February 15, 2023
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Kyle Cheatham: We go for things and so we’re going to screw it up a lot. And we’re not going to know what we’re doing at times, but we’re going to attack it and see what happens and then when we screw it up, we’ll learn and get a little bit better and then we’ll screw it up again. We’ll learn and get a little better. I think that’s just a fun way to live.
Dr.Bethany Fishbein: Hi, I am Bethany Fishbein, CEO of The Power Practice and host of the Power Hour Optometry Podcast. I think I’m probably showing my age a little bit. When I say that I did not know who my guest today was when I was first introduced to him. Somebody suggested that I speak to this optometrist, and I said, Sure, I’ll speak to him and had a nice conversation. And when I mentioned that I had spoken with him to my younger cooler associate. She says, “Oh my gosh, he’s like famous!”. And I admit I had absolutely no idea, but now I am in the know. And so I’m honored to have as my guest Kyle Cheatham, who is the CEO and Founder of KMK Optometry Board’s Review and also Vision Specialists, which is a three-location practice in Omaha, Nebraska. Kyle, thank you so much for being here.
Kyle Cheatham: Same, it’s fun. I’ve been looking forward to this.
Dr.Bethany Fishbein: Good and in the first 30 seconds I already told you you’re famous and got your ego going a little bit so.
Kyle Cheatham: I’ve learned over the years to laugh at that because it’s kind of a joke honestly, in the sense of being able to work with students over the years just been so fun. So I made me famous in this small little circle over the world. And it’s one that brings me a lot of joy and it’s really, really fun working with students and Doc’s throughout the country.
Dr.Bethany Fishbein: Yeah, and the stats, honestly from KMK Optometry are incredible. What was the number you work with, like 90 something percent of students use your board review course to study for boards.
Kyle Cheatham: Yes. We’re really fun. There’s like, I think 98% each year that’s been working with KMK for the last eight to 10 years or a year. It’s just kind of mind-boggling. Every year. People keep showing up and I’m like, gosh, this is so cool. Thank you for letting me do what I love to do.
Dr.Bethany Fishbein: That’s awesome. And really that’s what I wanted to talk about today. The idea of transformation of taking something that is a certain way realizing that it has the opportunity to be something bigger, better different, and having the courage and the bandwidth to take the steps and make it happen. And that’s honestly what I was really struck by when we spoke the first time so I’m hoping that we can just share your story a little bit and talk about how KMK got started. It’s a good origin story.
Kyle Cheatham: I was a student at Indiana University and honestly I wasn’t that smart. I was in the library studying for boards. We had like three months to study at that time. It was like my first day studying for boards and all my notes in front of me in everything. I didn’t know what I was doing. And this random girl walked by who I’d never seen before. I was like, Hey, can you help me study? And that was odd to me because I wasn’t the top student. And I later learned her story which was that she had failed boards three times. And she was I think just like aimlessly walking through the library hoping to find someone that would help. And I said sure, but I didn’t really know she meant like every day so she would show up every day and we’d study together. And as we got closer to the exam, she kept going to the bathroom because she wasn’t feeling well. I learned that she was getting sick every time she was just really riddled with anxiety. And so she went on to pass the tests and we don’t get the results back to like three months after boards, right? So it was one of these things where I got my scores back I was like really excited and then I was waiting and waiting and of course she got a call and then when she called she was in a church she had a priest open up her scores she started shrinking and it was one of those things that was like, so memorable because it really changed your life. And I remember thinking, this is fun. I want to do a lot more of this. So it really started with that one student it wasn’t this vision of we’re gonna start this big company or something. It was really trying to help one person and then it just kind of next year it was had other students from other schools call and say Hey, I heard you’re doing this thing. And so the first year it came we had one school and then went to four schools and seven schools and then 11 schools and it just kept growing. It was like I can’t believe this is happening. This is so fun. I love this I’ll spend the rest of my life doing this. This is like the most rewarding work because you’re working with people are crazy stressed and trying to just bring value to their life.
