Entering the World of Entrepreneurship - Jonathan's Journey
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Transcript
Jonathan VanHorn:
Welcome to the tooth and coin podcast, where we talk about your adventure of being a dental practice owner. In these episodes, we're going to be talking about problems that you will likely face as a practice owner, as well as give an idea about actionable solutions that you can take so that you can get past this problem in your practice. Some of these concepts are really big ones. Some of them are very specific, but we hope that these episodes help you along with your journey. Now, a very important piece for you to understand is that this is not paid financial advice. This is not paid tax or legal advice. We are not your financial advisors. We are not your CPAs. This is two CPAs talking about informational and educational content to help you along with your journey. It's a very important piece for you to understand.
Jonathan VanHorn:
Another thing that you need to know is if you enjoy today's content, join us on the Facebook group. So we've got a Facebook group that is active with dentists that is going to have content talking about what we're talking about today, to continue the discussion. Agree with us. Don't agree with us, have a story to tell, have something to share. Join us in the Facebook group. If you go to Facebook and you search for tooth in coin podcast, click on it to join it and be able to join us there. Finally, if you need some more help, we're developing a list of resources that are going to be centering it around our topics of discussion, to be able to help you a little bit more than what the content is doing. So if you'd like access to that, whenever it becomes ready, all you have to do is text the word tooth and coin T O O T H a N D C O I N 2 3 3 4 4 4. Again, that's tooth and coin all one word, no spaces, 2 3, 3, 4, 4, 4, reply with your email address. And we'll email you instructions on how to get into the Facebook group, as well as agita list, to be able to send you those resources when they're available. And if they're available, we'll go ahead and send them to you as well. So onto today's episode, hope you enjoy it. Hello,
Joseph Rugger:
Ambitious Dennis. And welcome to another exciting episode of the tooth and coin podcast. I'm Joseph rugger joined always by my awesome co-host Jonathan van horn. Jonathan say hello to the folks at home.
Jonathan VanHorn:
Howdi Doodie, everybody,
Joseph Rugger:
Or in your car or wherever it is that you might be joining us. We appreciate you tuning in and listening to our show today, today, we thought we'd take a different route and talk a little bit about entrepreneurship and kind of the spirit of entrepreneurship. So if you're listening to this podcast, you likely are a dentist that is out and you've owned your practice. You may have owned it for six months or six years or 25 years. You may be thinking about starting a practice, but that tends to be one of those things. It's just such a daunting thought and a daunting task to, to, to kind of strike out here on your own and, and launch into this world entrepreneurship. So what we're going to do today, I'm going to talk to Jonathan who's, who's done this and get kind of some, some thoughts on his journey as an entrepreneur and everything that's in between. So Jonathan man, always a pleasure. I'm looking forward to hearing more of your story every time I feel like I know your story, something comes up and I'm like, I had no idea that was part of Jonathan's story.
Jonathan VanHorn:
Yeah. So, I mean, it's, it's interesting. It, it's fun to, to be in, to be an entrepreneur. It's going to be sometimes a little scary at times too. And yeah, I'm excited. This is a little bit of a turn of a different, different type of a conversation for me to have, because usually everything I talk about is just like dentistry, dentistry, dentistry, taxes, accounting taxes, accounting, business, business business. So, yeah, we're excited to talk about the,
Joseph Rugger:
Yeah, so Jonathan and I, Jonathan, you and I met each other randomly sit next to each other at a continuing education in little rock Arkansas, about 15 years ago. And you know, at that time I was working for a company as the CFO and you were in public accounting and we ended up knowing a whole bunch of the same people from Northeast Arkansas. You had gone to school in, in the, in Jonesborough where I lived at the time and we just hit it off and knew a whole bunch of the same people. And you were, you were in public accounting, you were working for another firm and, you know, we kinda hit it off and had fun and, you know, exchanged contact information and kind of kept up with each other for a while. I remember, I remember specifically sitting and having lunch with you a couple of different times in little rock. Cause we were talking about all of these entrepreneurial ideas that you had, and we were kind of talking through different books that you had read. And I think, I think one of them was, was it the toilet paper entrepreneur that you told me about? Or was it the a hundred? I was a a hundred dollars startup who, which one was the mattress company guy,
Jonathan VanHorn:
Which one was that there there's a a hundred dollars startup and then there's also the pumpkin plain or the two big ones I really enjoy.
