Charbel Louis Karam – From Pilot to CEO: Scaling a Dental Lab Platform From 9 to 2,000+ Employees

my first acquisition had nine people,

eight or nine employees. And you know,

I said we'll finish this year ~ probably north of ~ two thousand,

maybe twenty five hundred employees.

That's the moment where you go home at eight or nine o'clock at night after your

your first couple of weeks, and you look at yourself in the mirror and you go,

What have I done? You know, what have I done?

What a mistake.

This was. I am not even qualified to attempt to do what I want to do.

Jump in. Learn. Pivot. Make corrections.

If you're not making mistakes,

you're not learning. And I I'll tell you what,

you're not going to make a single mistake behind PowerPoint.

Welcome to From the Ground Up Show.

Honest conversations with people who have built their lives,

careers, and businesses with heart,

hands, and hustle. Your host, Erick Loden,

acquired and scaled his family's roofing company,

growing annual revenue more than eightfold and operating profit about

15 fold before choosing an internal sale and retiring from the business at 37.

Join Erick and his guests for the hard-earned lessons behind real success.

Today, this should be a fun conversation.

My guest is Charbell Lewis Karam He is

the CEO and managing partner of Spectrum Killian Dental Lab

Okay.

Alliance, which is one of the largest highesthetic dental laboratory platforms

in the country. He is

A commercially rated pilot whose career has included leadership roles at Airbus,

Thank you.

Pratt

and Whitney Canada, Chrome Alloy,

and several private equity-backed

Yeah.

manufacturing companies. Charbell entered the dental industry with

an outsider's perspective and helped grow Spectrum Killian through acquisition,

consolidation, and technical innovation.

His work sits at the intersection of craftsmanship

It's just

and scale.

Preserving the expertise, relationships,

and legacy of established laboratories while building the systems,

technology, and leadership required to operate a lasting national platform.

Today we'll explore what his journey has taught him about execution,

MA, manufacturing, leadership,

and turning a collection of successful businesses into something even stronger.

So Charbell, welcome to From the Ground Up Show.

Thanks for having me, Erick.

Yeah, I'm excited, man. You've ~ you've had quite a career and quite a journey.

Yeah, and confusing.

~

I think you probably have a lot of wisdom to share with us,

but to get started, we like to go clear back to

Yeah.

the beginning. ~ where did you grow up and what was your childhood like?

I I grew up in in Montreal, Canada.

and you know, hockey fan, you know,

pretty humble beginnings and ~ loved sports and loved aviations from a very,

very early age, but my my childhood was unremarkable I would say.

what did your parents do when you were growing up?

My dad was was an educator. He was a university professor.

He was focused on ~ I guess IT back in the days what whatever that used to be.

my mom was a stay at home amazing cook.

I still miss all the all that food.

I I don't get to enjoy it as much.

But ~ yeah, a pretty pr pretty small family.

We were ~ we were in in Montreal,

Canada with with some close relatives,

but really humble being.

And what did you imagine doing with your life when you were a kid?

What did you think you were gonna grow up to be?

Abs absolutely not what I'm doing today,

I can tell you that.

Ha ha ha.

yeah, I d I don't know how many people chart their course when they're young

and and just follow through. I I wanted to be a pilot.

and that was a non-negotiable for me.

you could see behind me some some of my toys.

I could only see myself fly for the rest of my life.

I I love aviation. I'm passionate about flying.

I could spend my entire life in the air and I would never complain.

So as a as a young man, all I dreamt of was was to become a pilot.

I was I was myopically focused on that.

And it's it's interesting how life charts its own course for you and

and and you know, sometimes you feel as a passenger on this ride,

and sometimes you get to dictate where you end up.

But really interesting when I go back to my youth and the dreams of how

I wanted to be a pilot and nothing else would stand in the way and you know,

versus what I do today is very interesting.

Yeah. Yeah, it is. ~ that'd be an interesting study to see what percentage

of people actually wound up, you know,

close to a career that they dreamed about.

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But it it sounds like you you still got to do quite a bit of piloting.

You're a a licensed pilot and have worked a lot in the aviation industry.

what did education look like in pursuit of that ~ career as a pilot

and and now where you've ended up?

Well, I I I still fly today. I ~ every chance I get I'll I'll I'll grab

a I'll grab a plane and and pilot ~ more where I need to go.

look, I I'm not ashamed to say I I ran away from education when I was young.

I I I barely got by, did the minimum credits,

minimum classes. All I wanted to do is was to be a pilot.

I I wasn't interested in college education or higher education.

I just wanted to fly. And to be a pilot.

~ it's not really college type education.

It's ground school and a lot of hands-on training.

First you go through your private pilot,

you get to commercial pilot, and then you start adding on

all these different certifications to to to be a ~ a competent pilot.

So instrument ratings to fly through bad we weather,

multiple engines. So you're not flying a single engine plane,

but multiple engine planes, and so on and so forth.

So that was really my path for education,

and ironically.

got through all of that and and became the pilot that I want to be.

and when when I left aviation as a job,

I had to go back and rethink my my studies,

rethink my education. It was a it was a bit of an moment,

you know, that what do I do now?

So but yeah the the the path to becoming a pilot,

it's it's actually quite simple.

It's becoming more expensive for for for the young folks nowadays with with

everything, you know, fuel and inflation and so on.

It's

It's it takes a lot of funds to be to become a pilot,

but back in back in the days and I I sound like I'm I'm ninety years old here,

but back in the days it was certainly not not the expense that I see today

at at airports.

with all of those changes and ~ especially kind of the technical

or technological revolution that's happening now,

have your view of education changed much?

would you put more emphasis or more weight behind a traditional college education

now or is it less valuable?

What a dangerous question, right?

~ we want to inspire

Yeah.

the youth, we wanna inspire people to constantly educate themselves

and and learn more. But I think I think the root of your question

is not whether people should be thirsty for education.

I think the question is, is the common d common structure of education

the right one for everyone? And and for me per se,

~ I'm less of a of an academic,

less of a scholar type individual.

I learn more hands-on. I learn more under pressure.

~ so giving me a book, giving me homework is is a sure way for

me to forget everything and and not learn much.

would I would I do what I did again?

Absolutely. if you ask me where most of my skill sets come today,

where most of my the skill set that I use today to be who I am,

to to build the companies I'm building,

to be the success that I think I am,

come from flying, come from

the adversity that I've had to face in my life,

not necessarily from school. Not to say that you didn't learn tidbits

in school that were interesting.

I'm I'm ~ I'm very thirsty for information.

I love to read ~ articles. I love to listen to podcasts.

I mean, I mean I I prefer to to listen,

to be honest, than to read. But you know,

I I think the quest for information should never stop with anyone.

But the structure that's defined for us as education,

I don't think fits most people.

And if I had to do it it do it again,

I

probably would not go down that path.

I I of of education. I would go down the path that I went towards real life

you know real life studies, real life adversity,

real life stress that forges you into who you become.

And, you know, I'm I'm a firm believer in that.

I think even those that have a formal education,

if you asked them just what you said,

the the skills that you use day to day to be who you are and do what you're doing,

did they come in a classroom or come from life experience?

I think the vast majority would be life experience.

So

Yeah, yeah, I agree.

y you mentioned there that you've learned a lot from adversity.

I know early in your career, part of your ~ aviation career was

Flying search and rescue and medical evacuation missions.

I imagine that can be a a high stress environment with a bit of adversity.

~ can you tell us a little bit about what you learned from those experiences

Yeah.

or maybe even share a memorable story?

Yeah, look, I I think regardless of the type of pilot that you are,

whether you're an airline pilot,

a Bush pilot, military pilots,

and and let's just exclude for a second the elite of the elite military pilots that

put their lives at risk every second of every day,

because their their level of stress and risk is is just not comparable

to to the rest of us. But I think every pilot is constantly operating in a

in a risk environment. It is not risk-free and it's highly variable.

Things change all the time. and I always equate this to folks that are very,

very comfortable in routines and day-to-day jobs.

Well that job is is actually it's not very routine.

It's not very mundane. Everything is always different,

even though the motions seem to be the same,

well it's a takeoff and then cruise and then landing.

Things don't always go the same way.

And I think that that level of variability produces a minute amount

of constant stress, constant awareness,

constant state of attention. That's really,

really important. And pilots become very comfortable operating in that environment.

And what I've what I've learned from that is

I'm extremely comfortable in constantly changing environments.

In in my business, things are not always rosy.

Things are not always a linear path to get to the destination.

I think you know, being comfortable with that comes from flying.

So as a as a pilot, I was junior in in my company,

so I didn't get all the f the best routes.

I you know, I I covered the Rockies,

I covered all the valleys in the Rockies.

The the senior guys, they've been there,

done that, they don't want to do that again.

you know, they've got the better destinations.

So I had hairier areas to fly into,

less instrument capabilities for airports.

And there's there's a heightened sense of of risk when when you do that.

It's all controlled, and that no one is irresponsible,

no one is you know gambling their life at any moment.

But there is a certain level of risk that that you become comfortable with.

And you know, when when a slight mishap happens in a very

low-risk environment, beautiful destination,

no mountains, everything's flat around you.

there's there's still potential dangerous consequences,

but it's far less than if you're down in a valley between mountains

and and you've got fog creeping in and you're running low on fuel and you're heavy.

And so this is the world that I grew up in in aviation.

And it makes you a master of of managing risk and and making rapid decisions,

being comfortable with not always having

All the information that you need to make a decision.

It's something that I preach to this day.

Get comfortable with the 70%, right?

You don't need 100% to move forward.

In fact, people that get comfortable making decisions with

70% and constantly iterating usually beat the folks that wait until they've

got all the information to make a decision.

In my prior life as a pilot, waiting that long could mean catastrophe,

it could mean something really bad.

And so

It it's taught me a lot about this.

It's taught me a lot about controlling my breathing.

~ you know, in the military they they they teach some of the special operators

and whatnot to really control their breathing,

slow down everything around you before before you you engage,

before you open a door, before all of that.

Very similarly, when you when you're about to approach a certain landing

and it's it's a difficult situation,

middle of the winter, snowstorm,

there's minimal visibility, everything happens in slow motion and

you start getting comfortable with

~ data points that are not 100% complete,

but 70% here, 80% here, and and you make your way to to the runways.

So ~ I you know this is probably one of my greatest takeaways from from flying.

you asked you know stories of what what I've what what have I learned?

I've been through a lot. I've had a lot of small ~ all the way

to fairly severe mishaps. I told a story once

Yeah.

about

my landing gear that would not deploy and ~ force me to do a belly landing.

I'm in my early twenties. I don't have twenty thousand hours of flying.

I'm a I'm a young guy. I probably have a better risk tolerance back then than

I do today. You know, as you get older,

you start worrying about am I putting too much ~ Splenda in my coffee or

am I eating too much fat and whatnot.

Ha ha ha.

When when when you're that age and

None of that crosses your mind.

