1 rich Libsyn https://www.libsyn.com 90 600 Dr. Riley Uglum has been President of Eye Care Associates of New Hampton for the past 33 years. It is a highly systematized business that operates out of a modern facility and sets the standards for what an optometry practice should look and act like. It operates well beyond the realm of traditional practice management techniques by combining advanced financial strategies with systematic entrepreneurial wisdom.&amp;nbsp; Dr. Uglum is the founder and CEO of Promethean Ventures, a wealth creation/preservation company for private practice physicians. The company also specializes in implementing automated revenue growth systems for optometrists. He has co-authored a book titled, The E-Myth Optometrist with Michael E. Gerber and is a founding partner in Michael E. Gerber Companies.&amp;nbsp; Dr. Uglum is an Infusionsoft Certified Partner &amp;amp; Consultant and helps small businesses of all types implement automated marketing/workflow solutions. Dr. Uglum is also the executive director of the National Wellness Alliance, whose mission is to provide wellness and anti-aging solutions for the patients of private practice healthcare providers worldwide. Specialties: Medical Optometry, Strategic Consulting, Wealth Creation/Preservation, Entrepreneurial Coaching, Systems Automation, Marketing Automation, Fostering/Placing Service Dogs Full Transcript: welcome to the pharmacy leaders podcast with your host Tony Guerra the pharmacy leaders podcast is a member of the pharmacy podcast network with interviews and advice from building your professional network brand and a purposeful second income from students residents and innovative professionals well welcome to the pharmacy leaders podcast I'm Tony Guerra your host and today we have dr. Riley alum who has been president of I Care Associates of New Hampton for the past 33 years it's a highly systemized business that operates out of a modern facility sets the standards for what an optometric practice should look like and operates well beyond the realm of traditional practice management combining advanced financial strategies with systematic entrepreneurial wisdom dr. Uggla is the founder and CEO of Promethean ventures a wealth creation preservation company for private practice physicians the company also specializes in implementing an automatic revenue growth system for optometrists he co-authored the book titled the e-myth optometrist with Michael Gerber welcome to the pharmacy leaders podcast thank you Tony glad to be here oh great so I just wanted to start off with a question I asked everyone just to give people an idea of where you are and I gave some introduction but everyone's entrepreneurial Road is a little bit different I can tell us a little bit about yours and how you got to where you are today yeah basically where I'm at today is I can get up every day and be productive with things that I want to do the things that I have a passion for rather than having to show up as an employee and sometimes we think we own our own business but if we are the only owner or the only person that can do the professional work like a physician we take a vacation we quickly realize that we basically are a slave to the practice so what I've done and you know have coached other people to do is is move yourself from being that employee in a CIL's nest it doesn't matter what business it is and transition from working in the business is what we call it an e myths terminology to working on the business and I still work on my business even though I only see patients half a day a week I still make passive income from working on the business which is basically more lucrative at this stage then then working in the business which I still do a half a day a week and I get paid as an employee optometrist but now I can I can focus on on some of the passions that I have such as you know therapy dog work traveling things I don't get actually paid for but I'm making you know the passive income by properly structuring a business in an email format and and working on it instead of in it okay well often when somebody comes out of school they're looking for a job but the dream of entrepreneurship may already be in them we talked a little bit in the pre-chat that there's a way to maybe get a practice to somebody that doesn't have a ton of money coming out of school but certainly has the drive to succeed can you talk a little bit about transitions or how someone would transition to a practice that's already systematized like this yeah I'm actually doing that with with my young partner and it's kind of a complex formula but traditionally when we sell a practice we get it appraised and in enough time in the optometry world most practices most good practices are usually appraised at somewhere between 60 and 70 percent of the average of last three years gross gross earnings or receipts and really a practice should be based on the income it produces in the future so the way we've structured this is I get paid for selling half the practice over a 10-year period I get paid a percentage of what the practice continues to produce and that gives me a lot of incentive to work on the business yet instead of just you know taking off and traveling the world and saying here's the keys good luck so the some incentive for me to stay in the practice working on it doing some marketing things some admin things helping this partner do what I did because I get paid as a direct result of my my efforts