Joseph Rugger:
Yeah. So, so anyway, so, you know, as, as somebody that, that for me, most of my career, most of my earnings, most of what I've done for a living has been working for somebody else. And there's not anything wrong with that. There's certainly as good and bad in every kind of relationship that you have that's out there. So I thought I'd, I thought I'd just kind of pick your brain and talk a little bit today about, you know, kind of your journey as an entrepreneur and kind of, you know, it's not something that you walked out of college and said, I'm going to go start my own CPA firm. You said, you know, let's go explore, let's do this. So maybe talk us early kind of early career when you were working for somebody else and kind of a W2 employee and kind of in the grind and learning stuff.
Joseph Rugger:
And, you know, maybe just kind of talk us through a little bit about that part of your journey and, and maybe kind of when you started getting excited, like, have you always been an entrepreneur, like, were you the five-year-old kid that had the lemonade stand, you know, that measures your costs and try to figure that out. Like, when we talk about the entrepreneurial spirit, you know, learning about you and your family, you guys kind have a bunch of entrepreneurs. So like, is this something that you're kind of born with? Is it like ingrained in you talk to us maybe about some of those early stage?
Jonathan VanHorn:
Yeah. So in terms of just me as a person and growing up, I was always, I was always really competitive. So I really enjoyed challenging myself and I always enjoyed trying to optimize things and, you know, I also enjoyed games. So like the, I was when I was a lot, you know, I'm not like that physically gifted in terms of athleticism or anything like that. But at the same time I have a competitiveness. So when I was younger, that tended to me being more like I enjoyed playing video games a lot. So I was big. I was big on video games that a lot, I, I couldn't wait to get home to play play games. Like in the, usually my, the reason I would optimize my day would be when I was in school, you know, early, early Jonathan was so that I could have more time to play video games.
Jonathan VanHorn:
And then when I was playing the video games, I was always trying to optimize everything inside of those games so that I could do things in the most, in the best manner. And that's, that's just how my brain always worked. And I really enjoyed doing it as I got older, I started, you know, started playing more sports. And again, I'm not that gifted from athletics department. I'm six foot two, so I'm moderately tall and that's about it. Wasn't very good stops. Wasn't I wasn't very fast, but I had a hall, a lot of heart and I tried really hard and the want to be better, always allowed, allowed me to, to move, move up in those ranks. So, so that, that wasn't me in general. Then I got into college. I was always really, you know, I also enjoyed math, was a big interest of mine.
Jonathan VanHorn:
I thought that I was going to become a math professor before I came into the CPA world. It was something that I always did really well in and, you know, enjoy doing. So I, I almost went down that path eventually changed to be a CPA because I I'll be honest with you. I heard you can make more money being a CPA. Then you could be a math professor. So I became a CPA and I got out into the rural world and then I'm out in the real world. And, you know, I'll be honest when I started working for a CPA firm for the first time. And I went out, went on my first audit. I was a little confused as to what w what we were doing, you know, you know, so an audit was a, and that's, you know, a lot of people start in the audit field in the CPA world.
Jonathan VanHorn:
And that's where I started to, I didn't make it very long at the place I started out at changed around a few different firms, but while I was working, I still kinda kept that mindset of being the best that I could be. So it didn't really matter where I was or what I was doing. I was always trying to be the best at it. I was always to, you know, prepare the best tax return, be the person who could best understand what was going on from a tax standpoint, be the person who could do all these other things. But, you know, growing up, I always had a job. Like I always had. I always, you know, since I was 15 years old at a job before that, I found ways to make money, you know, doing things around the neighborhood or whatever it was, but I was always working.
Jonathan VanHorn:
And so, and most of that was in, I worked in a video store throughout high school, something that's not even a thing anymore. I, I sold, sold flowers on, on the phone, through a telephone service for three years in college, you know, does it a whole budget out on the moon? I started a moving company when I was in college. So I started a moving company in college. Yeah. So were you the ones that did not college hunks hauling junk and I, that was probably a similar story of how that got started. I was a guy, I had a trailer and I had an SUV and I had a fraternity that I was in that always had people that needed money of, of, you know, big guys that could move furniture. And so I'd have these furniture stores are selling furniture to their customers and they didn't have a way to move it.
