The Legacy & Wealth Podcast

The Multi-Million Dollar CEO: The Secret To Work Life Balance (Here Is The Truth)

• Mitchel Clark — The Standard • Season 1 • Episode 9

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Jeremy Freeman is an entrepreneur in the dental industry, co-owning multiple dental practices with his wife and scaling from a single office to a multi-location operation.  He has spent years learning how to transition from practitioner to business operator, implementing systems, sales frameworks, and leadership development to grow revenue and profitability.  His experience spans business consulting, team leadership, and navigating major economic disruptions like COVID while continuing to scale. 

In this episode, we discuss:

• Why most business owners are skilled operators—but poor leaders
 • The shift from “doing the work” to actually leading a company
 • How learning sales transformed a healthcare-based business
 • The real impact of hiring the right consultant at the right time
 • Lessons from scaling through financial pressure and uncertainty
 • Why your business will only grow as much as you grow as a leader
 • Balancing marriage, family, and business without compartmentalizing life
 • The importance of environment, accountability, and community for high performers

The Legacy & Wealth Podcast, hosted by Mitchell Clark and presented by The Standard, features conversations with entrepreneurs, executives, and high-performing men who are building wealth, leadership, and legacy. Each episode dives into the realities of success, covering business growth, personal responsibility, and what it takes to create a meaningful life at a high level.

Timestamps

00:00 Introduction & early business struggles
 01:05 How Jeremy Freeman makes money today
 02:00 Expanding into cosmetic dentistry & sales
 03:10 Entering entrepreneurship through marriage
 04:30 Early challenges running a business
 06:00 The turning point: hiring a consultant
 09:00 Treating business like sales vs healthcare
 12:00 COVID impact & near financial collapse
 14:00 Leadership growth & the “law of the lid”
 16:00 Transitioning from operator to leader
 17:10 The worst day in business
 21:00 The importance of emotional intelligence
 23:30 Why he joined The Standard
 26:00 Accountability and personal discipline
 28:30 Blending business, marriage, and family life
 33:00 Daily operations & managing by numbers
 38:00 Communication in marriage under pressure
 42:00 Raising children with values and independence
 50:30 Long-term thinking vs instant success
 54:50 Defining legacy and what truly matters

SPEAKER_01

Early on, I was a little bit upset that I felt like I married a business partner, but we didn't have any idea how to actually run a business. You know, we knew how to process payroll every other week and we knew how to pay the rent on the first of the month, and that was about it.

SPEAKER_00

What does it look like to have like a a really good family life, the business, but also the marriage? And how do all those things sort of fit together? A business only grows as much as their leader.

SPEAKER_01

Wherever your lid is as a leader, that's the lid of your company. So if you're a five million dollar lid, your company is going to be stuck at a five million dollar company. If you're a $10 million leader, your company is going to be stuck at $10 million. For me, it's I don't necessarily care if like the whole world remembers me. I don't care if 100,000 people remember the shirt.

SPEAKER_00

What I really care about is how Welcome to the Legacy and Wealth Podcast, a show for proven high-earning men who value wealth, character, and a lasting legacy. Brought to you by the Standard, a private membership community for high performers. My name is Mitchell Clark, and today I'm joined by fellow Standard member Jeremy Freeman. Thanks for having me. Yeah, no worries. Well, let's start this off. Uh the first question: how do you make money right now?

SPEAKER_01

So, right now, I'm in the dentistry space and me and my wife own four practices together, soon to be five. So that's how we're currently making money.

SPEAKER_00

Okay. What do you do in the dentistry practice? I know there's a lot of different specialties within that. So what do you guys normally focus on?

SPEAKER_01

Our primary focus is general dentistry. We just do the basic bread and butter stuff, crowns, fillings, cleanings. We do a little bit of cosmetic dentistry, a little bit more high-ticket, you know, $10,000, $15,000 plus cases, but those aren't as common as just someone who, you know, needs a couple fillings or a couple crowns or whatever.

SPEAKER_00

Okay. How long have you been offering the the more cosmetic elements? Has that always been a part of the offering?

SPEAKER_01

Or yeah, it's so we started offering it probably about five, six months into when we opened, because it is a little bit more advanced. So it took some time for my wife who's the dentist. She used to be the sole provider. Now we have four other dentists who work for us also. It took her a while to get to where she was comfortable doing cosmetics, but after about six months of being in practice, she felt more comfortable doing that. So we've offered it. I would say more recently, we've gotten we've ramped it up a lot more because we've we've found a price point that's pretty acceptable to people, and we've found a way that helps kind of move the needle, you know. Because even in dentistry, it's sales, even though it's healthcare. You know, it's still sales just like everything else. You have to sell a crown, you have to sell a filling, even if they really need it. People need to have a desire to want to do it besides pain. Pain's a big motivator, but you have to get people to do it when they aren't in pain, also. And so we've also focused more on those sales skills to ramp up the cosmetics. I would honestly say in the last six, seven months, we've probably done more cosmetic dentistry than we've done in the last nine years combined. So that's interesting. No, what made you get into this field? Honestly, my wife was a dentist. So when I married her, she already had a dental practice. And I didn't really plan on at the time, I didn't even plan on being a business owner.

SPEAKER_02

Sure.

SPEAKER_01

Uh, but we went to a Tony Robbins business event, I don't know, nine and a half years ago. And one of the things that we realized there is business ownership is the best way to financial freedom. Yeah. But of course, you have to know how to run one. There's a lot of people who run businesses who are just stuck on the daily grind. They might as well have a nine to five because they could have made more money, you know. But actually learning business and seeing some of the revenue that some people made there made me shift because I was actually in college at the time trying to be an accountant. I'm like eight credit hours away from being a CPA, but I never finished that because I was like, why don't we just push this, learn business, hire consultants, you know, go to all the classes, pay for all the gurus, and actually learn dentistry. And so uh that's really how I got into what we're doing now. I would say my wife and I are more entrepreneurs than you know, dentistry specific, but right now that's where we're at. And so we're gonna focus on that, probably have an exit someday and go into something that we're more passionate about. But right now, dentistry is our our focus.

SPEAKER_00

Okay. No, that's phenomenal. So let me ask you a little bit about your upbringing. Where where did you grow up?

SPEAKER_01

I grew up in Utah. So I was I was born and raised in Utah, which I really loved. I feel like the environment there was very helpful to um inspire growth and not just, you know, being okay with just average. And so I feel like as more opportunities presented themselves that helped me seek out those opportunities and pursue growth. So I really enjoyed growing up there.

SPEAKER_00

Okay. Where was that bridge? How did you meet your wife? I'm curious where that bridge was between growing up and getting into the dentistry business.

SPEAKER_01

So my wife actually went to Utah for some cosmetic dentistry classes. One of the best cosmetic dentists is based out of Utah. Okay. And he teaches a really big class on full mouth reconstruction. And so she was taking that class and we met while she was there one weekend and just kind of hit it off. And that's when I moved here to Texas because she was already living here, already had a practice here, and everything like that. So that was kind of the logical choice to move here. Was this after college for both of so I was actually in the middle of college when I met her? She had already been done. She was already a dentist, she was already practicing dentistry, but I was in the middle of college. So I actually transferred to UNT out here in Denton.