there if he continues to grow the practice and is successful then I will continue to grow the amount that I'm getting paid for selling that practice he has incentive to do the same to grow the practice because as part of this formula you know he gets he gets money paid to him which he in turn takes part of and pays to me for buying the practice but he has a lot more left over and then there's some built-in safeguards and in the event that you know he comes and becomes a meth addict or whatever or if I become or I become enough okay safeguards built in so each of us can can get out of that agreement but you could talk to him I think he's he's extremely happy I'm extremely happy with the arrangement and we did not do an appraisal which oftentimes costs you know thirty thousand dollars to get an appraisal done we didn't do that because I'm gonna get paid based on what what the practice produces in the future well tell me a little bit about and I think this may have come from the e-myth but about generational passing on to generations so you know maybe in our will we have X number of dollars that go to our children but in terms of a business I think the numbers are 50% it makes it to the next generation then only 10% to the third before it but it sounds like with what you're doing and the way you're doing it it's much more likely that next generation would not only be able to take over the practice but also continue to succeed and then give it to the generation after that and the generation after that can you talk a little bit about giving or keeping a family business within the family well my piece you know both my kids elected well my daughter's actually an oncology pharmacist in Minneapolis she chose not to take the optometry route so she actually can't get into the optometry business you have to be an optometrist okay my son's the practice manager so he's part of the practice but he won't be able to practice as a doctor now he could get into the consulting site if he wanted to something like that but in a profession like mine you do actually have to have a license but we do we do teach people how to do a personal banking system which has also been you know a huge part of where I'm at right now and it's called the infinite banking concept maybe you've heard of it maybe you haven't and it seems a little bit out there but the guy that taught this to me you know 10 12 years ago that's had a huge effect on my life and a part of Promethean ventures that's we train people to do that type of strategy too so that will that is generational and and you go well for example my kids I my children pay me the mortgage on their homes I own their homes and they basically pay me the mortgage and they're paying actually a higher interest than they would at the bank however when I'm gone they will get all of that back because it's paid into into a system a banking system that we own personally rather than financing through traditional banks and losing all the interests to someone else so that that's extremely generational and how we do that okay well you I think you talked about this quite a bit in the book where you actually started creating companies to avoid paying other companies and losing on the tax side and things like that but you don't necessarily have an accounting background how did that happen or how did you gain that savvy because many people read books about these things but but how did you start this kind of I don't want to say maybe it's taxes maybe it's just intelligence maybe it's just the way it's set up but the United States is set up for these things to happen too if you do it right but how did you become proficient at this Jim Rohn who's probably the father of all personal development guys you know Tony Robbins and and everyone but he has a saying yeah he has a lot of famous quotes but one of them is you will be the sum total of the five people that you hang around with most that's not his exact words but basically he's saying if you hang around with losers yeah it's hard it's gonna be hard to make something of yourself so I've just been fortunate to hang around with people that have already done these things so I did not create them but I remember when I first figured out some of it I was at I was just at a social event with a couple other guys from my hometown here who make a lot of money and you know they owned companies and they they make way more money than I do but I was kind of complaining and the taxes first time you know I made some decent money in optometry and I had a huge tax bill and I was kind of complaining about that figuring they would chime in too because they obviously paid a lot more taxes than me but they they were just not saying a whole lot and I finally just looked at my said I'm paying more taxes than you are and I I mean it's not funny but it's it's funny yeah that's what I realized okay they're doing something I'm not and I need to find out what that is and so yeah I'm not a CPA I'm not an accountant but I've been fortunate enough to be around people who were pretty astute at doing these things and I just learned from them I'm just kind of like a sponge okay well tell me a little bit about choosing New Hampton Iowa I'm also in Iowa now I've only been here ten years so people look at me like oh you're you know you're not from here or whatever but I bought the t-shirt says Iowa it's got home on it I didn't say trapped or captive or anything like that you know but we you know we look at these kind of