Jonathan VanHorn:
So they'd call me and I'd, I'd knew it for them. And I'd get a couple of people that would be able to go with me and I'd say, Hey, you know, you'll get this much. And for, you know, 30 minutes of where we'll go drive across town and get a mattress and take it to the other side of town and come back and you'll make 20 bucks. And in college, 20 bucks for an hour's worth of work is pretty good back in the early two thousands. So we did that and I always had a, like a customer service, you know, mind to it. Cause I always, I just very early on learned that that was a really important thing to, to have whenever you were, you know, providing services. And then I got into the public accounting realm and found out very quickly that, you know, a lot of the, the customer service, wasn't really an important piece of it.
Jonathan VanHorn:
Like it was more just like, what can you do for me and get it done so we can give this to the board and then the board can discuss it. And then, you know, we have crossed all of our T's and dotted all our I's. And then I went into smaller public accounting for, you know, for, for small business, rather than kind of like small to medium-sized businesses. And I really liked that a lot more because it was, you know, more customer service centric. You actually have to know your, your clients and you actually got to be able to help them. And so, yeah, so that's that, that was the part of me getting into it. And then very, you know, as I was traveling between these different firms, I was getting really frustrated with nothing against the firms I was working for. They were doing what they needed to do to do their business and to help their clients. But I could always just tell there was a little bit of a difference in what I wanted to do and what the typical industry norm was. I wanted to have just closer relationship I wanted, you know, to be able to ride more value effectively. And I knew that the value was there because I was working really hard on it. And I was trying to find the value where I could. So I kind of brought me up until the end of, you know, where I was working for somebody else.
Joseph Rugger:
Yeah. Well, there's that competitive streak again, right. Like we're doing it this way, but I think we can do it better, you know, and, and, and I'm sure that there probably are people that listen to our podcasts that are in situations that are, that run into roadblocks. Like, Hey, we're doing this a certain way, and this is the way we've always done it. This is Sally. Right. Same as last year is how we did it. Hurry up, get it done as fast as you can have as much realization as much profit, Hey, I've got this way to improve it. I mean, did you find yourself running against roadblocks that just really kind of killed that competitive spirit that you were talking about?
Jonathan VanHorn:
Yeah, there definitely was. And then it was there, it was in a bunch of different places. One was this time component, you know, whenever you work for a public accounting firm, you know, you're, you're, you're working a lot of hours. You're one firm I was working at, you know, I'd probably get there around seven in the morning and I'd leave around seven at night and work the weekends. And, you know, and that was in the busy season and the non-busy season, you know, you typically, you know, work up eight to five 30 sometimes, you know, seven 30 to five 30, something like that, just depending on the time of the year. Sometimes you'll work weekends too in the off season just to kind of keep up with everything. And the reason is because you're trying to get what are called billable hours, that you can bill your clients.
Jonathan VanHorn:
And so the, the, the practice can make money. That's just, that's just the model. That's how it works. And there was only so many hours in the day to be able to help people. And sometimes the value that you could provide to one client wouldn't be worth the billable hour, but it would still have value. So, and sometimes it was worth, the billable hour was worth it, but the client didn't see it. They didn't, they didn't get it. So to speak of why that was valuable. And so there was a, some, there were just some roadblocks in terms of how you could help people. So another example of that would be that, you know, there'd be maybe, maybe I could do something that could save somebody $2,000. Apparently my watch thought I was talking to it, but there, there were some points where I made, I could, I had saved somebody $2,000 a year in taxes with this strategy that could come up for them, but it would take me, you know, between research and implementation and, you know, talking to the client, you 10 hours to get that done.
Jonathan VanHorn:
Well, if I'm charging $200 an hour for my time, well, I just cost them in tack and fees to us what they're going to make back. But they, and they wouldn't see that, you know, well, you're gonna get to do this $2,000 every year, you know, going forward. And so it's worth a lot more money than that. And then at the same time, there'd be clients, you'd start to do the research for, and you get halfway through it and you realize this doesn't work for them because of ABCD rules when it comes to their industry or their situation, whatever it may be. And then another set, you do the research and it makes sense, but then you talk to the client and they didn't want to go forward with the steps to be able to make sure that that would happen. And so there was just a lot of roadblocks, but based on the nature of a service industry, that wouldn't allow us to do that in a typical CPA for a format. So whenever you're thinking about that terms of management, if you have employees that are trying to do all these extra things and spend all this extra time doing these other things that you can't bill for, are you going to encourage that typically? Are you typically going to discourage that? Okay,
Joseph Rugger:
No discourage at time is money, right? Cause we've already tried. We tried that once that's not worth it, quit spinning your wheels, stick to the script, here's the script, here's what you need to do.
