SPEAKER_05 0:00

What are dentists like? Well, let me tell you what I think. All of our healthcare professionals are like oh shit.

SPEAKER_04 0:06

Tend to be pessimistic.

SPEAKER_05 0:08

I don't want to use the word pessimistic because are averse to change. That's my perception of and if I got it totally wrong, I'm surprised. There must be tons of dentists out there that wish they could have changed. Well, HPCSA are cracking down on that regulation.

SPEAKER_00 0:23

You can't take risks with a person's life. So if you've got something that works, you want to stick to it because it's produced results. If you run a business and you've got a poor performer, what do you do? Let them go. You either scale them up that they perform or you let them go.

SPEAKER_05 0:34

But it just proves the point of healthcare practitioners being a flaws and take care of it but I knew you guys would hit it off. I'm also emotional at the moment. I'm trying to hold myself so I got the two things. Well, are you wearing a liners right now?

SPEAKER_03 0:47

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 0:48

Okay, yeah. I haven't been this close to you in a while. Exactly. And I mean, no disrespect to any of the previous guests that have been on the show. The big, big reason why I'm excited is the man sitting across both Yak and myself, Mr. Elton Lau. Elton, welcome till I say it right.

SPEAKER_00 1:06

Yeah, but uh did I pronounce it. I looked at a lot of people and I was like, wow, your whole life is determined by what somebody else says. Your boss. They're in a bad mood if they upset, if they wanna hold something against you, if you're smarter than them, if you wanna go further than them.

SPEAKER_05 1:22

But that's also quite a profound realization as a as an 18 or 19 year old. What do you think gave you that insight?

SPEAKER_00 1:29

Do you understand that you're gonna get 12 paychecks a year? You gotta take that and stretch those 12 paychecks with what you've saved for the rest of your life until the day you die. Put it that way. And you're gonna pay me. And Dr. Lindby.

SPEAKER_05 1:47

Yes, but cool, cool dude. So welcome back, everyone. And I mean no disrespect to any of the previous guests that have been on the show, but I just want to say something. I haven't been this excited for an episode ever. I'll tell you why. There's a couple of reasons, literally a couple. The first one, if you're watching, you'll probably see things are looking super different, super fancy. It's like do the Ash make paper all of a sudden or is it bonus season or whatever? No. We'll explain how this the studio looks the way it looks currently just now, but I'm excited for that because it looks really cool. The second thing is I've got a co-host. I finally managed to convince a co-host in the name of Dr. Yat Lindley to climb on the bandwagon. Yeah, into climbing. Uh when I first started this show, a little background info. I created the the logo for the the podcast, which says, Why did I become a doctor with Dr. Yash Naidu and Friends? If anybody's looked at it, it says currently with Dr. Yash Naidu Friends and family. But initially my concept said with Dr. Yash Naidu and Dr. Yak Lindy. And I sent it to him and I said, Yak, what do you think? He said, hold on, hold out. I'm not getting involved now. I don't know why, but he chose not to be involved from the outset. Um but clearly 10 episodes in has changed his mind. Maybe he's realized that I'm not that much of a BS as he thought I was, and things are working out. So that's the second thing reason why I'm excited. But the big, big reason why I'm excited is the man sitting across both Yak and myself, Mr. Elton Lau. Elton, welcome. Did I say it right?

SPEAKER_00 3:30

Thank you. Yeah, spotter.

SPEAKER_05 3:31

Is that how you pronounce it?

SPEAKER_00 3:32

Spotter?

SPEAKER_05 3:32

I like to take credit for something in my family. Elton, you all know about it. Here we go. I'm gonna give you a little bit of insight into our family. Everybody knows that Elton and Yak are thicker steeds, right hand meant, so to speak, right? Um and I always take credit for getting you guys introduced together.

SPEAKER_00 3:53

That's a true story.

SPEAKER_05 3:54

Uh-huh. We'll get into that, but Elton, welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on. Thanks. Do you remember when we met? Or how did we first meet?

SPEAKER_00 4:04

I was looking for a law firm to help us with an opinion piece for launching a clear aligner business.

SPEAKER_05 4:11

Okay, I'm glad you said it. I I I set you up there because you know there's the thing called attorney client privilege, right? So I cannot disclose my clients to the whole world, right? But a client can waive that privilege. So I'm glad you've done it and waived it. Are you by the way, are you wearing aligners right now?

SPEAKER_03 4:29

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 4:30

Okay, yeah. I haven't been this close to you in a while. So things are looking shinier than shinier than normal. Yeah, I remember I'll never well, I won't forget how we met, Elton, because I was this young-ish, nervous-ish lawyer. I don't even think I was a I was an admitted attorney at that stage. I might have just been in the process of switching over to a proper full-time actual deterrent. Because you know we've got to do our articles of films, so yeah. But it was you and a couple of your colleagues and sitting across the boardroom and you wanted this opinion. I mean, um I don't know if you want to delve into it further or not, but um I just wanted to give the listeners some background as to why why is it that I've got an entrepreneur on a show called Why Did I Become a Doctor? But there's a very good reason. I mean, Elton, you probably know more doctors and dentists than the average person out there. Probably including us, actually. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, even even the over six years. So how did you get there? To to where you were at the at the boardroom across the table from me, wanting an opinion on clear aligner business.

SPEAKER_00 5:36

On how to start a clear liner business.

SPEAKER_05 5:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:38

Sure. So it started, I suppose, 2016. I had a friend of mine owns a whole bunch of dental practices in the US, and he said Severin. Yeah, several. And he said, Also, you probably should look at this type of business. The margins are good, the technology is great. And I was in tech at the time, I was driving, she's probably about 400 people at the time, 100 million dollars, 1.6 billion rand. And I looked at my future within that and being a CEO, and I actually didn't want that life. I didn't want to run 19,000 people, ridiculous amounts of revenue. It takes everything from you. So um I sat down the business that we sold into the corporate. We carried on growing and scaling, and I resigned. And um I said, okay, cool. The global Clear Elena brand at the time had a 10-year patent. It was expiring in 2018. I climbed on a plane, I went to orthodontic conferences, technology conferences, 3D printing conferences, just to get an understanding. I took some time off. We landed up in Ibiza of all places on a holiday, and we formulated uh the start of what you know is active alignment.

SPEAKER_05 6:50

But hold on, hold on. Sorry. Uh you know I do this thing. Yeah, I was gonna ask, uh this is your I'm a co-host, yeah, so you always say, are we allowed to interject at any given time? Yeah, because I'm not getting how how did you meet several because that what that was the catalyst to sort of um propagate the whole alignment.

SPEAKER_00 7:08

Ah, so so so Mr. Bizarro, myself and my best friend um were in Vegas for a technology conference, and we wanted to go watch the Manny Pacquiao fight. Yeah, and we were sitting in the lobby and we saw all these people come out in festival outfits, super um festival dressed, and we thought, wow, what is going on? And everywhere we went, there was this festival vibe. Yeah, and we saw the many pacquiao fight, and we saw the electric daisy carnival, which is a huge nighttime festival, and we thought, shit, we're not we can watch the many pacquiao fight on TV, but for a festival with 400,000 people with music that we like. So we picked up I can't remember the American newspaper, and we looked it up and it looked like all dodgy ads. And there was this ad for do you want tickets to the electric daisy carnival with uh with a price for a table? And I said, Mike's let's phone this guy. And I randomly phoned this number, and as skeptical South Africans, I'm like, I need to meet you, but I need to meet you in the Venetian. I need to know that you're not gonna steal our money, chop us up and put us in a bag, or because it was like the junk mail of South Africa. Yeah. So he met us, he brought his friend to make sure he was safe, that we weren't gonna South African.

SPEAKER_04 8:23

Yeah, and this is everything.

SPEAKER_00 8:25

Yeah, and this is separate. So we met him in a very busy restaurant. We kind of felt each other out, bought the tickets, and the rest is history. From day one, we just became really good friends. We've been on multiple holidays together.

SPEAKER_05 8:38

What were you doing in Vegas at the time?

SPEAKER_00 8:41

Technology conference. Okay. I went this or something.

SPEAKER_05 8:43

No.

SPEAKER_00 8:44

It was actually, I think it was one of the VMware or HP Global Global Conferences.

SPEAKER_05 8:49

So what I was gonna interrupt and ask is how does a guy from tech I mean w from tech to tea? Yeah, that that has a nice ring to it. But from tech to healthcare, what had you ever dabbled in healthcare or ever thought about it or done anything before? Or literally just like I'm just gonna have a switch, switch in.

SPEAKER_00 9:08

Never. So I had my first business when I was 18. It was actually an adult store in Bernoni. After that, I had a car audio business.

SPEAKER_05 9:16

It was like an adult world type of thing.

SPEAKER_00 9:17

A Hustler Shop. Like Texas was Hustler Shop. When was um wow, I was 18. So what are you talking? 30, 28 years ago.

SPEAKER_05 9:26

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 9:27

95, 96 was my first business.

SPEAKER_05 9:30

Hustler, I'm I'm old enough to know that Hustler was like a porn man.

SPEAKER_00 9:34

You got a few, you don't have to lie. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 9:36

Well, now it is intermittent. Those things don't work anymore, right? But I mean, that that's a it's it's an yeah, it's a magazine. Yeah, he used to sell those.

SPEAKER_00 9:45

Yeah, all the anything that used to go with the adult industry. My uncle had a a shop and he was pivoting out of it into cash loans. And he cash loans became this massive explosion because of the margins they were charging. And he had about three adult stores. And I was 18, I was doing the first year of IMM, the Institute of Marketing Management. And I realized whatever you read, if you write, you pass. I was like, that doesn't seem like an education I need. Just give me the books, let me read it. I need the knowledge, I don't need the pass mark. And I begged my dad, I said, Dad, I want to quit studying. He said, What do you want to do? I said, I want to take over my uncle's shop, I want to buy it. So my uncle sold it to me. Two years later, I sold it to a German guy for three times more than I bought it.

SPEAKER_05 10:26

Yeah, they probably ran well with it. So that's at age of 18 or 17. Did you know, Zach, about Alter? I didn't actually. I didn't know that that aspect. This is why this is so fun because you you'll speak to a close friend of yours and you'll never have these conversations just in normal life, right? Yeah. Oh, I mean, all I knew about uh you prior to um the company you used to work for was you in Lesotho at some stage doing sound.

SPEAKER_00 10:49

Yeah, car audio. Yeah. So there was a gap. My brother-in-law at the time had a huge panel beating business down there, and there was one car audio place in the whole of Lesotho in Miseru. And back then, gear locks, alarms, immobilizers, big bass was going on. So I sold the adult shop. I moved down there and I opened up a car audio place. And that was the first time I lost everything in my life.

SPEAKER_05 11:14

Take us all the way back, Alton, like childhood. I mean, were you born here? Yeah, in South Africa, you're a Joburg boy, born and bred?

SPEAKER_00 11:21

Born in Joburg, sounds strange because most people don't know, but I was born in the apartheid era. Um yeah, I never fitted in with black people because I looked white, and I never fitted in with white people because I was Asian.

SPEAKER_03 11:35

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 11:36

And it was the mid-80s, 84, that Chinese people were first considered honorary whites. But although it said that on paper, it was nothing that you ever felt as a human.

SPEAKER_05 11:46

So you are Chinese, is that what on the you fill in Asian on the forms and things like that, or can you speak any language?

