, Selena.

SPEAKER_00 0:55

Oh, Julie, it's it's so good to be here with you. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_01 0:58

Oh, it's such a delight. There's been a lot happening just over the past couple of weeks in terms of what's happening financially as well. Let's start off initially, though. Tell us a little bit more about how you help dental practice owners make more money, keep more money, and develop some wealth.

SPEAKER_00 1:15

So, you know, over the last 25 years or so, I've worked with a lot of different business owners in general. And I noticed in recent years that I was um working with more and more dentists. It just sort of, you know, they were a cohort that were very ambitious, but financially felt behind the eight ball like it's not really something that gets covered to any degree as part of their training. And they also feel very vulnerable. They they know that there's a lot of people out there trying to push them into specific products. And what I realized is that dentists have a very specific financial profile that I think generic advice completely misses. They're not employees and they're not typical entrepreneurs, but they own a business usually that can't run without them. So they do earn very well, but my experience is they're often heavily leveraged. And when they finish years of expensive training with almost no financial education, um, all they come out with is a very high capacity to borrow money. So that combination produces predictable, repeatable mistakes. And once you start to see the patterns, you know, I really felt like I couldn't unsee it. And I saw that I couldn't, you know, I couldn't give generic advice that was really, you know, might apply to a general business owner, but didn't apply to dentists. So my evolution, I suppose, is to see myself as a a financial co-pilot. So I don't replace the role of the accountant, but really to help dentists understand where they are leaking money and how to better convert that into wealth.

SPEAKER_01 3:01

Magnificent. And you raised a really good point. Dentists do have a capacity to borrow a lot of funds, and so they can make sure their practice is exactly what they want it to be, absolutely beautifully designed, and all the equipment, top-end equipment that they that they want and need. Beautiful homes, beautiful cars, beautiful holidays, all the things. But there is a big piece missing, isn't there? Because borrowing at a high capacity is an aspect of how to build wealth, but without the other parts of it, it can actually cause a lot of sleepless nights and concern and worry of is this all worth it?

SPEAKER_00 3:40

Yeah, look, absolutely, you've hit the nail on the head. I mean, I've worked with practice owners who literally pay tens of thousands of dollars in debt repayments every month. Um, sometimes it makes up a huge portion of revenue, and the experience is I'm just working to pay down this debt. Um, the feeling is as well, like you could have a practice that earns great profit on paper, but people can't distinguish the difference between profit and what happens with cash flow and then how that ties into everything that they bank at the end of the day. And so there's this unrelenting pressure. And I often call dentists the working rich because they they earn really good money, but they actually can't afford to stop working. Um, it's very common in all allied health and and medical-related professions where you know they are perceived as top of the you know food chain as far as education and capacity to earn. But honestly, the the terminology of golden handcuffs seems to ring true for a lot of people.

SPEAKER_01 4:52

It kind of brings to mind Maslow's hierarchy of needs, how it can be flipped to be what you're talking about. That at the very base, you know, for people who aren't aware of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, it is a uh triangle. And at the very basis of that triangle, it talks about the uh most basic needs as humans. You know, we need shelter and we need food and we need these things to survive. As we achieve more, progress more, get more, we slowly rise and ascend up the pyramid. At some point, you're at the very top, which is self-actualization. So we've already got our family, our relationships, our self-awareness, all these things in place. And so we just, you know, it talks about that we have to actually have those foundations before we can progress to each subsequent level and to actually get to self-actualizations where you have a lot of freedom and choice over what you do, and you don't have to worry so much about all the other things because that's all well established. But I imagine that when you're a dentist coming out from university or opening up your own practice, you are at, from a wealth perspective, you are at that basic foundational, these things have to be in place in order for me to be able to ascend to the next level of wealth, the next, and not even wealth at that stage. It's not wealth when you've got an enormous amount of debt that once you pay out everything, you've got no money left. That we're just setting the foundations here, and sometimes I imagine a lot of practice owners may stay in those foundations simply because they don't have the awareness or they haven't met the right person to help them understand how to actually ascend to the next level, to the next level, to the next level.