So the same applies to

Mm.

flying. You you feel you feel really powerful,

you feel really immortal at that age.

But it was a tough situation. It's a situation where the plane's ~ main left landing

gear, the actuator, was fractured,

so the gear would not deploy. And so you effectively either have you don't have

a tricycle anymore, you only have the front and the right gear,

and you you can decide to land that way if you want.

~ I'm not an engineer or physics professor,

but I kept thinking, well, what happens to my wing when I touch down?

Does it does it lean and fracture,

fuel spills, catch on fire? Do I spin to the side,

roll over? I didn't like that.

I was I was looking for something a little bit more symmetrical,

and my thinking was, well, let's just get it all up and we're gonna land on metal.

And yeah, this happened gosh, 26 years ago now,

and landed on on the belly of the plane.

~ skidded to a stop. We got sprayed by foam,

got pulled out of the aircraft by the firefighters and and that was it.

That was that was my story. ~

man, yeah, that had to be a pretty exciting incident.

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So I know ~ as we talked about in your intro,

coming out of kind of your your aviation career as a pilot,

you stayed in the aviation industry and worked in a lot of large corporations

and then some leadership roles.

Can you briefly kind of walk us through your career track from pilot through

these various ~ jobs in the aviation industry and and leadership positions

and eventually you know where you are today.

Yeah. So I as I said earlier, I I made a decision to leave flying.

~ couldn't put food on the table.

It was it's a difficult career,

you know. The pilots, except for the few are are usually underpaid

and there's there's not a lot of money to be made in aviation.

People it's it it's a true work of passion.

and it was really a work of passion for me because the check wasn't wasn't there

for the the amount of risk that I was taking.

I made a decision to pivot my career.

But I loved aviation so much. I I tried to stay really,

really close to to aerospace. I didn't have a complete education.

~ my my my peers were MBA grads,

or at least had a bachelor's and so on,

and I I had nothing. I had I had some college education.

I was lucky enough to and this was through my dad,

who who is a scholar and had a lot of connections.

He he got me a scholarship in in Europe,

in France actually.

at a university that was providing college education for the fighter pilots

in the French Air Force, but they also needed some civilians with either military

background or piloting background like like mine.

And I was admitted and I was able to ~ get a great deal of education,

great deal of know-how, a lot of fun too,

lived on a military base with with some great folks and again

Being twenty-some years ago, you go back now and you look at

all these individuals that you grew up with,

and you know, some are prime ministers in in an African country,

another ones r ~ running an air force somewhere in Europe,

and really impressive to see where where people end up.

that was my segue into back into aerospace manufacturing.

I was ~ I interned at Airbus and then they hired me.

And I I absolutely loved my time there.

I I worked on this big plane there,

the ~ A three eighty, the double decker.

Which at the time was such a revolutionary concept on the back of that seven four

seven. This is a full two decker plane.

Loved out every minute of of working with these amazing individuals in in in France,

learned a lot about cultures too.

When you think about Airbus is a global company,

but they've got divisions in Spain and Germany and England and France

and in China and in the US, and and you get to collaborate with

all these these different cultures.

It's not as simple as as you think when you're a young

Yeah.

young guy and you think you're just gonna get the job done,

when you get a yes from each one of these cultures,

they all all have a different way of proceeding towards a yes.

Some it's a no until they're ready and it's a yes.

Some it's a yes, but then they're not ready and they're trying to figure

it out in the background. So I learned a lot.

I learned a lot about quality,

about operations. Airbus is absolutely a world class company.

but I had the itch to get back home.

I wanted to be back home in Canada.

Europe is lovely, but just wanted to be

Back home in Canada. So I ended up getting a few small jobs in in Canada,

not in aviation, unfortunately,

but then lucky enough to get hired by United Technologies at their Pratt

and Whitney facility in Montreal.

And and that was wonderful. now I I was back to the small engines,

exactly like the ones on that plane behind me,

the small Pratt and Whitney, the PT sixes.

and I I absolutely adored my time there.

Of course, Montreal is one of the greatest places to live.

so I lived there, I worked there.

~ in that that type of company is ~ is also world class.

This is a company that is really,

really keen on on quality. They're the the the level of seriousness they they

put behind how meticulous they are with production and their their standards

of quality really left a left an impression on me and I carry it to this day.

I I worked under the leadership of ~ of our president back then,

John Sabas, and John

Yeah, he was such an inspirational leader,

but he really instilled the concept of quality and how what we do here

is not about just doing it right the first time,

but he would always, always ~ center us back to we're carrying passengers,

we're carrying our our

Mm.

our our kids, our families, our friends,

and and and you know, we we we we all took so much pride in the work we did there.

I I I loved, loved, loved working at Private Whitney.

From Pratt and Whitney, I met somebody who was transformational in my life.

Just left them a 70th birthday video today.

It's a 70th birthday coming up in a few days.

And he helped me make the transition from aerospace manufacturing into still

aerospace manufacturing, but private equity back.

This was my first pivot into a private equity portfolio.

Until then, I had worked for just large publicly traded companies.

And you know, you're a small piece of a very,

very large puzzle. to now I'm still a small piece,

but I'm expected to have a pretty significant impact on the portfolio.

These companies are usually backed by private money.

And that that that time frame to transform,

to fix, to build, whatever, whatever the thesis is,

usually has a lot more pressure on the small individuals that are hired

to do the type of work. ended up

I would say probably a decade in this private equity operating world,

going in out in and out of different companies and fixing different things,

like ~ a commer a company that's lost this way commercially became

a really savvy salesperson, thinking about commercial landscapes,

pricing, and how you close deals,

how do you scale organizations to running operations,

~ running strategies for companies.

and like ~ like every

Like every private equity person at at some point,

I woke up one day and I said, I would really,

really love to do what I'm doing,

but with my rules, my my way. And and I I decided to embark on

Yeah.

this journey that I'm sure we'll talk to on here today.

but that was that was how I I I grew up in in aviation,

went into aerospace. Aerospace led me to private equity backed company that were

still in aerospace, and then I dabbled into

industrial manufacturing, surface technology,

some meta device. And and then with with all this ego and and

and excitement and adrenaline,

I said, you I I could do this on my own and I started my own venture.

And and then here you're

Yeah. Well you mentioned a few individuals and a few environments that really kinda

shaped your leadership, shaped your career.

Is there one that stands out as being the most influential?

Well look, I ~ this is actually a an interesting story because I as I said earlier,

I don't I don't read much, but once in a while back then I used to grab

a book like the Jack Welsh books and winning or I have a lot of books like you've

got on your bookshelf bookshelf back there,

extreme extreme ownership. And I I have them all and I read them all

and I love them. but there was a a book that Jack Welsh,

former CEO of GE, wrote, and I was reading through the book and

There was a unique interaction between Jack Welsh and his favorite

~ general manager. And that general manager's name was Armin Lazan.

And I had that chapter highlighted.

I would read it over and over and over again.

It was one of the most humble moments.

Jack Walsh was not a humble person,

but it was one of his most humble moments where he was learning from

the skill set of this general manager.

I ended up meeting an individual one day and I shared with him that I had.

I had read this and he said, Well,

I can introduce you to Armin Lazan,

but not the guy in the book, his his son,

actually. I ended up meeting the son,

and ~ the son is the reason for for who I am today.

He he ~ he his son, he was obviously a seasoned executive,

he's a private equity executive,

and he's the one who pulled me out of my day-to-day manufacturing

and aerospace into private equity.

and he's been an influential

part of my life. ~ the the story of me thinking it was him in the book,

then realizing it's the son and eventually working for him for over a decade.

Still today we talk. He's a mentor.

He's a he's a he's a close friend.

But you know, there's something about when when you're rooted your your your

confidence and your knowledge is rooted into someone like like this individual,

even at my age with my level of experience sometimes,

when I need a sounding board or I'm a little shaky with the decision.

And

I just need to replay it with someone.

He's a just the perfect individual.

There's such a level of comfort between us where I could I could dial

in the concern. I could dial in the risk that I perceive and just hear somebody

replay it to you. Often you'll replay what I just said and tell me it seems like

you know what you're doing and that gives you the confidence to move forward.

I I absolutely love working with him,

still still talk to him at least a a few times a week,

if not a few times a month.

Awesome. Yeah, that's fantastic that you have somebody like that to ~ coach

you and walk with you.

you mentioned your work in private equity and that that kinda gave

you the foundation where you looked around like a a lot of people that work

in private equity and said, I can do this on my own.

tell us a little bit about that process of starting your own venture,

how you raised funds, how you went about it.

what does that look like?

Yeah, look, I I came from I said humble beginnings.

We were we were poor when when when we grew up.

We we never had any money. And you know the concept of having money

has always been fairly foreign to me.

So as I as I evolved in in in manufacturing and then worked in private equity,

of course a huge part of the attractiveness was how f financially

re rewarding it was. you know,

people can have formidable

financial careers and private equity and portfolios of private equity companies.

Now making the leap out of private equity is terrifying.

It's very, very similar to every a hairdresser that wakes up one day and says,

I don't want to work in the salon anymore.

I want to own my own salon or ~

Yeah.

somebody who puts some money in a gas station and decides to be his own boss

or her own boss. Look, it's it's such a terrifying leap for most people.

It it carries a level of excitement.

And

usually it the excitement culminates in an explosion where you just get

it done and you say let's go, let's make the leap.

But as everybody and I'm sure you know,

as everybody feels the next day when they've made that decision,

you're looking at the bank account,

you're looking at the customers,

you're looking at whatever situation you're in,

and it hits you. It's like, this is this is real now.

you know I I made the pivot out of private equity and whether I

was consulting or helping

private equity firms look at a deal,

or I was part of the deal and I was oper operating guy.

I had big salary coming my way.

We had a lot of funds at our disposal to make big changes

and and affect transformation.

And it's you know, you sit in meetings and you have quick conversations like these

about 32 million dollars, right?

Versus the day you're on your own and you know your everything starts to matter.

~ I had a humble amount of investment ~

I start on my own. I didn't raise a fund.

I didn't ask for other people's money at the beginning.

and then pretty quickly I started to bring in friends and family,

larger investors, leverage some of the the loans that are available

to small-time investors. And as I started to scale,

then brought on more institutional type money behind me.

But at at the very beginning, you're concerned about everything.

the coffee cups, right? You want a coffee machine,

Yeah.

I'm a

I'm an abuser of coffee. I it it it's sort of the fuel that keeps me going.

But you're you're you reuse your same,

and I have that habit even today.

I'll reuse my cup throughout the day,

even though it's a it's a throwaway,

because I remember the days where you know you don't want to hit that that minimum

order quantity because you may not have the cash to get your coffee or

to get the cups and so on. It just makes you a really,

really, really good money manager.

and

Look, I I would give this advice to anyone.

we talked earlier about how school it was is that the right form

of education or not. I look at a lot of the financial students,

I look at a lot of folks that go to MBA classes,

they want to be CEOs and executives.

