During our recent high school reunion, a classmate and I shared some of the challenges we’d faced and overcome as successful small business owners. While I had established a dental practice in a small town, he had built one of the largest law practices in the state of Nevada. One of his tales really caught my attention. It seems that he invested $50,000 into a manufacturing venture he knew nothing about and lost it all. When I commented that I was sorry to hear of his misadventure, he surprised me by saying, “If you’re winning all the time, you’re not betting hard enough.”
Not being much of a risk taker, I never really thought about business ventures in that light. Indeed, I once gambled away a ten dollar roll of quarters playing the slots while attending a meeting in Vegas. It only took about seven minutes to lose all forty quarters, and I thought, “Well, that was entertaining!”
But looking back upon my thirty-five year career as a general dentist, I now realize that I took enormous risks at virtually every stage of practice. It was a significant financial risk to establish it long before the days of advertising, computers, the internet, or social media. And expanding the practice required borrowing and investing hundreds of thousands of additional dollars through the years as my business grew and embraced new technologies to better serve our patients.
Did we “win all the time?” Of course not. We endured three major recessions, survived the loss of industry, local jobs, and record high inflation, and fought our way through the many uncertainties of health care during the HIV/Aids crisis of the eighties (much like our recent pandemic). But we enjoyed far more victories than setbacks, and used my practice as an economic engine to help build a better community in which to live, practice, and raise a family.
Although not a betting man, I clearly bet on myself and my vision for the future year after year. And, unlike my classmate, it’s been my experience that you don’t have to bet “hard enough” to win all the time. You simply need to stick within your area of expertise and always bet on yourself…
“Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.”
John Wooden