SPEAKER_00 11:53

No, I can speak a little bit of Chinese. I understand a little bit of it, but I'm I'm basically South African three and three.

SPEAKER_05 11:58

And your folks are from China?

SPEAKER_00 12:00

No, my dad's was born here. My grandmother and grandfather stowed away on a ship. And then on my mom's side, my mom, my grand was from Portugal, and my oh no, she was from England, and her husband, my grandfather, was from Portugal. So I'm like a really mixed reed South African.

SPEAKER_05 12:20

Yeah. So what's like are Elton doing? Are you acing things in school or are you one of those?

SPEAKER_00 12:26

No, young Elton was getting hidings every day for ADHD, which they didn't understand what it was, so they just called you naughty.

SPEAKER_05 12:33

Yeah, what naughty you get.

SPEAKER_00 12:34

So I think up until standard seven, which is what now grade nine, yeah, I used to get like two, three hidings a week. For what? What were you doing? Don't concentrate. I can see what they're talking about. I kind of understand it. I don't need to know more.

SPEAKER_05 12:47

So like school-related academia.

SPEAKER_00 12:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 12:50

So it was Asian folks. I mean, it's quite a big thing. Was was like academics a big thing for them, or not really?

SPEAKER_00 12:56

No, my dad never he never told me what to do.

SPEAKER_05 12:58

Well, that's why that's why I asked, what were you getting the hidings for?

SPEAKER_00 13:00

Because it was all the all the teachers, back then corporal punishment. You get six of the best. That's what it was called. Six of the best. And I was never I was never unruly. I just didn't listen. I'd land up fiddling, drawing, not concentrating, talking.

SPEAKER_05 13:15

And nothing's really when you're in school, nothing's really interesting you and you're thinking No, you're more waiting for break.

SPEAKER_00 13:21

You're waiting to go when you're really young, play marbles, basically. You know, and then socialize with your the friends that you do have, which is I didn't have many, but um, yeah, and then young Elton used to have to run because I had to walk past an Afrikaner school, and I had to run past the Afrikan school on my way home so I don't get bullied.

SPEAKER_03 13:39

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 13:40

Oh. And this was where this wasn't in Springs. No, this was now here in in Melbourne. Okay. Parents well off, or no, she wow, we grew up. My dad was the middle, so my dad was one of nine, and um my eldest uncle, they they were in a township. And they're in springs. Eleven, twelve of them lived in in one house. It was the apartheid, and they lived basically in a township. And my one uncle went out and he said, Wow, people outside of the township, there's a thing called an education, there's a thing called a schooling system. And the four eldest never got that opportunity. But my uncle fought back against his father, and my dad was one of the four or five that actually ended up being forced to go to school because my uncle realized that they were so far behind in where the rest of the world or where South Africa was.

SPEAKER_05 14:30

So getting hiding is coming up in school. Any plan in your mind? I want to do XYZ when I get out, or what was the plan? Alton didn't have a plan, right?

SPEAKER_00 14:40

No, I I understood marketing, I understood supply and demand, even in school. So when you're in school and you don't fit in anywhere, I landed up in a in a Chinese boarding school that was about 1990, 90, 91, they opened the school up quite a bit more. So it was more a it was predominantly Chinese, but you still don't fit in. So to fit in, I sold comic books, skateboard parts. I thought, how do you fit in in a world that you don't feel you're a part of? And that was to create a demand in something that people would come to you for.

SPEAKER_05 15:10

Wait, in the boarding school, you were selling stuff?

SPEAKER_00 15:12

Yeah. Comic books, Chinese noodles, skateboard parts. It's just called noodles, guys.

SPEAKER_03 15:18

Where do you get called noodles?

SPEAKER_00 15:20

No, they were Chinese noodles. Oh, they weren't like Maggie's noodles, they were proper, proper Chinese noodles.

SPEAKER_05 15:26

But those days there's like no cell phone and techno. How do you figure out where to get stocked from and ah kind of work it out?

SPEAKER_00 15:33

You come home on a Friday from boarding school and you go look around and scaling. Scale it.

SPEAKER_05 15:40

You guys are making it seem like it's very obvious. I mean, if I'm thinking that to my high school uh years, my folks would drop me off at school and pick me up. I'd go for extra curriculars. I was also that naughty chirpy type that was doing IDs and stuff. I got kicked out of class once. I've had my feet up on the headmaster's table at one stage in high school. It's a story for another day. But I still wasn't thinking, let me figure out how to make a plan and get stock and sell things. So it's it might in your mind it's probably easy, but I really, I really, how do you get the thing is we we came, Yash and I have come from we we'd like to think we we we for the people, but we actually came from quite a bit of privilege, if I to be honest. We we were sheltered as as kids growing up. I can understand from your perspective what you're saying about you know, you would try and do whatever you had to to earn a buck in order to give you that you know amount of pocket money to go and do something else that you were interested in. So you you didn't ask your parents, you couldn't ask Daddy Lau for anything.

SPEAKER_00 16:46

Yeah, my dad didn't have much, he worked two jobs. My mom left when we were 10. Um, my dad worked two jobs. I didn't even stay with my dad up until late high school. We didn't even own our own house. Um, so my dad was I mean, he I look I I think back to it now, but every cent he made, he put into myself and my brother to try and give us some form of life that he never had. And during that time, you you kind of understand the pressure and you realize if you don't make it money yourself and you don't look after yourself, your dad's just trying to hold things together for survival more.

SPEAKER_05 17:23

Yeah, you so you see the context behind my question.

SPEAKER_00 17:25

No, I get I get your question. So, where did that stem from? It stemmed from not having anything and then realizing all these people around you have things and you can't go to I don't know if if I was just a little bit more mature back then because I was it was just me and my brother, but you realize you can't go to somebody that doesn't have anything to ask, and you can't put more pressure on that person, so you kind of got to help yourself.

SPEAKER_05 17:47

That's fascinating. It's the entrepreneurial spirit. It's also not necessarily a natural thing, it's also an a necessity type of thing almost, or not really, or it not not anymore.

SPEAKER_00 17:58

Now you just enjoy building things, you enjoy figuring things out, solving complex problems. My I suppose my passion is helping people, sometimes to my detriment. Yeah, but it's I can never work for a boss. Yeah, I've tried. Um after I lost everything in Lesotho, Yak brought up Lesotho, so I opened a really successful car audio business. The Lesotho riots happened, so the wrong political party rigged the elections or whatever it was, and they basically said you gotta leave Lesotho now because the whole country was in an uprising. We went back in seven days later, and I had no shop, no customers' cars were taken, everything was gone.

SPEAKER_05 18:35

You were living in Lesotho?

SPEAKER_00 18:36

I was living in Ladybrand, so it was a 10-minute drive to the Lesotho border, and then 10 minutes into Maseru, but I lost everything. Anything I'd ever built, I was how old was that, 20, 21? And I moved back to Joburg. I had to phone my dad and say, Dad, I need to stay in that room I grew up in. He said, What happened? I said, I've I've lost everything. And I had to start from scratch all over again. And that was the first time I've lost everything. I've lost everything twice in my life.

SPEAKER_05 19:02

You see, I I could I almost have to remind myself that I'm a host here and have to ask more questions because I just get fascinated by Elton's stories. I just want him to carry on talking, but I've got to realize that I have to ask something next. But you you skipped something about that. So, like the high school kid that's you know getting the the the hidings, the ADAD ADHD kid, after Matrick, what happens? Well, can I can I pause there? Yeah, look, I know a little bit more about your story. So there's things that I in my head also that I want to ask because I'm privy to know. But in high school, you you excelled. You were not just uh and like a kid selling stuff, you did excel quite a bit. You uh you became head boy actually after for very short time.

SPEAKER_04 19:44

Tell tell us a tell a head tell us about that.

SPEAKER_00 19:47

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_05 19:48

Um I like yikes, got your back here.

SPEAKER_00 19:51

No, it's good, it's good. It's um maybe we'll see.

SPEAKER_05 19:56

Oh, it's are you setting me up as on give me?

SPEAKER_00 19:59

No, so as much as I may have struggled, if the teacher was engaging enough or actually delivered something in a way that I could hold your attention, I performed extremely well. But everyone I came across somebody that wasn't was more mechanical than actually passionate about what they were doing. But the vice principal actually landed up teaching biology, and I excelled in biology, he was an unbelievable teacher. Standard 9, we went on prefect camp, and um the principal, Mrs. Tim, and all the other teachers said you can't even make Elton a prefect, and he was like, No, I'm gonna make him head boy, like this is the leadership, this is look at how he and he explained to me all these things, and I said, Mr. Keek, I think you've got this very wrong, and he still pushed it through, and um yeah, there I was. I started off the year with a white blazer, but I had met the woman I actually landed up marrying in my first marriage, Jamie, 16, and she we were partying that December, and nobody had told her I was 16. She thought I was 19 and she was 20. So the first year, or the first few months of Matrix, I went to school, but I wasn't really present. I was in over 18 nightclubs, we were partying, we were doing things, and my dad got called in and I got expelled within three months of being in Matrix. My dad begged the principal, said, Let him just write his exams. And they said, fine. So the last six months until you write your finals come October, November, I wasn't even allowed to attend school. I wasn't allowed to use the school bus. I wasn't in the hostel anymore. And I sat at home trying to study, which I'd done miserably. But I wrote, I was adamant. I still wrote everything on the highest possible grade, knowing they'll drop you to standard grade or lower grade to pass. But because I was head boy when I started the year, I'd already applied to college. And college said, Oh, because you're head boy, you get 25% off. Because your standard nine marks are good, we definitely want you. So I was already accepting to college on standard nine marks, although I was expelled in a trick.

SPEAKER_05 21:59

Yeah. And what did Mr. Tim say to you? You remember?

SPEAKER_00 22:02

Uh Mr. Keek. Keek. Oh. When I went to go fetch my marks, he looked at me at the end of the year. And um I walked in to collect the metric results, and he said, You let me down so badly, you'll make nothing of your life. And I remember that moment because I walked out getting taking my my metric marks. I was actually just glad I passed. I could show my dad in that I just just just passed by. And he said, Yeah, you'll you'll never make anything of your life. If this is when given responsibility, this is what becomes.

SPEAKER_05 22:31

And um yeah, it was a if he was still alive, well, maybe he's still alive, I don't even know. What like would what would you say to him today?

SPEAKER_00 22:39

So I'm grateful because as a 17-year-old, I finished Varsity when I was seven, uh, I finished Matrix when I was 17. It was kind of a wake-up call that people do put responsibility on you and you are responsible and expectations, you know, where you you take it for granted. But it was I worked for it, but I had a habit of working for things, and then once I've got them, I no longer appreciate them because now I've accomplished it. It's no longer important. What's the next thing I need to accomplish? But when it comes to leadership or taking care of other people's lives, it's not something you can let go of. It's something that you always have to be a part of, or don't ask for that responsibility at all.

SPEAKER_05 23:17

So, did he light a fire by saying that?

SPEAKER_00 23:19

No, the very next day I had a car accident. I was driving, a car hit us from behind. I think we were doing about 120, 140 on the highway, and my friends thought I was dead. So we came across all four lanes of a of a highway, and um a car hit us from behind, the whole back of the car lifted up, and yeah, your life flashes before your eyes, and you realize shit, life's short. But um, I won't say it lit a fire. I I needed to. I didn't, it wasn't those words of his did it add value and you understand the responsibility. You just stuck with you. But it didn't change the fact that we were pretty poor. You still gotta go out and and make something. I mean, when my dad gave me the money at the end of the first year of varsity, I think it was 70,000 Rand that he bonded from his house to give to your 18-year-old son and have that faith of like this kid doesn't know much, but he's telling me the marketing degree studying is not worth anything because as long as you remember, if you write it, you pass. I'm like, I don't need a pass mark to remember anything.

