1: A New Journey Begins

What do African animals, civil war, and Wall Street have in common with owning a dental practice? Depends how you see the world.

I didn't come to business from dentistry. I came to dentistry from a life of business - 32 years of scar tissue, and a childhood spent under African skies.

None of it taught me anything about teeth. All of it taught me what people actually do under pressure when the stakes are high and the resources are low. 

If you're ready to re-engineer the thing you set out to build all those years ago. Find peace and joy, and build a business you'd never want to sell, then get your boots on. We're going on safari. 

If you're looking for more of my philosophical, geopolitical, or macroeconomic content, visit my other podcast, The Sovereign Guide. 

More can also be found on my YouTube channel. 

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Hippo attacks, elephant charges, child soldiers, and kids wielding machetes. Malaria, leprosy, and how to absolutely not fit in on Wall Street. What could these things possibly have to do with dentistry? Well, probably depends on the way you see the world. But the way I see the world is they are intricately connected. But if you stick around and we spend a little time together, maybe it'll all start making a little bit of sense But first if you've stumbled into this podcast because you're looking for help, help with specific things, maybe how to handle insurance reimbursements, or you're navigating a fee-for-service conversion, maybe implementing scheduling efficiencies and adjustments, or you're upgrading a script for the front desk, or what- whatever those things might be, there are dozens of really high-quality podcasts out there run by good people that know what they're talking about, and they're really good at it, and you should really support them However, if you're ready to engineer or re-engineer a life and a business that yields the time, the financial, and mental freedom that you expected it to when you began, you know, the reason that you set out, "I'm gonna start a business or go into dentistry 'cause of the time and money that it'll give me." How's it going? But if you are ready to engineer that, that thing that you set out to do all those years ago, then get your boots on, 'cause we are going on safari. And I mean that literally. Safari is a Swahili word. I don't speak Swahili. I speak a bit of Zulu. But it doesn't mean a lodge, or a package, or a week of photographs from the back of a four-by-four or something. It actually means journey, on foot, in the real wilderness. A journey with high consequences, and all the dangers and excitement and the adventure that you were looking for, just like your business, just like your career. Except doing it with somebody who has walked it before, a guide. Someone actually familiar with the terrain, even if your specific path is a new one I've spent years of my life doing exactly that for a living. The job of a guide is to know the country, to read the signs, understand the ecosystem, but keep you moving towards something you might never otherwise have reached on your own. Or even if you did or do, maybe a little faster, or maybe with a little less drag and scar tissue. That's what this is. Same job for me, different continent, different industry. My name is Alistair MacDonald. I have never held a handpiece. I have never generated a single dollar of clinical production in my life. So if you came here for clinical insights of any kind, I have none, and I will never pretend otherwise. I'm an owner of a multi-practice dental operation with two incredible partners that I love and admire. And I've built and guide a private community, The Sovereign Dentist, a group of superb docs, incredible humans that are doing beautiful work in the types of practices that anyone would wish for. We'll get to how that all dovetails together at some point. What I'm interested in is helping people think differently about the problems and opportunities that keep showing up in their lives, twisting their kaleidoscope. It's the beauty of a kaleidoscope. Everybody's played with one as a kid. The idea of everything contained into this tube, same contents, slightly twisted, adjusted, seen through a different lens, completely different image, completely different perspective. So if you're looking for a different perspective, if you're starting to feel that the price you're currently paying in your life, your practice, your career is no longer worth the benefits it's giving you, even though you were sure years ago that this price would be worth these benefits, even if you used to think that, but you're starting to feel like that price is a little heavy. If you have discovered the limitations of scripts and checklists and manuals and system upgrades and noticing how they don't seem to actually manage people the way you hoped or the way you were led to believe or wanted to believe. If you are willing to consider the possibility that reading more books every week and working harder, getting up earlier, make sure those ice baths are even colder than they were yesterday, may not actually be the