SPEAKER_00

Okay, awesome. So let me, as you're going through this, what was kind of one of your biggest rough patches going through that transition and going into the dentistry space?

SPEAKER_01

I would say one of our biggest issues, and I don't know what other industries are like, but in dentistry specifically, a lot of dentists go, I want to own my own practice someday, right? That's kind of like you graduate dental school, one to two years, maybe five of working for somebody and saying, Hey, someday I'm gonna open my own, I'm gonna maybe slap my last name on a place and call it good. But the problem is most dentists are actually super broke. They literally live paycheck to paycheck because they don't know how to run a business. Sure. So I would say the biggest thing for us was we were kind of in that that whole arena of she's a dentist, I was decent at talking to people so I could get people to commit to a decent amount of treatment plans, but we didn't have any idea how to actually run a business. You know, we knew how to process payroll every other week and we knew how to pay the rent on the first of the month, and that was about it.

SPEAKER_03

Okay.

SPEAKER_01

But as far as like growing and scaling the revenue, we had no idea how to do that. It took us probably three to four years of just kind of messing around, you know, maybe paying ourselves eight dollars an hour, you know. Once those checks finally cleared, we'd pay ourselves very little with the amount of work we put in until we finally started seeking out, you know, consultants. We found a consultant who was dental specific. And it took us a while to commit because at the time, you know, it was like $5,000 a month or something like that. And we're like, oh my gosh, that's more than we pay ourselves right now.

SPEAKER_02

Sure.

SPEAKER_01

And so it was kind of horrifying. But then we realized, you know what, maybe this is the key to unlocking growth because this guy actually knows how to run a business. We know how to do dentistry, but we don't know how to do the dental business itself. So that was really a big turning point for us was realizing that's actually something that we learned at the Tony Robbins event that Tony Robbins, my wife actually, she's a very aggressive person. I love it. Um, Tony Robbins usually talks to, I don't know, five to ten people a day, where he specifically kind of talks to them and like diagnoses what's going on. And she actually he he was like, Who feels like whatever? I don't remember what the question was. And she just shot up and she was like, I do. And so she got a mic, you know? And one of the things that he, I don't even remember the specific question, but he was basically like, Where do you feel lost in life? or something like that. And she was like, I own a business and I don't actually even know what I'm doing. And he was basically like, I'm sure you're a great dentist, right? And she's like, Yeah, I mean, I feel like I'm a really good dentist. He's like, But you do you know how to run a business? She's like, Absolutely not. And so he was like, Well, then freaking find somebody who knows how to run a business. Is there people out there who know how to run a dental business? Are there people out there who know how to scale a dental practice? She's like, Yeah, lots of people do. And he's like, Okay, so why aren't you looking for those people? And that's when we kind of realized, like, oh, okay. So that's the real secret is finding someone who knows what the heck they're doing and doing it. And so that that really pushed us over the threshold of being like, well, the $5,000 a month. We'd actually met the consultant, knew his pricing before we went to Tony Robbins, put it off, hadn't done it, been like three or four months, and then we went to Tony Robbins. And I think literally the day after we got home from the Tony Robbins event, we called the company and we're like, all right, let's sign up. Is there a deposit or how does this work? Sure, sure. That's that's really when our life started to change, was the day we signed up for that consultant. Was the money worth it? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The I would say because they made you sign like a two-year contract. It was like, you know, $140,000, the equivalent of something like that. And so that was kind of scary at the time. And I think it paid for itself in probably the third month of increased revenue. That's awesome. So um, you know, we were we were consistently doing $40,000, $50,000 a month, which in dental that's not a huge margin, you know, rents $10,000 a month, payrolls $20,000 a month, and then random supplies and stuff. We were basically taking home nothing. Um, and I would say we jumped from about $40,000 to about $80,000 to $90,000 a month in about two to three months, just because, you know, he said that it's kind of what I said earlier. He basically said stop treating dentistry like healthcare and thinking all people will do it, start treating it like sales. And that's when we really realized, okay, let's focus on making this seem more sales-y. And that's that's just the reality of growing in dental businesses. You have to turn into sales and not treat it so much like healthcare. Like, oh, well, people need a crown, they're gonna do a crown. That's that's not reality. But if you help them realize why they need a crown, then that's when the money really starts flowing in.

SPEAKER_00

That's really interesting because I've I've been in medical device for the past five years. And so that is something I've noticed with a lot. There's a lot of really good surgeons and a lot of good doctors out there. But, you know, the difference between whether or not they stay afloat or not mainly has to do with how exactly they run their practice, which for I know for a lot of doctors, you know, dentists, surgeons, what have you, that's not something that they got into medicine for. And so it's a little hard for them to kind of wrap their minds around it and dive into it. But then when they're able to kind of bring those finances under wraps and start learning how to run your essentially your business, like a business, then all the bills are being paid. And so now you get to practice medicine the way you want. Because what I've also seen happen with a lot of doctors too is they'll sell their practice to like private equity or they'll go work for like a Baylor IDN or you know, THR IDN, you know, something like that. And they don't get to necessarily practice the way they want to, but it's just how they have to do, and or this it's what they have to do in order to, you know, bring the paycheck home. So I think it's really, really cool that you guys were able to both find a way to stay independent, make money, and I would you say that now, because of that financial freedom, she gets to practice, you know, dentistry the way that she wants to.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. So when we when she first learned cosmetics, she basically was like, this is all I really want to do. You know, she's like, I hate the daily grind of the fillings and the crowns and the the cleanings and the whatever. She's like, I'd love to just do cosmetics. And now that we have a lot of associate dentists to take care of the the more like minor, kind of mind-numbing procedures in her mind, she literally just jumps around all of our practices and does the cosmetics. And that's kind of what she wanted to do. And so she feels a lot more fulfilled. Because even from my perspective, like, you know, changing someone's smile is the best part about dentistry. When you see someone go from, you know, maybe a less optimal smile to literally perfect and see their smile and see how happy they are and see them, you know, we've seen lives change, we've seen people get promotions, we've seen people, you know, go on to like lose weight and feel a better relationship and everything, all just because it's a good thing.

SPEAKER_00

You are literally putting a smile on their face, quite literally. That's awesome. That's really, really cool. Um, so how long ago was that when you made that that sort of transition?

SPEAKER_01

I I would say the biggest transition we probably had was COVID. Okay. So we'd already had that consultant. We act his contract actually ended up ended like right in the middle of COVID, right in the middle of all the shutdowns. And at that point in time, you know, we weren't making any money. We went from making decent money. We weren't making amazing money, but we went from making decent money to, you know, zero. Sure. Um, and we kind of went into, you know, we need to really get this down or go bankrupt. Because, you know, we've we've got a lot of bills to pay. We already had a few doctors on payroll and we were seeing almost no patients. Because even if we try to open certain days, people would be like, well, I don't feel safe, you know. That that was just COVID. And so that's when we really went like, we need to get this figured out. So 2020 was probably the biggest shift in like our own mindsets, because one of the things I've learned from a few of our mentors is a business only grows as much as their leader. Um I don't I believe it's John Maxwell. He has a book where it talks about there's a whole bunch of irrefutable laws of leadership. And one of the laws is the law of the lid, which basically says wherever your lid is as a leader, that's the lid of your company. So if you're a five million dollar lid, your company is gonna be stuck at a five million dollar company. If you're a $10 million leader, your company is gonna be stuck at $10 million. And I actually firmly believe that. And I feel like COVID is what helped press our lid a little bit higher. Okay. You know, I don't think we're $100 million leaders at the moment. You know, our practice does about four or five million dollars between all of them. But I think that us getting there, and I think, you know, I think COVID pushed us from like million dollar leaders to five million dollar leaders, you know, maybe $10 million leaders. But I think it's kind of like every business owner goes through transitions of like either we grow more or we die. Because in business, you are either growing or dying. You know, there's no stagnation. You're you're going up or you're going down. So you you as a business owner kind of have to decide, am I going up or am I going down? And what does it take to go up?