Jonathan VanHorn:
Right. So, and that was, that was the, you know, that was the internal struggle, struggle that I was facing. I was like, you know, I can, I, I know I can do more for people. I know that as a business, we can do more for people and I want to do that. And so I've been to the, did it,
Joseph Rugger:
Yeah. Well talk, talk us through like, was there like always kind of this burning desire to do your own thing? Or did you just kind of get to the point where you were like, just kind of fed up about, you know, all the roadblocks you're running into and kind of this whole model of the billable hour had always been an itch for you or did you just kind of get to the breaking point?
Jonathan VanHorn:
So that's a really good question. My dad, whenever I was growing up had told me, you know, at one point, cause he shared the story before he was an entrepreneur. He owned his own furniture company. That's how I knew to do the furniture moving. Cause I've moved some furniture for my family and he told me, you know, very early on, you know, it's, it's really nice to own your own business, but it can be really hard because you can't really rely on anyone else, but yourself and you know, you've got it all, it all ends with you. Like you're ultimately responsible for all of it. And I can remember that, you know, hearing that, you know, 30 years ago and not really fully understanding it. And then when I got out into the, you know, the real world I was working for other people, I'll be honest with you.
Jonathan VanHorn:
I didn't know. I didn't know if I was going to do my own thing or not. Yeah. I kind of I'm, I'm very, I feel like I'm a pretty flexible guy. And so I can usually, you know, figure out the best situation. And I was just going to come with what, whatever came to me and the last position that I was in, I knew that wasn't going to be the position I'd ultimately be in just because of a bunch of different factors that were involved, but I didn't know where I was going to go from there. And so it wasn't like I was always, you know, from the beginning of finishing my master's will, okay, well it's time for me to do my 10 year plan to be able to start a business. Now it was, I'm going to figure this out as I go.
Jonathan VanHorn:
And if that opportunity arises, we'll go that way. And I'll be honest with you. It felt like it didn't really, no opportunities really came around that other than the ones that I, that I had. And it was very much a case similar to the dentist. I talked to you every day now, have they kind of just like, Hey, I can do this on my own. I don't, I want to have the ability to do my own type of, for Dennis his treatment plans for us, it's maybe it's tax plans or the way we handle our service engagements. And I, you know, I, I want to just do it on my own. I want to build my own thing. And I eventually had that opportunity and I took it.
Joseph Rugger:
That's cool. That's cool. Well, I mean, do you get a chance to talk to Dennis about taking the plunge? Like by the time somebody picks up the phone and calls us, have they made their mind up or do you find yourself like answering questions about kind of the, what ifs and helping them role play out and kind of being part of their, I guess homework or due diligence is like the official term. Right. But do you find yourself like coaching them through like as they're coming up with that or by the time they call us, they've already made up their mind.
Jonathan VanHorn:
You didn't know at the time the, the cognitive, the CPA they've made up their mind. There's not a whole lot. I can do to convince someone that it's the right choice, wrong choice for them individually. Jamie Amos, a friend of mine said something really, really smart. One time he says a lot of smart things. One thing that he said that was exceptionally smart or very pointed was the there's no, there's never a, like a best time to start your own business and all it comes down to, I'm sure I'm going to butcher this, but it all comes down to the cost of not owning your, a business as greater than having your own business. Like, you know, it costs you more to keep working for somebody else. And it does, you know, you could go do your own thing. Like the, the, your it's not worth it enough to you to keep doing what you're doing. And it may not be dollars and cents. It could be something else that's pushing you towards doing it, you know, going and doing your own thing too.
Joseph Rugger:
Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah.
