Case Study: Gary Kadi / Million Dollar Dentistry

Gary came to me almost 20 years ago with a plan for a consultancy that would serve dentists, a group Gary had identified as being in deep need of better professional guidance. Many dentists were floundering, and their businesses were failing. While they might have been great chair side, they had little idea of how to run a dental practice as a thriving business.

He came to me and said, “I want to get five dentists to pay me $120,000 each to consult with their practices for a year. I’m going to promise them dollar-for-dollar returns, so they are not risking a penny. This way, I will make $600,000 a year, and only five people will have my cell phone number.”

So, we set about writing Million Dollar Dentistry, which has now sold more than 60,000 copies.

After the book came out, one of the three leading providers of dental equipment came to Gary and said, “We loved your book. We want to send you around the country and have you speak to audiences of dental office teams at Ritz-Carltons. We will pay for your travel expenses, and we will pay you $6,000 a pop for each talk. All we ask is that, over the course of the talk, you say something nice about us.” Gary went on the road and galvanized his audiences with his unique thinking about how to run a dental practice like a business. He very quickly outstripped his initial dream of finding five clients to serve. Instead, he built a consultancy that served thousands of dentists, which he had recently sold to his team. Moreover, Gary is in the process of rolling up his top 20 dental practice clients into a single entity that he now runs. I have since done book after book with Gary, including one about the question of “deserve level.”

Most medical doctors, he points out, come from families of physicians, for whom entering medicine is a family tradition. By contrast, many dentists come from blue-collar backgrounds, and they are the first in their families to attend college or a professional school. As a result, dentists sometimes feel as though they are “less than” when compared with their M.D. brethren. Gary’s mission has been not just to improve the quality of individual dental practices but to raise the level of self-respect of the dental industry in its entirety. These days, you see your dentist for a lot longer than you see your primary care physician and top dentists doing things Gary’s way net seven figures annually. Thanks to Gary, dentists no longer have to feel that they are second class when they are contemplating their medical school colleagues.