SPEAKER_00

Okay. So you had, you know, you're going through the practice, you went to the Tony Robin uh Tony Robbins uh conference, met with the consultant, started ramping up COVID hits. What did you figure out during the COVID times that kind of put you back on track and got you back in the right direction?

SPEAKER_01

So I would say during COVID, we honestly like the the consultant we had at the time was great. And he actually scaled to 14 practices, sold for an undisclosed amount of money to private equity. He kind of leaned it. It was almost north of $100 million, you know, at the time. And that's kind of what made us go, whoa, we need to do this. But I still feel like even he was limited, you know, in the aspect of growth. I feel like he his leadership was kind of like we'd we'd reached the cap of what he can do for us. Kind of, okay. And so that's when we started looking for like more legit business leaders. It's funny because at the time, you know, we were we were at home. We were at home for about two months during COVID. We didn't really work because we don't do a lot of emergency dentistry, and people weren't just coming in for general like, yeah, no, I can push my cleaning off three, four months, however long this lasts, you know. So we just decided to stay home after cancellation, after cancellation, after cancellation. So we were at home and we were actually kind of going, well, what can we do like when we reopen when things kind of cool down? How can we grow? And so we were actually, you know, reading books, well, listening to books. We don't read a whole lot of books. We listening to books, a lot of things, and that's when we kind of really learned more like business principles, you know, reading books like Traction or Um The 10X Rule or whatever other books there are out there. And that's when we kind of, I think really started shifting in our in our brains how important, you know, it is for us to focus on the actual business side of things. At the time, we were still, you know, I was running the front desk, I was helping schedule patients, I was selling cases, she was still doing a lot of dentistry. And during COVID, we kind of went, if we keep doing that, I don't think that we can grow the way we want to grow. Like we need to get into an uncomfortable place, which is us be leaders, managers, directors, and not front desk and doctor, you know? And I think that's kind of the mind shift that helped take us to, you know, being more aggressive.

SPEAKER_00

That's something I've heard from a lot of people is that's like the main shift where the live business owners specifically, they they kind of they're used to being the jack of all trades where they're just running every single minute detail of the business. And that transition point is whenever they're able to take themselves out of that day-to-day role and like you said, become leaders of the business, not just the worker bees within it. So that's that's really cool. All right. Tell me about the worst day you've had in business.

SPEAKER_01

I would say the worst day in business for me personally is probably the day before COVID. Okay. And that's because everyone kind of saw shutdowns coming, right? Sure. I think California had shut down like a week or two before Texas did, and a few other states had already kind of shut down. And I think that we kind of were like, oh, well, Texas is more Republican, they're probably not gonna force us to shut down. And then I think even more like Republican type states started shutting down. And then I think me and my wife kind of looked at it like, okay, well, you know, this is coming. Like we're we're not really an emergency type service that they're saying is one that can stay open. And also, even if we do, you know, our patients are gonna show up. People are hoarding toilet paper, they're not gonna come get a cleaning, you know. Okay, right. And we weren't super stable financially. We had actually just completed our second practice. Um, we opened the doors for it March 1st. The government shut down March 17th, or not the government, the COVID shut down was March 17th. So we just opened that practice 16 days before, it hadn't even kind of established traction, hadn't in any way seen any type of success. You know, we'd only seen 15 patients at that point in time. Sure. And so we had this whole new expense, and now the government was telling us we had to shut down. And so that was kind of like a very dreary, we've worked hard, we're now a million dollars in debt between the two practices, we've got all this going on, we've hired two associate doctors, we've got all this going on, and now you know we could foresee a shutdown coming. And I think I I don't even remember exactly the details, but I remember the day before the official shutdown happened. I kind of kind of feel like I think that there was an announcement or something that like it's coming, you know, and I I remember going into that just like, well, I guess we're gonna figure out how bankruptcy works, you know, because that's what's happening. Like, there's no way, like I've got enough money to cover two weeks of bills, you know, I can pay my next rent for each location, and uh that's it. You know, I don't know how I'm gonna pay my mortgage, I don't know how we're gonna pay our hard car notes, none of that. And so I think that the nice thing about that hardest day in business is I feel like that really pushed us to work in COVID. I actually got tried looking into like getting into e-commerce and stuff like that during COVID, just so I could try to make some money, like drop shipping and stuff like that. It takes a lot longer to establish that than the COVID shutdown was. But I learned a lot. I watched a lot of YouTube videos, I watched a lot of trainings and stuff, but I think all that did was instill more in me that like we need to just work harder. You know, we just we just need to pursue making money in whatever way we can. So I think that for me was probably the scariest/slash worst day in business that I've ever had. How long were you shut down for? Like when could you open back up? I remember the Texas State Board released guidelines for us. I want to say it was like two months after. Okay. Like they, you know, I think if I remember right, they they let businesses open in certain waves. Like, hey, if you're in this classification, you can up open up more. Like I remember restaurants weren't open for a while. You know, but I remember I think we were one of the earlier waves that could technically open up. We technically could have stayed open because they said that you can offer emergency care, but we don't do most of the procedures that are considered emergencies. So we didn't really stay open.

SPEAKER_00

Um and kind of like you said, even if you were open, how many people would be coming to the city?

SPEAKER_01

Like we would have literally just been open for like root canals and tooth extractions. Sure. Like emergency, like my face is swollen, get me in today type stuff. Not like we would have had no security. We would have had a whole staff there trying to work and just be like, Well, hopefully someone calls a day in pain, you know. That that would have been our life because nobody would have been pre-scheduled. You know, nobody would have pre-planned an emergency. We would have just been there, like, hopefully someone has a toothache today, you know, and hopefully, whatever.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01

But we we, you know, we shut down just to save on payroll costs and other stuff like that, and call our landlords for rent abatements and all, you know, we did everything, but it was a pretty scary time.

SPEAKER_00

I can imagine. Okay. Um, for a lot of people, uh, they tend to rely on like a single strength to kind of get them through like most of life's difficulties. If you could define like your one superpower, what would that be?