SPEAKER_00 6:29

Yeah, look, look, absolutely. I I think um a lot of dentists come out of um dental school with a perception of what's needed to set up a practice that will not only survive but thrive. You know, the the number of practices per capita has gone up, meaning, you know, there's there's fewer potential patients per dentist than there was, say, 30 years ago. And so it's not enough to just put a sign on the door and expect that people will come, as as you know. But I think that the flip side of that is, you know, people feel like they've got a leverage to the eyeballs in order to differentiate themselves. They need to spend an enormous amount of money on marketing to get new patient flow. And really what I'm trying to help people understand is that, you know, if you if you take the 60,000-foot view and you you actually create a plan that's simple to follow and that doesn't require you to scale and scale and scale, what you can actually do is build wealth that is dependable. So that if, say, for example, tomorrow you decided you needed to take some time off or you wanted to extract yourself for a period of time, you could. Because the the thing that I find ironic is people can be earning hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more. And if they stop working for six months, the wheels come off. Um, and so you know, really helping people understand that wealth is what's left over when you stop working. And for most dentists, if they stopped working tomorrow, the whole thing unwinds. Um, and the frightening part is that it's completely invisible when you're inside of it, um, because the money keeps arriving and the lifestyle feels like it's evidence that you've made it.

SPEAKER_01 8:18

Yeah, that's so ring so true. I can see all that happening. And I think that when you do have all of these debts, because it does feel like, you know, back in the day when my parents first got married back in the 60s, uh, they bought their house that didn't have carpet straight away, didn't have a washing machine straight away, didn't have a whole bunch of things. You know, they sat on the floor to have dinner, and then slowly they would get enough funds, you know, scribbled away to be able to buy the carpeting, buy this, and buy that. I still remember dad saying, and even when we bought carpeting, it was second-hand carpeting, it wasn't brand new. And it feels like nowadays, nobody does that now. We buy complete houses with all of the appliances that we need from WordGo. Dental practices, I imagine, have kind of gone through the same kind of evolution. Whereas at the start, you just, you know, open up, get a strong client base coming through. Then eventually you'd add on pieces of equipment. But now you get a startup and they've got an OPG machine immediately, they've got a scanner immediately. And so I the gain then becomes, does it not? We just got to keep pumping up revenue to be able to afford all this debt that we are eventually going to pay off. So it's smart debt, but now I'm in that kind of trap.

SPEAKER_00 9:34

Absolutely. I I think um something that's really important to kind of flag is practice, success, and personal wealth are not the same thing. And nobody tells you that clearly when you're starting out. I think a big a busy practice produces revenue, and revenue pays expenses, and what's left is profit. Um, but if it is not deliberately managed, it just gets consumed by debt, lifestyle creep, reinvestment back into the practice. And there's a metaphor that I like to use, which is that of like a bucket. Um, and this is kind of specifically relevant to the financial lives of dentists, which is that you know, if all the water getting poured into the bucket is income, but you've got all these leaks, you're not structured properly, you're paying too much tax, you're not allocating revenues and profits properly, you just leak all that money. And so the only option you have is to pump harder, to run harder, to put more money in the top in order to feel like you're you're progressing. And the deeper issue is that the practice becomes the answer to every financial question. So, you know, maybe the mental question of a dentist is, I need more money. So the solution is, well, I better grow the practice. Or the dentist says, Well, you know, I want to invest. Um, so maybe the solution is put it back into the practice. Um, if they feel behind, then they just think, well, maybe I should work harder. And so the practice becomes both the problem and the solution and the only one they can see. And that's when a practice can stop feeling like an asset and feeling more like a trap. And I'm sure you've come across this where uh a practice owner can, in some cases, be paying themselves less than what they pay their associates. It's just it's more common than people think.