SPEAKER_05 24:19

So, did you go into marketing for after Good Chick? That 25% bursary or whatever scholarship that you got was for marketing.

SPEAKER_00 24:25

One year. No, yeah, a 25% discount, but I've just picked uh I picked marketing and supply and demand. If what I understand is everybody needs something. So if you create a demand or you fix a solution big enough, you have an income.

SPEAKER_05 24:39

And then after that, yeah, you're like, this is not for me.

SPEAKER_00 24:41

No, it was got to the end of the year, wrote the exams, and I was like, when I saw the exam papers, I was like, as long as you remember, if you write, you pass. So why do I need somebody else to tell me what I know?

SPEAKER_05 24:54

And what was the plan with that degree anyway?

SPEAKER_00 24:57

I have no clue back then. Back then they just tell you get this is what you do. You go to school, you get a degree, you get a job. And I realized I just couldn't work for somebody.

SPEAKER_05 25:07

This is uh why did I become a podcast podcaster coming out there? I can see you go leaning towards that question. I mean, it's useful to know that nobody has not everybody has a plan on day one or day. Yeah, so what we're getting at is you didn't have a plan back then. No, yeah, even choosing or going into marketing.

SPEAKER_00 25:24

You didn't have to broad bunch of things, and I was like, nothing here interests me. I don't want to be stuck to a desk. I don't want to be. I also knew I didn't couldn't really work for somebody quite young because whenever we were in groups or teams, um and even when I was doing things in the first year of varsity, I was looking at a few businesses, I realized your boss sets your ceiling. And most people, just on my the way I'm built, I'll outwork, outthink, outperform, and my life's got to be dictated by somebody that may have an ego, maybe at the end of their career, doesn't want to do things, but that's now the ceiling of your life.

SPEAKER_05 26:01

When do you come to this realization?

SPEAKER_00 26:03

Jeez, I must have been about 18 or 19.

SPEAKER_05 26:05

That's first year, second year, that's sort of tight.

SPEAKER_00 26:07

I looked at a lot of people and I was like, wow, your life is determined by what somebody else says, your boss. And if that they're in a bad mood, if they upset, if they want to hold something against you, if you're smarter than them, if you want to go further than them, that is that becomes your absolute ceiling as an employee.

SPEAKER_05 26:24

So what did that decide? Yeah, what did that be? And that's but that's also quite a profound realization at a as an 18 or 19 year old. What do you think give gave you that insight at such a young age? Was it growing up that way to to know that you you know you you had to work for whatever it is that you you have, or what do you think what's what's the difference? Because the average or 18, 19 year old, they don't have that. Not thinking of that. When I was 18, 19, that last in on my mind.

SPEAKER_00 26:53

If if I have to really think hard, 94, 95, you're talking about you know, the South Africa came out of just out of massive era, but massive interest rates. Interest rates here spiraled to 18, 19, 20 percent. And you see the average person struggling. Petrol stations used to close at like five, six, so you couldn't get petrol at night, you couldn't get petrol on weekends. Um and I just looked at all these people working, and I think it was of all of all people, I think it was a Liberty Life ad back then, that said, Do you understand that you're gonna get 12 paychecks a year? Right? And those over those 12 paychecks, as your earnings increase, you're gonna get them for 30 years. So now you're 65-ish. You've got to take that and stretch those 12 paychecks with what you've saved for the rest of your life until the day you die. And that just resonated with me. The noodle money wasn't capable. And you're gonna crazy you're gonna do 30 days a month for somebody for a one-day paycheck that the government takes a large portion of, that takes a large portion of, your bills take a large portion of, and the harder you work, you don't generally get more. You know, land up begging a boss for a raise. Hopefully, they see your skill set. The minute you want to leave because there's a better opportunity, they're like, Oh, you're not loyal. It the system made no sense to me. Still doesn't make sense to me.

SPEAKER_05 28:14

So you had this epiphany or something like that, and then what do you do? What do you do about it?

SPEAKER_00 28:19

Well, when I lost everything coming out of Lesotho, I mean, I was my 20s. I moved back to Joburg and I looked in the papers for a business, and I was like, I can't afford a business now, I've got no money. So I looked at what sales job could I take on? Because that becomes uncapped. What I put in, I get out. Okay. I'm not restricted by hey, you've got to work 40 to 45 hours a week, and this is all you get. And my dad said, Go into computers. Yeah. And there was a GM of a shop available for Hilton Wiener. There were a few.

SPEAKER_05 28:48

And um is this just going through the classifieds or back then?

SPEAKER_00 28:51

You're saying taking a newspaper, going at the back of it, looking at the classifieds and and there was an IT job posted, and the guy said, Come see me on Saturday, and I had no computer experience whatsoever. Yeah. But I went and um they liked me. Saturday morning, they wanted to interview at me at hop or seven. I mean, extremely hard-working guys. And they told me on the Wednesday I didn't get the job. I was like, okay, but I'm still gonna carry on looking. The following Monday, they phoned me and they said, Come and work. We know you've got no experience, you know you don't know anything about computers at this level bar playing a game or two. But the lady we gave the job to worked for two days, hated the environment, and hasn't come back. Yeah, but we like your attitude.

SPEAKER_05 29:32

Well, they told you that. That isn't funny.

SPEAKER_00 29:34

And they said, This is this is why you've been picked. Um and the guy's name was Julian Milner, he was the sales manager. And I the minute I walked in, you know, you kind of realize how much money you can make in technology. It's it's so scalable, everything dependent on it, even back then. And I told myself, I'm gonna work hard enough until I own a share of this company. And I did.

SPEAKER_05 29:55

What was the job actually?

SPEAKER_00 29:56

That sales.

SPEAKER_05 29:58

You so what do you have to sell?

SPEAKER_00 29:59

Computers, servers, desktops, notebooks, infrastructure, Wi-Fi was just starting, but most of the things were network cabled.

SPEAKER_03 30:07

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 30:08

Funny story. So I get there and they give me some sales training, and I'm like, okay, I know how to sell. I've been selling my own stuff for a while. And they're like, okay, cool. You understand how to build relationships, you know how to understand the product. I was like, yes. So now they put me behind a computer and they say, Here's a book, you got a telephone book, and you got a phone. This company, that company, and I started. And the one company said pure cold calling, and I call called 10 customers a day, almost till the day I stopped being in sales, moving up to sales manager, sales director, becoming a shareholder. I was always looking for the next bigger customer to let go of the smaller customer.

SPEAKER_02 30:42

Right.

SPEAKER_00 30:43

So if I can find a bigger customer, I can let go of three smaller customers, and then you constantly work your way up, so you constantly increase your earnings. And I get sat behind my computer, and the one company says, Cool, send me a quote. So I couldn't go to my sales manager at the time. So I phoned a friend of mine, Michael. I said, Michael, what is Excel? He's like, Elton, where are you?

SPEAKER_05 31:03

Well, there's no Google notice there.

SPEAKER_00 31:06

I doubt it. Is there Google or stuff like that? There was borderline Yahoo. It was Yahoo. Sort of in the day. And I he said, Elton, where the hell are you? I said, Mike, I'm selling computers. He was like, You. I said, I am. So he said, it's a little thing, it looks like this, it's green, click on it. So now I opened up. He's like, Elton, just wait, I'll come and help you tonight.

SPEAKER_02 31:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 31:24

So he explains to me what Excel is. So I walk into the office the next day, happy to make my first quote. And they said, No, email it to me. So I'm like, shit. Reach over, pick up the phone. What's email? He's like, what are you doing? Is it for real? Who's Mike's for real? Is it Mike? My best friend from a yeah, best friend from a kid, one of my best friends from a kid. And he came and he helped me through email Excel systems in the first week. And I had to learn it from scratch. And then there was a guy sitting in the corner who's in Australia now, his name's Paul Friend. And I watched him call and call and call customers. And he was the highest performer. And the more I watched him, I went to him and I said, Why do you still call? He says, Oh no, because I want to increase my earnings. I want to get rid of the worst customers. And that's where I got the methodology from. So every day before I left the office, I would phone 10 customers better than what I had. And then as soon as I picked them up as a customer, I landed the United Nations, DHL. Um, I landed some big customers just with that.

SPEAKER_05 32:23

You're selling software to them, or what do you sell?

SPEAKER_00 32:25

Software, hardware, infrastructure. And within three years, I was the top performer. I was about to be headhunted, and the directors called me in and said, 25% of the business is yours, stay. And I and that's what I worked for. 25%. I I stayed on, and about two years later, the business went bankrupt. They spent uh as much money as I made, they spent more than I could make. So we I landed up owing going bankrupt again, broke again. But I was ignorant this time. I didn't when I ran my own business, you kind of understand the numbers. When you start scaling into back then tens of millions, you didn't understand the numbers. And I got to stand in front of CGIC credit guarantee as this kid, but you listed as a director, but not fully understanding the impact of being a director. And they were like, you three guys owe X amount of millions. And I look at my two partners and I'm like, How do we owe money? And then he's like, Oh, but I bought my wife this and I bought the house, and because this one took money, I took money, and I was like, Wow, guys, this is this is not great.

SPEAKER_05 33:28

You were balling at that time, at that age, doing well.

SPEAKER_00 33:31

Yeah, I owned uh my own homes, I had two homes, I had a couple of cars.

SPEAKER_05 33:36

Okay, that that got lost on me.

SPEAKER_00 33:37

So you think super well. All I phoned my dad again, and I said, Dad, I gotta pay back this debt. Please can I come stay in the room this time with my wife? You're married then and um start from scratch.

SPEAKER_05 33:49

Although, I don't think you're you're realizing this because you lived this life. So obviously it's a bit of our so you went from that a guy that was paging through the classifiers, a newspaper. That's a common denominator, the classifiers, yeah. You know, no job. That's amazing. So I I think it's worthwhile pausing and just reflecting on that. Because or did it happen just am I just it's as exaggerated in my mind what a turnaround this was, or not really?

SPEAKER_00 34:18

I don't see it that way. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 34:20

I mean you get But tell me from right or from wrong.

SPEAKER_00 34:23

I mean Actually it it depends on how you see life.

SPEAKER_05 34:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:27

Right? I enjoy high performance, I enjoy achieving things. I I quit TV probably about 14 years ago because I want to grow, I want to get the best out of the time that I have. It's not life's not infinite. It's gonna come, it's gonna go, and you want to do what you enjoy between that. And unfortunately, the world we live in outside of the close friends that you have costs money. The human race is the only species to have to pay rent on earth. Right? And it's not that money is everything and it doesn't make you happy. But the more money you have, the better healthcare you can provide for your family, the better schooling, the better education, the better networks they get into, the better quality of life you have, the better quality of food you're able to eat. So money doesn't make you happy. If anything, I know some really wealthy people, they're quite unhappy. But if you understand that money brings that, it doesn't bring happiness, but it gives you access to freedom and a quality of life. And the comfort, even ability.