Dr.Bethany Fishbein: What year was that?
Kyle Cheatham: That was 2004.
Dr.Bethany Fishbein: So in 2004 you help this girl pass the board exams, you pass your board exams, I assume. How did that go from? I help this one person to where can I find more people to help? Like how did it start to take shape?
Kyle Cheatham: Yeah, honestly, it wasn’t some great master plan. It really started with the idea of like, how do you solve a problem? specific problem in bringing like a ton of value to a group of people. So that’s what I think about a lot in businesses like you got to think about what problem are you solving? And then how can you provide above and beyond value. When you solve that problem? There was one more variable that I’ve learned over the years is that you got to figure out what problem you want to solve. You want to deliver a lot of value. This isn’t what a lot of us think of naturally because we do things because most of the time we lead with our hearts, we’re not leading with how can we make money or something like that. But a lot of times the only caveat to that is you got to make sure that the problem that you’re solving and the value you’re bringing to people is to people that have the money to pay for it to that’s like the last variable I’ve learned over the years, but bottom line with KMK in that specific instance it was we helped that one individual she started telling her friends and all of a sudden the next year in Indiana there was every student in the class pretty much took it and the pass rate just kind of skyrocket and at one time it was like 65% and went to 92% and they just started telling it was word of mouth honestly, it wasn’t a great master plan and know anything about business at the time. I didn’t have a great plan.
Dr.Bethany Fishbein: When you were helping her. You’re really sharing your own notes or were you like tutoring? What made it into a program?
Kyle Cheatham: Well, the national boards has what they call a matrix which is an 80 page document and one of the pages might say anatomy of the heart and you’re like geez are the top line on one of those pages. So it’s not very descriptive, but it was basically starting with this 80 page document. My wife who is pretty serious girlfriend at the time was you know I’m not very good. At all this stuff basically three parts everything to do with the eye, everything to do with the body, and then how the eye sees which is like optics, visual perception, etc. So I was like I can do the eye stuff my wife really good at the systemic disease, physiology, kidney all that stuff. And they were my best friends at the time. And he’s really good at optics. So let’s team up. Kyle, Melissa, my wife and Kevin. KMK not that clever, right? Each one of us are going to own one area. And so it started with us just starting with that matrix and breaking it down and writing a book off the matrix. And so each of us had our area of domination certainly wasn’t domination to start. And we just started writing off that outline and before we knew it, it was like 700 pages and I’m like wow, this is a big book and I still remember the day we took it to Kinko’s and got it printed. For some reason they printed this 800-page book and like 15 Page segments. So maybe a chapter is 50 pages long, but it would print the first 15 pages and there’d be like a blue piece of paper and then pages 16 to 32 sort of thing. And so we formed this big assembly line with my mom, my dad, my brother and sister and Melissa were in this living room and we had all these pages like segmented out one to 16,17 to 30 and then we would pass these binders down and everyone three hole punch and put it in there and I still remember like yesterday because my brother I felt like was goofing off too much. I was like Tom focus! And sure enough, we get to the boardroom for the very first time. And a student raises their hand in the middle of the lecture is like I’m missing pages 322 to 348 or whatever I was like, Darn it Tom. I know it was my brother’s fault. So it just cracks me up to think of those early days.
Dr.Bethany Fishbein: I’m thinking about the investment of time that it must have taken to write 700 pages like to take that outline and to turn it into teachable content, let alone take it to Kinko’s and put it all together and binders. Did you have customers when you made the leap to do it?
Kyle Cheatham: Yes and no. The one student that we helped that first year she started telling everyone and then the next year’s class I started to get kind of random messages from let’s say, five to 10 people in that class of ad saying, Hey, are you doing this, this year? And I’m thinking this is fun. Like let’s do it. And I didn’t really know we’re embarking on creating an 800 page book. So it was like yeah, I think there’s some people that would actually love this and we can help, you know, and then all of a sudden as we got into it, I was like man, this is a lot of work. Please God, hope some people do show up. And so wasn’t really until we got closer and closer was a six-month process to write that. closer to that deadline was like we started realizing more and more as we started telling people it’s close to being done. It was like boom, almost everyone in that class was like I’m game for this.