SPEAKER_01 11:21

It is, and I've definitely seen that over the years on numerous occasions, for sure. And I do love your analogy of the bucket, because there's there's also only so much water that bucket can tolerate coming in as well. I mean, you can't just keep turning the tap on harder and harder and thinking that the current team or number of surgeries, number of services can cater all of that. Where it is at the complete uh ignorance or lack of attention spent on where are my holes in my bucket and how fast are they leaking things out? And is that the right rate, the wrong rate? Having an assessment around this, I mean, I hear a lot of dentists complain that they didn't learn anything about business in dental school. And I always say, well, it's because you didn't go to business school. You went to dental school. If you didn't learn anything about business at business school, then you'd have something to complain about. Because at business school they don't teach you how to do a filling either, but they don't complain about that. So recognise that all dentists do recognize that that degree that they get for dentistry is the starting point of their learning. But that is one facet of their learning if they're going to be owning their own dental practice, to actually understand the business side of it and then their wealth side of it. This is additional information that needs to come into your awareness for you to be able to make better decisions. And this is what you offer people.

SPEAKER_00 12:50

Yeah, so look, I th I think you're touching on something really important here. There was a book published, I'm gonna say, 30 years ago, called EMyth. And the the concept of e-myth was that business owners need to elevate themselves beyond being practitioners and think like business owners. And I'm actually arguing there's one more step that the book doesn't cover, which is I think practice owners need to elevate themselves from business owner to investor. Because I guess my bucket metaphor, the extension of it is that at the moment most practice owners are relying on one source of water to fill that bucket. And you know, if if that water gets disrupted or interrupted in any way, it can be catastrophic from a life perspective. And so I'm advocating that if you take the time and energy to build um assets beyond practice with time at the right pace and and in the right place, then you can basically add hoses or other sources of tap water into your bucket. Um, but yeah, I I think really elevating your thinking to investor is the ultimate, I think, journey for practice owners.

SPEAKER_01 14:04

It makes a whole lot of sense. And I can see how you get so in the weeds and so busy with the day-to-day, and the thoughts that run through your head as a practice owner, they're on repeat constantly. What's going wrong? How can I fix it? What's going right? That's fantastic. I feel like I'm on top of things. You've got your own even sense of identity as well that will either be pushing you to expand or keeping you exactly where you would like to be as well, where you're more comfortable, and what you believe you can achieve and the kind of levels of wealth that you might be talking about, Selena, that they, you know, is this the journey that I am on? Is this part of my path as a practice owner? Does it make it that I'm going to be busier? Does it make it that now I'm going to be dissatisfied with my practice, which I'm pretty satisfied with it at the moment? So there's so much psychological stuff that goes along with shifting your path.

SPEAKER_00 15:01

Absolutely. I I think a lot of practice owners think that the thing that they need to optimize for is revenue growth. And I would say that, you know, I think there are other things that you can optimize for. And, you know, what I'm really interested in is what happens after the revenue lands. So it's not that, you know, growth isn't important at various stages of your journey as a practice owner. But I'm going to say that I've come across so many practice owners that maybe earn significantly less, but they are wealthier. Um, you know, how much of your profit actually stays? Where does it go? How does it get turned into something that you can depend on? Um, and so, you know, I I think you know, having that broader life picture about the purpose of why you set this practice up, um, what is it going to do to support your life? And how are you going to make the most of really a golden opportunity to earn significantly more than others without creating, you know, a golden gilded trap for yourself?