SPEAKER_05 35:21

See, Elton can't help but but go into inspirational more, because that's that's very inspirational. But my question is, you've gone from classified to doing really well. And that's am I right? That's right. Yeah, three, four years. Yeah. But I think the the reason why he does, I mean it's not strange. It's strange to us as an outsider. It would be strange because it would be strange. I just think it's it's an achievement that's worth like mentioning and highlighting. It's not like you know, I'm not, I'm not saying it's strange. I just think it's it's important for people watching also to realize that that's possible.

SPEAKER_00 35:54

You know, but when that when that collapses again, it doesn't feel like you've done well. I mean, I lost all of that, moved in with my dad, had to pay back. And one of the businesses that were were chasing me at the time, I phoned him and I said, Look, I have an entire company. I'll come work for you, we'll do an equity swap. This is the book that we have. But there's one condition every single employee gets a job. And he said, deal. So he took on that entire footy man company on my word that I would work my ass off to make it work. And one plus one didn't equal two in this.

SPEAKER_03 36:27

It's how it exists now.

SPEAKER_00 36:28

It was called Bromide Technologies, it was an IT company.

SPEAKER_03 36:31

IT company. Bromide loser bell, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 36:34

And one plus one didn't equal two. We landed up equaling four or five. But my commitment was the first year I would not draw a big salary, I would not take commission, I would just work to make the integration work. And it did. I picked up equity in the business, we started running the business together. Um, the first year in that business, I borrowed a Bucky, a red course bucky from my brother-in-law that had a cracked radiator. So I had to pour water into it before I went to a meeting, before I left the office. Now you must remember I was driving around in a 540 BMW. Um, my wife at the time had a BMW released at 325 Ti. I had but I went from that to a course of Bucky with 180,000 Ks on that couldn't even get you from A to B reliably. From Beamer to Bucky. From Beamer to Bucky for a solid year. And at the end of the year, Dalpham was the guy's name, he said, okay, everything's fulfilled. Here's equity, here's how it works.

SPEAKER_05 37:31

And um in this technology company. And what what do you actually do? What do what do business people do? Yeah, what's life, what was then the life of Elton Lau at the time?

SPEAKER_00 37:40

Understanding what back then for me, it was understanding what the biggest companies needed to be successful. So you take and the the biggest company I I dealt with back then was Stannard Bank, and I phoned them for three years. Every single week I'd phone them and I'd phone the same five people saying, and then eventually they know who I was. Alts, we don't have business for you, we can't do this, we can't do that, we've got existing suppliers, to the point where my partner, Delphin became my partner, he said, I'll stop phoning them. It's it's it's you can't, you're irritating them, you're irritating some of the suppliers because you're putting so much pressure over three years to get into the account. And I said, I won't stop. And he's nobody understood it. And only a few years ago did I under get the words to explain it. And I phoned them and eventually they gave me a small window, and I rushed through to the bank, went to go meet a whole bunch of people, put a quote down, and the next thing back in the day it was a fax machine, comes an order out for like 25 million. And I was I was like, wow, I don't know how far this can go, but I understand how big the environment is, I understand how much they need. They've got 900 branches, they've got distributed environments, it was a huge environment, but that was the customer I wanted the most. And my one of my ex-CEOs called me in to give a pep talk to his team, and I found the words to it, and I told his team, the same thing I'll tell you guys, is if you know there's something that's going to change your life, why would you ever quit? So if you've got 10, 15 accounts or you're doing 10, 15 things, but there's one thing that's going to change your life, and I knew that was Stanner Bank. It was the highest spending business in the country on technology. And I knew by landing them as a customer, it transforms my business. But all I needed to do was give them enough value that it was almost like a value exchange. I wanted to give them three times, four times more value than what I was actually charging them.

SPEAKER_05 39:37

So sheer doggered determination, persistence, perseverance.

SPEAKER_00 39:42

I won't even say it's that. It's just knowing that that changes my life.

SPEAKER_05 39:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 39:46

Why ever quit?

SPEAKER_05 39:47

So it's not about persistence or but that motivated you and you carried on. You didn't just give up. The guys, your friend said, give up, Elton, just stop. You're irritating them.

SPEAKER_00 39:56

But to this day, if I know something's going to change my life, why would you ever quit? You know it will change your life. You should never quit. That that's just the way my brain works.

SPEAKER_05 40:06

But the own the only reason you knew that it would change your life is you could offer more valuable services to them that your competitors were.

SPEAKER_00 40:16

No, the market was, I think there were about 4,000 companies doing what we were doing.

SPEAKER_02 40:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 40:20

So it's through relationships, effort, working harder, understanding the environment better, saving their money. The technology was they were buying it very similar from everybody else.

SPEAKER_02 40:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 40:29

The change to my life comes from you got a company back then, I think their IT spend was like 2.5 billion rand. And your next couple of biggest customers, they were so distributed the way they purchased, it wasn't worth the effort. But all your other little companies that you're dealing with were spending 20, 30, 40 million rand a year. Now you've got one juggernaut with that type of IT spend that's scaling. Digital banking's just coming online, they're trying to move people to um apps, not even apps back then, they're just trying to move people to off paper, off checkbooks. You just got to look at the size of that market and going, if that changes your life. Even if it took 10 years, I'd probably still be calling them today.

SPEAKER_02 41:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 41:13

But the reason why I ask that is most people don't know what it is that is going to change their life. Did you know at that stage that you just getting that account would change your life?

SPEAKER_00 41:26

Definitely. The the the caliber of customer you have and that you have to deal with when you first engage with people so much better than you, you're like, wow, I got a long way to go here, I got a lot to learn. One is knowing the value of the monetary worth, right, of an account that size. The next is when you step into that environment, you feel very insecure. Because you're this 26-year-old lighty that's dealing with 40, 50-year-old people that are unbelievable knowledge. But I'm not frightened by that. I'm like, what do you know that imagine I could know that at half your age? You know what benefit that gives me. So I was I'm happy to lean into that uncomfort and feel vulnerable and insecure. Maybe I stay a little quiet in those environments while I listen and I learn, I don't talk. But that knowledge, you can't get in a textbook, you can't, nobody's just gonna give it to you.

SPEAKER_05 42:16

Did you put yourself out of your comfort zone, you think it wasn't a comfortable and space to be in?

SPEAKER_00 42:21

So that's my philosophy. That's my my leadership philosophy. It's my life philosophy. Stay uncomfortable.

SPEAKER_05 42:29

But does anything make you uncomfortable? You're the type that doesn't get uncomfortable by anything. That's just my perception of you.

SPEAKER_00 42:37

That's I I generally don't. But that's realizing you can't control anything. Right? What can you actually control in life? And I teach it part of the Meteor course. Focus on what you can control because you'll end up stressing about a whole bunch of things that you can't. But if I focus on what I can, my knowledge, my understanding, what I can do with that, and the rest will take care of itself. Unless you want to go into politics or try and change countries, and then then you've got to play a very different game. But if you're just trying to get the best life for you, your family, your friends, and make a difference for the the world in a positive way, there's only very few things you can control.

SPEAKER_05 43:12

So you land the big account, then you say, Okay, tech is I'm tired of tech now, it's over.

SPEAKER_00 43:17

Or or six. We landed up selling that business to a large, to a very large tech company. Um, my partner then decided he was going to retire, so I became the managing director of it. I think when we sold, we were doing about 300 million a year. Um, so what's it about 15 million dollars by today's standards? By the time I left when I resigned, I was doing a hundred million dollars, probably about one point four billion rands.

SPEAKER_05 43:44

It was about um still in set so you still sell it basically.

SPEAKER_00 43:48

I was the MD though. I had a four hundred people with me or in the business. Yeah. And um yeah, I l I meant it with some of the top CEOs, top CFOs, top marketing people. And the one CEO sat me down. There were two CEOs in the business. And I was a managing director of I was probably doing eight to ten percent of a really big company's number. And I had to stay for three years as part of the sale, and then two years I had a restraint of trade. But I actually stayed with the business for 11. And the reason I stayed probably six years longer, five years, one year was a handover, was access to knowledge. There was no ways I would sit with CEOs, CFOs in a small business. But because you carry such a heavy number, such a heavy title, your business adds so much value, I got to learn from some of the best in the country. And that's why I actually stayed. So it wasn't then it wasn't a money thing. I could have made a lot more money by moving early. But that knowledge, when you see businesses, mergers and acquisitions for billions, when you see things being deployed for hundreds of millions at a time, those are some super smart people. So I stayed, and when it came to the end, the reason I one of the reasons I left was to take over and run a 19 billion rand business or a billion rand business. I didn't want that life. I meant it with a CEO. I meant it with many CEOs at that level. It has to become your life.

SPEAKER_03 45:16

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 45:16

When you've got 14,000 staff members and that many people dependent on you, it's what I worked for my whole life, oddly. I worked to run one of the biggest businesses, but when offered the opportunity, I had an anxiety attack. I was like, that's not the life I want. You go home to a big house, it's not a home. You hardly know your family, you hardly know your kids, your friend, you don't have a big friendship circle. And I was like, wow, that's not the life I want.

SPEAKER_05 45:43

Always working, always traveling, and meeting with people and things like that.

SPEAKER_00 45:46

No, analyst presentations, you know, your pension funds that are shareholders in your business, you've got an exec board, you've got a board above that you're responsible for. And I was like, I worked for it, and I thought, okay, I can handle it. I know I can do this. I I was doing it at a little bit of a smaller scale, and there were some changes I would have made at the higher level. But um, you know, to run anything well, it's it's simple. People, passion, profit. Okay, the best people that are passionate, you'll make a good profit. If you've got terrible people that aren't passionate, you're gonna struggle to make a profit. So my formula is always simple mentor, groom, guide, grow, teach, train, have the best people. Hope make them passionate about the journey you guys are on, and you produce a profit.

SPEAKER_05 46:28

So then from teeth to teeth after that.

SPEAKER_00 46:30

Yeah, and that's when Yak brought up severin. Um we were friends partying, traveling the world, and um how it actually landed up when I unpacked it. I pulled up um, they were listed on one of the American technology um stock exchanges. And I looked at their margins. Uh you want to grab that, DY? Okay. And I looked at their margins, and their margins were anywhere between 78 and 85 percent. Right? So people were paying five, six thousand dollars for a piece of plastic straight in their teeth. And when you realize that for every hundred dollars, eighty dollars was profit, or every hundred or eighty random, I was like, wow, they haven't used technology to help the public, they've used technology to drive ridiculous margin. And when I put the business together, I said, if we could be the people's aligners, right? Straight teeth shouldn't be that expensive. And why that resonated with me so much was at 30, when when I was in that that large corporate cycle, I got braces at 30 years old.

SPEAKER_03 47:37

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 47:38

Painful process, but you're standing in photos, you're taking publicity photos, and you're so self-conscious. And I was like, I can't justify five, six thousand dollars or a hundred thousand rand for a piece of plastic to straighten my teeth. When I saw the margin, I was like, wow, I can slash this, make it super affordable, and give it to more people. And that's always been me. How do you help? And that's when I said, okay, I can release it, I don't need to pay the rent in one case. How do I do this at scale for a lot more people and empower a lot more doctors along the way? And the end result is straight teeth and an affordable price. And then I landed up really enjoying the profession of the healthcare in general. And I actually, as much as I enjoy the outcomes patients get, what I enjoy is when I engage with doctors and and helping them grow, I think that's that's very fulfilling for me.

SPEAKER_05 48:32

How did you I mean, you said a lot, right? Like you've gone forward a bit, but surely there's like a lot of legwork. How did you end up at that boardroom with me there asking for that opinion? It that's all part of the legwork, isn't it? Of of starting this company.