SPEAKER_01

I think that my superpower is really being able to understand human emotion. You know, I don't, I don't know why, but I think that something about me, like one, I think that you don't grow and scale your business or your life without others. I don't, I don't think you can get to peak physical shape without someone to guide you. At least maybe someone from the internet, you know. Maybe it's not an in-person like friend, but maybe someone from the internet. And I think that you also can't get in business where you want without being able to lead a team. And I think one of the biggest understandings of that is being able to understand where people are coming from. And that's something that I've always been really good at. I've always been good at being able to like judge moods, judge how people re will react to things. I think it helped me in sales, I think it helped me in managing, I think it's helped me in, you know, raising my kids. Yeah. Like I can tell when something's off with my kids because I unfortunately. I'm a person that bottles things up, you know, and I have two or three kids who bottle things up. But the nice thing is they have a lot of the same like tendencies as me. Oh, what's going on? Nothing. And then they just like will slowly like I'm okay, you know. And so it helps. Yeah, it helps me like, okay, little Jeremy, like, get over here before I kick your butt. You know, like sure, sure. It's and I think it helps me in my marriage, in my family, and my business, because I really understand kind of where those emotions are coming from, where people are going because of what's going on in their life. Okay. Do you feel like that's something you've always had, or is that like a skill you've grown more over time? I feel like I've kind of always had it for as long as I can remember. I remember even in elementary school that I was always the person kind of seeking out the people who seemed like they needed more help. Okay. You know, it didn't really create super strong friendships with me for anybody because I was really kind of just bouncing around to different people. Or one week I'd be with this person because I felt like they needed more help, or this friend. I had one friend that, you know, I could tell he needed help academically, so I helped him a lot. And I remember I still remember the parent-teacher conference where my teacher was like, I don't know what you've done with this friend, but his grades went from you know D average to in the B's. And, you know, I it's just things like that. So I I've definitely had that like I don't know if it's necessarily a good thing, but like almost seek out like the broken type people and see what I can do to help them.

SPEAKER_00

So uh in that case, sorry, so you went through that, went through COVID, you came out of the other side. What made you want to join the standard?

SPEAKER_01

I would say what made me want to join the standard was I feel like you know, kind of isolation. So basically, since I moved to Texas, I've been a business owner, right? And that's kind of taken all of my time. So it's really the only people I have interaction with are my family and my employees. And it's like the employees aren't people who are gonna push me. You know, they're they're not people who are gonna be there for outside of work, you know. Like they're they're there for each other, but who's there for the business owner? You know, if I'm having a hard time, I can't text one of my employees and be like, hey, you want to go to the bar or you want to hang out, or you know, whatever. It's more like I go home and it's like, well, that was a crappy day. What do I do? So I saw the standard, and honestly, what kind of stood out to me was you know what I can tell it it's pretty big here in Dallas. I can tell there's a lot going on, and I need something that can help me feel more connected to humans. Sure. You know, not just my wife. I love my wife. I spend every moment. I actually really like working with her. A lot of people were like, I couldn't work with my spouse. I love working with my wife, it's the greatest thing. I love, you know, the first time I spent time away with her was like a year. And I remember being at the hotel, like, wow, this is the first night I haven't spent with my wife in like seven years. Sure. And so it's really great working with her, but it still felt like I needed something, you know, some outer like defense almost of like someone who uh a group of people, essentially. What it what I saw when I first saw the ads for the standard was this is a group of people who will help me push myself. You know, I don't even know if I'll necessarily be able to like do all of the events or go to all the things or whatever, but what I saw was here's a bunch of other men who want to be better, whatever that is. Some of them want to be, you know, the best in shape, some of them want to be the best faith-wise, some of them want to be the best business-wise. And I saw that and I was like, okay, this is great. I feel like this aspect of my life is great. I feel like this aspect of my life is great. But you know, as far as like social interactions outside of my wife, I haven't had a regular conversation with people in seven years, you know? And fitness-wise, like who's holding me accountable to fitness? Nobody, you know, and I I really like the idea that there was a whole bunch of people, you know, they've got, I'm in a group chat with people who every single day text in, here's me at the gym, here's what I ate, here's my calories. And I feel like that's really important to me because one of the things I do is I'm a stress eater and a business is stressful. Sure. But I've also been to seminars where where there's super successful hundred million dollar plus businesses who are like, you know, your physical appearance, I feel is a direct representation of your mental appearance. So if you're someone who hasn't really taken care of yourself physically, you know, you're probably not where you need to be. Like if you're overweight and I'm kind of overweight right now, you're you're probably not going to be pushing yourself to that 10, 20, 50, 100 million dollar threshold because you can't even hold yourself accountable physically. Sure. And so I liked that aspect of the standard was that connection to let's improve this, let's improve that.

SPEAKER_00

Has that been helping having the accountability group? Oh, for sure. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

There there's been times where, you know, I still fall back into old habits and whatever, but it's we all have bad days. Yeah. Yeah. It's nice when no matter what, you know, some sort of text from four, five, six other people are coming in that day of here's me at the gym, here's me at the gym. It kind of kicks your butt because you know, I'm an early morning gym goer because I've got four kids. So I like to go before I don't like to miss out on time with my family. If I'm done with work, I don't like to go to the gym. You know, I like to go home to my kids.

SPEAKER_02

Sure.

SPEAKER_01

And so I feel like if I don't go in the morning, I kind of don't go, you know? Yeah. But sometimes I'll get those texts at like eight, nine of like, here's me at the gym. And it's like, okay, I'm gonna go during lunch because I didn't go this morning, but I can't let myself fall behind because here's other people who are out doing it too. Like, I can do it. I was just being lazy this morning, you know. Sure. Like I got eight hours of sleep. Why didn't I go? And so I I really like that accountability aspect. I also really like meeting people from all of the different backgrounds. Everybody's got experience in something. Someone's, you know, it feels like there's an expert in nearly everything. So if I want to talk to somebody about, you know, bank financing or apartment um purchasing or whatever, I feel like there's somebody in the standard who can who at least works in that industry, yeah, who can answer questions or give you a question?

SPEAKER_00

You can almost function as like a group of consultants in a certain sense. Yeah, I really like that.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, it really does feel that way. Like, oh, this person is super in shape. I'm gonna go see what they do. Oh, this person, you know, they their take home is several million dollars a year. I'm gonna go see what it is that they do. Oh, this person is has great knowledge of, you know, real estate, where it's going, what's up, what's down. I'm gonna go talk to him about that. And so I've really liked that aspect of being in the standard. I feel like every time I go to some sort of meetup, I learn something, sure, which is very valuable to me.

SPEAKER_00

Okay. That's awesome. Well, one thing I want to ask you about too was you know, you're a very unique position where your wife is a part of the business. I mean, she is the business, if we're being fully frank about that. You have four kids, is that right? Okay. So I want to kind of focus on like the day, because I think a lot of people listening to this will resonate with what does it look like to have like a really good family life, the business, but also the marriage and how how do all those things sort of fit together? And so, and none of us are perfect at it, but you seem to have found a pretty good balance in between those, and you're able to kind of grow in all those areas. So just kind of going into it, what's like a day-to-day look like with you and your wife and your kids? And how do you balance all those factors together?

