Jeff Ma
In today's episode, we're joined by the CEO and co founder of Jet Dental, Jordan Smith. Jet dental itself is an incredibly interesting business that does pop up dental clinics for workplaces. But even more interesting is the story behind it all the culture that drives it, and the struggles they've had to overcome. Listen in. As Jordan shares with us the values and philosophies he places at the forefront of his workplace culture, enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome to love. strategy, a podcast that brings humanity to the workplace. We're here to talk about business, but we want to tackle topics that most business leaders shy away from, we believe that humanity and love should be at the centre of every successful business. I'm your host, Jeff Ma. And I'm joined today by my co host and co author, Mohammad Anwar. Hey, Moh, how you doing today?

Mohammad Anwar
I'm doing good, Jeff. Thanks for having me again.

Jeff Ma
Absolutely. Each episode, as you know, we dive into one business or element of strategy. And we test our theory of love against it. And I'm excited to have our guest today. name is Jordan Smith. Jordan is the CEO and co founder of Jet Dental, which is an incredibly interesting business that I can't wait to talk more about. Jordan, welcome to the show.

Jordan Smith
Thanks for having me, I, I usually am on the other side of the podcast table and hosting. I like this site a little better. It's more comfortable.

Jeff Ma
Well, Jordan, I'm hoping today, while we have you, we can dive into more about your journey with Jet Dental, and talk more about the role that culture plays in that business and through that business. And I know that the COVID pandemic had a significant impact on the business as well. I'd love to take a look through that lens and all that and more. But first, we do some icebreakers. And yeah, just as just as awkward as they sound, as you might know. But I'll make mo go first. So Mohammad today your question is, if you could have dinner tonight, with anyone in the world, who would it be? And why?

Mohammad Anwar
I'd have to go at Tom Herman. Only because I've been trying to get hold of him to talk about, you know, his strategy and football and how he's played a big role in my generation and help, you know, our business direction. So yeah, I'd love to sit down for dinner with him and talk to him all about it.

Jeff Ma
Yeah. Yeah. So Tom Herman. If you're listening, you know, please reach out. We're looking for you. Jordan, same question. If you could have dinner tonight with anyone in the world, who would it be in Why?

Jordan Smith
Okay, so the first thing that popped in my head was the safe and sappy answer, which is my wife. I mean, I always want to have dinner with my wife. Right? But the fun answer. And I don't know why this popped in my head, but was Bob Costas. I love sports. And don't you think Bob would be interesting. He'd have like, he's met all these sports people. And he's call all these games and all these events. And I don't know why that popped in my head. It surprised me It did. But that is what popped in my head. And I gotta find a way to reach out this podcast is now I guess so. Yeah.

Jeff Ma
Good answer. All right. Nice to not see that coming.

Mohammad Anwar
And if he knows,

Jordan Smith
also didn't see that coming.

Mohammad Anwar
Jordan, and if he has connections at Tom Herman, you let me know. Yeah, you got it. Yeah.

Jeff Ma
See, Jordan knows who actually listens to this stuff, his wife. So he got he got the answer, right? Way more likely than Tom Herman. All right. Well, I want to dive dive into it. And Jordan, I just want to just start by, you know, opening up real light, please like, tell us a little bit about yourself, you know, high level introduction, but you know, what are you all about? What are you passionate about?

Jordan Smith
Yeah. So as you said, Jordan Smith, I'm the co founder and CEO of Jet Dental. So we're the premier pop up dental clinic for workplaces nationwide. So we go set up a pop up clinic at a business, and employees can sign up online and come get their dental work done while they're at the office. It's free the business, we just build their dental insurance. So that's what I do for work. And that's what my company does across the country. What I'm most passionate about from a work standpoint, there's really three things I love when it comes to work. The first is the people that I work with. Whenever my job satisfaction has been the highest it's because I really love my team. I enjoy working with them both. I think you know that I formed friendships and relationships and I just enjoyed being around them, but also they're challenging me and pushing me and you know, there are people I admire. That's how I feel at Jet Dental right now. So it's a lot of fun because I really enjoy being with them, but they also I admire them and so they push me and they make me want to be a better person. And which is great. So that's kind of the first thing I think about when I think about my personal job satisfaction. And I'm always trying to steer myself towards something that accomplishes these three things. So the first is that team and the people. The second, I really love doing something that I believe in. I know that's cliche, but I grew up in sales is kind of like my background. And it's always been really easy for me to sell something, when I really believe in it. And so you know, an example is like a vacuum salesman, I'm not knocking any, you know, vacuums important. I have a Dyson that I really like, and it sits on my wall, it's great. But for me personally, that wouldn't get me engaged and excited. And so I've always tried to go to things that I feel like are making a difference in people's lives and where I feel like you know, I can get a lot of satisfaction from that. And then the third thing that really gets me out of bed every day is just I feel like I'm making a difference. And so I've always tended to steer more towards startups or midsize companies where I felt like I could have a big influence and I don't like red tape. I don't like bureaucracy. And so I like being able to work with a team where we can come up with ideas and come up with solutions and, and problem solve quickly on the fly and make things happen. So that's a little about me from from a work standpoint. And then Personally, I have a couple of kids, I got a six year old and I've got a 20 month old and there are a lot of fun. And I mentioned right as we were getting on that I'm in my basement because the 20 year olds trying to go to 20 month olds trying to go to go to bed so So yeah, those to keep me busy. And that's kind of my my passion in my personal life.