celebrity chef shows and we see that you know there's this Scandinavian chef in the middle of you know the rural area and Scandinavia and they're you know have this great restaurant you know charging 300 a plate for 12 people and they're full first you know six months out how do you make a practice succeed in what is probably not a very large metro well I I've always looked at that as an advantage you know we're we're the biggest fish in the Pond and we've had other small towns come to us and say you know could you do a clinic in our town like you know a half a day a week or one day a week and we've always turned them down and we built a facility we have a lot of cutting-edge equipment part of this banking concept allows you you to to purchase equipment that a lot of other practices don't have and so we it was kind of like the Field of Dreams concept we said let's build this and they have okay yeah and that's basically what's happened so now the people from the other small town we have people that will drive 20 30 miles to see us because they love the care that we provide and in this one facility and I also don't have ophthalmology practices nearby so we can do a lot of medical optometry that that people would if you're in a city they're probably gonna go to an eye surgeon for a lot of this occur and we can do a lot of that right here in a small town they don't have to drag 30 40 50 miles to do that so the medical side of the practice has been a big part of our growth back in the day okay well tell me a little bit about being able to serve the underserved because it sounds like if you just happen to be in New Hampton Iowa you actually probably get some of the best primary care I work that you would in the state how does that you mentioned that you know other places want to replicate it but I guess if you are a practice in a smaller town what would be your first step to maybe getting towards the kind of systems where you could you know be a regional center I know that our 99 counties are still set by that you know courthouse in the middle of the county where you would you know take your horse to or whatever but but how would now with these other counties that are maybe underserved provides service for two three four counties well you just you have to be able to provide the services that a metro area would provide and and and there are set yourself apart from the other practices do things that they're not doing you know we recently put in a dry ice spa in our practice so we built the room it's like a like a massage room we have it we have a massage chair in there and we actually have an instrument that expresses the oil from the meibomian glands and the lids which is a very clinical thing but we do it in a setting it's more like going to a spa we have you know Roma therapy soft music playing in the background we accept people falling asleep why we do this for C Drive Wow no but nobody else is doing that okay or you just need to innovate like like Michael Gerber always said you find a need and fill it that that's how you become a successful entrepreneur don't just pick something you want to do or like to do or are good at necessarily when you got 50 other people doing the same thing in the area you know find a need and then fill it so yeah I guess that would be my advice for somebody you know going into a small town okay well let's talk about Michael Gerber and how did you guys meet or how did you guys connect just for the background I've listened to yours and the one by the veterinarian I believe is name last name is dr. Weinstein so though that's kind of what I have in my background but tell me a little bit about meeting the e-myth author yeah I I've always done mastermind groups without planetry and again it kind of goes back to that Jim Rohn principle you want to just hang with people who are doing what you which you want to do on a very high level you know one of these mastermind groups somebody was talking about email I've never heard of it and so I investigated and actually in Des Moines Iowa I don't know if it's still there or not but they actually have an email training center so we we signed up with their program and I didn't I have never met Michael Gerber at this point or never thought I would but he did what was called a dreaming room thing down in Flagstaff Arizona and it kind of intrigued me so we went down there for a few days with a few other entrepreneurs and he just teaches you how to maybe do and think of think of things in different ways as an entrepreneur and as a result of that and I signed up for some personal coaching with him and then that's how I actually got to know him on a small basis and became a friend that gives and then then he came to me with a with this book idea and he'd done one other book with what lawyers prior to that I think I was the second or third one that did the book but it was basically taking email concepts and then you know applying it to a specific vertical market okay yeah he calls it the vertical series I put in my two cents to see if I could write the pharmacist one we'll see how that works out but I hear that you get some kind of communication maybe a month later or something like that so we'll see we'll see how that works out and I wanted to take a piece of what you talked about in the book and you talked about adding a product which you don't necessarily think of because you had gotten to the point where you could and maybe you can explain it better than I that there's a