Who’s Leading the Business of “YOU, Inc.”?
I recently wrote an essay where I opened with the question: “Who is the real CEO of YOU, Inc.?”
That sentence was intended to be an “attention-getter” of sorts. It worked. I got a few nice texts and emails about the essay itself, which are always appreciated, but I also got a few unintended inquiries about thinking of yourself as a multi-faceted business in and of itself. Or possibly more appropriately, in and of OURselves…
I could be diplomatic and say that some of us require a mindset shift, but I’m going to opt instead to be “a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal” when I state the following:
We’re all entrepreneurs, but only a small percentage of us realize it.
Nature or Nurture? Or Both?
If I’m being honest, it took me a while to embrace what I’m about to share with you. Much of the reason for that was because I spent 7 years working in the family business and then 15 years working for the publicly traded company that bought that family business. Seeing business and leadership through the lens of a family-first preconditioned me to view commitment and loyalty as two sides of the same coin. The business came first, and if I left, the only person remaining on the ship would have been my father.
Absolutes make for easy equations to solve.
This all changed in February of 2014 when I was invited to come to Patterson’s corporate office and share a business plan with the President and the VP of Sales. I was in my 9th year as a General Manager at Patterson and had successfully rebuilt and improved two prior operations, so I had a ton of confidence in terms of where I saw the Charlotte operation going after only 12 months in the seat. This was an opportunity to “flex” for a captive audience of two gentlemen I knew very well and highly respected.
For two and a half hours that fateful Friday afternoon, I proceeded to have my ass handed to me for many perceived shortcomings and a general lack of ability. At the end of that meeting, the VP of Sales made the following statement: “Perrin, we’ve had GMs here for meetings this week from 10 different underperforming branches…and you’ve run 3 of them.”
I helped saved the Richmond Branch from imploding and left a very solid team for my successor to build off of…and had been gone for over 4 years. The Metro NY/NJ branch that I recently left had just won an award for Greatest Net Income Improvement in the entire Company. I was completely shocked, and my confidence and trust in the organization was shattered.
Until I came to two critical realizations…
Putting Humpty Dumpty Back Together Again
I got back home to Charlotte very late that Friday night and shared a few comments with Lucy (but spared her the brutal details of most of it). I went on a long bike ride the next day in an attempt to work out a lot of frustrations and a lot of incongruous thoughts because, as the Swedish film director and screenwriter, Ingmar Bergman, says, “Demons hate the fresh air.”
Sometimes you have to realize what you can’t rationalize.
What had happened to me 24 hours previously made absolutely no sense – a fact that was validated in the coming years when the Charlotte branch won Branch of the Year honors 4 out of 5 years in a row. The two critical realizations I came to were the following:
- In a larger company setting, my career was in the hands of others who would make decisions about my future when I was not in the room
- To change that, I had to be in “the Business of Perrin” from that point on
As much as it went against my upbringing, my nature, and my view of the way the world should operate, I changed my operating paradigm and put myself first. Let me be clear: I did not put myself first at the expense of others, but I considered decisions I would make from the lens of how they impacted my future, then how they impacted the company or others.
If nobody else was going to look out for me, then I would unequivocally do so from that point forward.
Burning Ships and Smoldering Platforms
While I look back on my career at Patterson with great appreciation and a high degree of positivity, I also reflect favorably on the exit I created for myself – one that took over two and a half years to culminate.
I’m a very methodical person with a great degree of patience in most circumstances. My exit from Patterson put this trait on display. I remember telling Lucy in the summer of 2014, “I’m not going to finish my career at Patterson, but I don’t know what I’m going to do next – I just know it will end here at some point.” I’ll probably write an essay at some point on the difference between decisions and declarations, but in this case I’m making a declaration. And over the next 30 months or so, I explored numerous options, possibilities and opportunities until one came into focus that was compelling.
That opportunity became the TUSK Partners business, and it was my maiden voyage into entrepreneurship. It was a concept that my two operating partners and I breathed into life where there was nothing that existed before. Everything was a blank canvas, waiting to be painted.. It was fun and challenging and exciting and fulfilling…and we failed miserably. TUSK Partners began life as TUSK Brokerage – a “tech play” concept of a dual-sided platform where dentists would buy and sell practices thereby revolutionizing the brokerage space. As it turned out, we were only about $5 million short of the necessary seed capital to fund such a platform.
We realized that the “Minimum Viable Product” we had invested 90% of our capital in wasn’t, in fact, anywhere close to being “viable” and that we were years (not months) away from generating income dollar one. As the brokerage platform was burning to the ground after only two and a half months in on a decision that took me two and a half years to make, I had a life-defining decision to make (cue The Clash): should I stay or should I go?
My ego would’ve never allowed me to so quickly return to Corporate America because to do so would’ve meant admitting to failure. I was way too proud for that…and Lucy was still a full-time ophthalmologist. As Bill Murray says in Caddy Shack: “So I got that going for me…which is nice.”
