Franchise Business Real Talk

How Coaching Transformed My Business with Hardik Chodavadia

• Guy Coffey • Season 2 • Episode 8

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In this episode I sit down with Hardick Chodavadia, a successful business owner in the dental field with seven offices in Austin and one in McKinney, Texas. 

This conversation dives into the importance of leadership, the role of coaching and mentoring in a business setting, and the growth of Hardik's dental practices, Enamel Dentistry, from their humble beginnings in 2016. 

The episode also touches on the challenges of managing multiple locations, the significance of daily huddles, and the benefits of having virtual assistants to streamline busy work. 

This episode is a must-listen for emerging franchisors, entrepreneurs, and business owners looking to enhance their leadership skills.

Find out more about Hardik and Enamel Dentistry:

Website: https://www.enameldentistry.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/enameldentistry/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/enamel-dentistry

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/enameldentistry/

Connect with Guy Coffey:
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/guycoffey
Website: www.guycoffey.com
Instagram: @guycoffey
YouTube: @guycoffey

 Welcome to Conversations With Coffey With Me. Guy, Coffey. I've owned independent businesses. I've been a franchisee of a global brand for over 17 years, and I co-founded and successfully exited our own franchise brand. This podcast is dedicated to growing the lives and businesses. Of entrepreneurs everywhere by sharing conversations with successful owners and some of my own experiences and insights.

So please grab a cup of coffee and let's just dive right into today's episode.

Hello and welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coffey With Me Guy, Coffey and today's special guest. Hardik Chodavadia and Hardik is a, um, business owner down in the Austin area, has seven offices in Austin, one in McKinney, Texas. This is gonna be an interesting one because we've never interviewed someone in the medical field before and um, we're usually straight and franchising, but a lot of the things that Hardik is doing.

Translate Well business if you're leading any group of people. Um, what's pretty special? Har to the 

thank much having me on, I.

Very cool. Yeah. Well, uh, I see what you're doing and just getting to know your story a little bit. I, it's just so applicable to anybody that's listening, that's an emerging franchisor, or you're running one, one unit of something, or you're just starting out in entrepreneurship. And the overall theme of this is.

Like you've gotta coach your your own team, whether that's one person, or in hard's case, 70 people spread out over eight offices. The difference between having a coach and a mentor within your own organization that's gonna keep people in your organization longer. Hopefully they're growing in your organization.

But even if they grow out of it, they're better people for it and they're always gonna remember like where they came from. So if you could just kind of take us back to not medical school or anything like that, but um, just like when you started out, how you started with your team and then how you grew your team and what kind of coaching you provide them.

Yeah. I mean, so we started with.

We opened our first office back in 2016, um, in Austin, and we started with a small team. It was me, him, we had an office manager and one dental assistant. And the dental assistant thought it was optional to come into work. 

It's on a, uh, if you feel like it basis. 

Yeah. It's just like, ah, you know, you know, it was funny.

I look back on it and it looks crazy, but we, we actually picked him up. And like would drop 'em off a couple times. But, um, yeah, I mean we, we, we were, I don't like to use the word luck, um, but I think it was hard work luck and opportunity and we were a bit blessed to be able to grow our first practice a lot quicker than we ever expected.

And our plan, there was two dentists, there was to have at least two practices because, I mean, we had a brand new office with no patients. I'm like, how are you gonna pay the bills? So Sure. Yeah. Uh, that was always a plan, but you know, we were lucky that we were able to, to grow it to the point where by the time office number two rolled around, neither of us could justify leaving that first practice.

So we were able to bring on a really good friend of ours as a partner at that practice and slowly kind of grow the group. Nice. But I think a key portion, and we learned this quickly.

We were young when we started this. I was 26, 27 years old when we first started. Uh, our first practice and the way we learn when I'm in dental school, there's not really any coaching, right? They're like, you're gonna do this or you're gonna fail. Right? So you're just like, it's just pure fear based. 

It's a, it's a big motivator.

Oh yeah. You're like, okay, I got a pass. And like, this has high stakes because if I don't learn, how do,

and so we don't, we never really got a lot of exposure. I was on like different competitive teams and that kind of thing. So exposure to that, and I'm all this, I'm a huge sports fan. So I think those lessons helped kind of translate into when we opened the business, but really realizing that when we were there at our first practice, it was just like your weaknesses as a leader are, and your strengths are magnified too, but it's like your, we are really under magnifying.

I needed to be coached because I didn't know what I was doing and trying to find mentors and, and read books and, and that's when that, that the door to that world really opened for me because I had do it. 

Okay. 

My, my assistant is not, he thought work to come to work partially because. Was I coaching him in the right way to understand the importance of it.