Grab a small business, you don't have to own it.

Go help somebody out manage their cash flow on a small business where they're

not sitting on twenty two million dollars of reserve and and and see what that does.

It is it is the best school.

To become a really, really good business guy.

You start to understand the relationship between acquiring revenue,

turning it into cash. So it's not just a high five,

but you don't see the cash. And then how do you deploy the cash intelligently

to affect whatever strategy that's in front of you?

And you know, you you could talk all you want theoretically what that looks like

in books and MBA classes. I'm a lot of schools do simulations,

but try it when you only have

20, 30, $40. And how do you make that work?

How do you make payroll when by the time payroll hits,

your bank account's depleted to $2,000 and just hope that the check that

you sent out last week doesn't get cashed in?

That is

Yeah.

probably one of the greatest lessons for me and has forged me into who I am:

is how do you manage that relationship of sales and cost and cash?

And it didn't come from all of my great experience,

didn't come from private equity,

didn't come from MBA, because I do have an NBA with a finance focus.

None of it came from there. It came from the first year of running my own small,

tiny business and being myopically focused on my coffee cups and sugar

and you know the the things that are so basic.

But I bet you every CEO on this earth here,

every C-suite leader, every executive,

that's not what goes through their mind on a day-to-day basis.

They're looking at all these

No.

big budgets.

I was focused on the coffee cups and until until today I still think about

the micro things because ~ that's where ~ that's where I came from.

I agree a hundred percent. I think

~ I think that's huge for learning and development is you know,

you get thrown in as a leader in a big corporation with huge budgets

and I think there's a loss of efficiency 'cause you don't know how

to be that detailed and ~ like you mentioned,

I I remember having a discussion one day about whether or not we could afford

to switch to the K cups for the coffee maker in the

in the office because with ground coffee we can make a whole pot for ten cents,

but the K cups are fifty cents per cup,

Yeah, kind of served that is the expected.

you know?

That's luxury.

yeah. and then ~ growing through those small stages to a a business where

the numbers do get big, that process can be a a learning process as well.

When you're when you're used to worrying about the fifty

Yeah.

cent K cup and now all of a sudden you've got millions of dollars that you're

deploying and moving and managing.

~ it's just a a different perspective that if you haven't experienced both

you really can't understand the other.

Yeah, and look, I think it's also it's a good segue into the example

we just discussed is financial in nature.

but as a as a leader, I think being intimately involved and knowledgeable

of the fibers of your business is is really important.

Mm.

you know, people people ask about well,

how do you make a pivot from one industry to the other?

And if if you stay very generic,

the jobs look the same. ~ whether you're a finance executive

or operations executive.

It's it's all kind of the same.

But the success comes from the details,

not from the the general high-level statements.

And so the same way a great leader should be concerned about his coffee cups,

I think any leader should want to go in the micro and understand the fibers

of his business and how his employees are successful and can make

him and the company successful.

And you know, when we talk about customer satisfaction,

such a

Such a broad term. You got all these experts out there that are that specialize

in the customer experience and the customer satisfaction.

but I think a leader should should really be curious and say,

you know, what what does a customer ~ day-to-day journey look like when they work

with me? And you know, do they have to double-click on a form and fill

it out three times? And is that annoying?

Because I'm not a customer myself,

but I'm a human being and I buy things and I and that's annoying to me,

right? When I have to re-enter my information

Yeah.

all the time and

Or these these forms that won't let you copy paste your email address

or is that why? You know, why,

why, why cause me such headaches?

I think leaders that become curious like that and want to get into

the the details of their business usually tend to be far more successful than

~ and and I I I don't want to offend people by saying corporate,

but people that tend to be more corporate,

more detached, more polished at the top.

And you know, there's nothing wrong.

There's nothing wrong with executives that operate.

world class at that level. But I think the best of the best are not shy

to roll up their sleeves. And when they walk the factory floor,

it's not for appearance. It's because they want to see is is that machine running?

Because I'm being told that we're at capacity,

but I'm I'm really curious, are we running it?

And you know, or it's not running.

Why isn't it running? because Jesse Jesse,

you know, doesn't have enough enough manpower and he can only work two shifts

and on ~ when you show up it doesn't run.

And having this intimate level of knowledge with your business and curiosity

I think makes you a very, very dangerous in a good way.

Dangerous leader, very capable

Yeah. Absolutely. And so along those same lines,

leader. Absolutely.

you have kind of a unique

perspective having operated in that ~ you call it kind of the corporate level,

the private equity, you had lots of budget and you've also kind

of bootstrapped something on your own.

what lessons have you learned getting

And so do you

to see both sides of that coin that maybe just one or the other doesn't provide?

Yeah, look, not every private equity firm or investor is is the same,

right? So there's there's there's a wide,

wide, wide variety. Private equity is just private money,

w whichever way it's structured to be deployed into a company,

usually with with the idea of multiplying your returns.

But not every private equity is built the same.

I I would tell you that the reason I wanted to do this venture

without the backing initially of private equity was because

I didn't necessarily know where I was gonna take the company.

I had an idea of what was going on in the industry,

but it was rapidly changing. And I don't have a crystal ball.

So I I didn't know where it was gonna end up.

I'm a hockey guy, right? Wayne Greske scaped to where the puck's gonna be.

I didn't know where the buck was going to be,

but I had a sense it wasn't gonna be here.

So I needed flexibility. I needed

I needed time. I needed the ability to pivot and say,

okay, I was heading north, but I think we have to go east.

And usually in private equity,

when it's a fund, they spend a year or so sourcing the the

the platform and investing in it.

And then now you're on a ticking time time plot where you have to affect

the change and get the returns before that company gets put for a transaction.

And usually the sweet spot is that five year time frame.

Well, I had no confidence that in five years,

I can do what I wanted to do with with my venture.

So that's why I made the decision not to pursue private equity.

I certainly have a lot of contacts,

a lot of people that would have backed me,

would have supported me, but they also would have their hands tied,

would which would have tied my hands.

And so I made a decision to bootstrap at the beginning and and now I've

got ~ formidable co-investors.

It's it's a family office, so it's not true private equity ~ structure.

And they've they've really, really allowed us to think differently about how do we

Capital and how do we transform?

And we've had to we've had to steer the ship right,

left a few times and change course a few times to really dial in

~ where the industry is going and how do we skate to where the puck's gonna be.

And for me, that would not have been pick possible in a traditional private equity

structure. Now, that being said,

you watch private equity do this masterfully.

They come in, they're able to operate a portfolio for a short period of time.

And they double, triple the their investment within that period of time.

Look, there is a time and a place for this type of investment.

what I embarked on did not fit that criteria.

Maybe one day ~ what I've built will become more of an institutional dental platform

that is more right for the private equity model.

But up to today, it has required a little bit more flexibility,

longer, longer periods of time to try and we say to try to crack the code

of how this whole thing is gonna shake out.

Well that's a a great segue kind of into ~ discussing what you're doing

now and what that looks like. So y you made the leap from when you're working

in private equity, you were still ~ in kind of related industries.

You started in aerospace and aerospace machining and kind of s kept in machining.

Where did this idea to go into dental dental laboratories come from?

That that seems like a little bit of

l out of left field and and kind of a wild idea.

How did you come up with that?

I would love to sit here and tell you ~ about my wisdom and how much of

a savant I was where I predicted something.

But I I shared this with you earlier.

I I didn't know dental labs existed.

So today I'm building a dental manufacturing company that I believe will redefine

how dental manufacturing is done.

But at the time, and I've been to a dentist many,

many times, I had no idea that dental labs existed.

I thought it was all done in the office.

And so when I when I left private equity,

I really wanted to be in something familiar,

aerospace. So I looked at aerospace.

Aerospace has gone through consolidation.

Private equity has been in aerospace for years and years and years.

There's not a lot of addressable assets for somebody with pretty humble

~ amounts of funds. And then I said to myself,

well, look, medical devices are highly regulated,

they look like aerospace manufacturing sites.

Let's take a look there.

This similar things had happened and there's just no space for small investors

to come in and and really have a meaningful impact without deep pockets and so on.

And then I stumbled on a dental app.

I literally stumbled on a dental lab.

And when I walked my first dental lab,

I was confused. I was confused because this is meant to be a medical business that

produces things that go in people's mouth.

and I was very, very confused how.

Dirty and old and archaic everything was and how very labor intensive it was.

Everything was done by hand. There was no technology whatsoever.

You remember, I come out of aerospace.

So, you know, some of our the casting houses that we used to walk with

r robotic lines and you could eat off the floors,

Bracken Whitney's campuses. I mean,

they're they're they're cleaner than most commercial kitchens.

I mean, it's just beautiful factories.

And you walk into this site where people are just waxing things by hands and

~ there's steam and smoke and it smells,

and and they tell you this is stuff that goes in people's mouth.

And I was, it was a sticker shot for me.

I I could not believe this. the the idea of what I'm building today didn't come

right there and there. At that time,

the idea was pretty simple. my God,

they're stuck back in the ~ prehistoric days.

Could we help them make the lead?

Could we help digitize? Could we help?

Let's look at aerospace. How do they do this?

Well, they use ~ 3D software.

Why aren't we doing it by hand?

So let's get a computer, let's buy the software,

let's and it was it was pretty slow beginnings of how to take very,

very traditional dental lab out of that space and made it make it more modern.

But as as the thesis evolved, the the strategy became very,

very different. You know, these labs are they're traditionally founder-centric,

and and I compare them to artists in studios.

If you've ever seen a movie of a

Of a of a New York painter and an artist,

and you know, he's he's bare feet and he's got paint on his feet and so on.

That's how I think of how the dental lab that I walked into looked like.

but at the same time, you you can't really buy the art studio.

The painters, the the artist is the is the business,

not not the not the the facility,

not his paintings. And dental labs were the same.

So when you look at building something more institutional.

That still relies on a lot of labor and a few people,

the key man, the key woman problem with these businesses that within somebody's

tribal knowledge and three, four decades of know-how resides the business.

Everything else around is just accessories.

So the journey began of how do we change that?

How do we how do we take an art form and turn it into something more procedural,

more repeatable? And that's the journey that I embarked on to build

the company that we have today.

that's an interesting origin story.

And ~ I imagine there was quite a learning curve as you kind of stepped into that

operator role. what is something you learned after taking ownership

and kind of becoming an operator that you could not have learned

in your previous career or even through the the diligence process

of buying the business?

~ you know, th there's a few things.

Number one, when you come from more industrial,

more aerospace tech companies,

you talk about standard operating procedures,

repeatable steps, scalable workflows.

those are just buzzwords. the the the systems are already set up in such

a way that you've got Lego blocks and you're building what you want ~ your workflow,

your factory to look like.

But when you step into you step into an artisan world,

how do you go from there to something very structured,

very repeatable, very engineering driven?