simplified keys to success. That's not to say they're not useful. But if you're willing to consider that there's maybe more to success in all domains of your life, If you are open to the possibility, I would state a fact, but possibility, that effort is in fact a commodity and intelligence is a ceiling, if you can consider these for a moment, and willing to investigate a different way of doing what you've been doing to change the price you pay for the results you either get now or want to get, then I have some things to share with you. Welcome to The Sovereign Dentist. We'll do things a little differently around here, and I think you'll spot that pretty quickly I didn't come to business from dentistry. I came to dentistry from a life of business, a life that looks nothing like the standard academic pipeline, nothing like the standard corporate pipeline. In fact, my life doesn't even look like those of any of my childhood mates. I grew up in the middle of a horrific civil war in Africa. The country of Rhodesia was becoming the nation of Zimbabwe. As kids, we grew up surrounded by terrorism. We learned to lie down in the back of the family station wagon, this giant yellow Banana Mobile that I was too young to be embarrassed to ride in, knowing that on certain roads, certain country roads, we were going to be driving through known ambush spots. my family and friends lived with guns under their and our beds. We traveled in military convoys from town to town. Tragedy and loss were everywhere, but so was the love in my home and the dynamism in my incredible family of multi-generational entrepreneurs. I was sent away to an elite boarding school that was designed around what amounted to violent hierarchies. We were policed by terror. The boys ran the school. I joke that it was a hybrid of Harry Potter meets Lord of the Flies. But I can tell you the things that I learnt there, beyond the academic expectations one would bring to these, was learning to understand how network dynamics work, how human incentive systems work, what we can now think of as game theory, what I now have come to understand as game theory and power dynamics and so forth, just to survive Those are the things I learned. I then went on to spend years sleeping in the dirt under African skies as a professional safari guide. I was a professional hunter and expedition leader, tracking wounded leopards, facing down mock charges from bull elephants, navigating crocodile-infested waters, and on and on. My journey and life up to this moment in time has not exactly been traditional. I started my first business at age 18. Since then, I've owned nine different businesses in seven different industries. I built and ran an investment portfolio that generated forty-six percent gains during the global financial crisis, which was simultaneously destroying portfolios with a fifty-six percent decline. I've lived through the largest asset deflation in history and come from a country whose inflation rate was a world record two hundred and thirty-one million percent. Zimbabwean business owners had to pay their employees twice in a day because what we paid our employees at lunchtime would not buy them dinner that night. I've been attacked by hippos three times in a canoe. Just lucky, I guess. I've done two first descents of remote African rivers. I've had malaria four times, tick bite fever twice, schistosomiasis six times. I've had meningitis, and I was struck by lightning at age nineteen. I've watched my babies be born and grow up to be incredible humans. I've been really broke and really not broke. I've been given the sweetest grace and kindness and suffered true heartbreak and caused suffering for others. I've done some super stupid stuff, but some of it worked out beautifully. And you know what's made all of that possible? The scaffolding behind it all? Building businesses that I love with people I just wanna be around. That's it. When we do that, it pays us in so many ways, certainly financially, but also socially, personally, and intellectually. I don't know of a better system that demands humility, insists on truth-seeking, chases you down until you're forced to face your flaws than business ownership, the entrepreneurial path. It also, I believe, can, I think should, help us develop into better humans. Build a business you love with the people you wanna be around. Getting there has demanded and will demand, you would've noticed for yourself, that we develop skills, concepts, insights, tools, but lived philosophies that carry across all industries and all domains. Most of what I will share with you in the episodes that lie ahead and the time that we'll hopefully spend together has come from the scar tissue of those 32 years. 