SPEAKER_00 48:49

No, that was that was huge because overseas you don't have the same rules and regulations you have in South Africa with healthcare. You know, in a lot of places overseas, you don't have to be a doctor to own a practice. You can own it, you can employ. And we weren't sure how to move forward. So we're like, we understand, we've built the technology, we've got the platforms, we piloted and tested results in moving teeth with with active aligners. And then we needed to go, okay, how do I bring this to life? What how do I legally fit in the framework? And being pro-South Africa, I could have shipped it in like other people did, right? So, and and why I'm anti that is the best way it explains when you do mining in the country, although the money goes out the country, you've got 5,000 people working and you're investing tons of infrastructure, there's a benefit to, there's a spend in the country. When you're buying an international product, the money goes straight from a South African bank account overseas, gone. There's no empowerment, there's no skills transfer, there's no manufacturing, there's no logistics, it doesn't add that. And I was adamant that if we're going to open this, I'm not going to open it in. I mean, Zim, I think it was Zambia offered us a tax relief of saying, oh, you only pay 10% tax if you manufacture here. I said, well, then I'm part of the problem of South Africa. I'm not part of the solution. So how do you create jobs? How do you help? How do you pay your taxes? How do you put all of that in place? And that's why I needed the opinion piece from you and Norton Rose Fulbright of how do I start that company locally? How do we create jobs locally? How do we spend locally instead of just doing what every South African landed up doing that at that level of just shipping product in and extracting money?

SPEAKER_04 50:29

Which would be cheaper to send it overseas?

SPEAKER_00 50:31

Of course. I could probably pay lower rates in in some of the other countries. You don't have power issues, you don't have manufacturing issues, you don't, but then you it doesn't feel like you're doing the right thing.

SPEAKER_05 50:42

And then fast forward how many years until because I see the company's actoriners, right? I see it every for my social media. Like there's vector liners in probably some of the places in the mountains out now. How does that join happen? Does it hit does it just happen overnight or no?

SPEAKER_00 51:01

Last year they asked me to come give a talk at one of the dental conferences, and I said it takes it took us six years to become overnight success.

SPEAKER_03 51:08

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 51:08

We lost money for many years educating. I think we've educated more doctors than any other clear aligner company in the country. Um, training, pre-support, post-support, marketing, the brand of actually getting people to understand that an aligner can straighten your teeth. People still think traditional orthodontics. Um and then we hit COVID. Oh you know, and we paid. We didn't my partners and I sat around the table and we said, well, if COVID's that bad, we're all dead. So pay staff. If COVID goes, if we get through it, we'll have the ability to recover, so pay the staff anyway. You know, and we bled almost down to zero again before COVID was was declared over. Um, and that that hurt, and then we started rebuilding the financial side of the business, bulking it up there again. It what it did hurt was the international expansion. We're in the UK, um, we're launching in Amsterdam, we supply African countries. So COVID hurt that expansion of rapidly growing because you know, we had families to feed, we had people to look after. But it took us a good four and a half, five years to start actually producing results that that you can be proud of of saying, hey, we one of the large, if not the largest, clear aligner brand in in South Africa. You know, we're starting to expand as a South African company into international markets and start taking on the ticket size.

SPEAKER_05 52:36

As part of that like educating doctor process, it it requires you going out around the country, meeting doctors, dentists, and all that stuff, or is that how you interact with people? Oh, it was the groundwork, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 52:46

Groundwork. I mean, I I think I've probably met over the past five, six years, three, four thousand dentists and doctors.

SPEAKER_05 52:54

A lot more than the average dentist. A lot more than most people at all.

SPEAKER_00 52:57

I've done a tour of the US, I've done the UK, I've done here, I've done Amsterdam, Germany. You know, so really understanding.

SPEAKER_05 53:06

What are dentists like? Well, let me tell you what I think. All of our healthcare professionals are that. I realize it's recently, and maybe it's just confirmation bias, the people I surround myself that I'm I think that healthcare professionals are very risk-averse people. Um which kind of makes sense because you get into medicine or dentistry because you think okay, it's a it's a quite a safe bet. You know, I'm gonna have a job when I'm done. So they're quite risk-averse. They tend to be glass half empty types for some reason.

SPEAKER_04 53:38

Pessimistic.

SPEAKER_05 53:39

I don't want to use the word pessimistic because it it's not what I want to convey, but always trying to look to avoid risk, and we'll see an innovative product as something to be skeptical about or a reverse to change. That's my perception of healthcare professionals. Have I got it totally wrong?

SPEAKER_00 54:02

I don't think it's wrong. I think that that from what I've seen, that conditioning you you can't take risk with a person's life.

SPEAKER_01 54:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 54:10

Right? You can't you so if you've got something that works, you want to stick to it because it's produced results, and you're comfortable with it, introducing new workflows, new technologies, new things makes you really uncomfortable because you as much as somebody tells you, what I've noticed with doctors is they want to see the results themselves. Right? And then if one or two friends start doing it and somebody's willing to hold their hand, they'll move. I think the the the problem I struggle with, I I've worked with quite a few DSOs, and that's not just in the dental space, but across a large healthcare space, is what's a DSO? In DSO from a dental point of view, stands for dental services organization. Four, five, eight hundred dental practices under one group. Um, the local one, we have one or two local ones here that own just not outside of dental, they just own large healthcare chains, multiple disciplinary healthcare chains. And when I was sitting unpacking with some of the DSOs or the large healthcare chains and some of the execs, you know, in a business, if you run a business and you've got a poor performer, what do you do?

SPEAKER_05 55:11

You tell me if you let them go.

SPEAKER_00 55:13

You either skill them up that they perform or you let them go.

SPEAKER_05 55:16

See, that was my initial thought, but it just proves the point of healthcare practitioners being pessimistic.

SPEAKER_00 55:22

See, what if we have to let them go? He knows this, he knows what I'm about to do.

SPEAKER_05 55:28

And you even have some positive spin on it, because that is the positive thing, right? Try and upskill them first.

SPEAKER_00 55:33

The the challenge you have is even when I was running a ridiculously large business, I would probably churn 10% of the staff a year. Okay, right? Underperforming, and it's not because they underperform you because it's just the job's not for them, but they've taken it for a paycheck. So you either upskill them or you find them something else to do. But with healthcare, the minute you get that degree, I can't remove you from the system no matter how bad you are.

SPEAKER_01 56:00

Good point.

SPEAKER_00 56:00

So you could provide terrible health care, I can't remove you.

SPEAKER_01 56:04

Yeah, right?

SPEAKER_00 56:05

So you can't constantly raise the standard of healthcare because you can't say every doctor's great. In anything in life, you get your high performers, your mid-tier, and then you get a whole bunch of people that are just there for a salary. And you can't move healthcare forward because you can't remove poor performance from a system. Those poor performance will end up in their own space. It could be a lower LSM, it could be wherever they find making an income from. But you can never remove it. We're also not producing enough doctors in the world with where the healthcare crisis is going and the cost of healthcare that we can fix it instantaneously. Doctors are qualifying, not able to earn enough in the early days because they don't even know a skill note patient-based. Some of them are buying franchises, they're landing up going into other professions because they're saying it's just too hard, too long. So, one, you can't just remove doctors once they qualify, no matter the level, especially at the lower level, right? When you walk in, and I feel it, and the the reason I feel it is I've been responsible for many people's lives from a financial point of view. I can imagine from a healthcare point of view, just going, you know, I do something wrong, this person dies. I do something wrong, it depilitates them for life. I make a wrong judgment call. You know, there's I watch there's there's things where they're saying, oh, you overdire, you're over-treating, you're overdiagnosing, or you know, you would potentially rather err to that than underdoing something, and something happens to a patient. Don't pick up cancer, don't pick up diabetes, don't pick up. So the I think doctors go through it, and the longer they're in the profession, the more they realize the impact of their decision.

SPEAKER_01 57:43

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 57:43

So they'll end up being more calculated, more risk averse to make sure that what they are doing is the best. But they also don't want to make a judgment call every time, right? So you don't want to sit in front of eight people a day because you don't have that mental capacity to make a judgment call eight times a day, five days a week, 200 odd days a year that you're working. So they put a system in place that in their head that goes, This is the best system I have that I can work with that will produce the best result for the volume of patients I'm going to see. And once that's in, it's very hard for the average human to break apart and learn on something that's already working for them.

SPEAKER_05 58:22

So is it easier to sell tech to big corporates or tier a liners to dentists? Um was it just the same thing, no difference?

SPEAKER_00 58:31

No, there is a difference. One one tech to big corporates, or in general, when you're running a business. I've got other businesses where we still sell tech. Um, I have a restaurant hospitality business, I have a leadership and training business. The the leadership and training business is very enjoyable because it gives transformation. Selling aligners and now we're doing 3D printed teeth and a whole bunch of things to dentists, where it's fulfilling is you're lowering the cost to a patient. Right? You're giving the doctor an additional revenue stream. And just the way I am, spending time with them, watching them grow, and the fulfillment you get from that is is much deeper. Tech every three years, it's going to change. So you're under that same pressure. Bank can't go down, IT systems can't go down, internet banking can't go down, insurance companies can't not send you your premiums, not pay you out. But that churn goes every three to five years. But there's never any acknowledgement of like shit, you've done a good job, like this is how many people you've helped, because it's just this in the dental space and the doctors, and I've worked with a few doctors as well, too, outside of dental. Is that tangible result, that feeling when when you get a phone call and say, shit, this helped me so much? Or you know, my practice has gone from doing this amount of money to that amount of money, or in some of the the leadership stuff, they're like, Wow, I moved from this type of person to this type of person. I'm less insecure, I've got less guilt, I have balanced my work life family, I understand this process uh unlocks me. It's it's a lot more fulfilling, and that's the reasons I'm in it so deeply, and I haven't pivoted out of out of healthcare yet.

SPEAKER_05 1:00:09

So, how'd you meet this cousin of mine, speaking of dentists, difficult dentists? Through you. Yeah. I actually can't remember how that happened.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:16

So I I can actually remember very clearly, even after you gave us an opinion piece, I kind of enjoyed your company. So I still used to phone you.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:23

How are you going? What's happening? And you said, Elton, you'll really enjoy my cousin Yak. You guys will get along. And um, I thought, okay, look, I like Yesh, but doesn't mean I'm gonna like his cousin. And it was about wow, it probably took me 60 days to phone him.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:40

Six euros.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:41

Yeah, well, about two months. Well, I was still getting to know Yesh. I was enjoying it, I was like, this guy's a dentist that is now a lawyer, across two professions, giving me an opinion piece. Like it's it's it's it's a rare human, especially medical, right? And in in having the legal side, on the legal front, you have the medical background now. I was like, that's that's cool. So I was for the record.

SPEAKER_05 1:01:02

I never actually ended up giving you that opinion piece because I left the firm by the time it was finalized.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:06

But we did get one. You done a lot of the backwork for the for the opinion piece.

SPEAKER_05 1:01:09

What was that opinion, by the way? If I can just ask.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:12

It was about how do we open an alignment.