That's hard. I did not have the appreciation for what it would take

to make that leap. And and I think that was such a humbling moment.

That's the moment where you go home at eight or nine o'clock at night after your

your first couple of weeks, and you look at yourself in the mirror and you go,

What have I done? You know, what have I done?

What a mistake.

This was. I am not even qualified to attempt to do what I want to do.

And yeah, I I had those moments.

I had those moments laying in bed staring at the ceiling,

going, Well, there goes all all my life savings and in this strategy,

and it's gonna be a flop. That was one.

Number two, every business school,

every leader will tell you, culture,

people, that's very, very important.

I'll tell you, you have to become the quintessential EQ leader.

~ psychologist, therapist, friend,

enemy, to be able to move things in in a direction when you're starting

so far back downstream. If you were to acquire an aerospace business that's already

working for Airbus or Pratt Whitney,

they've got quality systems in place.

They get their ISO certified, they go through audits,

and as you build, you're building off of a very solid foundation.

You can look at a few leaders in in the eyes and say,

Could you put a presentation together?

Let's talk on Monday and we're gonna review the KPIs.

And that triangulates. They would leave,

they would come back, and they would present,

you guys make decisions and you grow from there.

Try saying that when you go to an artisan studio,

right? PowerPoint? What is that?

Right? What's what's powerful about this point?

Yeah.

And I'm I'm I'm being a little facetious here,

but it's

it it's you have to really go all the way back and say this is a green field,

we're rebuilding from scratch.

But what's important here is

How do you become a real leader?

And that was I I I've always thought of myself as a leader.

I was a pilot. I've been put in really tough,

risky situations. I've put my life on the line to save other people's lives.

I've been a manager, a director,

a VP, a president. I'm a leader.

What are you talking about? But leadership there was real leadership.

How do you how do you convince people and give them a path and a vision that they

follow you where you're telling them everything you've done?

For the last 30, 40 years is not gonna get us.

It's not gonna get you to where you need to go.

And you have to divorce yourself of a lot of the learnings and teachings that that

that have made you who you are,

and you have to embark on this new journey that's scary,

different, doesn't even feel like it's the right answer.

And usually what that looks like is a leader that's really able to paint

the picture of where we're going.

I I I I used to tell my team,

~ if ~ if you're treading water in the ocean,

and I'm a terrible swimmer, so just telling you that story scares me.

Yeah.

My blood pressure is rising. But you if if you're in the ocean,

it's usually hard to see the horizon.

It's you it's hard to see the land when when you're you're in the water.

But if if you had if you had somebody with a little bit more buoyancy

and somebody on on his or her shoulders,

they already have a much better vantage point,

just a few feet, 10 feet above the water,

you already see a lot better.

Right. And so I think of that as you know,

a leader is not necessarily somebody who knows it all,

but somebody who's able to see a little bit further down the road than

the folks that are in the day-to-day fight for him or her.

And that leader should be an expert at one describing where we're going,

describing the vision, constantly repeating and helping them course correct.

Because again, if you're in the water,

the current is shifting you, you swim a little too far to the left,

too far to the right.

And the leader should help them constantly course correct towards that shore.

And that's a really important quality.

We read about it in books. People tell us culture and leadership and so on.

But when I really took over these smaller businesses,

it it really tested my leadership skills to that extent.

So I like I I I tell people very similarly to the cash example

we talked about earlier. ~ I don't think there's

Yeah.

a school that could teach you how to survive on forty dollars like that.

Very similarly, try to take

somebody out of their comfort zone and inspire them and give them vision

so they could drop everything that they have and start building the next chapter.

That's that's difficult. And you really have to immerse yourself into that

to to s to to to be to be able to develop these types of leadership skills.

you mentioned the ~ the sleepless nights,

the looking at your looking your at yourself in the mirror,

questioning whether you were on the right path or made a good decision.

was there a point where you really

You're a code.

turned a corner and felt like,

Okay, I can do this? Where you started to get some traction and started

to see things change.

Yeah, ~ I mean look, I think every entrepreneur,

every leader goes through phases where they doubt the the current state they're in.

and I think the difference between massively successful entrepreneurs

and folks that just didn't quite bank it is that they stick it out that last mile,

that last minute. I have a lot of friends in the military,

I have a lot of friends in special operations.

I grew up with some of these folks.

I flew some of these folks to their destinations.

And it's it's always about that last stretch when when you think you can't

get that one push up at the end,

you actually still have 10 in you.

But your mind is telling you that you're done,

you're tired. And entrepreneurship's very much the same.

And I was laying in bed thinking to myself,

I I can't do it. I'm not gonna be able to get through it.

But you know what, just close your eyes,

go to sleep, wake up the next day,

go back at it. That's all you need to do.

And the next day is a little bit better or a little bit worse.

Doesn't matter. Close your eyes,

wake up, repeat. And as I start to do that,

the company got better. I became much,

much better at what I was doing.

I had to, I'm going back to school here,

going back to school on how to manage cash to have enough coffee for the employees.

And how do I get an an an artist to drop his art and think on the journey

of of modernizing the business?

So I'm becoming better at what I do.

I'm becoming more eloquent. I'm learning alongside of them because

I'm interested in the details,

because I'm in the fibers of the business.

I don't just want to be told. I want to see it.

I want to learn. Can I could I try?

This looks difficult. Can I try it?

And as I start to do more and more of that,

the strategy became clearer for me.

You know, I took a lead in starting to consolidate these businesses.

I I was always of the opinion,

you know, play to your strengths.

I was an ops leader and I was a a business guy for larger companies,

but I never had multi-sites. I never galloped around the world to

try and wrangle cultures and different operational sites together.

It was I was always focused on one thing and I said to myself,

that's what I should do. Whatever I build,

everybody should be under one roof.

I should bring in ~ all into into into one home.

So buying these businesses meant that we would have to shut down whatever locations

they had and bring them into our house.

So of course I was

Conscious of distance. You can't buy a business in New York and one in California.

That that's difficult for relocation.

So I concentrated my efforts on California and I said,

~ I have to think about ~ the distance that people would have to drive.

I have to build a company in an environment that people want to come to work.

And that was actually easy because of I told you the culture shock

of walking into these older businesses.

I said to myself, why don't I build something that looks like aerospace?

Because I love going to work at Airbus.

Love coming to work at Brad Whitney.

This is a fantastic factory. Their lunchrooms are better than some

of the restaurants, right? And I wanted something like that.

So I built a company here today that I'm very proud of.

People walk our dental manufacturing company and they say,

this looks nothing like dental.

This looks like aerospace. Yeah,

exactly. And that's the best compliment I can receive.

So I played to my strengths by building something centralized.

but it wasn't just for the people,

it wasn't just so I could manage it.

It was also because artisanry is variable,

artisanry is scary for me. And as I was breaking down the process with

my teams and thinking, how do we go from artisanry to more standard operating

procedures, more repeatable steps?

Once you roll that out in production,

it was a lot easier for me to think about rolling that out into

a centralized site and gain the efficiencies.

You're gonna put equipment in place.

Well, I don't want to put equipment in 16 different places and make sure that

all 16s are following the rules and calibrating it.

Let's just put it under one roof.

And as I said, I like the details.

I want to be able to walk the floor.

I want to count out of my 16 machines.

Are they all running? Why is number 15 always down?

What's going on? You know? And that's that's sort of the beginning of

the journey of where we are at today.

We've we've centralized ~ this platform into

one of the largest dental manufacturing sites.

And the way we're addressing the manufacturing is very,

very different. We were born out of being a bunch of artisans.

I wasn't, but I was the one who brought them together.

And today we have engineers on staff and business leaders,

and you know, we we have SOPs and specifications and equipment calibration.

We're FDA registered and it it's it was such a journey to come out of

the New York artisan studio and now look like.

A a Pratt Whitney factory, basically.

So what was it like building that facility?

I mean, i if you're constantly acquiring new businesses and adding on,

how far ahead do you plan? How you know,

did you build a facility twice as big as you currently need it or three times

as big as you currently need? Did you have to build a new facility every year?

how how do you manage a growing business but yet a high tech facility?

~ to facilitate that growth.

Look, at the beginning, we made a couple of mistakes.

We built slightly bigger than we needed,

and we we s suffered a few successes.

We filled up the building really quickly.

One of the last buildings we had,

what a disaster. we took the lunchroom over.

There was a little quiet area that became the customer service.

there was two bathrooms upstairs,

and you literally walked past the last individual to open the door.

To get into the restroom. The conference rooms were all filled with employees.

We had desks everywhere. The building was just busting.

I gave up my office. It was eaten up by production.

And that was the last mistake I made.

And I said, what we're doing is working.

We're going to be able to roll up this industry really fast and not just

buy other people, but also with our discipline and the way we're working,

we're going to be able to win new business.

So we're going to keep filling up this factory.

~ and if you go back to what I said about private equity,

what I decided to do here would have been very,

very difficult in a private equity model where what's the return on investment,

what's the timing, you know, I need a three-year ROI and so on.

My partners, my investment ~ partners here are long-term visionaries.

They've they've been super successful with long-term investments,

they've built some of the most notable companies in our industry.

And they understood where we were going and allowed us to build this formidable

site. So if you take a small the factory where we were bursting out of

the seams and so on was barely 8,000 square feet.

Today we're in over 130,000 square feet.

we weaken more than ~ 10x our production volume into this factory.

And that's just by virtue of space.

But when you think about multiple shifts,

you think about the automation that we're bringing to the table.

So

Charbell back five years ago could do 10 of something with some

of the production lines and efficiency.

Now he can do 100 of something.

But now we brought in a couple of pieces of equipment,

AI, some of the automation. Now I can do a thousand of something.

So just by

Mm-hmm.

by virtue of becoming leader, more efficient,

more digitally driven, we can get more and more on this site.

So yeah, definitely overbuilt,

pretty large operation.

we haven't grown into it yet. We are in the process of growing into it.

But it's an exciting time because what I love the most is not fighting fires.

What I love the most is selling and winning.

And I love to tell my story. I love to to brag about my company.

So any chance I get to sit sit in front of the leaders in dental and show them what

we have, usually the answer is how how can we work together?

And ~

Yeah.

the the goal now is just keep filling up this factory that we build.

that's cool. So w when you said you kind of stumbled into your first dental

laboratory and saw some opportunity to ~ bring it into the modern

era with technology, at what point in time did you realize that was

an industry that was ripe to be consolidated?

it was from the consolidation was apparent to me on it's not day one,

month one. The first month I said,

there's so many people in the same situation as my founder.

So my founder, the b individual I bought the business from,

he was pretty advanced and aged,

he had a couple of health issues,

he's ready to retire. But he said,

Look, I'll give you just I'll give you the time you need to transition.

His business was not sellable because he's the art he's the artist.

And as I start to meet his buddies and meet more and more of these businesses,

everybody was in the same situation.

Everybody. except a few large players,

but even the large players were were the same.