SPEAKER_01

I would say the biggest thing that helps, you know, create cohesion for me is I don't put them all in their own separate buckets. You know, it's not like this is business time, this is wife time, this is kid time. I kind of blend it all together. You know, my kids actually know a lot about what's going on in the business, even though they're five, six, seven, and thirteen. Sure. They're all pretty young. They, you know, but they know a lot about what's going on. I feel like some of them could probably run business better than a lot of people do because put them on the payroll. Yeah, they they they hear about things, you know, they talk about things. Uh one of my daughters is like the greatest um advertiser for me, better than any of my paid ads. She tells all of her friends, she's like, You should see my mom. Oh, you've got a wiggly tooth, you should go see my mom. You should go to, you know, you should go to my parents' dental office, they'll they'll take care of you. And then like one of her friends just went to another dentist and she's like, I'm not her friend anymore because she didn't go to your dental office, you know. So I really think that not really compartmentalizing it is what helps me because I I do feel like if it was like, this is work time, this is kid time, this is wife time, I feel like that would be more overwhelming where it's more like it's all family time, you know. I can bring my kids to the office, I can leave early, I can spend time with them here, I can do that. Now, I do still have like after work routines, you know, we have like, oh, this is when we'd like to do dinner, but I'm also not such a stickler that it like ruins my evening if we don't have dinner at six, you know. Sure. And so I think that is also something that overwhelms a lot of people is like too much rigidity. Is that a word? Yeah. You know, uh, it's like if I don't have dinner at six, my whole evening's ruined. It's more like we had dinner together. You know, some people weren't here, some people were there, some people, you know, it was kind of all around, but we had dinner. Uh we had evening reading time, we had evening scripture study time, we had evening whatever. We all spent time as a family. My kids like to play video games. We have three X boxes that we've kind of linked up and we all play together, you know. And so there's there's just things that we we spend a lot of like I really feel like even though me and my wife have four dental offices, we run a business, a lot of people are like, I don't know how you guys have time for this. I feel like my kids get tons of time. You know, I don't I don't think that any of them would say they feel neglected. So and I think that's really because everything's just kind of a swirl of life, not necessarily like a balance, you know, or competition.

SPEAKER_00

It's more of a synergy than a balance. Okay. Correct. So that's awesome. Walk me through, let's say it's Monday morning, you're getting ready for the day. What does a day in the life look like for you and your family?

SPEAKER_01

So for us, I mean, during school, it's you know, the kids just we get them ready in the morning, we drop them off at school. I usually go to the gym before everybody's awake. I like to have that done before everybody's even semi-awake. You know, I'm usually back home by 6, 6.30 in the morning. And then we get the kids to school. We sometimes we go to work, sometimes we go to the office and you know, train people, make sure things are going right. But for the most part, we manage by numbers. You know, we look at what the numbers were the day before, what could have gone different. You know, we we keep kind of a tight leash on doctors that way we make sure that they're doing what they need to do. Cause that's usually the biggest downfall of dental practices is the associate dentist just being like, Yeah, I don't feel like doing anything. So, you know, that's not bad enough. We'll just watch it. That's not, you know, and then we kind of like keep a tight leash on that stuff. So we we spend a lot of our days looking at numbers and kind of re-evaluating the day prior and seeing what we could have done different to improve. So a lot of times we'll work from home, sometimes we'll go into the office, sometimes my wife will have a big case where she goes and does like a cosmetic case or something like that. And then for the most part, it's mostly just holding people accountable. Because I'm a big believer in accountability. I think that's how you grow and scale a business. Um, and for me, accountability looks like if I expect something due at noon, I'm gonna text you at noon if I don't have it, you know, or call you or whatever. Whereas I feel like you start to lose accountability if something's due at noon and you text them at three or call them at three, like, oh, where's that? Because then they go, oh, well, I've got three hours of you know, window. I've got three hours of leeway from this guy. So I'm just gonna not worry about it. And then, you know, the more that I get behind, okay, well, now I don't text them till the next day. And then it's like employees will just push the limits. So for me, it's mostly a day of accountability. It's like, okay, what's do at noon, what's do at 10, what's do at one, what's do at the end of the day, and then just making sure everybody's doing it. That way I can manage, you know, six, seven, eight people instead of me just doing everybody's job. Because before I really knew how to lead, it was like I just spent my whole day cleaning up things. This this patient didn't get a future appointment. This person didn't do this. Why didn't we do any treatment on this person? What you're just kind of filling in the gaps that need to be filled. It literally was just me now. It's more of a system of like um accountability. And then, you know, me and my wife will do a lot of like brainstorming. What could we change here? What could we do here? How can we make this better? What's going on with this person? Do we need to go have a one-on-one with this person? This person, you know, needs a ride-up, whatever, and it's a lot of back and forth. And we kind of talk about growth, where we're going, where we're at, what are our future plans? It's honestly a lot of back and forth between us all day and how we can get to where we want to go.

SPEAKER_00

Okay. That's awesome. So, what's uh date night look like for y'all?

SPEAKER_01

So, for us, we're both very much so like stay-inside type people. Okay. So we're not, you know, like adrenaline junkies or anything. So date night for us is honestly like dinner in a movie, or like she really likes to walk around malls, you know. So sometimes we'll just drive to a mall and just walk around and peruse stores and stuff like that because that's what she enjoys. Okay. And I'm a very easygoing person. I I I honestly just I like to enjoy things just in general. So for us, date nights mostly just getting out. We also don't like being away from the kids that much. So they're usually kind of short, but uh dinner in a movie, you know, strolling around the mall, nothing fancy, but we do try to make sure it happens frequently because we uh earlier on in the business, we did let that kind of consume us more. And we probably didn't go on a date for I don't know, two to three years, like a legit date. Yeah, we hang out all the time. We go to lunch together every day because we work together, we go to dinner every day, you know, stuff like that. But it wasn't ever really like, let's go do this for us. And so we've really prioritized that, even if it's not something like super fancy five-star restaurant, couple hundred dollar meal or a thousand dollar meal or whatever. It's more just like let's focus on us time and let's just do things we like to do. We both really like movies, we both really like to eat, we both really like to go to the store. So it's never anything crazy. Sure. You know, even if it's just a trip to Sprouts or something like that, we we kind of make it a date. It's funny because we actually went out yesterday, we went to pick something up, and we were next to Barnes and Noble. I was like, oh, let's just stop here because I really like the smell of Barnes and Noble. I don't know why. I agree. No, I get you.

SPEAKER_02

The bookstore smells great. I love to walk in there and just like smell all the books.

SPEAKER_01

I vibe with that. I do, I really do. Yes. So we stopped at this door, and my wife was like, Oh, this is kind of like a mini date.

SPEAKER_02

And I'm like, Yeah, sure. Sure, why not?

SPEAKER_01

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02

I I'm I'm here for the books, but I'll hold your hand while we're looking at the books.

SPEAKER_00

You could read all day for free, and no one's gonna say anything about it, or at least I haven't heard anyone getting kicked out of Barnes Noble yet. Yeah. Maybe after maybe after this uh this episode. Not anymore. Banned. If you want to connect with high performers like today's and previous guests, I want to invite you to apply to join the standard. We are a private membership community that improves the health, wealth, and relationships for six-figure earners who perform at the highest level physically, emotionally, spiritually, socially, and financially. What we offer is simple. We will give you a vetted local brotherhood of men on your level or above. We will give you a customized plan to build true generational wealth. We will give you a personal liaison to achieve all of your goals. If you are tired of being the most successful person in your circle, frustrated with always pouring into others and not having anyone to pour into you, or you want to have conversations like the ones you're hearing today in person, on a weekly basis with fellow higher performers, go to thestandardmen.com to apply. That's thestandardmen.com. Hit the link in the description below. Now back to the upset. What um let me ask you about this. Is there ever a time like let's say you and your wife are having like a rough patch or something, something's causing some tension between you all, but you still have to manage all these different things. How do you all normally tackle that?

