Hey everybody! Welcome to Conversations with Doc Martin, where we talk to extraordinary people doing extraordinary things!
In today’s interview, we talk to Kaleim Manji!
Kaleim is the CEO of Spear Education, which is the nation’s leading in-person and online educator for dentists, their teams, and their patients. Kaleim currently serves on the Pacific region board of the Young Presidents’ Organization, and he also currently sits on the Open Wide Foundation board. Kaleim holds his masters in Business Administration from Duke University, and was awarded one of Phoenix Business Journal’s Top 40 Under 40.
In our conversation today, Kaleim starts out by telling us a little bit about Spear Education and how they are training dentists and their teams to provide better clinical outcomes to their patients. Not only are they educating dentists from a clinical proficiency standpoint, but they’re also helping to educate from a business perspective as well.
Kaleim tells us that out of the roughly 150,000 dentistry practices across the country, about 100,000 of them are privately owned and operated. So the dentist who is performing the work during the day is also the person operating the business side of the house at night. Spear education aims to make that process easier by helping the industry on both fronts, to not only benefit the dentists and their practice, but to help the patients and their experience as well.
As we continue, I ask Kaleim if he could talk about his experience as a CEO in regards to what it’s been like to go from a much smaller company with only a handful of employees, to where his company is today now having several thousand, and what that process has looked like.
He starts out by talking about the fact that the title “CEO” is funny because he could go start a new company tomorrow with 4 employees and call himself a CEO, while there are other people like Elon Musk and Tim Cook whose titles are also “CEO” — and despite sharing the same title, their job descriptions are vastly different and that’s what the journey has been like for him as he’s grown. He states that he feels like he’s had a “new job” every single year since he began with the company.
He talks about the fact that when the company was much smaller, it was different because he “got to do everything,” while also getting to interact with a lot of the company’s employees. He goes on to talk about while he can no longer do everything just based on the sheer size of the organization, and that everything has changed as those years have gone by, one thing that he’s tried to keep consistent and at the forefront of importance has been a good and strong company culture.
We continue on to discuss the parallels and differences of what it’s been like for Kaleim to run a company during the current global Coronavirus pandemic crisis, compared to when he was running the company right after the 2008 recession. He talks about one of the most important lessons he learned from the 2008 market crash was the importance of financial liquidity in the business.
Kaleim goes on to talk about trust, transparency, loyalty to the team, tips and advice for small business owners, and so much more in our interview. Check it out on the Conversations with Doc Martin YouTube channel!
Watch the Video Interview on YouTube Here
In Gratitude,
Doc Martin
Find More of Kaleim’s Work Here:
Spear Education: https://www.speareducation.com/