They were just a conglomerate of multiple of these small businesses.

They it wasn't institutionally different.

It was just an aggregate of smaller labs with founders that that were about

to retire.

So I knew right away that this industry was right for consolidation.

The problem though was can you really successfully consolidate artisan studios?

Because as these artists retire,

the know-how leaves with them.

How do you how do you scale that?

And I have to solve for that at the same time as I saw the opportunity for scale.

I saw the opportunity for scale first.

Then I realized that scaling is actually very dangerous.

And to do that correctly, you have to decouple.

The IP, the know-how from the artistry and turn it into something that's

far simpler, far far more repeatable,

that's rooted in standard operating procedures,

rooted into engineering. And from there,

then you can start digitizing and bringing equipment.

You can't bring a machine that does the same thing that a ~ an amazing artist

can do. But then if you break down his steps,

maybe there's a step here that you know this can be cut by this piece

of equipment instead of doing by hand.

And that's gonna be far more precise.

and so that was the journey that we went on.

I knew immediately we could roll up the industry.

I thought that rolling it up was a mistake,

unless I was able to create discrete manufacturing steps to replicate what artisan

tree was doing for these founders.

Can you speak a little bit more to that process

Or

of taking something that is artistry,

very custom, unique. I I mean I I I'm a layman in both industries,

but I imagine, you know, in aerospace you're repeating you're making

the same part again and again and again,

and the the key is to make it exactly the same.

Whereas in

dental laboratory, the key is that each one is slightly different.

Yes.

They they are

custom. They're molded to that individual,

that person. there probably is a lot more artistry in there.

How do you take something that is so unique,

where each piece is unique and make it a a repeatable process?

Look, manufacturing is repeatable.

Now, we're not saying that how we manufacture should change.

What we're saying is the patient is different on a case-by-case basis.

And the output, the product is gonna be called the same.

It's a crown, it's an implant,

it's a denture. But if you were getting that crown and I was getting that crown,

it's gonna have a different size,

it's gonna have a different color.

So I I don't think we should confuse the concept of a custom product with

standard manufacturing protocols.

So, how a machine wants to cut certain material,

it's gonna cut it, it's gonna use the same burr,

it's gonna use the same material,

but the path that it's gonna follow is gonna be dictated by something.

So, how do you dictate a custom path?

Well, that's 3D design. So, with the proper data capture at the beginning,

understanding

Patient specifications, doctor specifications,

and there's ways to funnel that into a very structured method.

Then you can feed your pieces of equipment all that information,

and it's going to produce a very repeatable product,

very a very reliable, high-quality product,

but each one of them will fit differently in people's mouth.

And and and that's the goal. That's repeatable manufacturing and

a highly customized environment.

how you do that,

I've given so many different examples.

I'm I'm afraid now of repeating them because people roll their eyes,

but there's I I give I mean I give an example of of of paintings because

I I I always think of how people paint.

And recently I gave an example of like baking a cake.

but but the painting example is really,

really relevant. If if you have if you have an artist that can paint

a beautiful scenery, even if you ask that same artist,

could you paint that again for me tomorrow?

And

Could you give me five copies for Saturday?

They're all going to be very different.

~ not so different that they're unrecognizable.

There's gonna be a ton of variability.

Now, if I asked you to paint it and I painted it and he painted,

now forget it. These paintings,

they they can't even sit next to each other in the same gallery.

They're gonna be very different.

But if you and I were commissioned to paint,

I don't know, 50 or 100 of these paintings,

like like what you have behind you there in the logo,

then I would say, look,

Erick, I'm gonna be in charge of putting all the black on all the canvases.

All right. So I have the right brush,

I have the right color of black,

and I've got my technique to apply the black.

Then maybe you develop a stencil so you could stencil the mic and you've

got the layer of green, and then we go recruit one of your assistants to help

us do the lighter green shading.

And so we stitch ourselves in an assembly line.

So I'm doing one canvas black,

move it, canvas black, move it.

You're doing stencil and

At the end, we're gonna have 50 paintings that are gonna be very,

very close. Now, in the absence of machinery and perfect jigs and whatnot,

there'll be some slight variability.

But compare that to a bunch of artists or that same artist,

we've now tightened artistry and we now we've created a repeatable process.

And that's where it becomes interesting.

How do you how do you take dentistry down that path?

And as we start breaking down the steps,

I already used the example of a stencil.

You're gonna paint the microphone and you're gonna say,

look, I'm having a hard time getting the circle correct and so on.

You're naturally gonna try to create a gauge for yourself or a jig

or something to simplify that step.

And that becomes how do you take artisan tree,

break it into small steps, take the step,

how do you optimize it? How do you make it more repeatable?

And as you make it more repeatable,

then the question is: can you automate it?

Is there a printer that

Mm.

we can use to apply that color?

Is there is there something else that that can spray?

directly on the canvas and do that and so on and so forth.

And that's the journey from artisanry all the way up to complete automation.

that makes a lot of sense. That ~

Why not follow?

helps me understand it a little bit anyway.

So shifting gears a little bit here,

~ big part of your model, a big part of your business has been acquisitions.

what are the biggest things that you look at when considering

a potential acquisition?

~ look, I think this applies to a three person company all the way up

to a ten thousand person company.

I I think the alignment of strategic interest is really,

really important. there's too many roll up strategies in all sorts

of industries that roll up with the sole purpose of revenue and profit.

And I think that's a big mistake.

You can buy two companies that operate in exactly the same field,

they're selling to similar customers,

and aggregate the revenue, aggregate the EBITDA,

and quickly find yourself in a situation where one or the other or both

are starting to lose stop lines,

start to lose profitability. I think it's really important that when you look

at a company, that it has a if we think of the Lego blocks,

that it's a Lego block that fits the strategy that you're building.

And it's not purely done for revenue,

purely done for for EBITDA.

I I I joke with some of my friends and I say if if it's just an EVIDA play

and just a revenue play, why wouldn't you buy a coffee shop and then

a restaurant and just diversify and just aggregate revenue in Evidah?

you're not running these businesses,

you're just piling them on together on on a PL.

The reality is if you truly want to build an enterprise,

a business that has a vision and can grow and can morph and can address industries,

I think you'd really have to be

~ humble enough to recognize that strategy is really important and

is there a strategic alignment between these companies?

And so when you talk about strategic alignment,

strategy is not something that happens out of the CEO's office.

Strategy is something that is embedded in every fiber of the business

in every employee. So then it leads me immediately to to look at culturally,

can I gain alignment? Are these people that are going to join the family going

to row in the same direction as us?

And

There's a lot of leaders that talk about,

well, this is a CEO's job, and you have to get up and you have to align everybody.

But I think through diligence,

it's an important piece to make sure that the companies become complementary

to each other and are able to roll in the same direction.

Sometimes, even though there's willingness,

you're unable because they're strategically divergent,

or be ~ amount of resources that have to be deployed force you to make

~ divergent decisions. And then you get back to the people.

Do we have the right

cultural mentality and strategic alignment to have these companies row

in the same direction. If you can solve for that before an acquisition,

the battle's won. After that, it's stitching it together and making sure that

integration is happening seamlessly and that,

you know, one plus one equals three or four,

whatever type of math you want to use.

The problem when you disregard this because you're too thirsty

and are chasing revenue growth in EBITDA.

And just stitching companies together.

One is you have erosion that happens.

You've got divergent strategies,

conflicting strategies, your companies start to suffer.

Two, the equity and effort and sweat and blood and tears that should

be s spent integrating and building now are spent correcting.

And

Mm-hmm.

as you have erosion, now we need to deploy more salespeople to grow back again.

We need to cut costs because we're losing ~ we our profit has dipped,

and it's anti-

what you set out to do. So I I always advise that this should be part

of your diligence. You should look at a company and almost imagine yourself,

are we the same family? Can we roll in the same direction?

Is the strategy complimentary?

Is one plus one equal three? And if the answers are no,

then why would you do it? Why would you why would you

Mm-hmm.

embark on a mission where now you have to reinvent?

You might as well greenfield, might as well start from scratch and and

and build it within your walls.

Yeah. Yeah, that's a good perspective and I think one that's ~ missed

Good perspective and I think it's

a lot. so I I understand in a lot of your acquisitions the ~ former owner actually

stays on and becomes a part of your alliance rather than just selling out entirely.

I imagine that can be difficult to go from,

you know, being an an artisan,

an owner, the guy that's in charge,

to now being kind of a a

cog in the machine, at a, you know,

very regimented s machining oriented or you know,

more scientific rather than art artistic company.

How do you help those people transition and are you successful at that?

What does that look like?

What I what I would tell you is this goes back to the question

we talked about earlier, right?

People, cultural alignment. If you're about to buy a business and there's a founder,

if the founder says, Look, I don't I just want to retire,

do we have a business that can be absorbed and can we operate

it successfully without that founder?

And if the answer is no, walk away.

This is not a business for you to acquire.

if the fa founder wants to stay on board,

then it leads you to the next question.

What do you really want that founder to do?

In our case, we told founders right off the bat,

look, you're going to lose your day-to-day job,

you're gonna have a different job,

you're gonna work on the business,

not in the business. Because your skill set is so great that you hide

all the mistakes. And what we need to do here is to expose the weaknesses,

the single points of failure, so we can train the staff,

so we can elevate people, so we can fill in these gaps.

So basically, when you go on vacation for two months,

the business can operate successfully.

So that was one of the rules we used.

But it's something you do through diligence.

You don't do that after. You have to know the fibers of this,

the founder. You have to have cultural and strategic alignment.

Otherwise, it's a recipe for failure.

And look, have we done everyone perfectly?

No. I have some amazing success stories.

~ some of those founders basically had as good,

if not better, ideas than I did,

just never had the capital and the opportunity,

or they were maybe.

Too far advanced in age to launch something so risky.

And basically, when we came on board,

they said, Look, I've been waiting for you my whole life,

let's do it. Fantastic alignment,

then you go. We had other founders that may have said that,

but that wasn't really the intent,

and immediately reverted back to their old ways of working.

And this is the problem where now we're spending too much time trying

to decouple that, trying to fix that,

trying to get them on board versus focusing on the prize.

And again, if you spend

A lot of that time in diligence.

And if you're honest with yourself,

you know, I'm sure people have talked on the podcast,

deal fever, right? The concept of deal fever,

you fall in love with the deal for whatever reason.

You need the profit, you need the revenue,

you want to access a certain market,

and you stop, you start ignoring the signs.

The signs that are telling you,

look, this is gonna be problematic.

You're going to have adversity,

pushback, misalignment, whatever,

postclose, that's dangerous.

The minute a CEO, a leader, and the company takes their eyes off of

the North Star where they need to go,

just to deal with the day to day,

that's where companies start to lose ground.

And you know, s losing ground in in the industry that I'm in is so dangerous.

That industry is shifting and moving really,

really fast. You could become obsolete tomorrow.