SPEAKER_05 1:01:16

Was it like a yes or no?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:19

I I can't say anything. So it was how we legally opened an aligner company in South Africa with regards to the HPCSA, the Dental Technicians Council. How do you do that with and then provide employment scale skill in that space versus just opening off border and shipping it in as a product, which is easy? All the other companies were doing that. I was like, no, I want to open it in South Africa. But yeah, it took me about two months to phone Dr. Yak over here, and uh we had put up a facility for a doctor, and I phoned him and I said, This is what we're doing. And back then, not many doctors would actually come and be open to it. You were saying that they don't want change. And here came this Dr. Yak, not what I expected. What was the pitch? The pitch to him was we were opening what no, we've got a facility that we're doing aligners, this is what we're doing. And I got on with him. He said, I love technology, I love bringing new things into my practice, I love giving my patients what's actually the best available. He came through, he his accountant, I think, was his first ever one was a that he brought through, and he said, This is what I want to test. I don't just want to jump in. And we've just developed a friendship over five or six years to becoming, I don't have many best friends, but he's become one of my best friends in a very short period of time, five years. Uh that was one. So I do I do owe you one. I mean, I see him three, four times a week, if not more. I watched him go from a single room practice where his consulting chair and his surgery and everything was in one space to a staff complement of ten people and one of the best practices in the country.

SPEAKER_05 1:03:03

Are you also responsible for turning him into like this sexy beast that he is right now? Because Yak was never I don't know about it. Should I be quiet in and this a gorgeous?

SPEAKER_00 1:03:13

I have my version of I don't want to say my impact in his life of us spending time together. But I'd love to hear Yak's version of the guy that would pitch up and not want to train and make a face like us when we were starting to work out and he was more interested in the whiskey. Um, you know, he was happy with his single little practice before Elton going and said, Hey, do this, do this, do that. These are the ways you can do things. I'd love to hear his version.

SPEAKER_05 1:03:36

But yeah, thanks to you, I've developed No, I always say I should be in recruitment because I one of the things I just love doing, I don't know why, if it gives me such a kick, is like connecting people. I really love doing it. I don't know why. And then that's why I always brag to my family. Like, look at this relationship. It's all me. Thank you. I think it's a common denominator knowing both of you as well. It's a common denominator with the three of us. I don't think we like facilitating relationships and connecting people.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:08

If we know somebody can benefit from introducing them in their life or the place that they are, I think it is. We all three of us are built that way. So what's your story, yak?

SPEAKER_05 1:04:20

I I actually had to research it before this because I knew this question was coming. What like when when did I when did Elton and I actually meet? It was the 25th of February 2019. How did you know this question was coming, please? I just don't want our listeners and viewers. Obvious that you would ask this question. Yeah. Because I didn't we didn't circulate notes and things. This is genuine. Yeah, this is all organic. So it has come in. Yeah, no, definitely. Um what date? 2019, 25th of uh February. Elton pinged their messages like, uh, when can we meet this week? And then I said, No, I'm free, I'm ready, I'm free to meet anytime. Even if I'm not free, I'll say I am. And uh I think it was later on in that week that we actually did meet. I came through to Eastgate and I was overwhelmed to be honest, because I thought it was just gonna be, you know, like a dental practice. And I mean, what we know from dental practices are quite clinical, but active aligners at that stage and Smile Club were pushing the boundaries of what dentistry was all about, besides the aligners and the technology that was coming in, it did not feel like a practice, it did not look like a practice, it was sober spoke. And I was like, wow, this is really cool. And I got to meet everyone, I think, besides you, because you were not there, you were out in a meeting, and I thought, wow, everyone here was actually pretty cool. And this guy brought all of these people together, so he's probably uh pretty cool. But to remember the finer details of our actual meeting, no, I don't. That's and I think that's part and parcel of relationships that you you build that doesn't have a time frame. And it's kind of like transpires life, if you want to call it. You don't remember the granular details because it's just so organic. So was Elton the guy that influenced you to get into working out on things? But genuine, and a lot of people don't know this, but you were skinny. Yeah, I was athletic. No, you're quite athletic. Like you're not known for your physique. And he is he is it's an Elton to visit for the first day of lockdown. Yeah, Elton calls me. This is now our established relationship. He calls me and he's like, okay, we need to, we we're not going to gym, so we're gonna need to um like build a gym at at Elton's house. So he goes off and he buys like this the high-end thing. If I had like the rack machine or whatever you call it, I don't even know the names anymore. I go to macro. And I ask asks the lady, like, where's all your gym stuff? And there's like a sandbag there. But there's only a 12 kg sandbag left. And I couldn't even pick that thing up to put it in the trolley. She had to help me. Um but yeah, it's uh Alton's played a big role in in not just um, you know, my physique and wellness and my interpretation of relationships um and on all spheres and life, but he's he's quite a person that will put you out of your comfort zone. Okay, he will intentionally be the antagonist in order for you to further understand situations, not from your own biased perspective or the knowledge that you have, even if he doesn't have the knowledge, but he will purposefully try and get you to understand the situation from from anybody else's uh walk of life. And I know there's a person behind the camera, um, Kiara, listening as well, he'd concur with me because we had this discussion just the other day about Elton. Like he he will purposefully be the antagonist, not for the sake of just disagreeing with you, but to get you to understand that sometimes there's a bigger picture, and you can't always just bring emotion to every situation. Okay, so he opens up different perspectives for you. Yeah, for me, it was putting me out of my comfort zone, yeah, okay, definitely from weights to a bit of an ambush question for Elton here, because I just started doing Elton's course on MetaU. And one of the first few modules that I'm on, Elton, you mentioned there's a thing that when people engage with one another, one of the first things in their mind is W I F M. Right? What's in it for me? Now, this might be an unfair question, but I I'm I'm I'm genuinely asking when you're engaging with people like Yak and my cousin and stuff, but we what's in it for you? What inspires you to say, let me let me show this guy how to work out, let me show him to transform himself.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:46

Is it just love it or it's it's indirectly selfish but not selfish?

SPEAKER_05 1:08:52

Yeah, unpack, please.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:53

So so the background I come from, you're not accepted in many places. And Yak is one of the few individuals that the way he shows up for people that he loves is I've almost never seen. I've got two or three friends like that. So to have him in my life, I mean, I've gone through some stuff business-wise, through COVID. Uh he's very close to my son, my wife. The way he shows up for people he cares about, and it's not small things, he doesn't show up with like a small thing here. It's the big things in your life that he seems to understand, and I never want to lose that. So for me, that's that's what's in it for me. If you're asking about my friendship with Yak, is is the way he shows up. And it doesn't, he doesn't just do it for that person, he'll do it for anybody that person loves. I get a bit emotional because it's rare, right? But he'll do that for people I care about and and that loyalty is because I hope I do the same. You know, if if if I had somebody I love, I show up for them in the same way. That for me is is extremely rare, and that's what's in it for me, to have a person like that that I can say is my friend.

SPEAKER_05 1:09:56

Yeah, that's that's beautiful. I mean, I can totally relate to that. The funny thing is, I've never met a person that doesn't like Yak. I don't know why he just gets along with people, and it's not I'm not trying to say that he's one of those people pleaser types. Because I know that there's people that think he's irritating as hell, right? But I'll let you know later off can. Give me names. But there's something about the guy. If it's uh and I just again, I'm gonna pause and take credit, but I knew you guys would hit it off. And I've said said this about people to other people. Just maybe I must get into recruitment. Okay, but that's fine. I think we've belabored the point too much. Yak, any questions for Elton or before we move on to the next? Oh no, it will come. It'll come. Yeah, you still just asking in the those. I'm also I'm also um I'm also emotional at the moment. I'm trying to hold myself so I got the tip. But watch if you do these things, yeah. What people-pleasing tendencies. No, I didn't say it's people pleasing, and and and I genuinely don't feel like it's a people-pleasing thing. Where do you think it comes from? And just being that kind of connection. No idea. Probably growing up in a farm in Ginglovo, this a family inside joke because they don't believe that I grew up in in isolation in Tinley Manor. Uh but I did. I didn't have like um sort of like formative social relationships as as a young, as a younger child. It was just my sister, myself, my grandparents, and we did grow up on the farm like quite a bit in Gingislovu. So I think my understanding of relationships, it was it only came into maturity later on in life in in Peter Merritt's bug, and it was a bit more mature at that stage. So I think not interacting with kids at a like too much of a younger age probably played a little bit of a delayed um what do you call it, development of an emotional quotient than than other people.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:59

I mean, there was family at the time. It's weird. I think you have a higher emotional quotient than other people.

SPEAKER_05 1:12:04

Oh, that's what I'm saying.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:05

Because yours is way higher, you're way more sensitive to how other people are doing and feeling than most people.

SPEAKER_05 1:12:14

I do agree. It does come with it's put forward. But isn't it cool how people two people from two different backgrounds, right? Because Yak was the first guest on the show, so people will appreciate his background. And he just mentioned it a bit earlier about relative privilege, relative sheltering as we grew up. You totally different background. But let's move on now. This meta you thing. Where does this do you just get bored of the teeth, or you just is it another how does it come out? How was it born? How was Meta You born?

SPEAKER_00 1:12:49

Yeah. So it was about five years ago, one of the CEOs that I that I had to report to asked me to come chat to his team. And I said, Why do you want me to come chat to your team? He said, Because no, you motivate, you inspire, you give knowledge, you give wisdom. And I was like, I don't know how to do this, I don't know how to run a company. And um he sent me another WhatsApp, he says, I need the favor. So I said, Okay. And he was running, he's running another large tech business. So I sat down and I put a PowerPoint presentation together of a few key things, and I pitched up there with my notebook. There's an entire executive team. I'm normal I'm used to dealing with execs, but I'm like, what is it that he was actually struggling for? And he was struggling to motivate them to enjoy selling and driving a number. So all I done was I actually told my story. I said, This is why I went after Standard Bank, this is why I done certain things, these things change your life. You know, if you go look at how you develop, would you rather be in charge of your development or it forced on you because the world's changing? And I gave a whole hour chat, and after that chat, the exec team and the the senior sales team came past me and said, Jeez, I wish I got to work for somebody like you. I said, Well, you do, you work for for Rob. And Rob phoned me and he said, Thanks so much. And he said, Also, you should charge people a fortune for this. I said, Rob, I spoke shit. He's like, No, what you have is intellectual property. You you've done this, you've built huge things. And um, a friend of mine sort of wanted out of his large tech business, and I said, No, I don't want to be in another tech business at that level. So I promised him, I said, what we'll do is we'll make a deal. There'll only be one chief. So if I say yes, you walk away from your business, but I won't run the business. I'll put a leadership team in and I will groom and develop that leadership team very quickly, but from one within the business. And the time between that happening, I sat down and I thought, if Robert's saying that this is possible, I started doing a lot of pricing, understanding pricing, and I put down a framework, and that framework landed up being 385 points. I was like, if people know this, it's what they've never taught, from self-mastery to how money's made, to how business works, to how you think about problems, how you think about yourself, how you interact, why people don't get on with you. And I was like, wow, 385 points is too big. And I sat with this huge whiteboard just full of words, and I said, okay, what is the most, what are the most important things a human needs to know? And I was able to strip out about 200 things that are nice to know, but they aren't the key framework that helps a human move forward. And the the first step to helping a human move forward is understanding of self. Once you understand yourself, and then you understand how to interact with other people, you start understanding how to grow towards something. You then understand how money is made in a career, you then understand how money's made in a business, then you understand the environment that you in dictates how successful you're going to be. And if I can put that all into one course, it is 30 years of knowledge. And when I was running, I still to this day when I run companies, I buy courses all the time. I spent fortunes on my own knowledge and my team's knowledge. For two years of the business, I had a psychologist in my business that just would sit around the entire business all the way down to the receptionist and say, you know, you're one of the most important people in the business. And the receptionists say, That's impossible. He says, Well, you're the first person a customer speaks to. You're the first experience of my business. So when you phone and say, Hey, Yak, how's it going? Because you can see on CLI, Alton's just busy, I'll get it. That is customer service. Down to the driver's interaction of handing over, down to the engineer in the data center. And I'd unpack all of that. And when I landed up with 180 topics, I thought, okay, what how do I benchmark that if this as a course would work? So I phoned a few execs that I knew and a few friends, and I said, here's a price point. It was a thousand dollars I was pricing at the time. And they said, Alton, are you smoking your socks for a one-day course? I said, Come and uh tell me afterwards. After the course, the feedback I got, and I the people I invited were highly critical. So if you're overcharging, they would have they would have really told me. I had a CFO of a 7 billion euro business attend, and they were like, if I could have had this any time in my career, it would have sped up so much. People came back and the feedback was so positive, they said this is actually a bargain because you can't get this knowledge even walking through life. You can't, you've distilled the most important things. And then when I was labeling it, I was during COVID, we had um quite a hard lockdown. And a lot of the online gaming I was playing, they used this word meta, meta. And I was like, okay, meta stands for the most effective tactics available. And that's when I branded the course. And I was like, anybody that should start with this, that it should change their life within a day.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:56