Dr.Bethany Fishbein: When did you feel like this is a business like now we’re going to do like business things like marketing and a budget and projections and stuff like that.
Kyle Cheatham: I can’t remember very specifically, it was in year two, because in year one, we went to Indiana, we created that book we had this grand idea of me, Melissa and Kevin are going to each teach our content to the students but there was like 75 students or something. So we’re going to split them up into three groups at 25. Instead of teaching all of them at once we want this to be personal. So we’re going to teach each group and so we were teaching these like 10-hour days for like five straight days over and over. And I remember at the end of that fifth day, I remember thinking like holy cow I don’t know if we thought the best way because we would just sit at dinner and like literally be like don’t talk to me because we’re so tired. We’d loved it. But we literally couldn’t talk. But even that was so fun at that time. I didn’t really think of like, oh, this is gonna be a really awesome business. It was like we’re just helping these students. I love this and when it became a business, we’re like, wow, this has potential to be something as the next year for schools called and I remember, one of the schools is Nova down in Florida. And we started with that class. And I remember standing in front of this podium and their lecture hall and the whole room was packed. It was like oh my gosh, this is so cool. This is like a legit business. And this is something I love to do so much. It feels like it shouldn’t even be fair, like I love this and I’m gonna get like paid to do it and it has a ton of potential. It’s like invigorating.
Dr.Bethany Fishbein: That’s the best kind of work right when doing the work gives you energy at the same time it takes your energy you describe that feeling and I so relate to that, because that’s how I feel about what we get to do. It’s so rewarding to help people and it’s exhausting. Like you have those dinners for sure where you just nobody talked to me and you can’t do that. But at the end of the day, it really feels great. What were some of the inflection points after that where you kind of had to choose, do you still go out and lecture to each group of people that does this or you don’t do that anymore?
Kyle Cheatham: I got to a point where I can’t do it anymore because you want to invest in your team and we have about 15 different instructors. A lot of them honestly a lot younger than me and hipper and connect with this. I love the part of being on campus but I realized that it was taken away from my ability to invest in the company in the way I needed to. I remember reading the E-Myth years ago. I love that book. And it described the idea that when you run a business, you need to be in the technical stuff, but also be a manager and you also need to be a visionary. You need to be three people in one. And I remember the time you like I can’t be three people, but it broke it down in a real simplistic way of like, I think it was 60% of the time you need to be visionary. You need to be leader you need to be setting the tone of where you want to go. Next thinking of the next idea thinking of the next way to innovate your business. And then around 30% of your time you’re managing or overseeing managers and then 10% of the time, technical. The technical in this business is the teaching. And so I still do a lot of online stuff, but just not as much in the schools because I’ve really tried to follow that 60-30-10 format on the business and making sure that culture is great making sure we have the right people in the right spots, kind of the same columns of first thing is get the right people on the bus and hire the right people and then once you have it like you need to constantly figuring out are they in the right seat? Are they motivated? Are you engaging your top people? Are you empowering the right people? So I spent a lot of time thinking about that and doing that.
Dr.Bethany Fishbein: Any screw-ups that you remember along the way of going from being that 100% technician role doing the work to transitioning in a leadership role, because it’s so relevant to practice. It’s how practice owners start out we’ll talk about your practice in a minute. But that’s a common point where people struggle, they open an office, maybe they open cold, they’re seeing all the patients, they’re ordering the glasses themselves. They’re dealing with insurance, and then they go home and they’re figuring out their own Google ads like they’re doing it all and they grow to where they can’t do that, or they have to choose to do something else to keep growing. Any big mistakes that you learned from?