So no, it's it's very simple advice,

but pressure test that through diligence.

Before you get married, before you embark on this trip.

that's some good advice. And then ~

Give the backs in.

in a culture right now that seems to be moving that direction rapidly across

a lot of different fields being consolidated and and bringing in private money

to build these larger platforms,

I think you just hit something that often gets missed and and that's probably

a big reason, ~ at least in my industry,

we're seeing some of those platforms and conglomerates really succeed

and do wonderfully and some that are

crashing and burning pretty quick and I I think you just put your finger

on probably the differentiator there.

~ well I know ~ in your industry and in a lot of industries right now,

~ my goodness,

kind of the limiting factor

for a lot of people is experienced technicians,

that skilled labor. how serious of a problem is that for you?

And do you think that the technologies you're developing,

the t technologies you're utilizing are gonna overcome that in a substantial way?

Look, I think ~ it would be arrogant of me to say it's not a problem.

It's problem for everybody. Every industry's suffering from that.

The baby boomers, less and less schools teaching different crafts,

specifically in dental, we almost have no certified dental technicians being pumped

into the industry anymore. So we're living off of an aging population

and and you know, to their credit,

they'll they'll work for the for the businesses that will pay them the most.

So there's

Less and less loyalty on that front.

But as you as you look back to breaking down artisanry into more

~ formulaic processes, it gives you an opportunity to start changing the formula.

finding an artist that can paint a great painting,

difficult. Finding me with a ~ a roller ~ that can put black

on a canvas, a little bit easier,

right? So

~ it changes the pool of hires that you can go after.

as we become more digital, we also we like to tap into people that

are more digitally savvy. So a dental lab back in the days needed somebody with

a tremendous amount of craftsman skill,

great hand skills, great dexterity,

high precision. today we equally need somebody who's super com comfortable with

a computer, who doesn't mind spending 14 hours clicking away on

3D designs and different pieces of equipment.

So it changes the type of workforce you go You know,

we're proud to say in our company at Spectrum,

we we really, really emphasize the hire of people without a dental background.

That's that's our pride and joy.

nothing against certified dental techs and founders,

but we were born out of that industry,

and there's less and less of these this talent available.

The talent that's available to us are folks that,

you know, they work at a grocery store or they're a barista somewhere

or they're flipping burgers and they haven't quite figured out what their career

is gonna be. They see one of our ads,

would you like to become a dental apprentice?

And of course people apply. No,

it sounds good. They show up, we check them for culture,

you know, do they have the right winning attitude?

Do you have any hand skills? because obviously there's still some labor

in what we do and you don't want somebody to get hurt.

Well, if you don't, are you good with a computer?

We usually can onboard 100, 150 people

to do ~ very small tasks without any dental background.

And the way we work

Mm-hmm.

is they end up stitched in a in an assembly line,

and within a few weeks, within a month,

they're productive and they're contributing to our manufacturing.

So

Yes, the labor shortage, the the shortage of very skilled labor

is hurting the industry. It's hurting the industry by a factor of 10x,

50x of my competitors, then it's gonna hurt us.

There's only a few

Mm.

in our industry that are marching down the path that we're marching towards where

we're decoupling artisanry and turning it more into standard operating procedures

in more automation, more repeatable steps.

So I I think it's ~ for for the ones that get it,

it's a fantastic opportunity.

For the others, it's it's a it's a it's a call to action.

You have to wake up. The industry is is sending you strong signals that

you won't have the labor, you won't have the capabilities to do this in

the next few years. And so it's all it's on us to adapt and and ~ in order

to stay relevant.

So as a CEO of an alliance or a conglomerate,

and you've talked a lot about,

you know, it's not all about just eBitada or revenue,

~ but it's a it's the culture,

it's the fit, it's the direction everybody's going,

being on mission together. What metrics do you most closely monitor?

you know, you've talked about being in the fiber of the business.

Are there some some key metrics that you watch that give you an idea when there's

a problem you need to dig into deeper?

luckily now I'm I'm surrounded by executives and we've we've we've really morphed

from being a small enterprise to a legitimate company.

We have a we have a C-suite and VPs and directors.

And so I'm I'm really lucky that my day-to-day has shifted from being

in every every detail, every fiber to having that opportunity to manage at

a at a broader level. I'm still super curious about the detail.

I'll still walk the floor. I still meet and talk to people.

what I would tell you is I don't think there's a single KPI that

a business leader can look at that tells you the health of their business.

I think every KPI in standalone risks giving you the wrong indication.

And going back to my pilot days,

you've got a cockpit in front of you and there's plenty of information.

Every one of these pieces of information in the silo could kill you if you

if you if you read it and only operate based on that.

But as you start to look at

~ different sets of information.

They call the basic six for the pilots.

You need to look at those six pieces of instruments together and bring

the data together to be able to make the right decision.

And I I think business is is very similar.

If you've got CEOs that are very financially savvy,

so they look at cost and profit and so on,

you could be super profitable for a period of time until your business disappears,

customers leave. You're not

Yeah.

going to see that on a profit and loss.

conversely, people that just monitor customer growth and so is that translating into

cash? We talked earlier about cash management.

plenty of times in my career I've closed multi,

multi-million dollar deals, but then I have to chase to get paid.

We didn't get paid. And so I I don't know that it's a sale if you just high-five

the salespeople and say we won and you never get paid for for

a $30 million contract. So I think there's a lot of KPIs that are important

for a leader to look at and very similar to flying.

In isolation, any one of these KPIs could lead to your demise.

I think being savvy to be able to read different types of data is important.

Also, being comfortable with not having all the information.

A lot of business leaders won't make a decision until all the data is laid

out in front of them. And you hear it described as paralysis by analysis

or you know the the hundred percenters,

whatever whatever you want to call it.

I I think.

Becoming comfortable with look,

you're never gonna have perfect information.

You're never gonna know exactly how every one of your customers feel.

you know, we've got tens of thousands of customers,

how are we supposed to talk to all of them?

~ and so as as as you start running these businesses,

how do you become comfortable with the right amount of information,

the right level of information?

It's never gonna be a hundred percent.

And you you can't

paralyze the company and not make the decisions that are needed,

especially in dental where the industry's moving,

the industry's shifting. It's not going to look the same in five years.

It already looks dramatically different.

We've gone from the prehistoric ages five to seven years ago to something that looks

like you know Star Wars today.

And that's not even it's not even done.

And now we're shifting towards something really,

really new new tech, very advanced,

AI driven, automated lines. How do you how do you

Do that in the span of 10 years if you're just only waiting to make

the decision onto you've got perfect data.

The data is never going to be perfect by definition because your industry shifting.

So what was good and relevant and 100% accurate yesterday is

no longer accurate today, and it's going continue shifting.

So I think those two things, there's not a singular set of data points,

being comfortable reading all the different verticals,

all the different data, being comfortable with incomplete information to

be able to infer and make decisions,

also be comfortable being wrong.

in adapting your decision based on look,

Mm.

we were at seventy percent, wrong decision,

but we learned and now we've completed the data set to eighty,

ninety percent, we're little smarter,

and you're able to continue the operating on.

that's good. That flexibility and ~ dynamic movement,

I think, is huge, especially like you said,

in a changing industry. the the industry isn't the only thing that's been changing

in your business. You guys have been growing at a a ~ rapid rate.

and ~ like you said, you went from kind of operator owning a single relatively small

business to now overseeing this massive alliance,

having a s C suite. how have you handled

the the growth of that business,

were there ever times where the business outgrew your ability to lead

and to manage and and where did you go to correct that?

it's a great question. if if you go back in my past,

I led organizations that were far larger than the business even today.

But that doesn't matter. That doesn't matter.

And I I learned that the hard way.

Because when you start back from the bottom and you start building,

you get back to your roots. You become an entrepreneur,

you're learning from the ground up,

you're worried about the coffee cups,

you're not thinking about your $10 million budget.

And

It changes your management style.

And one of the one of the changes that I loved is it made me a people person.

I I absolutely love to talk to my people.

I at the very beginning, I knew everything about everybody all the time.

I mean, there's not a birthday I missed.

There's I I knew kids' names and this person had problems with his mortgage.

This this this individual had some concerns about her daughter's health,

and I knew it all. And I pr really pride myself on that.

As the business scaled.

I had to back to school and realize,

I I can't keep this up. I we started having these waves of recruiting where

I didn't know the people's names and I would see 30,

40, 50 new faces, and I would hurry up,

try to introduce myself, and now I can't remember the names,

I can't remember you know the birthdays.

And and it's just a small example to illustrate that,

yes, I was a leader of a thousand,

two thousand, three thousand people before,

and you think, you're coming with all this.

knowledge and know-how, no, because I had to go back to school to be a real leader,

a different type of leader, a leader from the ground up,

right? From the ground up leader,

build and scale. And what made me successful was people,

really getting close to people,

managing people, this vision of how do I grab you out of your artisan tree

and help you on this journey of digitization.

So being like the best visionary,

the best EQ leader, and then immediately having that tested by

Can you actually remember 450 people's names?

Can you can you remember all of their birthdays,

all of their issues? And you know,

we're on bath here this year. I can't say too much on this podcast,

but we'll probably be north north of 2,000,

2,500 people here by year end.

it's a different management style.

So my mentor always said to me,

What got us here won't get us there.

Perfect example. What got me to where I am today is my EQ,

my connectivity with people, being close to the ground,

close to everyone.

As you scale and you've got multiple sites,

that changes. So I have to rejig my man management style and make it look more like

what got me to ~ private equity,

where I was running bigger teams,

Mm.

bigger

platforms, but not lose sight of what made me successful.

So I think I've emerged now as a very different leader.

I'm still very people focused.

It doesn't matter my title, my level of responsibility,

I will go down to any individual.

Have a one-on-one with them. I don't believe in levels.

I'll skip any level. If I want information and I'm curious about it,

I'll go talk to a mill operator.

I'll go talk to a to a finishing technician because I want to know.

I'm not interested in having that information filtered through a bunch of managers

Yeah.

and C-suite. If they are curious,

they could go find out as well.

And that's something I've never done in the past.

I've always been very corporate,

Mm.

very high level. So I think trying to blend the two parts of my lives where I was a

larger company, corporate executive with ha having built it from the ground up,

worrying about the coffee machines,

but now scale back to ~ what I used to have before,

but not letting go what made me so successful at small scale.

So I think it's a it's an amazing growth journey for me and recognizing

the power of hanging on to that as a as a leader.

were there ever moments where you had to

Perfect. That's for easy.

intentionally slow the growth of your business so that you as a leader could catch

up, systems could catch up, cash flow could catch up?

were there times where you had to kinda hit the brakes on some pending deals

in order to to get the rest of the system together?

Yeah, look, ~ the growing pains of a company.

~ you the the systems that you have,

you go from paper napkins where you write notes and you attach them to

a case to then you you now you're professionalized.