SPEAKER_01 16:10

Yeah, the I feel like possibly the reason people start their practice when they're younger, say when they're in their 40s, I keep hearing that the age of practice ownership is getting younger and younger all the time, but also the age that people are selling their practices is actually getting younger and younger as well. Which one of the many reasons why that could be the case is that it's not satisfying whatever needs, whatever dreams they had when they first opened that dental practice, and they think that's not the path for me now. But the reasons why we start things evolve and change over time. When we think, for example, about the goals that we have, like the read the goal, the reason I started being a consultant, dental practice management consultant 15, 17 years ago, 15 years ago, they would have been a series of reasons that now when I'm in my position now, they're different now. And your capacity for dreaming different things is different, and how your career can actually fall in line with that is different now. I often reflect back to that saying of I think Tony Robbins has said it, I think a whole bunch of other people have said it too, that what we feel like we can achieve in one year is often far greater than what we can achieve. But what we can achieve, when we're asked what we can achieve in 10 years' time, we always pull it back and understate it and don't think that we're able to achieve that much. And I remember being intrigued by this concept because if anybody said to me, where do you see yourself in 10 years? I would have been like, I'm gonna be a bloody winner in 10 years' time. I've got 10 years to achieve all of the wealth and the connections and the impact and all the things, it's gonna be enormous. And when I started researching more about this online, I found this article called, and it was the the article itself was speaking about an online game called I can't remember what the name of it now was. Anyway, but it is Osmos, Osmos, it was called. And in this game, Osmos, you are an atom of a particular size floating around a medium with a whole bunch of other atoms around you. The purpose of the game is to come across atoms which are your size or smaller, bump into them, you swallow them up, overcome them, and then you become that little bit bigger. And so as you are overcoming manageable smaller atoms, you're getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, and then at a greater capacity to be able to eventually start bumping into those atoms which previously were far too big for you and too great for you to overcome. Now you are larger because of the journey that you've been on, and you can overcome them as well. And it spoke about this is the reason why we always underestimate what we can achieve in 10 years' time. Because the journey between now and 10 years, when you think of the experiences, the insights we'll learn, the different changing of mindsets that we're capable of over those 10 years, we have no idea what we'll be capable of in 10 years' time. So, of course, we're going to underestimate it because we're doing it, we're projecting ourselves with our current mindset. Our current mindset is temporary, it evolves, it will get better and stronger over time. And I feel like that this question around wealth and what I'm capable of achieving, and therefore what I can dream about, and therefore what I can use this vehicle of a dental practice can leverage me in what way to achieve what kind of dreams. So when you do have the thought of going, I started dental practice and now you're 10 years into it or 20 years into it, reassess what you think that dental practice can allow you to do, can how it can be leveraged toward your future. Because now a whole different set of dreams can be identified, and maybe you're stuck in the old ones. But the work with you, Selena, and having really being able to utilize funds and wealth in a way that you've never done in the past, but is completely open to you can absolutely change your future.

SPEAKER_00 20:26

Yeah, look, um, there's so much gold in what you just said, and and one of the first comments you made is people are wanting to exit practice younger and younger. And I've certainly seen that as well. I I've got um uh a couple of practice owners who were quite young and who basically started with me and said the goal is get me out, get me out as quickly as possible. And it's because they had aspirations in other areas and they saw the practice as a means to an end. Um, the other thing that you're talking about, which is you've got to you've got to stack your wins, you've got to compound your learning, is really you know, that's gold. And all I would say to that is unfortunately, a lot of practice owners that I speak to, they see the exit and the the lump sum that they might get at exit as the game. Like the goal is just get me the highest exit value prices possible. And the reality, the financial reality that I've witnessed is even if you're a practice owner and someone gave you your dream practice price tomorrow, I would say at least 90% of practice owners wouldn't have a clue what to do with it in terms of converting it into an income stream they can depend on. And that's the problem. So, you know, that that idea of positioning yourself so that you create wealth along the way means that by the time you get to an exit and someone hands you this massive lump sum of money, you'll know exactly what to do with it. Because the majority of people, even if you gave them, let's even say, you know, a deposit for multiples of millions, they just wouldn't have a clue how to convert that into anything meaningful, and they might make some poor decisions, in fact.

SPEAKER_01 22:14

Because how much of that can they lose just because they're not utilizing those funds in a smart way?

SPEAKER_00 22:19

Oh, just you know, it's everything. It's tax, it's um, you know, inability to understand risk, it's no prior knowledge of what's available, it's trusting the wrong people, um, it's putting your money into things that are not a fit for you know your your investor profile. It's it's so much, but it's um I think that the gold in what you're talking about, Julie, is that if you take the time and it doesn't take much time, it's not like the the effort required to run a practice, it's not the same. Building wealth has a much slower cadence and requires much less effort than running a business. Um, but if you get that right and you start to compound that knowledge sooner, you you will put yourself millions of dollars apart from another practice owner who, say, for example, just ignores the money and wealth equation, maybe you know, spends every pay rise, um, grows their lifestyle, has better holidays, you know, upgrades the home. The two practice owners, one that pays attention to wealth and the other that doesn't, you know, 10 years down the track can ends up, can end up with a net worth differential of, you know, many millions, five to ten to fifteen million dollars. It's fascinating.