certain level of antioxidants that you need to have for a good eye care and obviously as a country were aging and many people want to stop that aging certainly with eye care I have presbyopia you know I'm my I had to start using the cheaters three years ago went to the optometrist and then got my glasses and and so tell me a little bit about that that's to some people and say so you give people vitamins and I feel like it's it's much much more than that yeah well especially in in macular degeneration we were kind of ahead of our time when we did that and it wasn't really well accepted by our patients and in a small town Iowa we it seemed kind of out there for them but now I mean there's tons of studies that show we use omegas with lutein and zeaxanthin and in a supplement that we are going to be much better off you know from it from the standpoint of macular degeneration it it nourishes the macular cells and it's a preventive way eating right you know exercising you it doesn't matter whether it's macular degeneration or diabetes or cancer whatever but if we take better care of ourselves just like you know we buy a car and real and we change the oil at the right time and take care of it it's just gonna last a lot longer and it's it's a it's a concept that just makes sense to a lot of us that are health-oriented but and it's just I think it's just starting to make sense with with some of the people out there that are you know eating in McDonald's every day and and are overweight and and sitting in the recliners too much so it doesn't matter whether it's eye disease or heart disease or whatever we're just gonna be a lot better off when when you get to be my age then if you are not following those basic principles and then supplements are just maybe a little easier way to get the nutrition in there that you should have if you eat all the right things you probably don't even need the supplements but you know what what are the odds of that yeah I'm not that person that weight but three almost seven year olds I I tend to stress eat so I wouldn't hate the supplements for sure yeah well let's take it to a little bit of a different place where they've called loneliness the new smoking and as many people retire they kind of don't know what to do with their lives and yet they may be in a position like you are where they they have this money but the reward for having this money is not really having a lot of other people that have you know succeeded and they're still working so how do you spend time when you don't necessarily have so much passive income how do you structure a week or a day and and you could travel the world if you wanted to you've chosen not to but but tell us a little bit about your structure and what it looks like at the end which you know they say active retirement but I don't I don't necessarily think that word means what we think it does but maybe talk a little bit about what what it is to have that kind of passive income and to still be very fulfilled from what you're doing that's really good plan I think that's really important I think there's a lot of people right here in New Hampton Iowa that you know I see him I see him go into you know these guys that could they go to the coffee groups every day and talk about the same stuff and and I it's I read an article just the other day that that my Ben Hardy who was a great personal development guy but they've got studies that shows as long as your brain is learning new things all the time you're forming new synapses you don't age as fast and I've always just loved to learn new things so you know I've traveled and I've done I've done a lot of that stuff it's not not as attractive to me anymore I've been I've been more of it you know a bit on the selfie side as a taker focused on business making money that type of thing and now due to a series of things I realize I need to give something back to the planet so I'm passionate I do therapy dog work at Mayo Clinic I do a grief support group for the local church still active in the business and I'm not as not Tomic respite I want to see that business thrive I don't have time to go to coffee I can tell you and I'm doing things I'm passionate about so for me it's it's more service and volunteer stuff now and it just makes me feel good inside you know I've done I've done I've got stuff and I've done stuff and you do the stuff and then then what you look forward to that vacation you come home like okay now what so I think you just need to find something you're passionate about and if it's if it involves helping other people if just you learn new things and you hang around with different people and you form new synapses and you just need to stay a lot younger and more vibrant can you tell me about the therapy dogs I'm just not familiar with it yeah well I I started out well gosh seven eight years ago I was working with a service dog group I've always loved dogs and I've got a couple of my own and I I decided as part of my giving back I started helping them acquire dogs for their service dog program they they do dogs for PTSD service veterans for autistic kids diabetic detection dogs that type of thing and that's fulfilling work and in fact and Kathy and I even fostered a dog time you you do the basic training career and then you turn it over to them for the formal training and it went to an autistic child that was very fulfilling but what I realized is with therapy with service dogs you're training a dog to serve one person that