Kyle Cheatham: Oh, yes, several. I’ll give you my top one is that I don’t manage people very well. I’m a horrible manager. I’ve learned that so where that became relevant for me and where I think a lot of you guys listening today if you’re in an eye care office, you’re trying to transition to seeing patients less it was the idea of Yes. Okay, this transition I’m not going to be as much in the technical day-to-day but man I kind of love the day-to-day stuff. I love seeing patients. In this case I love teaching this whole company came from was my passion to teach like so I’m going to do that less. So you kind of go through this at least I did a little bit this little bit of a mental identity crisis. I’m like, I have to switch I have to kind of be something different for this company to help the most people and so when you finally when I, I shouldn’t speak for anyone else, when I finally made that transition, and then it was like okay, I’m not going to be the one teaching as much. It’s having that right person that’s great and overseeing that as opposed to like, Okay, I’m free from that. I’m not going to be doing that as much but I’m gonna hire people and I’m gonna get out of their way I’m gonna empower them. I think some people are more micromanagers if they hired someone else, they want to watch their every step. That’s not my problem. I erred on the side of almost hiring right people getting out of the way so much you have, oh, they got this. They got this and not giving them enough support. In short, it’s meeting with those people weekly. It’s having a short meeting where you’re checking on them, how’s it going? What can I do for you? What problems are you seeing? It’s being more present? And I realized over the years I’m not good at that.
Dr.Bethany Fishbein: KMK has gone through another transformation recently. You found an unmet need that now your graduated students are having talk a little bit about what’s gone on in the last few years.
Kyle Cheatham: Yeah, so our posture, I mean, if I could look at the audience right now look at you, obviously I see you but our posture as a company is like warm around somebody my right hand out, like I’m putting my arm around somebody. So our culture that our company we talk a lot about behind the scenes is like it’s all about the students all the time. So with our instructors with our team, it’s like we’re not here for us. We don’t get them from the students to try and impress them. It’s all about them. So we’re constantly thinking about what problems do they have, that we can meet to provide substantial value in their lives. And so thinking about a new grad coming out of school, it was really about the mindset of how do we empower them to find their dream job and to really find a great spot from the moment they get out. Not like for many of us where you waste the first three to five years of your life just kind of finding something. How do we help them find their dream job? So we started the process this past year where all the people that go through KMK now have the ability to meet with us individually. We have them fill out data that basically says where they want to go, what is their specialty that they want to do? A lot of them are saying I want to be in private practice and I really would love to go to a private practice allows me to do ocular surface disease or I’d love to be in a practice that allows me to buy in and own a practice one day, right? So it’s on the front end, they spent about five to seven minutes filling out data in our portal. And then after that it’s kind of phase one. Phase two is we meet with them individually on Zoom, and we learn more about the details what they’re looking for. And then we go out and meet with practice owners and develop relationships and help match them. But our philosophy really comes from the student’s perspective of helping them find their dream job and helping solve their main problems and some of those problems are not just finding a job because a lot of people can help you with that. But it’s also we have an attorney on our team that reviews their contract, we have a data compensation tool that helps them be realistic and what they’re looking for in their first-year salary. So we’re really trying to help guide them and find a great match. Since I’ve owned a private practice for years. I know the struggles of this so I love it from the perspective of other private practice Doc’s who come up to me all the time or I see him like how do you help me find a new grad or help me find a new doc like I’m starving for a doc like it’s a great situation. Sometimes I listen to them talk about their practice and like that is a good situation. Like why isn’t their no one knows about this? And then when you talk to their private practice doctor, like I’ve tried this, this, this, this this, there’s just I’m not dissing anything else out there. I’ve noticed the problem for years. There’s just a missing link between that and so KMK we’re really pumped about helping to match awesome private practice docss with new grads that want an opportunity and it’s not just new grads, because we’ve worked I think there’s 40,000 of ODs out there. KMK has been around 18 years. So we’ve worked with 26,000 Doc’s out there. So we’re excited to welcome in our campaign alumni in the near future, but right now we’re just starting small and trying to get really good at what we do, and then we’ll expand after that.
