My guest on this episode is Tony Layne. I met Tony and his wife Cassi at SMBash in February after several folks strongly recommended I talk with them and I'm glad they did. Tony and Cassi are lifelong entrepreneurs in various ventures, but by far, their most successful venture is Senior Dental Care, now called Aria Care Partners under private equity ownership.

Senior Dental Care started as a mobile dental services company for senior care homes and evolved to partner with insurance companies to pay for their services on behalf of patients through Medicare, meaning it didn't cost patients a dime to get dental care. Once the insurance aspect clicked, this business exploded, and it's created life changing financial results for them both.

Our discussion is very story-based as we go through Tony and Cassi's journey, which is fantastic as their story is anything but dull, boring, and smooth, which brings me to a point about challenges. At the end of the episode, Tony said he was concerned that he'd talked about too many near death experiences in their business, but I feel these stories are perhaps the most important to share.

When we hear stories of successful entrepreneurs today, they rarely share failures and hardships endured during the path to success, and that makes other growing entrepreneurs think that they're failures when they hit a rough patch. Sharing near death experiences in entrepreneurship is incredibly important as it demonstrates that hardship is normal, even for those that become successful. I hope Tony sharing his near-death experiences encourages others on this podcast and others to share the same.

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Links:

Tony on LinkedIn

Lynniam Farms

Topics:

(6:07) - Tony's background and career in Real Estate, construction & dental health care

(32:50) - Being extorted by the state of Florida

(37:08) - Butting heads with the board

(40:39) - Growing their business and growing their family

(44:31) - Acquiring an 1,800 acre property that would become Lynniam Farms & selling off the dental business

(54:22) - Stepping away as CEO and getting into the transactional side of the business

(56:31) - Setting up a Family Office

(58:46) - Do you want to spend more time working with traditional searchers?

(1:00:13) - What college class would you teach if it could be about anything?

(1:01:28) - What's a strongly held belief you've changed your mind on?

(1:02:46) - What's the best business you've ever seen?