SPEAKER_01

I would say the biggest thing for us is generally communication. Okay. You know, uh something that I really cherish in my life is I married a very emotionally intelligent person.

SPEAKER_03

Okay.

SPEAKER_01

I came from a whole lot of just bottle things in type family, you know. Nobody ever really talks about anything besides maybe sarcastically. Right. You know, and I had that problem a lot early in our marriage. My wife would do something that irked me and I would just, you know, some sort of response like that. Sure. But the nice thing is, you know, she was mature enough to kind of be like, don't respond to me like that. You know, I don't need a sarcastic response, like you can tell me how you're really feeling. And so it took me a while. It wasn't like the first time she said that, it was like a beam of light going on in my head of like, oh, you're right. You know, it took me probably a couple of years to get better at actually saying things. But I would say the biggest thing for us is open, honest communication and understanding people's feelings. Like it took me a few years also to understand her feelings, you know, because I'm a very logical person. Yeah, I'm a very like this, this, this, this, this A, B, C, D, E, F, G type person. And she's more of a I feel type person. And so it took me a while to be like, but that's not what happened, you know. Like, let's look at this, like a crime scene investigator type thing. And I'd be like, this is what happened, and you're looking at it this way, and can't you see it from this person's perspective, and stuff like that. And it really took me a while to realize, you know what, this is the person I chose to marry, and her emotions are the only ones that matter to me. I don't care about the neighbors' emotions or you know, my parents' emotions, or my friends' emotions, or her friend's emotions, or whatever. I'm not gonna go in and be like, well, your friend said this, and I understand where she's coming from. You're not married to them. You know, like I'm gonna look at it and say, okay, I hear what you're saying, I understand what you're saying, and this is why you're this way. And I think being able to, for me to understand that has helped our marriage because, you know, whenever someone's upset, it's more like I can step back and be like, all right, so this is what's going on right now, and this is how we can deal with it. And this person who I'm talking to who we're having a tiff right now, I'm gonna listen and I'm gonna interpret what she wants me to interpret, not what I want to interpret and go into investigation mode. I still, I still do sometimes. I'll catch myself and being like, I mean, I don't know if that person's wrong, you know, but I realize like, okay, well, let's let's look at her emotions and see why she's feeling this way. And I think that helps a lot. Okay. And it helps resolve those shifts. Now we we'll still have some things that'll, you know, carry into the next day or the next day, or you know, like, oh, I can't believe that happened type things. But for the most part, especially since we work together, we have to get over things pretty quick. You know, we have to talk through things pretty quick or because we can't have it running into the business the next day or whatever.

SPEAKER_00

So how would you describe has your relationship with your wife changed at all from you know, prior to the Tony Robbins con uh conference moving in today? Like, how has the relationship kind of changed and morphed over time?

SPEAKER_01

I think that early on, I was a little bit upset that I felt like I married a business partner, you know, like because that's what it felt like at the beginning was like, oh, well, you know, it's very business-y all the time, very to-do. But then I realized, you know what? Like, this is really what the purpose of a relationship is, is to build our lives together.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

You know, we're not here to do this or satisfy that or whatever. It's like we're really here to build our lives. And what do we want in our life? Well, at the time we already had kids, they were babies, but we already had kids. And we knew the biggest thing we want is if we want to do a weekend away, or if we want to go to Europe, or if we want to go to well, my wife's Chinese, if we want to go to China, okay, we want to take our kids there for the whole summer, maybe help them learn Chinese or enroll them in school out there or whatever. Um, we want the financial freedom to do that. Okay, so what does it take to do that? So let's kind of look at our marriage and see what we can do to work together to achieve those goals. And what does she desire in life? What do I desire in life? Let's talk about those things and let's see how we can work together to help each other achieve our own desires, but also our family's desires at the same time. And so I think kind of just looking broad picture, that's what really helps me move forward, is like, okay, this is really a cohesive unit, and let's figure out what we can do to help each other and to help ourselves.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, because I think that's one thing people kind of miss about marriage. It is, it is, in a sense, almost like a business you're developing together, in a sense where it's it's a legal contract between two agreeing parties and you're agreeing to build a life together. And I'm you know, not unfortunately, but you know, the business and money and the house and everything else, it's it's all part of that. So I think what makes a good business partner can also bleed into what makes a good, you know, lifelong partner in general. It seems like y'all have found a pretty good balance about that. I'm kind of a similar way to you, where my wife's more of the emotional one, and I'm more of the, well, let's like look at all, you know, back to back. And I I quickly found out that was not the best way to resolve an argument pretty quickly. So I wish I'd found that out a little bit more quickly, but um, no, that's really good. Um, so right now, with the way everything's together, just talk about the kids for a little bit. What are some things, because of the way that you all run your lives and your business and everything else, how do you feel like that's impacting your kids?

SPEAKER_01

Uh, I feel like one of the most important things that us as parents can do with our kids, and this is my opinion, this is my family, this is how we run things. Not everybody has to see it this way, but we feel like our goal as parents is to instill values in our kids, whether they're moral values, financial values, family values, whatever types of values those are. We want to be able to instill those in our kids to where they understand it, but aren't forced to live those values, right? I feel like a lot of people kind of look at thing and things and they're like, oh, well, I'm gonna force my kids, you know. A lot of people will go to a certain church and be like, if my kids don't grow up in this church, I'll disown them. Sure. It's like, well, that's why your kids are gonna go away from your church because you've got that mindset. And so ours is kind of like, hey, me and your mom think that owning a business is the best financial strategy in life. And so we would like you guys to learn how to run businesses. My daughter, who's only eight, went to a Grant Cardone event three months. Really three months ago. That's incredible. She was the youngest person there. They almost didn't Let her in. We had to talk to, we had to go way up the chain to get her there. Okay. You know, but we're like, we want her to learn business. And it was a 10x ladies, so it was more like focused on uh women. Right, right. And we're like, we want her in this room of powerful billionaire women who have achieved a lot, you know, they've they've done a lot, they know what success looks like. And so we we wanted her to go to that so she can see women who are successful.

SPEAKER_02

Sure.

SPEAKER_01

Because that's our values. We're not like, hey, you must be a business owner someday. But we're like, look, being a business owner is the best way to financial freedom. But if you want to work for us or if you want to work for somebody else, you know, that's your decision. And we tell that to the one who's the oldest one, he's 13. We tell that to him all the time. Like, look, you know, we we know that you have desires to do this. If you want to do that, that's great. However, this is what your lifestyle is going to be like. That's just reality. If you want it to be different, then this is the the pathway. But we're never like, no, you can't do that, you know. And so I think I think that's really our desire, our goal with our kids is to show them the way and everything. Like, look, this is the type of person that you should look towards when you get married. You know, this is the the the values you should look for in a person and yourself. These are the decisions that you should be making, these are the things that help us. Here's why you don't do that, here's why you don't do this, here's why you do do this. You know, and we do even from a young age, we tell them like this, this, you know, we're not afraid to tell them things because I think that, you know, this is just a personal thing, but I feel like sheltering your kids is a good way to create kids who want to go out and find things for themselves, right? I agree. Like I feel like I had friends who grew up in very, very strict religious households where they couldn't even watch like Harry Potter, you know. And those kids are the most jacked up adults, sorry to say it that way, but they're the most very far off whatever path their parents try to show them that I've ever seen. You know, they're they're they're failures in life. A lot of them are they're they're just stuck in drugs and alcohol and stuff because their parents were so strict on here's our religion, here's what you must do. You can't watch Harry Potter, that's demonic. You can't, you know, you can't even look at the alcohol section in the store. How dare you, you know. And so now look at them, you know. And so we're not that way. We'll tell them, like, here, here's why we don't drink, you know. But we're not like, if you ever do this, we'll disown you. Right. You know, so that that's that's kind of what we believe. We want to instore install us a good set of values in our kids that make them desire to be that way.

