Perrin DesPortes Of Polaris Healthcare Partners: 5 Things You Need To Create A Successful Career As A Dentist

As a part of our series about healthcare leaders, I had the pleasure of interviewing Perrin DesPortes.

Perrin DesPortes is a Co-Founder of Polaris Healthcare Partners. He has spent his entire professional career in dentistry. He has more than 25 years on the business side as a 4th generation family member of Thompson Dental Company, including 15 years as General Manager of Patterson Dental Supply 15 years where he ran three different business lines. Since 2017, he has applied this knowledge as a consultant, helping group dental practice owners and clinicians unlock potential and create generational wealth. He attended Washington & Lee University for undergrad and earned his MBA from the Darla Moore School of Business at the University of South Carolina. Perrin is happily married with one daughter. In his spare time, he is an avid cyclist and tennis player, enjoys cooking and reading, and loves good red wine and strong coffee.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! What is your “backstory”?

I grew up as 4th generation in a family-held, dental distribution business. Only about 3% of businesses make it to the 4th generation or beyond, and ours ended up being no different. We ultimately had to sell the company to a larger, industry consolidator, but I learned a lot about a family-held business at an early age, and it’s not usually the “easy street” that so many assume it to be. Think about it for a minute: would you want to be in business with your family?!

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?

After I left a Corporate America role, I launched what was supposed to be a tech startup with a few partners. Three of us had left our “real jobs” and worked on a software platform for almost 15 months until the beta release completely imploded and we had only about $20,000 left in our bank account. We were a LONG way away from dollar one in revenue — let alone income — so in classic startup fashion, we “pivoted into something that wouldn’t scale” and changed into a completely linear, traditional service-based revenue business that focused on consulting services and M&A advisory services. All too often people only see the finished product, but the real business is in “how the sausage is made.”

Are you working on any new or exciting projects now?

While most of my background is in the business side of dentistry, our company focuses our resources in the group practice space of different healthcare service verticals. Many are in the midst of some aspect of consolidation (mostly driven by Private Equity influence), but there are a tremendous number of entrepreneurs who want to build a group practice and are not necessarily interested in selling it anytime soon. The excitement here is that I get to bring my “corporate America” experience to play in an emerging business that often has the growth, scale and profitability to apply those enterprise-level services and philosophies to make a similar impact on a smaller scale.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

There are three people I would credit for much of my success through my near three decades of experience. Randy Eckard was the VP of Sales for the family business and recruited me away from my hometown to get me out from under the shadow of my family legacy and then promoted my candidacy to the company that acquired the family business to allow me to “play on a bigger playing field” for the new company in a new market. Sometimes people see things in you that you don’t see in yourself.

The second would be Bob Foss, who was technically a peer of mine in that new company in that he held the same role, but had about 10 years’ more experience and success than I had at the time. He saw a lot of promise in me and basically took me under his wing as a mentor, though I never asked him to be or fully appreciated it at the time. Bob literally saved me from myself on numerous occasions, and I probably would not have lasted the 15 years I didwithout his early guidance.

The third is my current business coach, Alastair MacDonald. I became a full-fledged entrepreneur 7 years ago and it has been a period of bumpy growth (coming out of a Corporate America setting). Now that I’m in my early 50s, I fully appreciate that wisdom is shared, not taught.

For each of these individuals, the Steve Jobs comment ,“you can only connect the dots looking back,” is completely appropriate.

Is there a particular book that made an impact on you? Can you share a story?

I’m a voracious reader, so this is a challenging question! Some of the best personal development books I’ve ever read are: “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen Covey and “From Strength to Strength” by Arthur C. Brooks. “Mere Christianity” by C.S. Lewis is a book I refer back to often. “Conspiracy” by Ryan Holliday is an unbelievable story and “Gates of Fire” by Stephen Pressfield is possibly one of the best novels I’ve ever read.

How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?

I practice two quotes: “Always leave things better than the way you found them” and “Take care of the people who take care of you.”

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share a story about how that was relevant to you in your own life?

The two I revert back to almost daily are: “Always leave things better than the way you found them” and “Take care of the people who take care of you.” Life doesn’t have to be overly complicated.

Can you share your top three “oral hygiene tweaks” that will help people look and feel great?

I defer to and am thankful for the direct care professionals who do a great job of sharing this advice with their patients.

Based on your experience, what are your “5 Things You Need To Create A Successful Career As A Dentist” and why?

1. Seek out a mentor or personal coach. Leadership is lonely and being a healthcare entrepreneur is filled with challenges. Success early on is simply minimizing your chances for mistakes, so learn from those who have experience and be willing to even pay for guidance to accelerate your learning curve.
2. Information is readily available on Google and elsewhere. If you can assimilate it in some way, it can become knowledge. However, knowledge assimilated over time and experience becomes wisdom, and wisdom isn’t taught; it’s shared.
3. Being a healthcare provider (dentist or otherwise), you think your success will be based on your clinical skills — which are obviously critically important — but they matter very little if patients don’t consent to the treatment you’re proposing. Interpersonal skills are critically important to both managing a team (staff) and connecting with “your customers.” Once you’re successful in each of those aspects, then the growth of your practice or group shifts into being more dependent upon your business skills.
4. Far too many patients view healthcare services and providers as a commodity. It’s critically important to understand this as a provider and evaluate “what makes you different” as a business owner. Consumers will gravitate to an Experience, but they’ll seek the lowest cost for a commodity.
5. When people first get started, they tend to look at their career as a 30+ year arc, but in today’s world, you should always be strategizing, planning, and evaluating on a continual 3to –5-year horizon.

If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of wellness to the most amount of people, what would that be?

I think about “wellness” from both a physical and mental standpoint. Physically, I think we would all be better off if we committed to a consistent approach that took into account diet, sleep, and exercise. None of that is rocket science, but so few really make it a priority. Simply limiting “bad foods” (processed or fried, red meat, sugar, alcohol, etc.) in favor of “good foods” (lean protein, fruits and vegetables, whole grains, etc.) isn’t a hard trade to make. 7 to 8 hours of sleep per night and 30 minutes of exercise each day also seems reasonable. Start with creating a routine and make incremental changes. Mental wellbeing is crucial because we’re all living lives “in comparison” to social media feeds us or “in opposition to” people we don’t agree with. Taking time to learn something from someone smarter than you (typically by reading) is beyond rewarding and having a grounding in a greater purpose (typically faith) creates mental peace and serenity.

We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them :-)

I’d love to grab several cups of coffee with the author, Ryan Holliday. I do follow a good bit of his work, but I’m fascinated by the business he has built by creating a following (a “tribe”) around something he is passionate about (being a writer with a lot of focus on stoicism) and doing it through several different media applications. I admire all of that immensely.

What is the best way for our readers to follow you online?

You can find me on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/perrin-desportes-7428067/

You can email me directly at: Perrin@PolarisHealthcarePartners.com

Thank you so much for these wonderful insights, and for the time you spent on this interview. We wish you continued success and good health!