has a special need with therapy dogs you take your own pet you put them through a training program that you can basically do yourself and that dog is designed to go out and spread the love amongst many people so we worked we've worked at Minneapolis Airport quite a bit in the past we work at Mayo Clinic care centers Hospice so I take I've got an 11 year-old golden doodle and who loves the work and right now we're pretty much focused on Mayo Clinic so we go up there a few times a month and we basically go around to hospital rooms and and like people up by letting them cut a dog and and we do a lot of therapy dog for the nurse nurses at the stations do they used to love to see these dogs come through hang on my kids would flip out they would absolutely love it well I've asked you a lot of questions there's I wanted to see if there's anything that you wanted to talk about that maybe I missed and maybe especially talking about interprofessionalism we're in in schools you know they try to put the physicians and nurses and pharmacists in this you know emergency case but it sounds like we could help each other as business people and then just community leaders as well so maybe you know talk a little bit about as a final note how can we work together as health practitioners rather than you know individuals who just happen to have our own shop yeah that's a good point Tony and it may be it's easier in a small town but I remember I used to you know I would write scripts for meds and and we get an unusual case in and so I would I would you know had back in the days we used the PDR and and we look at the internet and I I didn't want to look foolish when I phoned that prescription into the pharmacist and now also it's my my daughter became a pharmacist she's a dad why don't you just call and ask us you know that's all day long that oncology Doc's and they say what would happen if I combined this drug in this drug of that is that viable should I do that or not and I came to realize yeah you know so I do that now you know if I'm in doubt I just call up the pharmacy what do you think and I always in the pan pass you know was more like an island I got to know what I'm doing before I talk to somebody else and we do the same thing now with physicians you know become good friends with some of the the family practice guys here and and they can call me up they get a weird eye case in the ER and they can call me at Amen you know they'll send a picture on their iPhone or whatever wouldn't what do you think this is or whatever so there's just I think there's more collaboration maybe than there used to be but far eh I love you you pharmacy people I mean that is so complex there's so many new drugs you know you and I care that come out all the time and we go to lectures and some sometimes if I sleep through part of it I I wonder a little more about that drug and now I know I can just call up the local pharmacies and just ask them and I used to feel stupid doing that and you just can't know everything there's just too much to know now so we need to rely on each other yeah I twenty years ago when I graduated from pharmacy school the the options were limited and and the hospital pharmacist was often in the basement so I would just tell people hey you know what we're in the basement with no windows we really want you to call please call you know let me have some human contact and and I was probably the same way when my kids were first born you know it's they're like adult repellent until they get a certain age you know so but but uh okay well was there anything that maybe you wanted to say before we went off a need last word and maybe about a myth or anything like that you know I would say just enjoy the ride sometimes we get so caught up in running a business you know as an entrepreneur and we try and keep too many balls in the air and you know I've come to the point you know you just gotta you got to enjoy the process you know we're focused on goals and that's important but I think you just need to focus on the process and slow down a little bit sometimes it's it's a crazy world out there and it can just it can consume us I just yeah I pretty much I don't look at Facebook anymore my LinkedIn you know very little it's not that I'm anti-social but there's just too many things too many more important things to focus on and I could you know you can call down that Facebook rabbit hole pretty easy and next thing you know there's there's an hour to gone that you could have done something or enjoyed life a little bit more spend time with your kids grandkids whatever so I'm still working on that sometimes I still get consumed by the all the stuff out there and I am a shiny object person okay wait just just it yeah and just enjoy the ride sometimes alright well thanks so much for being on the pharmacy leaders podcast yeah thank you Tony it was good pleasure talking to you support for this episode comes from the audio book memorizing pharmacology a relaxed approach with over 9,000 sales in the United States United Kingdom and Australia it's the go-to resource to ease the pharmacology challenge available on audible iTunes and amazon.com in print ebook and audiobook thank you for listening to the pharmacy leaders podcast with your host Tony Guerra be sure to share the show with a hashtag hash pharmacy leaders Pharmacy Residency Podcast http://pharmacy.libsyn.com/ <iframe title="Libsyn Player" style="border: none" 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