Jeff Ma
Absolutely. Tell me a little bit more about your story with Jet Dental. That's what I find it so interesting is such an awesome, like business. How did you kind of get there? How did you stumble upon that or start that idea? Like, tell me the story there?

Jordan Smith
Yeah. Good question. So I don't have a dental background. I'm just a business guy. Before this, I was the VP of Sales inside sales for a large call centre, we had about 400 reps. And I've always wanted to start my own business. My dad was a serial entrepreneur. And he's had a lot of successful companies and exits. And I went to, to school at BYU and Brigham Young University and they they have an entrepreneurship track. And that's the track I chose. I'm just fascinated by entrepreneurship. And so my dad had had had an exit from a company he was working on, and we kind of said, hey, let's see if we can find an opportunity to work on together. And so we started looking at businesses to buy, we started thinking of ideas. And really the first goal was let's see if we can find something we can buy and, you know, scale it. And we really didn't find anything we liked. In that process. We came across a company that was for sale, and they did mobile dental, but for nursing homes, and they were just in one state, like in California or something. And it was the the owner was a dentist and his wife was a hygienist. It was just them just the two of them. And they would go and do you know, help nursing homes, and they wanted an absurd amount of money for their business. I remember asking like, well, how many clients you have. And I was like, Oh, I don't know, just want more. We need work we call us they didn't really have a business. They just had this lifestyle thing that they thought maybe they didn't look, they're ready to retire. So we weren't interested in buying the business. But maybe like six months later, that idea came back to us like, well, what if we could do mobile, dental or pop up demo or whatever you want to call it for businesses? So we started talking to some business owners we knew that had large, successful tech companies here here in Utah where I live. And they said, yeah, we like that. And so we came up with kind of that idea there. We partner with a dentist here locally, who also loved the idea. And that's kind of where Jet Dental was born. And so we got kind of our first handful of businesses and, and we got rave reviews from people doing it. And really the, when we knew we had something was, I think when we started seeing that nearly everybody we were seeing hadn't been to the dentist in over two years. And that's still the case today, the average DENTAL PATIENT hasn't been to the dentist in over two years. So we realised that by making it convenient, we were getting getting the people in the organisation who needed it most to actually come and participate. And obviously healthcare and rising healthcare costs is a big deal for HR people and for companies in general. And so we realised we had a not the whole solution, but we had part of a solution at least from an oral health standpoint. And so yeah, that's kind of the founder story.

Jeff Ma
Awesome. I love that I you know, I'm gonna want to talk about culture. That's what we're here to talk. Yeah. So I actually actually see it from two different angles. I hope we can hit both thing. First I wanted I'm curious about the culture within the walls of Jet Dental. Oh yeah. You know, I want to hear about kind of your view on that. And second, I'd also want to, I'd be curious to know how the services of Jet Dental you see affecting the culture of the businesses that you that you bring it to. So both of these I think are really going to be some interesting topics. And why don't we start with kind of within jet dental like, Yeah, a little bit about your culture philosophy?