SPEAKER_00

Okay. So more show them the direction and kind of guide them, but without having like, if yes, that's that sounds really, really good. It's funny you say that because I was also one of those households that Harry Potter, to this day, I think I've seen maybe one Harry Potter movie, but I'm so far removed from it at this point that it's you know, it's lost some of the allure, but I find that funny because I also didn't watch Harry Potter growing up either. So um, and I also know a lot of other people that growing up in a really, really sheltered household, like at some point or another, they're gonna leave the house, they're gonna leave the flock. And I it it's yeah, I've seen a lot of people that were oppressed their whole lives that as soon as they step out into the real world, they just completely go off the rails. It doesn't always happen. There are some people that like it's not everybody. Yeah, it's not everybody. I would say maybe half the people I knew that grew up under that kind of lifestyle, like once they explored, whereas if they had had a little bit more freedom in the beginning to kind of explore under, you know, it's better to explore under your household than you know, off in the world completely by themselves.

SPEAKER_01

I think when you're allowed to make mistakes, you learn from them. Sure. Instead of like you've never been allowed to make a mistake your whole life. And so suddenly you're just like, whatever, I'm gonna go do whatever I want because who cares? And a lot of people when they do things don't look at like the long-term perspective, you know. Like I, you know, I believe in life after this, so I always look at things of like an eternal perspective, right? Like, what decision am I making today that could affect my forever? Yeah. Is this decision I'm making right now going to affect eternity? Sure. Because I don't want to do it if it's something like that people view as fun or whatever. And so that's how I do things. Right. I don't force that on anybody, but that's kind of the values I'm instilling on my kids, right? Like if you want to do that, just think about long-term consequences, not even necessarily eternal, but lifetime consequences, or for sure. It's it's kind of like the signs in Walmart. You know, shoplifting could leave you with a record. Uh, you see that at like every single bathroom when you walk in, because you know, they like to press charges. And it's kind of like think of that whenever you make about to make a decision, is what will this impact have on my life? It's it's like the book. I don't know if you've ever read The Compound Effect. I have, yes. Uh he talks about how like the little microscopic changes every single day, you can end up, you know, so far away after a year from where you started. And so I think it's kind of the same way you make one decision and one decision. And maybe that decision turns you back towards the path of where you should be. But I think it's also good to show my kids, like, hey, here's a bunch of people who've already done it. Here's here's books, here's resources, here's whatever videos and look at these people and look at what they have. And doesn't it look nice to have what they have?

SPEAKER_00

No, I I really like that because I've I'm I've had this conversation with a few people where we're talking about like good and bad decisions tend to compound over time. I was listening to someone talk about the people that tend to have the most success in life usually have a more long-term effect. They're thinking, they're thinking more along the 10, 20, 30 year horizon and not necessarily just like today, or because you talk a lot about people that are living, you know, paycheck to paycheck. I also think there's a lot of people that are just living kind of moment to moment without thinking, what are all decisions I'm making today going to lead to in the future? Um, and I think uh, and I had a conversation with somebody else that they recently are they're trying to turn their life around right now, but it's very difficult. And I just told them like, because they're like, well, it seems like it's easy for you to make the right decisions. Like, yeah, but that's also because I've been making a lot of these decisions a lot earlier in life. And so it's just it's easier to continue along the trajectory if you've already been in that path for a while. Whereas if you've been making bad decisions for a long time and now you're trying to make a turnaround, it's difficult to start. But as long as you keep up the momentum, you'll start seeing some payoff later on in the future. So and sometimes it's a painful lesson people have to learn later on in life, but better to learn later than never at all.

SPEAKER_01

So Yep, I agree. I think a lot of people are looking for the like get rich quick, you know, or the instant weight loss, or the, you know, like I have 40 pounds to lose, how can I do that in a month and a half? It's like you can't, you know, for sure. Uh I want to make a million dollars, how can I do that in a year? You can't, you know. Maybe there's some scams out there that you can, but if you want to do it the legit right way, yeah, for anything, there's not a quick path. So you have to go back boil it down to your individual decisions and say, does this get me towards whatever? And we actually do this with our employees. We call them PPFs, personal, professional, financial goals. We sit down and say, What's your one-year goal, what's your three-year goal, and what's your five-year goal. Yeah, for sure. And honestly, we don't keep people around who don't aim for those goals because how are they gonna help our company grow if they don't care about their own growth? Sure. And so we do it with ourselves too. I actually every single day write down what are my targets, what are my long-term targets, and what are my goals for today? Because these goals for today better help shape up those long-term targets. You know, if I want to get to $100 million in revenue and 12% body fat, what am I doing today that's helping me get there?

SPEAKER_00

Right. Um, it's like there's no such thing as an overnight success. I know um, I think it's sometimes it looks like overnight success from an outside perspective, because you put in all this work that's yielding no fruit, but then eventually at some point it just it almost looks like it happens overnight. Cause I think sometimes it it does happen overnight, but that's because you've been putting so much effort on the back end where at some point it just reached that trajectory where it just starts going up, where it looks like you achieved it overnight. But yeah, in reality, that's not the case.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, you didn't see him before the success. You only saw the success, and you're like, oh wow, it must be nice to be there. But I think that you know, one of the people that I listen to, his name is Russell Brunson, and one of the things he talks about is he he actually only will work with business owners who he's who have been through what he calls cycles.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Because he thinks if a business owner's never had a downtime that you're bound to have a downtime. Sure. So um, and he feels like if you've never had to like crawl out and get gritty and really, you know, figure out how to get through the nastiness that you don't actually know how to succeed in business. And so maybe there's someone who's managed to scale a business to 10 million, but he feels like that person's gonna have a downfall at some point in time. Yeah, you know. Um, there was another mentor, he was actually at the Tony Robbins event. His name is Keith Cunningham. He's a he's kind of an older guy in the industry, he's kind of fading out at this point in time. But one of the things that he talks about is how he went from a hundred million dollars a year to zero, like that. And I think that that happens, and I think that it probably he was probably making small decisions that he was on the right path, but slowly guiding himself off the right path. And so that's what I think it's important. That's why I write down my targets every single day and those goals that are gonna help me achieve that target. Because even if I'm what if if you know 18-year-old me were to look at me nowadays, I'd be like, wow, holy crap! Yeah, my goal when I was 18 was to make a hundred thousand dollars a year because nobody in my family made a hundred thousand dollars a year. Sure. And now I look at it and I'm like, I'm not doing good enough, you know. Like we're we made uh 220 or whatever last year, and that's like that wasn't very good. Sure, sure. What can we do to do better? And so um, I think that having that future perspective of constantly, where am I going? If I don't have a plan, I'm going nowhere. Yeah. And that kind of I know I went a little off track, but that kind of brings back to those whole everyone should have personal, professional, and financial goals and what we're going to do to achieve those.