You're using Excel, and Excel can't keep up with the scale.

Then then you buy yourself a little software that's meant for a small company,

and that is that that's that's technological evolution over Excel,

but can't keep up with your scale.

So

Look, your systems, your processes,

your even your people are constantly tested.

I hate to say this, but it's it's a harsh reality.

Some people get promoted into roles and they are absolutely amazing

and they're crushing it, but the company outpaces them.

The growth at outpaces them. So we've had to we've had to change certain personnel,

move people around. Some people are no longer with us just because they they

couldn't keep up with the growth.

It's the tougher side of being a leader is to to recognize that,

you know, you're not in the business of the individual.

You're in the business of the masses.

You've got multiple families to feed.

You've got a big, big company and a strategy to execute.

And you have to divorce that from individuals,

people that are close to you, that have been with you since the beginning.

That's been a very hard journey for me.

And I would say, yes, at one point in our growth,

we have to hit pause and rethink a few things.

Think the

Think the ~ leadership of our company,

think the systems. Should we overinvest here?

You know, we don't have the cash,

but we absolutely need the bigger system.

We need the bigger people that can operate a company 10 times,

20 times the size. And so that was a point in our life here a few years back where

we hit pause and reinvented ourselves and then got back to work.

And what's interesting is if you do it well,

it accelerates your growth, it accelerates the transformation.

If you put the right people, the right systems that are all scalable.

then you don't have these anchor points and you're really able to

to grow your company.

Kenton you give us a little bit of an idea of the type of scale we're

A little bit of an idea that

talking about with ~ r revenue or staffing numbers.

I mean, where did you start and where are you now and how long has that taken?

Yeah, I I can't share revenue because of the private nature of of our company,

but I can give you a rough idea.

My first my first acquisition had nine people,

eight or nine employees. And you know,

I said we'll finish this year ~ probably north of ~ two thousand,

maybe twenty five hundred employees.

and it's been an amazing journey of growth.

~ our our first my first lab was twelve hundred square feet.

we've got 130,000 square feet today of manufacturing.

By the end of the year, with with some of the work we're doing,

there's some MA, there's some organic expansion,

we'll be north of 500,000 square feet of manufacturing.

So it's been it's hyperscale, it's ~ it's a lot of transformation,

it's a lot of great decisions,

a lot of terrible decisions. some things where I look back,

go, how did I not see this? I I should have,

could have made the decision.

I was asleep at the wheel in other areas.

I'm thinking to myself, my God,

I must have had a crystal ball because I figured it out.

And it you know, that's that's what leadership,

that's what being an entrepreneur is.

You're you're not gonna get it all right.

You're gonna get some of it. Hopefully the the few that you get right outweigh

all the bad decisions you've made.

And for all the bad decisions you make,

being able to pivot very quickly,

being able to recognize I screwed up,

made the wrong decision, it's fine.

Dust yourself off, keep moving,

make the next decision, make the next decision.

But it's been a journey of growth.

~ puts a lot of strain on everyone.

It's not for everyone. I I tell I tell our new hires,

you know, you've seen this on on advertisement,

~ fast-paced environment, dynamic environment.

Yeah. the the you you should really define that when you put that on a job posting,

because when you come to work for us.

It's fast-paced, it's dynamic.

I've had some of my executives complain.

Priorities are constantly changing.

Well, guess what? The industry's constantly changing.

By definition, your priorities have to constantly change.

Adapt, right? Override, change your vision,

and then plow forward. And then when you get that wrong or the industry shift,

not a problem. Shift with it. It's a very,

very demanding environment. Some people,

myself, I absolutely adore what I do.

I don't think.

I say this. I don't think I could ever go back and be a leader

in a well-established company.

I don't know what I would do with myself.

I probably would cause problems just to see if I could fix them and adapt to it.

But I I love this constantly changing environment that we're in.

this is a cool industry. There's not a lot of industries that are

at an inflection point. There's a lot of industries that have gone through this 30,

40 years ago. And whoever was

At the time in the Hell of these companies,

we read the Vaven books and and you know,

they're they're the business cases we talk about.

This is a this is an industry that's about to pivot onto itself.

And I'm I'm just so grateful to be able to have one stumbled on it.

I literally stumbled on it, and two,

be able to be one of the individuals that gets to leave his ~ thumbprint on it.

So it's it's an exciting journey.

what is the timeline there? Wha when was your first acquisition?

The the the first acquisition dates back to twenty sixteen,

~

Okay.

twenty seventeen, and it was a little bit of a slow play until twenty nineteen

we began buying companies and scaling them.

My co-investors joined me right after COVID.

So we were shut down like everybody during COVID.

And luckily for me, they took a look at our business,

fell in love with the model, it aligned with their strategy again.

having this alignment of interest,

not just, hey, we have money, we'd like to invest money.

You know, what's your vision? What what are your expectations of this

and what are mine? And we were able to align and they really,

really accelerated our our journey.

They've they've allowed us to expand,

to acquire, to build, to destroy and rebuild because the industry was changing.

And ~ yeah, I would say 10 years overall,

but really in the last five-ish years,

the acceleration has has started.

That's incredible. Twelve hundred square feet to five hundred thousand square feet

in ten years. eight or nine employees to twenty three hundred employees,

that that's incredible.

Can you tell me about a decision that cost you a significant amount of money?

What what was the most costly mistake you ever made?

I have a lot of personal examples.

I think you want more business examples,

but

You know, here here's a here's a simple one.

And I I'm sure any anyone in business,

anyone in a leadership role who's gonna listen to this is gonna have

a similar example. We had a we had an opportunity with customers and we were

we were selling a certain product,

but we were constrained. We had we had a capacity constraint and it was

a piece of equipment. And it wasn't insignificant.

I I don't exactly recall, but let's call it

forty thousand dollars or fifty thousand dollars.

So it's not it's not it's not nothing,

but it's not, you know, twenty million dollars.

but we didn't have the money. We didn't have the money and we sat on it

and ~ didn't figure out a way to go and buy that piece of equipment.

And when we look back, the revenue that we lost,

the runway that we lost had we had this piece of equipment and

we could have penetrated this market better.

What a what's the expression, ~ penny wise and pound foolish type decision.

you know, we probably left a hundredfold on the table because

of this singular decision. So it's not necessarily cost me a lot of money

in terms of we invested and and and wasted the money,

but we didn't invest something that should have been nominal or you know,

at the time I should have scraped and said,

could I sell my furniture?

You know, could I is there a car somewhere I could grab and sell and

get get some dollars to try and come up with that amount of money?

And it it's it's so funny that this example happens in world-class companies,

public companies, right? Myopic budget reviews,

wait, we don't have the capital for this,

but it's once again, it's a leader that's looking at a singular data point,

one dashboard, one KPI, not looking at all the KPIs.

And so I I don't have the budget to buy this,

so I'm not gonna sign you up.

To go spend hundred or a million or three million dollars.

But as you start looking at the other KPIs,

this is meant to fuel strategy,

growth, sales, whatever, penetrating a new market.

And you could have shortchanged the company's ~ growth here for the next five years

by making a myopic decision. I did that.

And it's it's very easy to do.

It's very easy to do when you're in the day-to-day,

when you're fighting, when you're counting your coffee cups to make sure you're

gonna not gonna run out.

Decisions like that make sense.

We don't have the money, we're not gonna do it.

And then later on, ~ you know,

~ Monday quarterback or hindsight is twenty twenty,

you look back and you go, What a what a short sighted decision that was.

that's interesting. I see a lot of businesses that go the

Interesting. I see a lot of business list.

other direction and they'll they'll spend money they don't have to

buy anything with promises and then when it doesn't come through,

it you know, they're in a tight spot.

So like I like your analogy there of it's not a singular KPI.

It's it's not a decision made on one set of information,

but it's really gathering the big picture to make those decisions wisely.

And my my my mentor used to say,

field of dreams, build it and they will come.

Some people just build it and hope that it will come.

Yeah.

And

look, it worked in certain business models.

If you've got real good insight and you're ahead of the market,

look, kudos to you if you can predict that.

but it's it's a tough spot to be in.

And in our case, we didn't do field of dreams.

we secured enough runway to say,

look, we're going to be able to fill up this facility,

but we absolutely built ahead.

We built ahead of

schedule ahead of growth by like I said,

by 10x, 20x. And and now we've got a we've got a job to do here,

to continue filling this and growing into it.

But ~ yeah, the the the KPIs and whatever you want to call the dashboards,

my myopic thinking is is a problem in in in corporate America.

There's companies tend to be very siloed ~ within themselves in divisions don't talk

to each other. ~ people are incentivized differently.

There's salespeople are incentivized to sell a product.

But if that product is not sold with a software,

which is a different division,

then then that's the software side is self-bringing.

it looks easy when you look at it at at 30,000 feet and say,

why aren't you guys talking? But that's that's most of corporate America,

very siloed, very myopic thinking,

very like punctual not punctual,

but very ~ pointed thinking on a singular KPI instead of looking at the full

or the totality of ~ of the picture.

growing as quickly as you guys have,

what is your relationship with debt?

Do you utilize some debt leverage to grow and how do you how do

you analyze whether that's a good decision or not?

Look, I think debt is a great tool for every entrepreneur.

usually entrepreneurs or investors like debt because there's less impact

to the equity holders, less risk on the equity holders.

but there's a price to pay with that.

And it's not just the interest,

right? ~ debt carries different requirements,

different covenants, different metrics that a company has to operate to.

So

A leader needs to make sure that they are in the correct life cycle

of their company and performance to embark on the debt journey.

Again, myopic thinking, we don't have enough equity dollars,

or we don't want to suffer additional dilution,

let's put more debt on the company or private equity's favorite thing.

Let's refi, take some of our capital off the table through debt.

But you also have to ask yourself:

is debt going to put so many covenants and restrictions on the business?

That the leader now is managing for debt,

for covenants versus for the growth for the strategy and business.

And it's a, you know, it's not a very difficult balance to strike,

but again, ~ depending on the situation you're in,

the company's in, you could be forced to make the wrong decision.

You absolutely need capital, you don't have enough equity,

dollars coming at the table, you have access to debt.

that decision may make sense at some point.

Put cash on the balance sheet.

~ slight industry downturn, your covenants are not quite there,

you're now cutting where you should be adding.

You're you're not adding that piece of equipment as I described earlier

to penetrate the market date that is in your plan because you have

to hit that covenant. And so it it's a very dangerous predicament

for a leadership team to find themselves in a position where they're managing

for debt compliance versus for the growth of the business.

So that's my advice on debt. We use debt I've

had debt my entire career. I've had great examples of having debt where debt

was ~ additive to our lives, the debt holders were partners,

they really helped fuel your growth.

And I've had debt where the first two hours of every day of my career within

the company was to manage liquidity,

availability, making sure you've got enough money to borrow.

And you're no longer running your business,

you're running your cash flow to manage debt.