SPEAKER_01 23:42

It is fascinating. And I imagine this is one of those areas, it's like a retirement conversation. I'll worry about my retirement later when I'm closer to it, you know, when I'm 60 years old, I'll worry about retirement. Um, and wealth can be the say in that same kind of basket for many people. I'm just busy trying to build my practice or stabilize my practice or get through the next month in terms of staffing issues and all the things that go on. Whereas it sounds like, I imagine, that the sooner you start that wealth creation journey, you are better off at potentially millions down the track.

SPEAKER_00 24:16

Look, you know, I I get that when you are a young practice owner establishing yourself, it's literally you can't mentally deviate from the goal of how do I get this practice financially viable and uh an ongoing concern? But I think there's nothing to stop a young practice owner from every now and then tuning into what could I be doing? Am I structured properly? Am I paying as little tax as possible? Where are the opportunities for me to siphon off profit? So, you know, I work with um a number of very young practice owners who are incredibly stressed about, you know, just keeping the lights on and making sure they can manage their debt and, you know, manage the practice week by week. But I would also say that they've got their eye on the prize, they've got clarity about what the game plan is over the net the next three to five years, and they know exactly when they can start siphoning off money. And I think that that just being on the front foot just will put them streets ahead of someone who's just like got that attitude of I'll worry about it down the track when I get there.

SPEAKER_01 25:28

Yeah. So tell me a little bit about some of the people that you have been working with over the years. Are there a couple of cases that kind of come to mind about the length of time, the amount of time, or the I should say the length of time they can start to make shifts and changes, the amount of time they have to spend on doing that and their own kind of personal awareness through that. Have they been quite surprised at what they've been able to achieve?

SPEAKER_00 25:49

Well, look, so I've I've worked with practice owners who are very established. They're in their, you know, mid to late 50s, they've they've run a really good business for years, and for some reason or another, they've just either neglected the wealth creation piece or they've invested badly. They've put their faith in the wrong people and they know that they have a short runway. So the objective for those people is really like, okay, how do we optimize the management of cash flow and profitability of the practice, and then focus on, you know, having them be more aware of how to make better investment decisions. In addition to like how will a practice sale potentially play out? How could they be creative about it? How can they make sure they don't pay too much tax? All of those things. So that's kind of the the later end of the journey. I'm also working with practice owners who are very early on in their journey. Um, I've been working with a few practice owners who bought or established their practices during COVID, which was the worst possible time. They were, they were hit really badly from all ends. They they were, you know, carrying a lot of debt, um, whether that's equipment leases or just the business debt itself. Um, they had fractures to all the shutdowns and they just didn't get out of the gates the way that they thought. Um, I also have worked with uh new practice owners who didn't really understand how much they should pay for a practice and overpaid and now find themselves in a situation where they're just trying to keep their heads above water while they they manage that. But there is always opportunity to refine and optimize and make things more financially comfortable. Um, and so yeah, I mean, everything from both ends of the spectrum. Um, but for me, you know, the the people I work with, it's quite a I would say a bit like yourself, Julie, it's a bit of an intimate experience. You have to be quite vulnerable. Um so my goal is not to, you know, work with a lot of people, it's to work with good people who want that kind of closeness of relationship with someone who can really help them with their day-to-day. Yeah, beautiful.