Jonathan VanHorn:
That's when, you know, that's, when you know, you're ready is whenever, you know, you'd rather go out on your own and fail than to stay where you are and, you know, just kind of get by. Yeah,
Joseph Rugger:
For sure. I like that. I like that idea of the opportunity cost, right? Because you know, we've only got so many hours in a day. We've only got so many weeks on planet earth. So many years on planet earth, you know, is, are you costing yourself opportunity by, you know, sitting in grudge and through another day, you know, and you know, I would imagine that many of our clients will, we'll definitely be able to relate to your thoughts on, I wanted to do it better and I could see it doing it better. I was talking to a potential client the other day and I said, well, what made you start you to start your own practice? And they said, we see so much work that's out there. That's just not good work. And we know that we can do it better period. And I, I mean, I got here that come out in your kind of story about CPA land, you know, and, and we're not unique as a, as CPAs. You know, every, every industry has that. Every industry has the folks that are doing same as last year. And you know, we're doing our best to get by and maximize the profitability. I'm not mad at the CPA profession for any of that stuff, but we think we can do it better.
Jonathan VanHorn:
Yeah. I mean, it comes down to solving a problem. If you're willing to start any business, whether it be dentistry or a CPA firm, you've got to try and solve a problem. And the problem that I felt that was out there was that the traditional CPA business model, not what the CPA industry does, but the typicals typical average CPA model was not, was not the highest value that can be brought to a CPA client relationship. And the, the, the other problem was to me was that the, you know, in the dental space, that there was a lot of, of, of business owners that didn't, that needed more help than what the traditional model allowed CPM model allows. And so I said, why don't we, you know, why don't I start a business to do that? And that's what we did.
Joseph Rugger:
I was, I got a chance to visit with, with a business owner, not too terribly long ago. And I was trying to pick his brain on a bunch of stuff. And we were talking about, you know, the different ways that, that we compete or the way that we operate. I shared this with you guys the other day at our meeting, you know, number one is price, right? So like, we go out, we compete on price, Hey, here's how much, how much it's going to cost to do this. This is how much I charge for a crown here's how much, you know, x-rays and cleanings and exam costs. We compete on price. And if you compete on price, you're going to constantly be in just a no win scenario as a race to the bottom, right? Like everything's going to become more commoditized. Everything's, you know, w in any industry, it'll be more and more commoditized to, to, to compete on prices, kind of a losing scenario.
Joseph Rugger:
Number two is performance, right? I have a job that needs to be done, and that is that I need my teeth cleaned. I need, you know, I need to get this to pain, taken care of. I need a root canal. You know, I performed the job. Well, lots of folks that can perform that, right. If you were to say our performance as a CPA firm is completing tax returns to in tax game plans, like there are a lot of people that can do that and can perform the minute you don't perform. If that's all you're competing on, you're gonna lose that client. Oh, well, we got something wrong. Like number three is we have a tendency to work on work with people that we like. So number three is that they like us, right? We're nice people. We're easy to get along with. We returned the call.
Joseph Rugger:
And so kind of the three big things that we're competing on, right. It's price performance with. And they like us. We hope anyways. And the guy asked me, he looked me in the eye and he said, what's your number four. You said, number four is what it is that separates you from everybody else that was kinda taken aback. And I said, I don't know. I'll have to get back to you on that. I need to figure that out. I'd like to say was that I'm going to work harder than anybody else. It's. I'd like to say that it's, I'm smarter than everybody else. Those are probably things it's. A lot of other people would say, I'm going to give better service than anybody else. It's probably something else there, but it would say, so for those of you that are thinking about owning your own practice, starting your own practice, or if you're in the middle of practice ownership, if you're not competing on price, you're not competing on performance. You're not competing on because people like you, like, what's your number four. So I, I turned that over to you, Jonathan. I don't put you on the spot here, you know? W what would you say, you know, as a firm, like, what is, what is our number four, just to get people thinking about what their number four might be?
Jonathan VanHorn:
Yeah. So, I mean, when it comes down to price, quality and service, you know, for us, we always try to, we don't, we didn't want to be the lowest cost. So we don't the way I always explain it to people is that the lowest cost is always going to be like, oh, I can app like a software that just automatically just get renewed every month. And it's very low cost. And it just does one thing for you. And it just does that over and over and over again, the, the CPA we have, we do so many things as a CPA firm. We can't do that, but we can create systems and processes to make sure that that has done well, if that goes over to service. So, or to, to, to go to quality. So if you go to quality, there's like a pretty high threshold for any CPA firm in order to be able to deliver in quality.