Jordan Smith
Yeah. Well, I think the best way to describe our culture is just to bring up our mission and our values. So our purpose at Jet Dental is to make it easy for people to have great oral health with fanatical customer service are fanatical customer care. And so I think that really is a driving force for us at Jet Dental. It's not easy to set up a dental office every day, take it down and go to a new place, our employees throughout the organisation, especially in operations out in the field throughout the country, how a really difficult job. And the reason we have so many people, our office managers were kind of like the general manager for the areas specifically, that have stayed with us for a long time, is because they believe in our our purpose. And they see on a daily basis, how we're helping people who really need it most again, as I mentioned, people who haven't been in a really long time. And I think a lot of people who got into dental care, it's because they wanted to help somebody, right. And so that's very motivating for them that they get to do something that on a daily basis is making a big difference. Second, I want to mention our values. So I think this is our values do a good job of describing the type of employees and the type of people that we have on our team are my teammates. The first, our first value is one team, I think we've got a really great culture of people who have each other's backs. We disagree and commit, that's an old Intel saying, where they would get in a room and they would maybe argue about what was the right answer. But then they, once they left the room, they were committed and there was no backbiting meeting after the meeting type of stuff, right? We were committed. And so we're not perfect no company is we make mistakes. But in general, we've hired people who care about teamwork, they want to be a good teammate. They try to be a good teammate by extending trust and, and giving people the benefit of the doubt, assuming the best in others. And so I think that value of one team really highlights our culture. I could give you story after story of, you know, folks who've hopped in, even though it wasn't their responsibility to help another teammate out, someone gets sick, and an office manager flies from Arizona to Florida to cover that person's area now to make sure that we give a fanatical customer service experience for the business, but also because they love their teammate, and they want their teammate to succeed as well. So that's our first value. Our second value is relentless. So we've got a team that is problem solvers. They don't just say, Oh, I have this problem and throw the dead cat on your desk is what I call it right here, here's a dead cat, you deal with it. Like they, they try to think of solutions, and they try to come up with a solution to the problem. And I think we have people who kind of leave no stone left unturned. They're constantly trying to improve their process or improve their their function in the business. And then lastly, is fanatical care. Time and time again, we get great NPS scores and great reviews on Google, because I've got a team who really cares about people, and they want to go above and beyond to give a great experience to start with. But if we screw up to make up for that, and go, you know, even even further and make up for that if we make a mistake. And so I think literally it means you know, we're fans of our customers and our partners, and we want to be a good partner to them, and we want to help them achieve their goals. So that answers your first question a little bit about who we are. And then second, on how our, you know, our team, Jet Dental helps the organisations we serve. We're really blessed and fortunate to serve over 600 businesses across the country. And all of them are, you know, top employer type businesses, you know, they get great reviews. And the reason they're bringing someone like us on is because they do these kinds of things all the time for their employees, right, they're always looking for, for ways to improve the environment. So you know, I think when it comes to culture, I really do think that the people you work with is the most important aspect of culture. And there are studies that show that you know, like McKinsey has a study that showed that you know, your job satisfaction, interpersonal relationships is the biggest portion of your job satisfaction and then within that interpersonal relationships. Your manager relationship is the most important like 80% of that section of job satisfaction. But certainly Having a great environment makes a big difference. And I think one of the reasons why HR professionals love introducing Jet Dental. There's some obvious things that like, Oh, that's kind of fun and unique and doesn't cost me anything. It's just going through my insurance. But I think one of the big reasons why is because they really do care about their employees. And the reason they bring things like us and on site mammogram and onsite vision and other things like that, is because they want to show their employees, hey, we're not just going to offer good insurance benefits. But we really do want you to be healthy. And we want you to use those free benefits in dental, you know, it's two free cleanings a year, typically, we really want you to use those benefits because we know preventive care can help you be a healthier person. And obviously, there's some engagement aspects there, right? If you're healthier, if you have more confident smile, even you're going going to perhaps perform better at work. But I think they do it out of love. I really do. I think they are offering stuff like us because they want their employees to be healthy, and they want them to have those things. And so for example, you know, a lot of dental offices have better hours than bankers, right? They're open three days a week, nine to four or whatever. And so for the average working American, it's not really easy or convenient to go to your dental office, I think pretty much all Americans know they should. But it's not easy to get off of work, right? You're gonna take a whole afternoon off, drive over, you know, sit in traffic, sit in a waiting room where they're playing like overly emotional Michael Bolton, music while you wait for you know, like what, you know, it's not like the most customer centric experience. And so, you know, atJet Dental by making it convenient, we just get people to do what is the right behaviour. And I think there's a lot of solutions like that in the marketplace. And we're just one small piece of that, that and you know, hopefully we can be one extra little reason why. You know, we make the experience at a company better I know one. You know, VP of HR recently told me, he loves the look on his face, they own car dealerships. He said he loves the look on his face when they tell an employee like yeah, and we have a dentist come to our office, and they'll help you get your dental work done. And he said they like their jaws open because they're like, what, that's crazy. So literally, yeah, that's right. No pun intended. So anyway, that's it. It's fun. I love what we do. And I think it's, it's, it's fun when you have employees who are passionate about what they do, and customers who really love your service. That's it's a fun, fun place to be.

Jeff Ma
Do the insurance companies like you.?

Jordan Smith
They do. Yeah, so we get references from a lot of the insurance companies actually to their customers. So they refer us to their businesses. And again, a big reason why is because study after study after study shows that preventive care works, right? It helps you stay healthy, prevents worst things from developing and also is way less costly. So in dental specifically, there's been a lot of studies done one done by one of our great partners, Cigna, they studied over a million and a half of their members who had both the dental and the health insurance, they could track it all the way through. And they found that people who got regular preventive care had a decrease in costs over the next five years of like, 35% it's right around there, I might be misquoting it a little bit. For those who did not get any dental work done on a regular basis, their costs increase by 43% over the same five year period. And so that's just the look at the costs there were also stats showing that they had 19% fewer hospital visits and 23% you know, lower ER visits or admissions and so it's just clear that it works and it's a winning solution preventive care in general as a winning solution for any organisation or any individual