SPEAKER_01 28:11

And you know, it's just one of those situations where just a conversation with someone like yourself is so enormously helpful because we do have these set series of thoughts about what does wealth actually mean and what impact would it have on my life? And they're usually pretty limited thoughts. You know, for example, it means I'll be able to live in a nice house and not have to worry about my retirement, not have to worry about when I die. But wealth can mean so much more than that. And to be able to really get a sense of the legacy that you can leave behind, the impact it can have not just on you, but on the broader community and the broader world around us, going back to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, of course, it's only when we've got our own basic needs looked after that we can start to aspire to have a larger, broader impact on the people around us and on the world around us. And so quite often we think, oh no, I'd be if if my with my current beliefs around what wealth actually means, I'd be happy with this amount of money, you're selling yourself short a little bit because what happens when you get older and you start to want to live a legacy, you actually want to have a larger impact. You want to one day retire from owning your own dental practice and being a dentist, and then there's going to be a what next? Because if you're planning on retiring at the age of 70, for example, studies at the moment, some its research is indicating that you can live a long, healthy life up to the age of 110 to 120 now. So, what happens when you've actually got another career's worth of time after this current career and where you actually want to make quite an enormous impact? What then? And so this is where I'm talking about like just do what you can to have the conversations with someone like yourself, Selena, where you can encapsulate more than what you're currently thinking about because there's more potential out there for you.

SPEAKER_00 30:13

Yeah, I mean, you know, you're really speaking about the purpose of, you know, what's the point of putting yourself in a financial, a good financial position as early as you can? And, you know, for me, it's really about this idea of the freedom to choose. I do a lot of work with young adults in terms of mentoring and trying to support them as they enter the workforce. And, you know, one of the big things is that, you know, well, what's the urgency? Like why why is there a an urgency around getting your financial well-being in order? And that the truth is it's not about the big houses and the fancy holidays, it's just the luxury of the freedom to choose. And so for dentists, um, particularly those whose identity is very much tied up with being Dr. So and so or being the practice owner, it's not just the financial part of the equation that's difficult to reconcile, it's well what comes after that. And so, you know, life design beyond being a practice owner is is another aspect of you know that you know their life that they'll have to think about. And as you're right, it you quite rightly point out, people are living longer than ever. Um, but my experience is the people who are letting go of practice, by the time they get they get there, if they've done the right things, the next few steps are kind of at least, you know, the the next few metres or the next few kilometres are laid out. And then beyond that, there's there's not that fear that maybe a lot of people have. I I know, you know, this is kind of left afi, but a lot of dental practice owners will say to me, I love dentistry. It it it's you know, I feel really good about being a dentist, and I I've I'm not in a hurry to to leave the profession. And I say that's awesome. But when you kind of get them in a quieter moment and you say, But you know, what if you had the freedom to choose to work less? Like not leave, but just not have to turn up five days a week. The truth is most of them completely light up. You know, so yeah, I guess the point I'm making is you know, the the next chapter of your life as a practice owner doesn't mean that you completely exit. It could be that you become a mentor in the practice, that you stay on working, you know, only on cases that matter to you, or that you nurture a younger cohort of other dentists to come in as owners. There's so many permutations there. And I think unfortunately, the conversation around practice exit tends to be very binary. You're either in or you're out, or you know, you sell to a corporate or you sell to another practice owner or another dentist. You know, it and my experience is the more creativity you can bring to that end of your journey, the more options it opens up for you beyond dentistry.

SPEAKER_01 33:18

Oh, for sure. And freedom's it. Like freedom is more important to people than they realize unless they've consciously moved through that process of understanding what freedom actually means to their own life. And it is freedom. And if you didn't have to have any thoughts about can I afford it? Is it the funding? What happens if income stops? If you didn't have to have any thoughts around that, what would be available to you for the next phase of your life? And being in my position as a consultant and facilitating some practice sales, you know, there's absolutely a handful that I'm thinking about right now of dentists who have retired. One of them, you know, they all loved dentistry, one of them had to because of a physical ailment. So that was unf he was younger than what he would have chosen naturally, and that was kind of being forced in that position. But the others, you know, they felt, oh, maybe, maybe I am done and I have to leave it, you know, pass the torch to the next person. But they then, you know, a few weeks later, they're like, you know, you ring him up, how's everything going? I'm lost. What do I do? I don't know what to do. And so purpose is such just such an enormous part of our life. And if the financial accommodations didn't need to be considered, how what kind of purpose could you develop in your life? What would, as you say, what would light you up? And certainly mentoring is a space that in some instances we've lost a chunk of mentoring from the dental profession and for various reasons. And the the younger generation of dentists are missing out on some of the enormous lessons, insights that mentors in their world would normally have passed on to them. And these are key insights on how to run a dental practice as well, you know, these and how to get along with people that you employ, how to get along with your clients. And so these are key parts of it. But to be able to keep your involvement in the industry that you've loved so much, that has given you so much and that you've given back to it so much, and to maintain that and actually start to make sure that the previous generation is moving through in a more empowered way, gosh, I'd be a huge supporter of that. But that's just one of many, many options that are open to people. I mean, I've heard of so many people going into, you know, doing a lot of philanthropic philanthropic work as well, and recognizing the amount of satisfaction, fulfillment that giving back can give as well. Again, when you don't have to worry about does this actually pay a wage?