Jonathan VanHorn:
Like you have to, you can't be at the bottom echelon or the bottom quintile of, of service offerings, or quality of service in a CPA firm. If you do that, then you're going to have so many headaches and issues as a firm that you're going to very quickly be out of business. So that, that service should almost always be very high. Our quality should always be very high. I mean, using quality of service interchangeably, but the quality always has to be very high. And that should be the standard for all CPA firms. I mean, that's the, that's what the CPA stands for effectively as quality and professionalism and standards and things like that. So then it comes to service. You know, it comes down to what we were talking about beforehand in terms of being able to, you know, the relationship and being able to do the things extra, that then over and above what typical firms can typically do.
Jonathan VanHorn:
So in terms of fourth, you know, for us individually, it comes down to, we are we're, you know, we're, we are remote from. So we're able to do things very quickly. We're digital, we're very efficiency, minded. We're able to turn things around many times. She'll email us a question that, that are an issue and it's taken care of, you know, almost immediately, whereas in like a typical CPA firm environment, you know, they've got to start the billable hour, which usually means it's, there's a line of projects in front of you because they've got us set up their billable hours. And so we have a lot of efficiency and as well as industry specific knowledge that we can deliver to our clients in a way. So circle this back to the original. First of all, the conversation about me individually is something that we're we're obsessive and our firm is the, is just being able to respond to clients very quickly, having very fast response times and being able to respond to situations very quickly, as well as being able to get big issues resolved quickly.
Jonathan VanHorn:
So a good example of that as like the, the, the HHS provide a really fun, we sent out an email this morning, or this earlier this week to all of our clients with a very in-depth email. Like here's what you need to know. Here's what you need to do. Here's what you need to understand. Here are the due dates. Here are the different ramifications of this. And by the way, that whole thing that is not tax or accounting related, but that's just that, that that's completely separate from what our field deals with, but it's something that we knew about that our clients needed to know. And so we were able to deliver that and, you know, I would, I would argue that's probably a part of the service. I don't really think you can have a fourth thing in addition to quality or service or price.
Jonathan VanHorn:
I think that I could probably make an argument. Everything goes into one of those categories, but in terms of like what the standard, you know, the standard look, as of whenever they try and make, do the pricing triangle or the triangle a lot, where do you want more? Do you want a better price? Or do you want better quality or you want better? Service are four thing almost if you will, is that we're kind of able to encapsulate all those things because of the fact that we are so efficiency minded, we have a very high quality of service. We're a very reasonable price point compared to the market. And at the same time, we deliver a really good customer service. At least, at least I believe so.
Joseph Rugger:
I do too. That's why I enjoy working with Morgan with our team. We got an awesome team. So you've been at this kind of on your own five, six years, any regrets, best decision ever, worst decision ever, you sleep better, you sleep worse. It's been a good decision for you. It kind of, you know, again, in that entrepreneurial spirit that we talked about earlier, what are, what are your thoughts looking back on this?
Jonathan VanHorn:
Thanks so far. So we started in 2013, so it's been about eight years now, but the, the worst case scenario was always the, I'm still a CPA and give it a year. It doesn't work. I'll go work for somebody else. Like no big deal. I know how to work hard and know how to work smart. I use a Le it's not like I'm going to go to the, to the college, to, to, and I'm going to use it, lose a year of eligibility. Like it's going to be fine. I'll still have experience. And some employers might actually like that experience. So it wasn't, it wasn't the worst case scenario and same thing with the dentist. Like if you go out there and you give your best shot and doesn't work out, yeah, you're going to have some debt, but at the end of the day, you're still going to be a dentist.
Jonathan VanHorn:
She'll still be a high income potential person. And that's one of the reasons banks love the Lindia is even if it doesn't work out, they're still going to have income potential in the future for me. Yeah. It's been, it's been really great. I love how many people were able to help. You know, we get, we created this really cool business that I feel like serves multiple sets of value to different people. So it breads a lot of value to our clients that at price points that are reasonable, we get a lot of really cool stories from our clients about how we've helped them in a bunch of different ways. They're really nice from an employee standpoint, if we have these really great employees that we've been able to give these, you know, positional career opportunities that they wouldn't have been able to have, if this business type didn't S it didn't didn't exist.