Jeff Ma
that I love that I love like how it seems to be a win for really everybody involved it's kind of Yeah, win win win win Yeah, it's one wins Yeah, that's amazing. I'm curious if you have any perspectives on the challenges I guess more specifically because I think culture is often forged in through hardships and Yeah, kind of really it's easy to have quote unquote good culture when you know you're in the green and everybody's doing what they love because I mean, you just defined you know, the people who work for Jed dental with the same three things that you open with like, like they like the people they work with. They like doing they're doing what they believe in they they're making a difference. So yeah, you found it, you found a great team, but it's easy to like, be in that space and everybody's happy. But what about when do you have any examples of like challenges and things that when they go wrong? Where does what is your culture look like that and do you have any, like insights into

Jordan Smith
that? Yeah, it's great question. So as a business that relies on people to be in the office COVID was really, really challenging for us. When COVID hit, we were kind of right on our hockey stick growth path, you know, we were month after month was tremendous growth. And all of a sudden revenue dropped to zero for a couple months, you know, most states are requiring that dental offices could not do preventive visits, right? Or elective type stuff, which preventive typically would fall in, in that case. So all of a sudden, we were like, Whoa, we've got all these teams, all these managers that we've committed to across the country. And, you know, we don't have anybody to serve. And so it was definitely a you know, it was interesting, I wouldn't say it was panic. I've been in, in other situations and other companies where there was like, panic moments, but it didn't actually feel panicky, we were fortunate, we just raised some money for the first time ever, right before that happened and December 2019. So cash wise, we knew we would be okay, but that we needed to make some decisions, right, that we were going to have to unfortunately, we did have to furlough folks mainly, like part time, folks in different areas, you know, some hygienists and assistants that we just could see, we weren't going to have any, anything for them to do. I think fortunately, a lot of them already worked at other practices, and they just worked for us part time. So it wasn't like their main source of income. But for for those folks that it was their main source of income, specifically, like our general managers, our office managers throughout the country, we, we took a hard look at it and said, you know, we, we really want to commit to these folks, it's hard to find a good office manager, I think they're really the secret sauce behind Jet Dentals', we've got these great people out in the field who hire great teams, and then do a great job with the customer. And so ultimately, we ended up committing to them, that, hey, we're gonna we're gonna keep you on board, we're gonna figure this out together. So for some of them, that met just keeping them on their full salary for others. They said, Oh, I can, I can do this. And so maybe pay me part time kind of thing. And then we figured out stuff for them to do, we did cross training type things, we had them help with credentialing, for instance, with our doctors so that when we came back, we'd be ready to go. We took a hard look at all of our standard operating procedures and said, well, let's update these right, so COVID was a really challenging time. And we're still dealing with it, I mean, we're, we're still not fully, you know, 100% back from COVID. Obviously, everybody's experiencing this across the country. And it's still affecting our business. Fortunately, we're back to where we're growing month over month again, and so it's it's busy again, and that's that's a lot of fun. But I do feel like our office managers who were with us during that time that we committed to are now more committed than ever and are stronger than ever and I was on an email chain with one of them specifically, who we were able to help with, you know, we did a few cash advance things because she had some challenges during the pandemic, including family member passing away and so things like that we we helped with from a financial perspective, but anyway, as an email chain with her recently and her manager, and you know, she she had recently flown to a few different events for us to help cover for some other managers. And she said, You know, these, we thanked her for doing that. She said, these are the links you go to when you love your team, and you love what you do. Right? And that's like the highest praise that I think any manager could receive. So shit. Yeah, challenges are tough. And like you said, I mean, all boats, all boats rise with the tide. Right? So when it's when, when things are not going, Well, what does that look like? And, you know, I think we were able to commit to a lot of our team members, unfortunately, not all of them, I wish I wish we could have kept all of them. But we were able to commit to a lot of our team members. And now we're, I think we have even even bit better relationship than ever, because we all went through a very vulnerable, tough time together. And I think we were very honest and open with them about, here's the challenge, here's where we're at, and we want to keep you and we want to figure out what that looks like. And we had individual conversations with each of them and found a way forward. And I think that built a lot of trust between our teammates. And I think whenever you go through a challenging time with somebody you know, I think all of us who love our family members and have have a strong marriage or things like that, usually it's because you went through some really hard things together and that that can help forge you together. You know, there's a million examples of you know, analogies for that, you know, and you know, steel on the fire and all that you know, but you get it right like When you go through a hard time, that really does bring you together. And when you can get through that you you develop a lot of trust with the other individual on the other side.

Mohammad Anwar
So how do you think prior to COVID? How your culture was to where it is now? What are the stark differences or noticeable things that you see how you guys operate is changed from before COVID to now and activating to all of the reasons and rationale he gave? What are some examples?