And and you know I if I have a choice,

of course I never want to find myself in that situation.

Wanna find yourself where debt is just another cash instrument to help grow your

business.

Is there an opinion or a belief that you once held strongly

and you've changed because of your experiences?

~ I think we talked about it, so this is gonna sound a little bit redundant.

It goes back to it goes back to people.

I was a firm believer that I personally could overpower any situation.

And I certainly have a track record of situations as a pilot in my personal life,

in my professional life, where I,

as the single individual, persevered and got through that last mile,

and I was the I was it. I I made it.

But where I had to recalibrate my mind is if you truly want to be successful.

You have to surround yourself with people.

You're always, always, always,

always going to be stronger with people than alone.

And it's hard, it's really hard when,

especially with my upbringing,

my DNA, very self-sufficient. You you always think of some people can drag you,

can hold you back, some people make you weaker,

some people need to be held you know,

helped and and ushered up a mountain and

That takes energy and time away from you.

And so my thinking used to be I'm better off doing things on my own.

Look, a good example. I've had a 25 plus year career,

never, ever, ever had an executive assistant,

ever. and that's because I always thought,

look, I I I know how I want my flights planned,

how I I my documents prepared,

I can set up my own meetings. And it's a little bit of extra work for me,

but I do it the way I want to do it.

It's gonna be perfect.

~ but I think back of how much capacity I could have had if I had

the right partner who I, yes, invested in in the beginning,

helped through how does he or she become a great partner to my professional life,

but I never made that investment thinking I was always better off,

more performant on my own. That same analogy applies in larger businesses.

So you said earlier the growing pains,

and you know, what what is that pivotal moment?

Well, the pivotal moment is when you realize that.

You can't remember 450 people's names anymore.

And that's a problem because you absolutely need leadership in the company

to care about every single employee.

And so, how do you do that? You have to do that through people.

So your job becomes less and less about talking to one individual and more

and more talking to the masses through other individuals.

Your job goes from when you're very small,

the company's performance is predicated on the things that you do with your

own hands. So

90, 95% of the success of the company is things that you do.

As you start scaling, as a CEO,

it's actually 95% of what other people do,

or 99% of what other people do.

You're not doing anything. My job is not doing anything.

My job is looking out on behalf of that company.

We go back to floating in the ocean.

Can I see the shore a little bit better than my team members and help them course

correct? Can I hold people accountable?

Can I?

Can I be that person standing in the face of adversity when everybody's confidence

is shaken and saying, guys, I'm gonna go through that door first.

Let me go. And you follow me, but we're all going.

And if if you can do that as a CEO,

you can be an amazing leader. But it also means that you have to learn

to work through people. And that was a big pivot for me.

I, for the longest time, never worked.

I was a even though I was a leader and had multiple,

I was always an individualist.

I put my own presentations together.

I checked my own files, I booked my own travel,

and you know, you get to this point in life where you realize you're

so much better by surrounding yourself with the right talent.

Mm. That's some good advice. That's something I can relate closely

to and probably should have leveraged a bit more myself.

So what is the most important piece of advice you could give to someone that wants

to do what you've done, that wants to follow in your footsteps and

~ build a business like you have?

I just gave that piece of advice for a very close dear friend of mine.

He ~ he was part of of one of my journeys,

but never really owned it the way I owned it from the beginning.

And he's run reached a time in his life where he wants to do something on his own.

He's he he's me 15 years ago or 10 years ago.

And I watched him for weeks and weeks analyzing and studying the market and

Putting all these different reports and strategy plans together.

And at the beginning it was impressive,

then it became concerning. And I grabbed them and I said,

you have to get going. You have to start.

Take the leap. there's absolutely a danger of overthinking,

overanalyzing any situation. And your plans are not as good

as your practical learning. You have to jump in and learn.

Once you get that 70% threshold,

that's my magic number. Once you're at 70% knowledge,

I understand the industry at about 70%.

I think I know what I want to do at about 70%.

My engineering plan is 70% ready.

a product. The product is 70%.

We're at a minimum viable product.

70% of the features are there.

Go. Go. That is where you succeed.

So my advice to entrepreneurs,

to leaders, whether you're

You know, 75 years old and you're so seasoned or you're fresh out of school,

it doesn't matter. Jump in. You're not going to s to analyze your way to success.

You're not going to PowerPoint your way to success.

Jump in. Learn. Pivot. Make corrections.

If you're not making mistakes,

you're not learning. And I I'll tell you what,

you're not going to make a single mistake behind PowerPoint.

You're not. So you have to get in.

And that leap is really, really important.

Look, it's scary. Not everybody has the means to do it.

Not everybody has years of savings in the bank.

And so I I absolutely understand that they're they're worried about their kids

in school and the home and the mortgage or the rent and the car payments.

So that's life, absolutely life.

But if this is something you truly want,

you have to take the leap and you have to do it.

And you have to be honest with yourself.

you know, drinking your own Kool-Aid is dangerous.

So recognizing where you're making mistakes and pivoting.

And I think anyone who's willing to take that leap.

And always hold themselves accountable with look,

I'm never gonna be 100% right,

but where I'm wrong, I will make the pivot,

I will adjust, I will recognize that I was wrong or asleep at the wheel.

Well these people will always be more successful than the ones that

are sitting back and constantly analyzing a situation.

My advice is go take the leap.

Okay. Yeah. You'll never get there if you don't take this first step.

So

That's right.

well, you've you've mentioned a mentor that helped you a lot.

we talked a little bit about your kind of individu individualism being

a restraint on your business and and leveraging people being a a big key to growing.

and there you were talking about,

you know, taking the the leap and just going for it.

What has been your best resource when you get to that point where you can't just

do it? That the the success of the business doesn't depend on what you're doing,

just working hor hard, grinding more,

~ but you need that bigger vision,

~ or when you face those decisions that you're uncertain about,

what is your best resource to pushing through those barriers?

Yeah, look, there's there's two simple answers.

The the first answer is we're not alone.

Everyone's surrounded by information,

people, experiences, and it's hard sometimes as an entrepreneur.

Yeah, the ego kicks in, right?

It's hard to pick up the phone and call an old colleague,

a boss, a competitor, and say,

I tried this, it's not working.

How are you doing it? Or can you help me?

It's not in my DNA, but it's becoming my DNA.

I I ask.

For help all the time. I ask questions.

When people tell me their story and how they did things,

I can be annoying. I'll I'll ask details.

I want to know how. I don't want to I don't want the the headline.

I want to know the details. I want to know what the article says.

And that educates me, it helps me.

And sometimes it's validation of what I'm thinking,

sometimes it's a different thought.

Like, my god, I never never thought about it this way.

That's interesting. when I interview people,

even if I'm not hiring that person,

if I don't think they're gonna be the right fit for the role.

I'm learning from those folks.

When I'm reading an article, I'm not interested in what the reporter has to say.

I'm interested in how they thought about it or how the individual they're writing

about it is thinking about a certain situation.

So I think we all have access to information.

It's do we choose to tap into it or not?

But here's the secret. until recently,

I was notorious for being up at three in the morning in the office by four

or four thirty. I lived most of my adult life sleeping.

Maybe a total of four hours a night.

But that's not because I like to sub.

It's because the morning is my me time.

I love to be in the dark, quiet setting in the office.

Of course, that coffee. That coffee is really important.

And I think this is my time where I get to think.

I'm not interrupted. I'm not I my thoughts are not being skewed

by other people's concerns or or

production issues or commercial issues,

it's my time. And I get to do whatever I want with that time.

If I want to read an article, I'll read the article.

If I want just want to stare at the moon with my coffee and think,

I get to do that. And I think too many people today are not spending enough time

thinking. You know, I I I I I'm not a big fan of social media.

I I blame a lot of our problems on people that just sit there and and

and you know numbingly just scroll through one social media platform after

the other.

And I think that if you replace these hours with just quiet time thinking about your

strategy, thinking about your next move,

validating some of your thinking,

assessing how you did the week before,

the year before, that allows you to grow as a professional.

So my answer is twofold. You need the time to think.

If you're not thinking, you can't absorb information that that's around you.

And then don't be afraid to ask.

There's a lot of people. I I can't tell you,

I I have a massive network. Not a lot of people call me and say,

look, I'm about to start something.

What are your thoughts? I there's this young man in Europe that taps

my brain once in a while and it's surprising.

He's he's in his twenties, he's not afraid to ask for help,

he'll ask for help. But so many entrepreneurs that I know are struggling

and they won't ask for help. I mean,

I'll pick up the phone and ask for help whenever I need to.

I think between those two things,

You you know, you've got everything you need as an entrepreneur to think.

Charbell, this is my favorite question I ask of every guest.

are you a person of a particular faith tradition?

And if so, how has that shaped your journey and your leadership?

Look, I'm you know I I l like most people,

I'm confused about about what we what we get told.

But I have my own faith. And what it is is I believe in humanity.

I believe that people are good,

not bad, and I believe that we are stronger as a society than as individuals.

And what has really formed me into the leader that I am is

That I believe more and more in the masses.

I believe in unity. I believe in if you if you are stepping into the role

of a leader, whether you're the president,

whether you're the CEO of a company,

you're the manager of a gym, you have a unique responsibility and a duty

to unite people and show them the vision and bring the people.

The div divisive behavior that's going on all over the world,

that's going on in

In in in companies, the silo mentality,

the individualism, I think hurts us as a society.

And you know, there's there's a real case to be made here that we've lost sight

of what made us great as a country.

And and I I think that applies to every company.

Every leader should really think:

Am I a visionary? Check, am I uniting my people behind me and behind

the strategy to really be the best company that I can?

And if you can do that.

You become an unbeatable, ~ unbeatable company.

that's really what's shaped ~ my my my thinking.

I would tell you the other thing is because I have I have some time with

the military and the and my flying career and search and rescue.

I would tell you that being able to persevere through things,

for some people, that's God. For others,

it's family. For others, it's love.

Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter what you want to call it.

You always have to have this one North Star that you don't lose sight

of personally and professionally that allows you to get to tough through tough

situations. As we said earlier,

the difference between the mega successful and the ones that just barely didn't make

it is that last minute, that last mile,

the last push-up. Just take it,

do it. Your body, your mind is built for so much more than you think.

So much more. But we we're all creatures of comfort.

my shoulders hurt. I can't get this one last push-up.

No, you can. You could do another 30.

You just don't know it. Just open that up,

open your mind to that possibility in life.

And I think you can overachieve and over out,

you can outperform anything you've ever dreamt of.

It's, you know, it's something that I really live by here.

Charbel, thank you for that. And ~ thank you for your time today.

You are a fountain of wisdom and knowledge and have just a a ton of experiences.

It's been ~ fascinating for me to learn about you,

your career, and your thriving business.

So thank you for your time today.

Thanks for hosting me, Erick. So so good to get to know you on this podcast.

Yeah, it's been a lot of fun.