Jonathan VanHorn:
You know, I started a digital firm in 2013, and it's getting a little bit more popular now, but back then it was, I would get a lot of really weird looks that people be like, oh, so you're a digital firm. So you work off of your phone. Like, no, that's not really what it means. You know? And we've been able to get a lot of people this really big, this really large amount of work, flexibility that isn't allowed in other places. And so I felt we were able to turn a what the culture of a, of an industry that is typically very rigid and very billable hour dependent, and allow that our us to turn our business into a very flexible work-life culture that provides a lot of value to our employees, which then gets permeated and gets to the, goes back to the clients as well, because we have really smart people that work for us. We have really, really hard workers that work for us that are, that, you know, just enjoy it, enjoy that flexibility as well. So, yeah, best decision ever, other than marrying my wife and having my kids probably solving
Joseph Rugger:
No that's fair enough. Well, it's something that you're proud of. You know, the, in those of you that are listening to this that have built a dental practice from a scratch start or from an acquisition, or, or if you're going to go out and build one and build something that you're going to be proud of, you know, I really appreciate you kind of open it up and giving us an idea of what, what life life is like inside of Jonathan van. Horn's head, as you kind of have created this thing. And I, I really like this competitive spirit that you talked about, which is like, I always want to do it better. I want to come up with a way of doing it better. So, man, it's been a pleasure getting a chance to chat with you a little bit. I hope this has been valuable to our listeners. Any other concluding thoughts, Jonathan?
Jonathan VanHorn:
Yeah. Just make sure that you're, if this is, if you feel like you're able to do it, you probably are. Try not to listen to too many voices out there saying that you can't. I know it's very cliche to be like, you know, oh, you know, big cheerleader. Yeah. If you, if you just believe really hard, you can do it. But the reality is is that if other people can do it, so can you, like, there's nothing, there's nothing that special about that other person, other than they had a risk profile. And there had that, allowed them to make the decision that they were willing to take that jump. And once you're willing to take that jump and no one can tell you when that is other than yourself, like don't, don't call me and say, Hey, I want to talk about maybe like, am I ready to be a practice owner?
Jonathan VanHorn:
Don't do that. Like, you're, I will never be able to tell you if you are not literally just listen to these words. You're the one who has to say when you're ready. No, you talked to your family and talk to your friends, things like that. Maybe they can convince you, you're talking to some random guy on the internet or some random CPA is not going to do that for you. So, so just be aware that you can do it. Other people have, you can too. And entrepreneurship is great. It's like one of the, I, you know, not to be, you know, political or, you know, you know, to, to, you know, American or ish or patriotic, but it's one of the most American things that you can do to like, that's like the that's one of the benefits of being in the us is the ability to go out there and do it yourself. So it's a really cool thing to be able to do. And we're, we're, we're lucky to be in a place where we can do it.
Joseph Rugger:
Absolutely. Well guys, thanks again for listening to us. We'll catch you next time. Bye guys. Bye.
Jonathan VanHorn:
That's it for today, guys. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the tooth and coin podcast. If you are going to be a practice owner or a new practice owner, and you're interested in CTA services, head on over to tooth and coin.com, you can check out more about our CPA services. We help out around 250 offices around the country. I'd love to be able to have the discussion about how we could help your new practice. We do specialize in new practice owners. So people that have are about to be an owner of a practice they're requiring about to be an owner of a practice. They are starting up or has become an owner in the past five years. That is our specialty. And we'd love to be able to talk to you about how we can help you in your services with your tax and accounting services.
Jonathan VanHorn:
And if you enjoy today's episode again, go to the Facebook group. Talk to us about what we've talked about, joining in on the discussion, and let's create an environment where we can talk about some of these things so that we can all help each other, get through these things together so that this adventure of business ownership is more fun, more productive, and better in the longterm. Lastly, if you want access to those resources that we're going to, that we are currently building, just text the word tooth in coin 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4 that's tooth and coin, no spaces. T O O T H a N D C O I N 2 3 3 4 4 4. Apply with your email address. We'll send you instructions on the Facebook group. We'll send you the resources when they're available and we will see you next week.
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