Jordan Smith
Yeah, I think it's a good question. I think, I think COVID forced us to be more transparent. Like literally about financials, right? Like, hey, here's our four year I mean, I just did this with several team members, we looked at our four year forecast and where we are now and where we want to be. And, you know, I think we have a more intelligent workforce now. They were intelligent people, I just mean about our business, right? So they, I think, know more about how we win as a company, how we make money. You know, what, what factors are most important in delivering a great customer service experience. So I think there's a lot of education that happened, and, you know, shame on us for maybe not being more proactive about it, but when we were forced into it, but because of that transparency, I think, again, we form more trust, and they learn more about the business. And so definitely a big part of what I'm seeing is a lot more innovation. I know that's just a buzzword, but really all that means is good ideas, and we look at good ideas and put them into practice. So other things that came out of it, were more frequent communication. Not just with individual manners and managers and one on one, because I think that's really important. And maybe we'll get a chance to talk about that. But also, you know, as a, as an executive team, we started looking for more opportunities to talk with our team about challenges we were facing. So for example, we do, it's been it started weekly, and lately it's, it's on me, I need to do a better job. But it's been more like every two weeks, we do a little video, it's pretty quick, just with how we're how we're doing some performance numbers, we give some shout outs, and we talk about people who went above and beyond over the last week or two. And then usually, there's like one challenge, at least that I'll bring up, like, here's some things we're facing, and what are your thoughts and we get a lot of great feedback and, and sometimes it comes directly to me and other times it goes up through their manager or supervisor. But I definitely think to me like that constant feedback loop and innovative ideas, and whatever you want to call it. That's definitely a big stark difference I've seen from pre COVID. To to now. And, man, that's what you want, right? There's always gonna be problems in a business. But what what excites me is when you see your team members diving in, rolling up their sleeves and trying to solve that problem and working together as a team to solve that problem. That's when you know, you've got at least the start of a good culture, which is great.

Mohammad Anwar
Awesome. I, everything you described is resilience, like, it's a perfect combination, like your team is becoming resilient when the needs are the most these type of challenging, challenging times. So no, that's awesome. That's very cool to hear. And seeing those differences is also really good to hear from how your organisation behaviours of your team changed as a result of COVID. It's actually, like you said, Make You guys better, more resilient, more innovative, and, you know, be able to go and solve problems.

Jordan Smith
Yeah, absolutely. I do think, you know, long term, we are and will be stronger as a result of that challenge. And there will be more to come. And I'm sure they'll that will get stronger for it as well.

Mohammad Anwar
Awesome. So talk to me about you as the president of your company. How is it that like, you know, you're a nationwide organisation? You have managers, probably all over the country, I'm assuming Yeah, a little bit here. So correct me if I'm wrong. How do you maintain in this remote? You know, world? I'm assuming you're always remote, but with at least the regional Valley? Yeah. Right. How are you making sure to keep that human connection and mentorship? What's your approach? And how do you? How do you approach it?

Jordan Smith
Yeah, we talked earlier about the importance of that personal connection at work, right? I mean, studies show that's kind of, for most people anyway, for the average person, that's where you drive most your job satisfaction. And then within that, that manager relationship is really, really important. And so having, I think, really strong, supervisors, leaders, managers, whatever you call them in your organisation throughout throughout the organisation is really, really important. And I think cultures really begin to shift when that happens, So a quick example from a previous organisation, and that I think helps illustrate the point I mentioned, I used to work at that 400 person call centre. I, when I was the VP of inside sales, we grew from about 150 up to that 400. And when I took over, there wasn't a lot of structure around the teams, there were managers over individual teams, but there were a lot of teams like, you know, 20 teams, and it all kind of funnelled up to me. And that felt unreasonable, like it felt it was already it had already grown too big for me to give anyone individually as manager the attention they needed. So we added some director levels, and the biggest change we made and I didn't know all this employee satisfaction stuff back then, by the way about interpersonal, you know, it just I learned it through experience. The biggest change we made was we started investing in training those managers of those teams, you know, performance training and sales training, but also culture training, right? How do you have an effective one on one, how do you show an employee that you care about them pretty basic stuff. But we we would look at, you know, we'd have a little book club, and we'd read books, and we talk about them as a management team. And we'd have monthly manager meetings. And the biggest thing we like focused on harped on was you need to have a weekly one on one with every member of your team. Occasionally, if you had a really parchment person every two weeks, but you need to be frequently talking about near term, work with them on a on a frequent basis. Now, ideally, it's happening more than weekly, you're having informal, not truly one on ones, but informal touch points every day, right. But you need to have at least one weekly one on one where you're giving them feedback, you're giving them you're taking an opportunity to coach them. And we started doing quarterly surveys of the employees about their manager experience. And without fail, the teams that perform the best had managers who had frequent one on ones, they didn't miss one on ones. Interestingly enough, they didn't always rank the highest on the quality of the one on one, which I think is kind of interesting, like it seemed the frequency, at least in our organisation, the frequency mattered more than the quality. So just the act of like showing up to the one on one and connecting with that person, even if you weren't fully prepared, made a huge difference. And you saw a like a 20% bump, typically in the in overall sells with those folks who had those frequent one on ones compared to the managers who weren't doing that. organizationally, we went from like 300% turnover was a call centre again, remember, so like, you're literally replacing your team three times a year, down to just under 100%. Obviously, still higher than we want it to be. But given that we were hiring mostly college students, in a call centre, we made big improvements in the turnover aspect. We were more effective sales wise, I can't remember those numbers anymore, to be honest. But I tell that story because I became a huge believer in one on ones from that experience. And again, I think obviously a well prepared one on one is better than that, then not prepared one on one. But any one on one is better than no one on one. And I think the point there right is just you need to be connecting with your people. And ideally, you're connecting with them more often than once a week I my team, we talk way more than once a week. But we do have a formal one on one set scheduled same time, every week. And we we do our best to stick to that. And I think that's really important. And so for us as a as a group, our executive team, having one on ones with their managers, or managers having one on ones, they're people. That's really, really important aspect of what keeps our culture going. And I think honestly, you know, as companies grow it gets, it gets challenging to keep the culture the same. But I usually feel like that's where it disintegrates, it disintegrates because you have leaders who are not servant leaders anymore. You have middle manager, folks who maybe are not getting the training and development, they need to become a better leader. And as a result, for lack of a better term, the frontline really starts to suffer and you see it in their performance and you see it in their execution. And so I think you know, there's a lot of things we can do better in relation to time and we need and we there's a lot of things we can do to improve. But my main, the main thing for me that I think impacts our company and in previous organisations I worked for is when you have great servant leaders throughout the organisation meant things tend to go a lot better.

