We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jeffrey Mathews a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Jeffrey, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear a story from back when you were an intern or apprentice. What’s a memorable story you can share with us?

I think that often times our childhood sets us up for our work ethic and entrepreneurial aspirations for our future. Growing up my parents kept a tight budget and it was rare for me to get anything simply asking for it. I would be at the grocery store and ask for a quarter to go play the video games and my parents would tell me to just play it. When I was young pretending to play on the game was fine. As I got older playing the game machines without any money wasn’t fun anymore. One day while my mom was grocery shopping I asked for a quarter for a gumball and of course the answer was no. So I went to go play on the machines. 8 years old a few moments of boredom and I noticed the screws on the back of the gum ball machine. I unscrewed them and popped the back off. To my dismay, I saw rows and rows of quarters. I took one out and got a gumball. I took another one out and played the video game. I then took all the quarters and put them in my pocket. Very proud of what I had discovered I went back to my mom. Pockets full of quarters and a ching in every step. My mom asked what was in my pockets. I proudly announced I had found all the quarters inside the machine. To my surprise, I was scolded to return the quarters and apologize to manager. I went and returned the quarters apologized and went back to mom explaining that I needed to get my own machines. Now supportive, she said what’s your plan to do that? I thought for a second and remembered the push lawnmower in the garage. I was going to mow lawns and then buy gumball machines. I set out door knocking. My supportive mom walked with me around neighborhoods and waited at the end of the driveway as I pitched my lawn mowing sale at every door. It took almost a full year of saving before I was able to buy my first gum-ball machines. Fast forward 2 years I had 12 gumball machines placed in small businesses all around town. My entrepreneur spirit was launched. As my Mom drove me around the town and then waited in the car while I go in asking to speak to business owners and negotiate my next gumball machine placement. To my dismay everybody didn’t want to help me and let me place my machine in their store for free lol. So now at 12 years old I’m negotiating payouts with business owning adults. The art of the real estate deal is when your purchase the property at the discount. So many things in my childhood translated to effective business later in life. During the day when I didn’t need to restock gumballs I wanted something else to do. I got a job at taco bell working both the register and in back making tacos. Here I learned about exchanging my time for money. I also learned a lot about efficiency. How to make tacos fast and efficiently. Get customers out the door quick. Limit the lines and produce. I was learning about bottle necks and inefficiencies. I decided I wanted to be a CEO and run a company. I didn’t know who would hire me tho to run their company. My dentist was the nicest guy. He had his own dental office and it was like a mini hospital. Helping people and running his own operation. I didn’t think he really worked much just came in and talked, the hygienist did all the work. What a great job! What if I could own 100 clinics! I went off to go to dental school not knowing anything about teeth. I fell in love with the art of it and patient care. I had a vision for what would make people look good. Compassion for those that needed help and enjoyed the confidence and health I could bring to people. For the next decade I focused on being the best. I didn’t care much about scalability or owning multiple clinics I just wanted to perfect my craft. It took me years to reach a pinnacle of which I would focus my time on training other dentists and get them up to my pace to reach the quality care and high aesthetic standards that I have. Sharing knowledge and skills with colleagues was my the next phase of my career and something that was finally scalable. Even though I was focused on my dental career the entrepreneur spirit doesn’t go away. Two of biggest pieces of advice I can give someone is there is not time and do it now. The most annoying question to me from people is what do they do to make money or making money is their focus. The focus is the quality, the service, how you help somebody else or improve somebody’s life and providing value. That’s the key to every business. How can you help somebody else is what the business is set around. The old adage stays true take care of people and they will take care of you.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My first job is a Dentist. I deliver the highest quality of care possible with the highest aesthetic standards. Creating perfect natural smiles that are uniquely designed to compliment that specific individual. Every dentist that works with me is vetted and held to the highest standards so that we raise the bar higher in general dentistry. My 2nd job is my consultant company for Antiaging Medspa. Having perfected the art of the face and facial symmetry providing my expert skill set as a master injector and sharing that knowledge of facial aesthetics with a team of nurses as they provide Antiaging services like Botox, fillers, and lasers. My 3rd job as a developer I love designing and creating right now small projects maybe one day large developments. I’m most proud of sharing my knowledge and growing together with special individuals, and having great people around me to challenge one another and perfect what we do.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

There’s a saying never wish what somewhat else has unless you know what’s been done to get there and what’s been done to stay there, because doing those things may make you very unhappy. There are no short. cuts when it comes to offering a superior product or providing a superior service. It takes years of work, practice, and hours to be the best at anything. That has to be the focus. My goal as dentist was to provide something special to my patients I worked countless hours taking extra continuing education classes to perfect my craft. You have to go in 1000000%. In addition, My goal early on was to own my dental practice as soon possible. The more sacrifices we take the faster we ll meet our goals. During dental school instead of taking large living expense loans like everyone else I lived off canned tuna I skipped out on expensive coffee and stocked the cabinets with Ramon noodles. Thinking back at that discipline of trying save every penny I could was horrific. I think scariest part though is later on becoming successful and becoming so accustomed to comfortable things that your scared to put it all the line again and start all over if needed. Resilience and drive are so important and once you train yourself to delay gratifications the hard things become much easier.

We’d love to hear the story of how you turned a side-hustle into a something much bigger.

There is a saying you can only be a master of one thing. That’s completely untrue. Although it is true that you shouldn’t take on too many things at once that you will lose focus on the goals and time commitments necessary. However, you can work a full time master that and then go home instead of turning on the TV use the next 6 hours to begin your second mastery. Short term rentals started becoming a thing in Nashville so after my work day I began learning real estate. Don’t be scared to try and master new things. However, its also very hard to stop doing something your great at when other opportunities arise. Don’t be narrowly focused take on multiple opportunities

Contact Info:

• Website: www.goodlettsvillefamilydentist.com www.antiagingmedspa.com
• Instagram: thedoctorjeff