And it's changed. I I'd say my success rate's like 96%. There's four, you're gonna get four percent. People don't want to change. You can ignore what you know, but you can't unknow it. So when you do want to switch it on, that knowledge lasts forever. And you can always refer back to it. It comes with a booklet, it's on, we've digitized it now, so now we offer it for $300. I've just just just got it CPD accredited, so for eight ethics points.

SPEAKER_05 1:18:19

Okay, so this is it can be applicable to medics and things like that. Oh, because I'm just thinking execs and if I can answer that on your behalf, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:28

If I can just pause that, yeah, it's been almost through the course, just been in proximity to me and the things that I've done. He's actually come to the course twice.

SPEAKER_05 1:18:35

Okay, and this is what uh like I wanted to touch on. There's something you told me a long time ago. If you're good at something, charge for it. And it's not that you know, this is for me something that you is a sort of chargeable skill or something that you want to make money off. But I would notice, especially when we'd go out to like concerts or shows or listen to music or just for lunch or whatever it is, there'd be a lot of people approaching you to ask you for your advice in their sphere of life, whether it was relationships or business or cars or sound or whatever it is, but you'd have this knowledge, you'd have this ability to impart some form of higher learning that would get them to where they needed to be, no matter what it was. And what I took from it was it was all translatable. What you were saying about relationships was the same thing almost that would be applicable to a business, kinda very similar. This was my understanding of it, and this is why I think like when I when I did the course, the translation that makes it successful is the same core values that you can apply to dentistry, that you can apply to um a medical practice, or you can apply to a relationship, or you can apply to basically anything that you can or you want to see yourself being better at. Yeah, well, clearly, I mean, if it's CPD point approved, then clearly it has application in the healthcare industry.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:12

So, how the CPD approval came about, well, I suppose let's start in the beginning. I ran a few courses, right? And every single course was sold out. And then I paused for a full year. I put a lot of effort into the tech business and I put a lot of effort into the active aligner business. And during that year, people started emailing saying, My husband's changed, I need to come on your course. My business partner's changed, I need to come on your course. And physically in person, it used to be in person before we Kieran decided to digitize it and we started scaling it. And I was like, okay, there's a demand for it. So I put out an email and I said, look, these are the people that have attended. I'm thinking of running a second one, and two days later the course was full. I genuinely restricted it to 20 people, but the last one we ran, I had 30 people attend. I was actually oversubscribed. And I made an exception to allow the hall to be a little bit bigger, and we filmed it at the same time to bring it into what you you see now in the digital space. Um, and then I was sitting with it and we're selling courses, people are buying it, it's changing lives. And I was sitting there the one day and I was like, doctors struggle with a whole bunch of things. Um I actually wrote it down on the board. And I said, okay, if what are the top hundred challenges doctors face? And it gave, and I said, do not give me any information that's not research-backed. And it gave me over a hundred issues and problems that a doctor faces. And I said, okay, that's too much. Anything that is similar, combine, anything that's not needed, that that is taken care of in a clinical curriculum, remove. And I landed up with the top 50 issues that doctors face. I said, take that and put it into buckets that you can segment where doctors struggle with. And then it came out with things, what was it? Mental health and emotion, um, career and professional clarity, business and financial pressures, personal growth and fulfillment, communication boundaries, relationships, patient issues. So I bucketed it into that and I said, Kieran, this can help doctors that are there's no self-mastery when you become a doctor. There's no boundaries. You attach to a patient, you're stuck in the same environment, you're subject to your peers. Nobody teaches you about money, how to grow a career. Because once you get that degree, you kind of this is who you are. Your identity is attached to this. So I sat with AI for a long time and I put those things into buckets and I said, What does the meta you course fix for doctors? And it fixed over 85% of the challenges they had. And I was like, wow. So if that is from a point of view outside of clinical, that doctors understand career path themselves, that it's okay to make a change, why are they stuck in certain ways? How do they relate? How do they create boundaries? How do they learn about money? How do they learn how to run a practice? How do you learn how to be in a practice with other people you're stuck with five days a week?

unknown 1:22:57

Right?

SPEAKER_00 1:22:57

And that becomes a real challenge because you become a product of your environment. How do you help people understand, change your environment, be better in the same environment? And um I thought, okay, would this qualify? And I sent it through. And the reason why we went with the South African Medical Association is they have one of the most rigid CPD accreditation submissions summer, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:19

And they came back and they said, This is incredible, eight ethics points. I was like, wow.

SPEAKER_03 1:23:24

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:25

Eight ethics points for a single course. Wow. So I was like, that's how even they would have seen it. And I think Kieran done the submission. It was a hectic submission. And we had to put down what this addresses. And if I looked at if I'm pushing it and I'm getting normal people and businessmen, entrepreneurs, leaders to excel from my course, I was like, why is that not in the doctor and healthcare space? And I, through running the course, I probably had about 40 doctors in total come. I've had doctors fly from all over the world come and do the course. I've had Dan, he's now doing it in the UK. He's taken it into his son. And he's like, wow, there's this this we never get experience or exposure to this. And if I have to go and try and find it, it's almost impossible because it's in 180 different locations of information. And that's why I thought, okay, how do I take that now and dedicate to a doctor focus of saying, here's a roadmap when you're stuck, or when you want to personally develop, or you want to grow your career, or open more practices. And that that foundation is why I decided let's go with SAMA and go for one of the most rigid CPD accreditations. You've had CPD accreditation done as well.

SPEAKER_05 1:24:34

And I think just recently you mentioned in one of your articles that, well, HPCSA are cracking down on that regulation. So that's why I'm surprised pleasantly that you can get eight C eight ethical points from one single course. Normally, ethical points are quite hard to come by. You get one here, maximum two here, and it's very scarce.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:57

We haven't started marketing it. So although you'll see through my socials and a couple of the posts in spreading education, we haven't tried to sell the course yet. So although the course is live, people can buy it right now. When we're mainly focusing on corporate and individuals, I need to put a comprehensive offering video sales letter, and in the next two, three weeks we'll go out to doctors and saying, here's what it addresses, here's how it works.

SPEAKER_05 1:25:21

Um we'll have to put a link in the description.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:24

And I'm hoping the ethics points are a plus, not a reason.

unknown 1:25:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:28

That when when doctors watch the video and they're saying, Wow, this is what it addresses in my life. Like, here's I I'm struggling from burnout, there's anxiety, depression. Yak and I are both speaking at a at a health and wellness getaway for doctors. And it's some of the biggest topics of like depression, suicidal boundaries, um, lack of identity. And I was like, this is some of the things it'll fix, and then it'll still teach you how money's made. How do you develop a career? So if you're at this stage, how do you become the best in that, if you want to be?

SPEAKER_05 1:25:56

Yeah, eventually I think the word of mouth marketing will be the one that gets you over there because there's always going to be those doctors. I'm one of them included sometimes. Then you sign into a webinar, you log in because you need the points. But you switch off. Yeah. And and and trust me, I know a lot of people just log in, go to the dinner, the dishes, whatever, and get the point at the end of the day.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:18

So I suppose that's important to mention that because I'm not looking to try and change or help people that I want to be helped. Yeah. You know, from good to great is way easier than from battling in victim mode to trying to help somebody just get to a little bit of an achievement state. And why I focus on the on the upper echelon is because once other people see them transform, the low performers go and say, Oh wow, this is possible. That's when they start moving, by when you show progress, when Yak shows progress. And they're like, Wow, I didn't know this, and they say, Hey, there it is, there's the roadmap, start. But to take somebody that doesn't want to start, it's not my target market. My target market are people that are like understand where they are and saying, I want to be better, or I'm stuck, I know there's there's more for me. I don't want to try and move people that are almost immovable.

SPEAKER_05 1:27:07

So, this meta you thing now, is it the new standard bag pursuit for viewers?

SPEAKER_00 1:27:12

Or no, it's my passion project. Is it the bad passion? It's my whole life. Every business I've run, and even I think my my family feel it the most. If I love you and I'm passionate about something, it's people, passion, profit. Yeah, best people, well skilled, passionate about what they do, you make a profit. And the people component of it, understanding or a person knowing they can control the rest of their life is so empowering. And I've seen it with so many people I've been a part of. That for me is fulfilling. Seeing people achieve things they thought were never possible. And it can be a general human. I get I still get messages to this day of saying, Hey, I worked with you for two years, and this is how you've helped me. That that's it's the most fulfilling thing. Even though we sell the Course that it that it's a sold-for course, production studios, marketing, ads, all it cost a fortune. It's not just profitable. You gotta run Facebook ads, you've got to build entire websites, there's an entire LMS platform behind it. You've got to pay for CPD accreditation. So it's it's purely passion. The doctor market was just explaining to doctors what it is. But another reason I put some of the stuff together when when Rob first started was I was tired of Peep having to listen to people that were confident but not competent.

SPEAKER_05 1:28:32

Right, right. I love that. I love that. I just always talk about overconfidence and undercompetence.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:37

And I'd have to watch lectures and people, and I'm like, wow, this person's read something and is regurgitating it. And when they get questioned, there's no depth to it. That they just it's rinse and repeat. I was like, that doesn't, I can't that's one of my biggest fears, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:28:53

Like I when I first started doing like, you know, I do CPD talks and things like that. But I started even before that when I joined Norton Rose, and you know, the directors, you you're kind of forced to do public speaking, even if though you don't want it. And the biggest fear of mine was that I'm gonna be in a room full of people that know more about the topic than I do, and they're gonna see right through it. Um so it's weird that you just I don't know why I'm thinking about that, but it's just I hate it. Do you still feel that way though? No, no, I I'm so comfortable in what I do. Um, but there are there will inevitably be times where I have to talk about something where I have to research, read about it, learn about it, and then I end up becoming the expert, just in preparing the talk or and and in business and self-mastery, and that it's even worse.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:37

So the doctor's still a small pool of your general population. Everybody's in business, everybody has a job. And I just you I'd get leadership, personal development people, and business coaches, and I was like, wow, the stuff you're talking, you you haven't even run a business, and you're telling people how to run a bit. And I get it, you need coaches for a lot of things. But when probed at depth and trying to put three things together, they couldn't. Yeah, they couldn't understand. You need a marketing arm, you need a sales arm, and then you need an ops arm. Just that understand. They were like, I don't know, focus on sales. I was like, but sales is just lead generation, converting the lead to some form of pipeline, warming them, then selling, and then you still need a whole team to deliver this. Somebody's got to go out, and then the sale is post because people either become a victim of your sale or a benefit of your sale. I was in places where I'd bought somebody's product and now I'm a victim of their service. Don't phone back, can't get things fixed. I was like, that's that's part of a sales process because you're either going to be referred or not referred. So I was I just got tired of people that were happy to stand on stage that were confident but not competent.