SPEAKER_00

Does the family have those goals?

SPEAKER_01

I know you have them for yourself. Do you does the family itself have goals? So my wife and I have like family goals that we've laid out. This is where we want to be, this is what we want to do, this is these are the kind of things that we want to be able to do in life. You know, like I said earlier, one of those big things that we really want to do is take our kids back to China for a decent amount of time, you know, maybe not three months, but maybe a month or a month and a half or whatever. And in our current state, we can't do that. You know, our business is still too reliant on us. We don't make enough cash flow. You know, there's not enough systems in place to just have everything churn without us to where if we were to disappear for a month and a half, it would keep running. You know, maybe like a week and a half.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

But even then, after a week and a half, we'd probably come back and be like, okay, what do we need to do before we die?

SPEAKER_00

You'd be so stressed out while you're gone about what's going on with the business that it'd hardly be a vacation to begin with. No, that makes sense. Well, so I know um at the previous standard conference, there was a big emphasis on legacy. And I know we've been talking a lot about like the family and everything else, but what does the term legacy mean to you and probably just as important to the family?

SPEAKER_01

So I think legacy is how your posterity remembers you personally. Sure. Uh, you know, I I know a lot of people, there there's even people who don't necessarily believe in like eternal life or life after this, but they feel like the way that you can live eternally is to have people remember you. Yeah. For me, it's I don't necessarily care if like the whole world remembers me. I don't care if a hundred thousand people remember me. What I really care about is how the people, my kids and their kids and however many generations I get to meet before I go, how they remember me. That's my legacy. Because I feel like at the end of the day, that's all that matters. You know, as big as my goals are, as much goals as my wife and I have, I always say at the end of the day, as long as we have our family and we're in good health, we could live in a paper box, you know? And so it's nice that we have these goals and these financial ambitions and you know, business scaling is our our overall scheme. But at the end of the day, what really matters if we boil it down is us and those four kids, right? Like that, that's our legacy, is how those kids end up. And I I look at that a lot as how are my kids gonna end up? Am I gonna raise hellions, troublemakers, whatever, or am I gonna raise people who are, you know, independent, well-run, well-guided kids, you know, or adults someday, and they they make good decisions. And I don't go, oh boy, you know, this person should be in public someday. Yeah. Um, and that's that for me is really legacy, is at the end of the day, I do everything I do is for my kids and their experience in life. So how they remember me, how they see me, how I'm viewed as a parent is really what my legacy I feel is what's going to define my legacy.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, you know, since we're talking about Grant Cardone quite a bit with the 10X conferences, I remember a quote where he said, like, the real wealth isn't in like the monetary amounts you have, but in the relationships you've cultivated as well. Because he he would often say, a lot of my business, a lot of the great things that happen in my life are because I know some really, really great people. If you're surrounded by really great people and um and get to kind of glean off them, you'll never run out of opportunities. And so I think that's I think it's a cool thing that you guys have invested just into each other and also you know, being well known. I love the fact that your daughter is such a hardcore proponent of you all. Your your daughter's probably a big reason why everyone in the community knows who you are. So that's really, really cool. Um, what are some of the most important if there's like one important lesson that you wanted to leave off to your kids that you hope that they learn, what would that be?

SPEAKER_01

I think the biggest lesson I want for my kids to learn is to do what makes them happy. You know, I don't I don't think that they should do anything that isn't going to lead to their happiness, right? Uh I believe happiness is the ultimate goal for everybody. And that's really my focus with them a lot. Now, what I teach them and as far as you know the church that I take them to or the the desires of owning a business for them someday, or you know, me and my wife always joke because they love they love like Hello Kitty stuff. We always joke because Hello Kitty has this like uh franchise, it's a cafe where everything's like Hello Kitty style and it sells like hot chocolate and coffee and stuff like that. And we always joke that we're gonna buy one of those for them someday just because they love that stuff so much, and then they get to run a business. But at the end of the day, really it's about you know what makes them happy. One of my daughters really wants to be an interior designer.

SPEAKER_00

Okay.

SPEAKER_01

And she right now, you know, she's only eight, but she's like, I just want to design you guys' dental offices, that's all I want to do someday.

SPEAKER_02

Sure, sure.

SPEAKER_01

And I'm not gonna, you know, when she's 20, be like, hey, you said you were gonna do this for us, right? And so I think pursuit of their own happiness and not I know there's a lot of parents who try to live vicariously through their kids, you know, like, oh, I can see that this kid's athletic, so I'm gonna push them into basketball or football or softball or whatever, so they can live the life I never lived. I I know if I would have just woken up at four every morning as a teenager, maybe I could have, maybe I could have made it. I was skilled enough, but I didn't put in the work. Sure. Like, I don't believe in living vicariously through my kids. I want them to pursue what they want to pursue and enjoy what they want to enjoy and live the life that they want to live, even from a young age. And again, I can instill values and things in them, but I think that at the end of the day they get to to make their own decisions. I feel like kids are even smart enough to make their own decisions, you know. I'm never gonna be like, well, playing baseball is you know, team sports is the only way to learn how to do this when you grow up. So you're gonna play until I say so, you know.

SPEAKER_02

Sure.

SPEAKER_01

And I feel like a lot of people grow up in environments like that. So I'm not that kind of person. I'm not saying that's the wrong way to do things. That's just the way that I look at things. And so that's that's what I really hope my kids get out of what I teach them is pursue pursue happiness.

SPEAKER_00

That's really cool. Okay, very interesting. Well, look, I've really enjoyed this conversation, but for uh people that want to be able to find, so let's say I have a toothache tomorrow and I wanted to find the best dentist practice in town to go and take care of my toothache. How can people find you?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, so we have four practices right now. It's called luxury dental with an I, L-U-X-U-R-I. And we have a couple practices in Dallas and a couple in the Denton area, Flower Mound, uh 380 corridor area. So that's where we can be found. We're we're accessible and we have really great doctors who really want to help take care of their patients.

SPEAKER_00

Okay. How can people find you specifically?

SPEAKER_01

Uh I I'm on Instagram. Okay. I I recently started an Instagram page. I'm trying to be more it's I actually started it to to help myself with fitness motivation. Okay. It's kind of like my online diary of workouts and weigh-ins and stuff like that. So I do that. Um, my my username is real Jeremy Freeman on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, all of those things. I'm trying to be everywhere, but trying to establish kind of an online presence, but also personal accountability online right now.

SPEAKER_00

Not to be confused with the fake Jeremy Freeman. Right. Okay. There's a lot of fakes out there. I'm sure there's only one real one. Yeah. Well, I'm glad we were able to get the real one here on this podcast. I appreciate your time. This has been a really, really great story, and I think a lot of people are gonna gain a lot of value from it. Um, but yeah, I'll see you at the next uh standard event that we have a little bit later on. All right.