Mohammad Anwar
Awesome. No, thank you for those insights. All right, so that was that was really good. How big is your organisation? And how many leaders managers do you guys have?

Jordan Smith
Yeah, so our executive team is five individuals, middle office managers out in the operations, there's 15 that cover several states. So those are the operations most important kind of general manager position. We also have a couple people at corporate that support those office managers. I think total our organisation is about 100 individuals, about 100 people. And then, on the sell side, we have some some managers as well, who helped our sales teams. Got it.

Mohammad Anwar
And so you personally, just out of curiosity, how many one on ones See you do a week?

Jordan Smith
Yeah, so mine is just with the executive team. Got it. So So I've got four that. So I've now have less than I've had in a long time, actually, when I, when we first started, the company had a lot more. But what's great is when we have one on ones, every week, we talk about their people, right? How are your people doing What can your individual, this individual or that individual do better, I structure my to dues based on the people I have one on ones with so my direct reports and or direct supports the people that I my teammates, my team, I organise my to dos under them. And that helps me to remind myself that my goal as a leader is to make their environment better to help them improve their, their organisation and their processes. And so that that's just one little way I kind of remind myself that that's your goal, as the leader is to help them do what they do best and to help their people to do what they do best. And so yeah, that's, that's a little bit about our structure.

Mohammad Anwar
Awesome. Thank you.

Jeff Ma
Alright, just out of curiosity, do you face any? Do you ever face any? Like, around you, I guess you kind of described your structure. But you also kind of said, like, you don't come from a dental background, there's a lot of this medical expertise at play. And sometimes that brings about politics or power struggles and decision making kind of things. Is there any, you have any examples of that, or anything that's happening there, or how you've dealt with kind of being in a position of power, but you know, having a lot of experts around you in different areas? It just popped in my mind because it feels like it feels like I've seen before and heard before situations where you know, that power dynamic exists. And as humans with all the all the best intense or still come to the table with different perspectives and have to work through these types of these these situations.