32 years in the trenches of entrepreneurship, in multiple different industries, in different countries, in radically different social and economic and market pa- patterns and cycles My life is amazing, and that's what I wish for you, too. I'm doing this right now because I believe that these things that have made such a difference in my life, these concepts, thoughts, thought experiment, philosophies, mental frameworks, behavioral adaptations, tools that have made such a difference in my life and those docs that I have worked with for so many years will work for you, too. Their results have mirrored my own, and I wish the same for you Needless to say, none of those things about lightning strikes and leopards taught me anything about dentistry, that's for sure. What they taught me was human incentive systems, power dynamics, the ability to spot dangers in the grass and opportunity in the unknown. Tracking, which is really nothing more than reading what has already happened in order to predict what happens next, and what human beings actually do under pressure, as opposed to what they say they'll do in that meeting you just had, or a partnership agreement, for example. When I entered the healthcare space over a decade ago, I didn't see dentistry or veterinary medicine through the romantic lens of a university professor. I saw an industry hell-bent on franchising itself into a dehumanized anonymity. An industry that was forcing rigid scripts and checklists onto fellow human beings and running healthcare like an assembly line. Thank you, Michael Gerber and The E-Myth. What I'm saying is the dark night of the soul that everybody typically shares wasn't something that happened in an op for me. It happened standing in dental and veterinary practices watching really, really brilliant, sophisticated, and deeply trusted professionals destroying their personal lives, their physical wellbeing, and their personal income and assets. Look at the data. Vets and dentists consistently rank amongst the most trusted human beings in society. Just allow that to percolate in your mind for a moment Vets, for example, suffer suicide rates up to three and a half times the national average. And don't worry, dentists rung amongst the highest, you know this, occupational risk groups for chronic stress, physical burnout, marital strain. Why? Not because they're weak, not because they lack resilience, and certainly not because of work ethic. Some of the hardest working individuals I've ever met are in this industry of ours. It's because both fields share a structural fatal flaw, a hyper-specialized clinical education with no curriculum that teaches business skills or more critically, on-- in your day-to-day life, building and handling complex human systems. Nothing. No line item in the curriculum for that one. We've got docs that are waking up at four in the morning with what I call entrepreneurial brain damage. They are trapped. They're trapped with volatile overhead. They're trapped by team turnover. But the worst is underneath all of this, the worst is knowing that if they stepped away from the chair for any real length of time, their income goes to zero. If any part of that describes your experience, your lived circumstances, I want you to know that the vast bulk of your suffering is not what you think. It is not a system problem. It is not a flaw in the checklist. It is not because your front desk script is outdated. It's not even a personal or leadership problem. It is simply an error of understanding, a misunderstanding replicated throughout this industry by others who, incredibly good people doing their best, don't themselves know another way. But I do, and that's why this show exists In all of my years in business, in the industries that I have the privilege of working in directly and through private clients, I have never seen an industry that is so protected, so poised to capitalize on the raw opportunities of limited supply of a certain skill set facing unlimited demand in the world, be so completely undermined by the burdens, unnecessary burdens of business ownership and entrepreneurial endeavors. It's so unnecessary. When I peeked up like the meerkat that we all are and looked across this industry at individuals that I was working with directly, several of whom are very influential, high profile in-- people in the space, and the more I looked, the more I saw good people paying inordinate prices for otherwise average returns. There's a better way And I'm gonna show you exactly how I've done that, and why those that I love and serve every day have as well. And as I say, that's why this show exists. We're gonna be talking about a ton of different things, and I'll be sharing principles that have been portable to all domains of my life. and over time, I will do my best to walk you from concept to strategy, and finally tactic. I have taught and trained Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu for nearly 25 years, and what I noticed as I was working my way up through the belts is in the early stages, I would notice that white and blue belts would come into every class talking about the new technique that they've learned. They've caught this thing on YouTube, "Hey, have you seen this guy has got this new move?" There's always this idea of tactic, tactic, tactic. That's how I used to think early on in my jujitsu career. It's also how I thought early on in my entrepreneurial career. But as I have grown over time, I've come to discover something far more powerful, which is once we go upstream and we pay attention to philosophy, to