SPEAKER_05 1:30:43

Is there anything that actually stresses you out, like anything you don't enjoy doing? You're such a high-performing type that's like positive and upbeat. Sometimes I'm I'm sure some people might actually be irritated by your type of optimism.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:56

I'm sure they do out my family. Yak will feel it sometimes. I'm sure he sits in spaces where he's like, let's just be morbid. But he's also extremely upbeat. Nothing bothers him either. Uh, there's no point. If it if it does, it hits us, and you you realize just do what you can. Yeah, cut it out. Um, but there is, I mean, when when it comes to your loved ones, when it comes to your family, when you're trying to solve a really big problem, of course it stresses you out, you worry about it. But I I try not to express it. So the best way I can explain it is just because I carry it well does not mean I don't feel it. But I don't want to express any frustration or struggle I may be going through because it's mine, not yours. But when people walk into a room and I and I walk in like this, I'm like, yeah, shit, it's so terrible. Yeah, I'm bringing everybody's energy down because I'm in a shit space. That's not fair either.

SPEAKER_05 1:31:47

So who do you open up to? I mean, what's your outlet?

SPEAKER_00 1:31:51

Yeah, Kieran, my wife, my son, my dad, but it's not an outlet of pouring and putting my problems on them. You know, in general, if I've got a really big problem, I go look for a specialist.

SPEAKER_01 1:32:02

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:02

I'm like, here's what we need to unpack. So I'm not going to go home from a day's work of frustration and go to my wife to try and seek a solution or take it out on her. I'll be like, who knows the best way to fix this process? I'll phone them and I'll sit with them and I'll be like, this is a stuff up, this needs to be done, and they'll help me through it. So people feel it, but I don't go to people that shouldn't feel it.

SPEAKER_03 1:32:24

I get you.

SPEAKER_05 1:32:25

And I think one, if I can touch on that, the we joke about it a lot and we put it in the gym, but it's more so for gym motivation, but it translates very well into everything that we feel. And it's what we're feeling doesn't determine the way we act.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:42

Okay. So no, regardless of the way I feel, will not determine what I need to do. So we remove emotion from something you know you need to do.

SPEAKER_05 1:32:51

And this is something you've got to train yourself on. It's not doesn't just come naturally. I mean you've got to remind yourself.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:56

It's consistency, right? And it's dedication. But if you can have dedication, and yeah, can I he says we write it on the gym? So in in our home gym, there's a bore, there's a big mirror, and on the mirror we actually write things that we want to remember. And it says who needs motivation when you have dedication. So you don't need to motivate yourself and rile yourself up or what have you. You know, you just gotta go to the gym, you've got to finish a course.

SPEAKER_05 1:33:19

You gotta obviously beat motivation.

SPEAKER_00 1:33:21

So why do I even need to because the sit motivation is is the start of a positive emotion. Yeah, and that's okay to do, but when the emotion drops off, you stop doing something.

SPEAKER_03 1:33:31

Unmotivated.

SPEAKER_00 1:33:31

Yeah. But your health, your career, your fitness, your family, your responsibilities don't need motivation. They need you just to be dedicated and understand it needs to be done.

SPEAKER_05 1:33:43

That's fascinating. So, what do you do for fun?

SPEAKER_00 1:33:46

What do I do as work? What do I do for fun? I love partying. Yeah, I love music, I really love music and partying.

SPEAKER_05 1:33:52

Like what um partying, going to Ibiza and all that stuff for Ibiza, Vegas.

SPEAKER_00 1:33:57

We built our own nightclub in our house now. Yeah. So we have about 300 square meters worth of nightclubs DJ in there. Yeah, DJ Yak? No, it's dumb, it's Drake. He says it's D-R-Y-A-K.

SPEAKER_05 1:34:09

See, there's some things you need to cut out of this guy's uh, you know.

SPEAKER_00 1:34:13

I know you're a great insp inspiration and everything, but it's he opened KD's Palace, a couple of hundred people for a DJ set as a relatively new DJ. Okay. Well, that's because he knows they wanted me to come back, but I had a day job.

SPEAKER_05 1:34:25

Clearly because he knew a guy, so they shouldn't.

SPEAKER_00 1:34:27

I mean, he opened within a couple of months, he landed up opening.

SPEAKER_05 1:34:30

Were you responsible for his comedy career and all that stuff? Also, did you encourage him to go and I was like, Nah, I didn't, yeah, but I didn't know Elton then. Oh, yeah. This is before pre-Elt B E. B E E.

SPEAKER_00 1:34:45

So, from your your point of view, yeah, um, moving off the course quickly, yeah. A question on your life how do you go from a dentist to a lawyer, then to a medico-legal, D-risk health profession, helping health professionals through three different spheres? What goes through your mind being able to change career paths so easily?

SPEAKER_05 1:35:09

But can I can I even take a step back like before that? Because we never got to ask him this question at any of our podcasts. But why did you choose dentistry in the first place? What got you into dentistry? You're not gonna get a long answer on this short. Okay, sure. Because I just didn't know what on earth I wanted to do. And because he had great uh uh academic results and metric, he could have done whatever he wanted to do. And my old man said, actually, well, it's not the typical Asian Indian dad that says you must go and do X, Y, and Dad. My old man said, Go, why don't you go play cricket um in the UK? Because I was quite into cricket, I've made Natal and all that stuff as a schoolboy. But I just didn't know what I wanted to do, and I went with the flow, and it took me years to figure it out eventually. And even when I was making the changes, the only reason I made the changes is because I had a support system. So it's nothing fancy and nothing interesting. But um, yeah, I just didn't know what I wanted to do. That's why I'm always fascinated by and I always dig into those questions like I was asking you about being a natural entrepreneur and things. I'm always fascinated by what shapes a person's choices as they grow up. And also I love to hear when people tell me they had absolutely no clue until very late or you know, whatever. So, because it just sort of reaffirms my upbringing almost. But yeah. You didn't answer the question though. I didn't no, the question is I didn't know what I wanted to do. I just did, I went with the flow. No, why do you change from No no, I I mean I blame Twitter. It's very weird, but um so dentistry, I knew, I mean, I hated it. I knew it wasn't gonna be something I'm gonna do the rest of my life. I always wanted to do law, but I thought it's not a safe option because it's such a saturated field. So I went into something that I thought was safe based on the marks I got. And after I started working, if not definitely I don't want to be a dentist. And I used to always like play on Twitter and read things and follow people, random people. And what I would find myself doing late at night on Twitter is reading judgments that people I used to follow lots of journalists, legal journalists and things like that. And they would tweet about this recent case that came out, and I'd find myself sitting and reading like a 15-16-page judgment at like one in the morning. What am I doing here? Maybe I actually do enjoy this kind of thing. And then that's when I said, you know what, screw it. Let me change. But it was only doable because I knew I could do it with the support of family and wife and things like that. I'm pretty sure my s story and my situation is not as unique one, and there must be tons of dentists out there that wish they could have changed like one year after starting to practice. But they just hadn't have enough support. No, they have, yeah, you have responsibilities when you're at that stage. After five years in paucity, lots of people have loans, people have families to take care of. So my story is not very now.

SPEAKER_00 1:38:09

I'll have you on I'll have you on my podcast. I find I've got some like in-depth questions there to help people try and process things because comes from somewhere. You don't need necessarily support to change direction. You just need belief, and you've obviously got a belief in yourself that's deep that you can tackle different hard things because not one of the things that you chose to tackle was easy. Yeah, right? Dentistry, five-year doctorate degree, uh, lawyer, what's the lawyer's period now?

SPEAKER_05 1:38:35

Four years minimum.

SPEAKER_00 1:38:36

Four years, then landing up in one of the largest firms that anybody would want to be a part of, to leaving that then now to go on the other side to it's it's they're hard things that you seem to do easily.

SPEAKER_05 1:38:48

Well, if you if you're gonna put it that way and make me sound so brilliant, then yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:38:53

Hard things. You got my cousins and I got a few lawyers, and I use a lot of lawyers.

SPEAKER_05 1:38:58

When they talk about me on your podcast, yeah. You say all those things.

SPEAKER_00 1:39:02

Yeah, they tell me what their life is like and what the world and what it was to pass and what they had to go, and it's obviously something you don't find difficult. So, how do you pass? How do we help other people get that mindset? Then even going, I've built a full ability to earn good money as a dentist, to be a good lawyer, going, oh no, I'm going to pivot again to that's that's not a mindset easy to come by.

SPEAKER_05 1:39:24

Well, you you're slowly, slowly getting me to think about coming on your podcast because I hate talking about myself, man, like as the the guest. But I feel like we can go on for like hours and hours and hours. Um, and the guy behind the camera is telling us we need to cut shortly. No, he's just telling us that there's five minutes left on one. Yeah, five minutes gets the memory card. Yeah. So we but there's always there can always be a part two. How long have we been chatting for? We've been chatting for like what two hours now almost. So I wanna know. What did it feel like?

SPEAKER_00 1:39:52

It felt quick. Yeah. It it felt quick.

SPEAKER_05 1:39:55

So I'm gonna put links to maybe use course on that in the description. We'll probably have a part two sometime soon. You know, or maybe in ten years' time or whatever. But you know, you're not gonna let um you know.

SPEAKER_00 1:40:08

Well, part two can be on my podcast. So I've got we've got two. So we've got the most effective podcast, right, which is Alton Lau hosting the most effective and and getting that across. And then I've got the small club podcast launching.

SPEAKER_03 1:40:19

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:40:20

And that's just within the doctor space, all different types of doctors and industry leaders, because nobody's sharing what's going on in each space. Hearing from a head of a dental supply company, hearing from the head of that, going through other doctors' journeys and and how do we help that provide that space?

SPEAKER_05 1:40:36

Oh, yeah. Well, Mr. Lau, it was it was a fascinating convo. I didn't expect any less. Uh we could have gone on for three, four hours and made it like a Lex Friedman type, but let's let's pause it for now and thanks so much.

SPEAKER_00 1:40:49

See if the guests went, uh if the audience went uh a part two.

SPEAKER_05 1:40:52

Yeah. I don't know. My opinion, I think that we haven't touched even the tip of the iceberg. There's so much we all I wanted to ask you, yeah, like Dubai, and you know, there's so much coming. And it's nice to get an insight instantaneously, and then you know, two, three weeks when people are watching this and then they're like, oh, this guy is there now. Okay, let's you know, let's connect with him, let's see what he's doing there and you know what's happening in his life. But yeah, as I said, we always deliberating on what the guests want, but I think this is uh the viewers, yeah. Yeah, the viewers, but this is this is more organic for me in the sense that it's it's about us just general conversation between friends and family. That was fun, man.

SPEAKER_00 1:41:36

People that mean something.