I mean, it's, it's a basic function come to work. I understand. And you know, that is who he was. But the other piece of it was, we, we had a lot of failures with our employees early on because of that. Right. Because we're like, okay, well just tell, I'll tell you what to do and you should just do it. Right, 

right.

Transactional leadership. 

Exactly right. 

Yeah. 

That's not anybody is looking for. And I, you take a step back and the, the times I was most successful in my life in a place where I was supposed to be working or you know, school was when I had someone who took a vested interest in helping me learn or helping me understand the reasons why and took a vested interest in, in, in my growth personally, whether, like you mentioned at the beginning, whether I.

Be good at the job that came as a result because that, that, that's the coaching was in the framework of that. Um, and that was a really amazing lesson for us to think about because then when you focus on the growth of the individual person and you like can talk to them and, and actually care about what their, their goals are, those relationships with our team members became a lot more powerful.

And then buy.

When I see someone continue to grow, and they, and I'm happy when they leave, actually. Right. Because that means they, they're so good. You know, you, you've had those team members, like this person, like, why are you here with me? You're capable of so much more. Right, right. Um, oh yeah. And so my, my favorite example to give was we had, when we first opened our first office, we were a mess.

Um, and we hired a, a, a dental assistant with like, some experience, but she was still pretty young. I mean, I think she was like 21, 22 years old. Like she was still very young and she helped us get our craft together and helped us get organized. And she's just like, guys, like, you know, it was one of those things where she, she was like the adult in the room for, for certain, right?

Her.

Based of her feedback and she continued to get better in her role because we were kind of working together and coaching. And then eventually she was like, Hey, I think I wanna become a hygienist and go back to school. And I'm like, absolutely. We, we accommodated her schedule, school schedule and that kind thing to help her do that.

And then she went to Hyn school, became a hygienist, and we were able to hire her back.

And now she is grown even further. She's our hygiene coordinator for all of our hygienists for the company. So she trains all our hygienists and helps them grow and that kind of thing. So I think stuff like that, there's like so much that falls on you as the, the leader and the owner of a business. Right?

And it's like stuff like that are like, okay, yeah, this is like. This is what makes it worth it. Like seeing these people grow and fly, especially when you know their potential. 

Yeah, totally. And you know that you had a partner in their growth and gave 'em a track to run on. Exactly. And then those kind of people, they just, you know, they just flourish, you know, and then they're, they're great and.

If they can add value to your company, awesome. If they end up going somewhere else for a while or something like that, you know, never burn bridges and then they come back and they help you run your business and kind of buy back your time.

That's one of the things that I wanted to touch on just because of your coaching and, you know, the, the large number of units, uh, locations that you have. I'm, I'm always thinking franchise units and things like that rather than offices, but you know, one of the things is everybody listening to this is in business or wants be an.

You know, one of the, the people that we follow, you know, our, our coach is, is always talking about like, build a business and a life that you love. You know, like sometimes people are building a business and it's just making a miserable, but you are a walking illustration of, you know, you don't have to practice dentistry.

I every day anymore. You know, you and your business partner can switch off and in. Was that something that you planned to do all the time, or is that something that you learned like, Hey, if I wanna. I wanna have eight offices. I can't be doing procedures all day long. Like I, I need to like sign leases and pay rent and, you know, and, and meet with the CPA and things like that.

How did that evolution happen? Because I think that's one of the things that people get to this pain point in their business and consciously or unconsciously, they kind of sa sabotage themselves because they're like, if I grow anymore, I'm gonna have to work even more hours. Right. You've done the. 

I said naively before we started, if I'm still practicing dentistry in five years, I failed.

But that was just naive. I.

Not practicing dentistry because you're working on the business. The big turning point for us was office number three. And so I was still working full time when office number three opened and two was pretty one. Obviously I'm in the building all the time. Right. So that is not, not difficult. It was, it was.

It was part of just being at work. Right. Um.

Right. But once we got to number three, part of it was there's too many human being to, to work around and we didn't do a good job of about how our time from day one and, and especially knowing what I know now. I would've, the journey would've been done a bit differently, uh, probably a lot differently, but by the time we got to office number three and working full time, it's like, you know, like you mentioned, I gotta pay rent.

Like, we gotta go meet with the cpa. Like, we gotta do this. And like doing all those things became nearly impossible because as the person who's delivering the care, I work business hours and I don't, I can't leave. I have appointments, I am the one that people are leaving to come see. And, and if you, you close down an afternoon, then I'm like, okay, I know exactly how much revenue I'm lo I'm losing because I'm the direct creator of that revenue, so I don't wanna do that.

Right. And so then the, the hard part for us was, as a dentist, my primary income. The dentist, right? I make a salary as as what I produce in dentistry and at that point, that's my primary income. The distributions from the business while decent. We have two brand new growing practices that really how aren't particularly casual Plaza.