the concept behind a tactic, and are able to tease out a strategy that leads to a tactic, you will develop your own tactics, and that's what I wish for you. You know, as I joke with jujitsu students all the time, who taught De La Riva the De La Riva guard? De La Riva obviously understood a concept about hip and knee control that allowed him to explode his game with myriad tools developed by him and for him. This has been my own journey. Unencumbered as I am by formal university education, this has been a journey to mastery in multiple domains in my life, and we're gonna do that together. So if you are a white belt or blue belt, if you are desperately looking for or seduced by tactic of the week from a YouTube channel, I invite you to ascend with me. Let's go upstream. Let's spot the concepts and see what universal characteristics they have. We're gonna talk about building a business that you love, that you don't have to sell. we're gonna talk about how to focus on being effective instead of right. That one's gonna leave a mark on you. Believe me, I've still got bruises from discovering that myself. We're gonna discuss how, and I'm gonna reveal how incentive systems drive all human behavior, including your own. And the way to adjust behavior of others is to upgrade and update our incentive systems. I believe that financial freedom is not a number in your bank account. It is not the number of practices or list of assets that you have, some distant thing off in the future, this magic number we have to hit. Of course, Wall Street and Merrill Lynch would love to have us focused on building that number. They happen to get paid a percentage of those assets that they manage. I'm here to tell you the good and bad news that real financial freedom is found in the percentage of your income that you live on. Financial freedom sits inside of the percentage of money that you actually live on, in our concepts and work together, what will be revealed pretty quickly is how everything answers to and is measured by time. Now, I'm gonna share a few things that are not for me, and that you won't find here in our time together. Little micro tactics, go and say exactly this. That doesn't change you, it just gives you one more tool. The tools do not make the carpenter. The understanding makes the carpenter. The tools make their work manifest. You're not gonna find egos, at least I hope not. I hope mine doesn't leak out sometimes I'm going to say and do things that are either wrong or ridiculous in front of you in real time. This is like a trapeze act with no safety net underneath me. But you will also notice that I am somebody who lives by the ethos, the mantra, that I don't want to be wrong a minute longer than I have to be, and I'm constantly looking for that error correction. You're not gonna find regurgitated thoughts or a business book club kind of business book of the week, and have you read, for reasons that I'll get into in future episodes. You're not gonna find someone telling you what to do. I hate being told what to do, and I don't disrespect the autonomy, the sovereignty, the wisdom, the experience of those that I teach and mentor by telling them what to do. What is most beautiful is when we have a conversation that reveals their conceptual understanding or misunderstanding that changes what they do by their own choice instead of by the dictum of some guru or expert wagging a finger in their face and saying, "What you need to do is..." And here's what you're definitely not gonna find here: somebody who has it all figured out. I live my life, and always have, on the frontiers of my own knowledge, which is to say the frontier of my ignorance. If you can think about the sphere of everything you know, you will realize that the perimeter of that sphere, the circumference, is in fact the field of your ignorance. I'm actively working to expand that circumference, and I don't have it figured out by any stretch, but I'm having a hell of a lot of fun getting there. And I want the same for you. In the next episode, I'm going to share a concept with you that will lead to an immediately actionable training for you and your team. It is day one training for every single employee in every business that I have, as it is of all of the docs that I support. I'm gonna share an audio with you and an attendant or supplemental video of me teaching this to you so that you can do it on Monday morning Going forward, we've got so much to cover. I started my first business at age 18. My family have been entrepreneurs for generations before me. It's not just my deepest belief, it's my lived experience that business ownership is the most powerful vehicle for growth, connection, expansion, insight, and joy that we could possibly wish for. Yes, I said joy. Joy. My life is amazing, and I'm doing this-- The reason I'm doing all of this is that I wish the same for you. I wish the same for you. Cheers.

Speaker 24:12

That's it for this episode. Thanks for being here. Hey, there's only two things that you have in your life, your time and your attention. That you've given both to me for these few minutes of today means

24:23

everything. Cheers.