SPEAKER_00 35:56

Yeah, look, totally. And and I think what we're both saying is uh selling your practice uh should not be held up as the holy grail. You know, it's really just a point in time on a continuum. And yeah, I I think planning for life in the lead up to that moment and beyond is is really it's it's not a straightforward answer. It's unique to everyone, and I think there's things that you can do that prepare you for both sides. Beautiful.

SPEAKER_01 36:27

So, what kind of clients are if they're out there thinking I'm intrigued about all of this and I'd like to have a conversation with Selena, what puts them in the basket of people that you can help?

SPEAKER_00 36:38

Uh so you know, I'm at a stage of my journey where um, you know, fewer betters is probably uh my motto around working with a lot of people. Um so I want to keep my my client base quite small. Um I think people who are really aspiring to run a practice or exit a practice where there's financial, you know, peace around how money's getting directed and looking for opportunities to um financially be more in tandem with their business is really important. And of course, um, you know, I have been in the trenches as an investor for you know over 25 years now. If that's a piece that feels um maybe incomplete or they feel uneasy about that, then you know, that side of things as well is something that I can help people with. Beautiful.

SPEAKER_01 37:33

And what does the journey look like? And you know, do you have a website or how would people best find out about what to do next with you?

SPEAKER_00 37:41

Uh yeah, so I mean, my my program is freedomwarrior.com.au. So you can find me there. Otherwise, um LinkedIn as well. You can look me up on LinkedIn. But um, yeah, there's there's a specific resource on the website, which is uh just a quiz, which really helps people understand, you know, what is their you know financial savviness right now and and where are they at? And it takes two minutes and it's it's just a really good starting point for for anyone who's really interested in understanding where are their strengths and weaknesses right now.

SPEAKER_01 38:13

Fantastic. That sounds like a go-to thing to do straight away. Nothing to lose from finding out that little bit more information. And and there is just so much you go through phases as a dentist of what you need to know. At the start, it's all about the getting your degree and all the clinical expertise and you're doing all your further training into that. Then if you once you open up your own dental practice or buy your own dental practice, it's all around practice management and business management. That's your next phase of learning, but don't neglect this wealth side of it because it is freedom, it is your future, and we don't want to get to a point where we have wasted a whole bunch of opportunity. And gosh, can you imagine if where I would have been sitting if I addressed this earlier? Because it is about breaking outside of what the current kind of truths and awarenesses are around what it takes to be a successful practice owner now and start encompassing incorporating other things into that equation as well.

SPEAKER_00 39:05

Yeah, look, you know, I think if you're a practice owner, you've gone to all the time and effort and trouble and stress to take on more risk. Um, so you might as well make it pay off big time.

SPEAKER_01 39:19

Beautiful.

SPEAKER_00 39:19

I love it. Anything else that you'd like to mention before we wrap it up? No, no. Very enjoyable conversation. I love these meandering chats. So thanks very much for having me on, Julie. Oh, so delightful.

SPEAKER_01 39:30

Thank you so much for being our guest, Selena. And all of the links to Selena are in the show notes. So do tap in, especially do that little quiz, two-minute quiz. How quick is that? And then that can give you a bit more insight about what you'd like to do as your next step. Thanks, Selena, for your next time. If you enjoyed this podcast, then I encourage you to head over to Amina and my website, dental businessmastery.com.au. You'll find all the information that you need if you would like to gain our assistance in helping you and your team achieve great success. If you would like to find out more, you can also email us directly at info at dental businessmastery.com.au. Thanks so much for listening.