I have one, our original practice doing very well, but then it became this choice. Where am I?

'cause I know that investment will pay off in two in the next two years. Right. And that took a while to be okay with. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, we are lucky enough to find a really amazing dentist to bring on. Um, and, and we, we kind of hedged our bets. I'm lucky to have a, an awesome partner. So we brought on an associate in our first office as like the one full-time there and.

We'd alternate weeks and we didn't have to fill in anywhere. We didn't do any of that kind of stuff. So at that point we were still, you know, just four dentists, right? Between three locations. So that, that was like the, the smallest stepping stone into doing what I'm doing now. And then it took probably two and a half more years to go completely out of the chair, out of the dental chair, working all the.

Take the time and invest in what all the a hundred thousand things that you need to do in a grow a business. 

If you like this show, would you do me a huge favor and share it with one more person? It's super quick and easy to do, and it will help me impact more people in a positive way. Thanks. Now, back to the episode.

Let me ask you this. Do you think in hindsight with everything that you know now. Compared to what you knew at that point in time, could you have shortened that timeline of two and a half years? I 

think I could, yeah, 

a hundred percent. 

I, I think what, what Dan Martel used is the buyback ladder, right? And, and so I look back on it and all the things that I originally went out of clinical care to do, where things that I could have easily had a VA do, like 80% of it, and that, I mean, a VA would've.

You know, a very minimal cost, even if I hired an actual in-person executive assistant. Right, right. That would've been a way more powerful move for us than, than all this stuff because I, I was not organized. I didn't have a good calendar. I had my appointment calendar. That was my excuse. I was like, I got my work calendar.

It says all the.

Instead of going this weird drought and things together, I think it would've amplified what I'm really good at. And same thing for my partner. It would've amplified what he's really good at without having to like make sacrifices on that. Because honestly, 80% of what I was doing was busy stuff, not stuff that was, was revenue generating.

Right? 

Yeah. I think we all have done it and you know, it just. Maybe someone listening is like, well, yeah, if you've got eight dental practices, like, you know, hire an army of VAs and you can do anything you want at that point in time. But this point in time, it sounds like you had one thriving practice, two growing practices that had overhead and fixed costs that you had to cover, and you know, it was demanding of your time.

You know, and it's just, it's like Dan, it's also.

Is easier than two times, you know, growth by Dan Sullivan and you had mentioned 80% just now, and that's, you know, the Pareto principle that everybody talks about. And it's like if you can figure out what the 80% is, that's like someone else could do and focus on your 20%, that 20% will pay for you to get someone to do the 80%.

And then you're also in your sweet spot and you're kind of enjoying work more rather than paying bills and things like that. And the first thing would be a, a va, you know? And so many people are like, well that's, that's for big time executives, guys and gals that are making tons of money. It's like there's so much low hanging fruit that doesn't cost a lot to get taken of.

VA.

Don't actually require any thinking. It just has to get done. 

Yeah. And, and, and it's a repeatable process that you can show somebody, like do a Loom video, show 'em how to do it once. Exactly. Put it in chat, GPT, like these are the steps I take to do this. And yeah, there's, there's so much automation and it's.

And it's not rocket science. It's AI is as new to everybody else's. You know, like we're all just getting exposed to it basically. Well, you know, most of us, and it's just a, a matter of just trying to figure out how to use it and that that could save a lot of time and money and energy. And the whole thing about, you know, the two and a half years going back to your two and a half years, it took, it's like, man, if you could, what's that worth?

You know what I mean? Like, if you could had like your schedule today. Right at the beginning of that, you'd be like, I would spend a lot of money to get that right. Because also now you're, you're working on your, your, you know, your, your highest and best use. You know what your brain is gifted at is obviously growing, growing a business, entrepreneurial, and then coaching others.

If you're coaching 70 of your own employees like you. Not just on your clients who are getting good service, but your, your team and um, and showing others in your industry and just in general, like the people listening to this is like, you can create this great work environment where it's mostly growth focused and nothing's nirvana or like Perfect all the time.

I'm sure there's. You know, some challenges that come up with that many people involved in anything. If you are interested in learning more or from our guest today, please check out the links in the show notes. If you wanna learn more about me, please check out my LinkedIn at Guy Coffey, that's G-U-Y-C-O-F-F-E-Y.

Or for more personal and behind the scenes info, check me out on Instagram. Which is at the same handle at Guy, Coffey. Now let's get back to the episode. The other thing is, you know, as we kind of land the plane here is like the other thing is when you're teaching stuff like that, I'm sure you found it yourself is as the teacher you gotta be.

Not just talking the talk, you gotta be walking the walk, you know? So it kind of helps you elevate your game? 