Jordan Smith
Yeah, it's interesting. You know, I think I see what you're saying, I think to because of my complete lack of dental experience, I really do heavily rely on our, our experts, right, our dental director, the dentists we work with throughout the field. So for me, personally, I don't really get that involved in the clinical decisions. We really trust them. Lane, my COO, he's got a great set of standard operating procedures. I know, several people who've worked for us and left even said like, you guys have some of the most, you know, some of the best strength standard operating procedures I've seen edit for a dental office. And I think that's a credit to our experts and dental experts working with our COO on on, you know, coming up with with all our protocols and procedures and falling of course, all the state and, you know, CDC type guidelines that are out there, but yeah, you know, I think maybe the only time I've really seen that is where maybe individual individual dentists, for instance, want their individual tools, right? Like, I like this tool best, I like that too less. And that's probably the only time where we've kind of had to put our foot down and say, listen, it is not scalable. If you have to, in every organ, every area, buy a bunch of different stuff and supplies for a bunch of different dentists and employees. And so I think we have a pretty like, this is our equipment, we vetted it and this is what we feel is best that's kind of the only time I've I've really seen that in a big way. You know, I think another reason we're fortunate we don't do everything. We don't do root canals and implants and we're kind of doing bread and butter dentistry, which has been around for, you know, a really long time and I think it's pretty straightforward what we do so but to your power struggle point. You know, I think there's I'm a big believer in The importance of trust with teams. And there's kind of two things I think about when think of trust and Stephen R Covey, Stephen Covey son has a book called speed of trust where he talks about this, but he talks about character trust, right? So your integrity, do you work hard? The, you know, do what's right when no one's looking kind of stuff and your competency trust, so you're good at the job. So one could say it's doing the right thing is competence, or excuse me, is the character trust and doing things right is the competency trust. And obviously, the character trust is table stakes, and is kind of the most important thing when it comes to any in employee, employer, teammate relationship, right? Do I trust that this person is working hard, they're trying their best, they're an honest individual. But the competency ports part is really important to right, you want to make sure that people are developing their skills are constantly improving. A great example with our organisation, you may think I'm a nice swell guy, and you have character, trust me, but you will not come to me for dental work, because I'm not a dentist and I don't have that competency, right? So, you know, I think with power struggle type stuff. A lot of times, what I look at is, you know, can you trust the character of the individuals involved the character trust, right? competency trust, to some degree can be trained. Now, I'm not suggesting we like trained dentists, like, you know, you need to have gone through dental school have have experienced hygiene, hygiene is the same way. But you can train aspects of the job sales, certainly you can train sales traits, right? You can train helping people solve interpersonal conflict and solve problems, when that's the conversation, and when you're just trying to help people see, hey, look, you both have good characters, and let's maybe do a better job of assuming the best intent in each other, right? Let's not go to the worst extreme when something bad happens, when you can help them kind of meet on that level. And then you train them a little bit on the competency standpoint of here's a better way to approach that situation. Here's a better way to Let's ask questions first before we assume you know, those kinds of things. I'm, that's what leaders are there for, right, you're there to help with those kinds of things. What I typically get mad at and don't really have much patience for is when I can't trust the character of an individual. When I no longer when I lose character trust. Those people find their way out of the organisation, whether forcefully or or on their own. Because, you know, that's, that's table stakes, you have to be able to, to have character trust. Now I'm not saying people don't make mistakes. We all make mistakes. But do you have the ability to say you're sorry, and own up to things? And you know that that matters? So for me, when it comes to power struggle type stuff? That's kind of the question I asked, Can I trust the character of these individuals? And are they just kind of having, you know, oh, maybe they're, they're letting their ego a little too much. But ultimately, do I trust these individuals from past experience? And whatever? And can we work through that? So anyway, that was a really long winded answer to your question. I

Jeff Ma
love it. I think that I think that's a we talk about this all the time, right? In our line of work in what we talk about trust is front and centre in every conversation in all its forms. Yeah. And so we can we kind of divide ours in different ways. Well, and yeah, so you're, you're kind of really hitting the nail on the head. And it's great to see it in practice, when it comes to having vulnerable trusts for you know, one another. It's it requires a little bit more than just what you've seen them do before what you know they're capable of, but it actually goes into that trust that's less tangible, but But definitely, definitely felt. So that was really insightful. I appreciate you sharing that. Yes. Before we close out, I want to shift gears just a little bit and talk about your podcast just a little bit. Sure. Because, yeah, you mentioned earlier you used to be on the other side of the microphone here. So yeah. So tell us about that show. Tell us about what what how that happened.

Jordan Smith
Yeah. So it's called the Winning Teams podcast. And the whole goal is pretty similar to yours. Probably a little bit more amateur than your guys podcast, but we're trying we're doing the best we can. But the goal is we're interviewing leaders, and talking about what it takes to have a winning culture or winning team, right? What was their experience. So we've interviewed CEOs and VP and CHROs lot of HR folks, as well as retired NFL athletes who now are in business right? And it's interesting to get those perspectives. Across the board. We had the pleasure of having Moh on our show and his show comes out shortly and it was awesome. We got to hear His story and I won't. I'm sure you guys have started to share the story on here. So I won't repeat it. But it's awesome. And I'm really looking forward to that. So that's the Winning Teams podcast. That's what it's all about. And kind of how it started was we just felt like, we work with all these great organisations, and great leaders in these organisations who have a story to tell. And primarily who we speak with in organisations is HR. And so we were trying to think of, you know, a what, what is content that they may be interested in from just a pure marketing standpoint, right? Like, I'll be honest, like, there's a marketing play there a little bit. But for me, personally, I love it. Because I get to meet a lot of really interesting people, I get to hear a lot of great advice. And it's just been a lot of fun for for me. So it's definitely not my day job. I'm not I'm not a great podcast host or anything, but there's great content on on it, because we're just into interviewing really interesting people with really great stories to tell. And I think you can get a lot out of it. So it's been a lot of fun.

Jeff Ma
Awesome, absolutely. Kind of fast, anyway.

Mohammad Anwar
Yeah. Good. I was gonna ask, like, based on all of the podcasts you've done, what are the common themes that you've seen? If you could just give us like the common theme from all the leaders you've interviewed and stuff? What do you think is like, the pattern that you've seen that could be really insightful for our audience to share?

