by The value of building strong partnerships.
By Pete Mercer
The leader’s journey never ends. There are peaks and valleys at every stage, which brings varying levels of confidence and anxiety. There will be plenty of wins and losses as well. This is what it takes to walk down this road – today’s leaders are faced with more challenges and obstacles than ever before, while also having more opportunities for success and prosperity.
For the Thriving Leaders Series, DEO Magazine spoke to Dr. Tony Molina, the head of partner acquisition and development at Guardian Dentistry Partners, about building partnerships and learning hard lessons on the job. He has had experience with all the highs and the lows of owning and operating a dental practice, using those experiences to build his career into what it is today.
Guardian Dentistry Partners is a rapidly expanding dental partnership network with partners in Alabama, Florida, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia. Guardian works to improve the dental industry through partnerships that support their dentists and change the industry altogether.
The value of building like-minded partnerships
Building partnerships is a foundational component of running a business. No matter what stage or season of life you are in, you will likely need to build a partnership to sustain your business practices. Ideally, this will be with someone you trust and share the same values, but it does not always work out that way.
Dr. Molina owned a private, fee-for-service dental practice in Florida for over 20 years. After that ended in 2012, he was looking for opportunities that did not require him to be practicing as a dentist. In Dallas, he met a couple of periodontists and decided to form a hub and spoke partnership where one of the periodontists was in the main surgical center and Dr. Molina would run a series of offices that would funnel patients into the surgical center.
They bought an office together but quickly learned that they were not compatible. Dr. Molina said, “We did not have the same financial vision on how to manage the office, which was the first lesson learned. You can plan all you want and think you know how it is all going to work out, but until you get into it, you do not really know what people’s expectations are.”
Partnerships often work like marriages – you are committed to the business and to each other, even when things get hard. In sickness and in health. Marriage can be a beautiful thing, but it does not always work out. In fact, marriages and other long-term relationships often end over money.
The most misunderstood thing about partnerships is that you do not have to agree on everything. You probably will not agree on everything, but it’s all about how you compromise in the hard moments to ensure that the business works.
Finding the right partner
It can be hard to find a business partner. It requires a sense of trust and vulnerability with another person over a huge investment. Finding a person or group of people that you can trust is the first step.
Eventually, Dr. Molina found the right partners to help him build a couple of dental practices in Dallas. The key to their success? Playing off each other’s strengths. Dr. Molina’s strength is in operations, while his business partner was better suited to the financial aspect of the practice.
“You have to be sure that you are aligned financially and philosophically,” Dr. Molina said. “For instance, my business partner could not go in and run a dental office, but that was the knowledge I brought. What he did was keep me very focused on the numbers. Which worked for us, because he was not there all the time. He was relying on me for the day-to-day operations, and that is what leads to the numbers.”
When you have built a partnership with another person or even multiple people, try to leverage each other’s strengths to build checks and balances that improve the processes within your organization. Complementary skills are key here, which would allow you to tailor the organization to your strengths.
Working with Guardian Dental Partners
Dr. Molina came to Guardian Dental Partners in partnership development in the early years of the company, folding his existing practices into the larger group. In those days, Dr. Molina was still flying back to Dallas to run the group of offices that he started while actively looking for new partners for Guardian.
He said, “My whole idea was to tell people that we are not here to change how you practice. You are obviously running a very strong practice with great numbers, which is why we are interested in partnering with you. We partner with dentists to alleviate some of the stress of running a dental practice. That resonated with the right kind of people in the right way.”
Currently, Dr. Molina utilizes his knowledge of operations to efficiently provide support to the dental facilities partnered with Guardian. Through his role, he has built an infrastructure to budget for repairs and maintenance for all the facilities under his umbrella. This allows him and his team to forecast future budgets and allocate the appropriate funding for their various projects.
He said, “If our partners want a piece of equipment, they have to build a business case for it. We have our set forms where they requisition what they need and what they need it for. If they add a certain piece of equipment, what can they anticipate the doctor, or the hygienist, is going to be able to do with it?”