I did, however, take a minute to pause and think more deeply about the crossroads in front of me, and I realized a second critical life lesson…
The Freedom to Choose, So I Choose…ME
We become entrepreneurs because we make the choice to be entrepreneurs. Nobody forces this choice on us. It is the ultimate expression of freedom and the irrefutable acknowledgement of responsibility. Nobody owes you anything unless you can bring value to someone for something they cannot or will not do on their own. The lifestyle can be brutal, and failures are rampant. There is frequently no roadmap as to how things evolve and no report card to tell how you’re doing along the way. If certainty is your jam, then this ain’t for you.
There are few better embodiments of “owning the outcome” than deciding to become an entrepreneur.
Many of you who own your own healthcare services practice do so because you view it as a natural evolution of the reason you went to medical or dental school – to be a physician or a dentist. As a clinician who owns a practice, you have a high-paying job. Granted, you change people’s lives for the better, so it’s a very fulfilling job, but if you take two weeks off to take the family to Europe, then the practice probably isn’t generating any income. So it’s a J-O-B.
The Freedom to Choose, So Choose…FREEDOM
Making the transition from a clinician who owns a practice to an entrepreneur who owns a business has to be intentional. You’re basically moving from the “time and effort economy” into the “results economy,” and those results are mostly generated through the time and effort of others.
This is also the essence of becoming an effective executive, and it’s one of the most rewarding journeys in a professional life.
For those who embrace the choice of truly becoming a healthcare entrepreneur in building a viable business that can continue to exist if and when they’re not on site, the reward is true freedom. Dan Sullivan, Founder of Strategic Coach, breaks it down into freedom of time, money, relationship, and purpose.
Let’s not overcomplicate this. If you don’t control how much you work and what you do when you work, then you don’t have the freedom of time. If you don’t have a business that is financially rewarding enough to allow you to do everything – every thing…not any thing – you want to do to in life, you don’t have freedom of money. Freedom of time and freedom of money are the starting cornerstones to stability in becoming an entrepreneur.
They’re the reasons you think you became an entrepreneur.
As you evolve through your journey as an entrepreneur and gain wisdom borne out of experience through mid-career, you realize that the true rewards of the commitment you made are in the depth of quality time with the people you love or find interesting as well as the opportunities to make an impact in the causes you hold dear. These are the freedom of relationship and the freedom of purpose.
The CEO at the Annual Board Meeting
If you’re the CEO of YOU, Inc., is it a Board meeting? Or a Bored meeting? If it’s the latter, then you’re probably living an experience while never taking inventory of it. Every experience has an outcome, but it’s up to each of us to reflect on it and derive our own constructive insights that create the meaning behind it.
If you’re in “the business of you,” then how’s the business performing? Is it ascending or declining? What does the business look like in the next 3 to 5 years? As an example:
- In 2005, I decided that I didn’t want to work for the current Regional Manager and that I wanted to take a step up in my career to run a bigger operation. 15 months later I was living in Manhattan and running the largest market in the country.
- In 2008, I decided that I didn’t want to take a corporate Director-level role at the company headquarters and that I wanted to move back south from New York, so I set my sights on one of three potential locations, should any one of them open up: Charleston, Raleigh and Charlotte. 18 months later I was living in Charlotte and running that branch.
- In 2014, I decided that I would exit Patterson at some point and 30 months later I was one of three operating partners in a start-up venture.
- In 2020, I decided that the complications surrounding our ownership structure were irreconcilable and 9 months later found myself rebuilding a following under a completely different brand.
- In 2024, I decided that I wanted to have more freedom of relationship and purpose in my life, so I crafted an exit with my partner from Polaris to allow me to create what has become Next Level Executive.
I say all of this for the sole purpose of showing you that the choices I have made have been thought-provoking and highly intentional. They seem to have happened about every 3 to 5 years.
Is your life happening to you or are you happening to it?!
Wisdom from a Fortune Cookie
There’s an old Chinese proverb that I’ve shared in a lot of presentations that states: “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is now.” Overcoming inertia is challenging for anyone, but it’s also a choice. You can surely have a career mindset, but there’s no gold watch waiting for you in the end. We’re all working for ourselves now, but only some of us realize it and our “career” is now measured in 5-year increments.
The other dirty little secret (that nobody seems to talk about) is that as we age and evolve in our outlook on life, financial success starts to have diminishing returns. This is outright alarming to those of us who are wired to be high achievers…until we realize that success and fulfillment aren’t the same thing.
As we go through phases of our entrepreneurial journey that are paralleled by phases of our life, we begin to understand the distinction between the two – and that distinction is rooted in those two freedoms of relationship and purpose that I referenced earlier. I was fortunate in my last transition in that I was working with a business coach who could bring it out of me and help me understand that internal phase of emotional growth. I honestly could not have navigated it on my own; however, now that I understand it, I can fully embrace that phase of my personal evolution. And I’m better off for it.
That same recent essay I referenced at the start also mentioned Steve Jobs’s fantastic commencement address to Stanford University where he talked about “connecting the dots looking back.” It’s an interesting exercise to go through, but it’s only beneficial if you have the courage to ask yourself what the exercise will reveal when you do it 10 to 15 to 20 years from now.
If there’s a change you should make or a choice you should embrace, the fortune cookie you crack in 20 years would say to do so now.
Now, go grind some beans.