Oh yeah, a hundred percent. If you're 

telling people like, Hey, gripes go up, they don't go down, and then you start complaining in a staff meeting about the economy or something that's totally outta your control like that, that's not gonna fly.

Do you find that as well, that you like you have to level up your game? Because we know something and we're communicating doesn't mean we're great at it. Like we're all works in progress. Right. 

I think that's a point I try to hammer home to our team all the time is like me talking to you guys about this is just of an as much of an exercise that I'm hoping it's for you.

It's for me. Because you're right. I think we all, I think in, in certain situations, we all feel like a bit of imposter syndrome and like being in that position and I'm like, you know what? Like if I'm saying it, I hope I better be delivering what I'm saying. I think that's one of the biggest impacts that, that even creating content about this kind of stuff has.

Right. If I'm putting that out into the world, then I need to live my life, like I'm saying. Exactly. 

Exactly. 

And, and it's really funny actually, I, I post these videos mo almost every weekday. Um, and we have a Slack group internally. I actually, this video started. I was trying to figure out a way to communicate in our morning huddle, like stuff that, those are kind of things I talk about philosophical things or like mindset related things or how we wanna be customer service, that kind of stuff.

And when I'm there in person, it's really great to do and my idea is like, okay, maybe I'll do these videos every single. Like I'll just gonna do 'em every day. It took me about four months to get the, 

IM 

right. Oh yeah. I'm like, who am I? But then, then, then this is what it became, where it's like, okay, if I'm saying it, I gotta be doing it.

And there was a time, and I was super proud where I was in an office and one of our office managers, I was doing something or had said something, he's like, well, in your video you said to do this. I'm like, you know what? Thank you. You're right. I need to live. Live up to the top that I was having. Uh, one, I was like, oh, you're actually watching the video.

That's awesome. But it's good to hear it back. 

Yeah, yeah. People are listening, you know, uh, as Dan always says, more is caught than taught. You know, it's like just these messages. And that's interesting. I, I, I said we were gonna land in the plane, but like, I just gotta go back to like, one of the things that we had in.

That we insisted on was a daily huddle. Like it was like five, sometimes it's five minutes every morning. Just so that people could separate their commute into like, okay, now we're in work mode. These are the goals of the day. These are the challenges that might come up. You know, it's, it's a busy day. It's a slower day.

Remember it's the holidays, people might be on edge, whatever the case may be. And it was just a great segue. So have you done that from the get go or is that something that you implemented later? 

I wanted to do. It's something that we didn't do it at my first. I had, I had one dental job at it for a big company.

Um, and we didn't kind of, it kind of didn't, it was inconsistent. And then I had a couple of mentors in the dental space that just hammered home the importance of it. I wanted to do it from the beginning, and it took about eight months to convince my partner because.

We gotta be here 15 minutes before we see patients because, uh, like we gotta have this conversation. And then, you know, about eight months of having an assistant that would never show up to work, I was like, okay, you're right. I gotta set the example. 

Right. Right. 

And so we, we've been, it, it's been something that we've been doing for a very long time with varying levels of.

Huddle,

get in the right mindset. Serve each other and our people in the best possible way. 

Yeah. And we saw it across our system, the, um, the studios that had it as a, like, we're breathing today, so we're doing the morning huddle. Um, that kind of approach to it, that they always perform better than the ones that like refuse to do it or they're like, oh, we do it when the manager's in, but we don't do it on days that she's not in.

No, this is, this is it. So it's a really important thing. I know that's more of a tactical thing, you know, and this is more about leadership mindset and coaching, but this has been really, really great. I appreciate the, the time and the conversation. And, um, so Hardik Business is Enamel Dentistry in Austin and McKinney.

Um, we'll put all, everything in the show.

Even if you're just passing on his messages to your team, that's a.

Humans performing and cooperating well and communicating well. It's not about, uh, how to do a root canal or something like that. So 

most people don't wanna hear about that, 

right? It's a very, uh, select group. Um, yeah, exactly. Thanks so much for sharing, uh, what you're doing, um, how you're growing and how you're affecting people.

And kudos to you on, on all of your success and wish you more and more. But thanks, Hardik. 

Yeah. Well, Guy, thank you so much for number one having me on your podcast. It's, it's, uh, I remember I saw the message. I'm like, I'm just gonna shoot him a message because I listened to a couple on this. I thought this would be really cool.

And thanks for the kind words about me and obviously the business. And, and thank you for, you know, the kind words on the content imposter syndrome is real when I'm posting this stuff. So, um, it, it's, it's, it's really cool for me to get some feedback from people outside of the normal people that I'm talking to, all the.

Thank you. Thank you 

so much 

for that. 

It's, it's healthy. Yeah. 

Yeah. Thank 

you. 

Take good care.