Jordan Smith
Oh, that's a good question. I should, I should probably start writing writing common themes down every single time, I'll tell you, I think the first thing that comes to mind is transparency. So almost every show someone brings up honesty, transparency, whatever you want to call it. And ultimately, what I, the reason I think that comes up a lot, and people flat out say this, is because connecting with your teammates, and building trust with your teammates requires it. If you want to build trust, you have to have a level of vulnerability and transparency, otherwise, it's not going to happen. I have a personal story from from my own life that relates to this, I remember when I was this VP at, you know, pretty, pretty young, inexperienced VP at this company, you this call centre, we would do Patrick Lencioni suggest this in his Five Dysfunctions of a team book to build vulnerability trust, we would do every so often we get together. And in a room, all of our managers, we would say, the one thing that most positively affects the team about each person, and then you go around the room and say the one thing they need to stop or improve, to help the team grow. And we always start with me, and everybody go through. And I remember one of our managers, he told me about a time where we were not pacing to hit our goal. It was kind of getting near the end of the month. And I basically said, Yeah, I mean, we're not going to hit this month, but let's do the best we can. And we'll, we'll figure it out next month kind of thing. I don't remember exactly to say it was something to that degree. And he told me that, you know, in hindsight, maybe it's obvious, but he told me like, Man, that just absolutely deflated me. Like, here, my leader was that, like, I trusted to lead me into battles was kind of his words. He said, and you were basically saying, like, you didn't believe in us, and there was no way we could hit this goal. Here I thought I was like, being just Mr. realistic, you know, and, and, and that like deflated him. And it was a really good learning moment for me and something I've never forgotten that, you know, when I'm being realistic with the team, to never cashed out, or, you know, you still have to build it with belief, right? It's okay to address what's going wrong, but still have that belief of but, you know, we can still here's how we can still do this. And that was a really good learning moment for me. So that's what I think we're talking about. We're talking about vulnerability trust, like being able to go to your leader and give pretty hard feedback, like it hurt when I got it, but it also was like I had to hear that right. And I needed that in order to coach that team teammate better. So that's definitely one theme that has come across time and time again. We talk a lot also about values. So values tends to come up in in most of the conversations, and I think it's less about what your values are. And more about that you have them in your they're unique to you. It's something that your team really rallies around and cares about, right. So if A lot of literature on this, but I think that it's important that again, it's it's unique to your culture and who you are. And it's okay if maybe those values need to change and be a little bit organic as the company grows, and, you know, maybe address needs differently, but one of the guests we had that talked about his value said something really interesting Scott Johnson, he's owner Motivosity, he had a company that he sold to Adobe for over a billion dollars very successful guy in his company. Now, it's just kind of a labour of love, he doesn't need money, it's just he, he loves what he's doing. And he said something interesting, he said, your value should cost you something. So one of their values is stay young. And he said, you know, what that looks like in my organisation is sometimes people take work off for a couple hours to go play pickleball to stay young. And that cost me some actual time and productivity when people are away from the office. But what I get in return is this vibrant, young, excited workforce. And I don't mean like actually young, they have all people there. So don't Don't, don't mistake what I'm saying here. But this, this idea of staying young, and I've seen his employees post pictures of him shooting a Nerf gun in their office at someone else, right. And so just this idea of, you know, we may lose some productivity time here to go away and have fun. But they put their their money where their mouth is when it comes to their values, and it actually cost them something. So that's probably the second thing I would say. And then third Mo, I would just say is like, is is very similar to your podcast, they don't always say it this way, but that you should love your team. And you should be trying to build a place where people love to come to work. And that looks like and feels like a bunch of different things. You know, I've had folks who've told us about Client Services and how to be better client service people. I've had people tell us about how to recruit better. But ultimately, it does come down to that, what is that human experience in the office. And if you don't love who you work with, and you don't love what you do, usually why it's pretty miserable. And so when we talk a lot about any and all aspects of how to improve that. And so it's a lot of fun.

Mohammad Anwar
Awesome, no, thanks for that summary. That was really good. I appreciate you sharing your insights. Sorry to put you on the spot, too. But I think No, no. Thank you. Yes, I

Jeff Ma
wrote it down. Your value should cost you something. I love that. Yes. All right. Well, Jordan, thank you so much. You know, hearing your stories today, and having kind of having your experience in that journey really was a real pleasure. So I really, really appreciate you having taking the time to come and join us today and in sharing so much.

Jordan Smith
Yeah, thanks, guys. I love everything you're about. I love what you're doing. I love the message you're sending and sharing. And it's a lot of fun. So thank you.

Jeff Ma
Absolutely. And to our listeners. As always, we will be releasing new episodes every week on Wednesday. And never miss an opportunity to keep plugging our book by the same name. Love as a Business Strategy. It's a best seller. Go check it out. And if you like what you hear, as always, please leave us a review. Give us five stars, tell your friends, all that good stuff. Mohammad, thanks for joining as well. Jordan, hope to have you back soon. And with that, I'm signing off