Dr.Bethany Fishbein: I like what you said about the posture of your company being putting your arm around somebody and kind of guiding them. I hear that through what you’re speaking about, you know, first guiding a student to pass a board exam and then guiding a young doctor to find a great opportunity. Eventually probably guiding older doctors to go through that process of bringing a young doctor successfully into their practice, whether for employment or partnership or purchase that really carries through. And the idea also that you shared about how do you solve a problem and provide enormous value to people who have the money to pay you to do it comes through as well. The problem we need to pass boards, we’re freaked out about it. And then the problem of how do we land in jobs that are the right fit for us from the start. So it’s neat how the philosophy carries through the transition and the company. Talks about how those same principles guided you in your career into private practice. It sounds like you’re busy enough teaching and doing your things like you could have chosen to not practice optometry at that point.
Kyle Cheatham: I felt like the whole principle of the E-Myth of a really successful businesses have people working on the business and people in the business right. I really felt like when I was going through KMK we work with all these students that I see so much potential in so many of them to have a great career and I was thinking like, I don’t have to make the same mistakes. I made the first five to 10 years out when I was in I was doing KMK and a private practice at the same time. I saw a lot of people doing private practice. First-year out I worked in like six different places a half day on Monday here half day, here on Monday afternoon, it was all these different places. I saw these different variety of things. I thought, man, what an opportunity if like you could set up a private practice and have a new doctor go into it that if you can take care of the business stuff and just allow the business to thrive by being the visionary a lot of them were coming home to speed the technician. So that was where all this started. It’s really all around the word empower. How fun is it to empower people and put them in a position where they can use the way God made them to just attack what they’re really good at but I learned over the time to Bethany, I didn’t know a lot about private practice. I screwed up that several times too. It took me years of all this like you make so many mistakes. You’re like well probably shouldn’t have done that. So it’s been a journey and mastered it by any means. It’s a fun challenge of like, how do you take that mindset of empowering and empower people by giving them an opportunity? And then if they want to buy into it and only one day Great. That’d be kind of a fun story. Look back on your life you feel like because of your understanding of business, you can set up other people to have a better life. That’s really where the real motivation comes from.
Dr.Bethany Fishbein: So did you open a practice cold? Did you buy an existing practice? How did you get into it?
Kyle Cheatham: Well, I started working at one of those six places, whatever that I worked at my first year out was this optical that was like 700 square feet had like handmade signs. It was ran by an optician who is like in our late 60s And I remember I’d be in the exam when the exam was too short. So every prescription I’d have to add a minus quarter to it means that type of place and then the walls are really thin and she kept telling this story to patients about how she was in a tornado and it almost blew off one of her thumbs. She was holding on to the wall like as the tornado was. So I mean it’s very humble beginnings of your like, do not tell that story again. You’re killing me, but it was at that place and I started off seeing patients like a half day a week and then it grew to like a day and a half and then two and a half minutes. He retired on the spot that practice and so we didn’t have anything so I had to learn everything from scratch about how you do billing and credentialing and all that stuff. I made basically every mistake in the book. And I realized throughout all those mistakes I was making, like if you just keep plugging along and keep learning, you can figure it out. It’s not crazy hard, but you just got to keep going. I think that’s probably one of my best attributes is I’m a learner at heart who believes that kind of course you’re gonna mess up and you guys just keep going you gotta keep working. I think the biggest thing, especially this post-COVID time and it’s just easy to get really discouraged. I see a lot of my colleagues is down about life. They’re discouraged about things. That’s okay for a spell, but then it’s just kind of getting the mindset of Alright, let’s go live short. This is all gonna be over before you know it. My mom passed away when she was 53. I remember when she was 49. Her and my dad they were almost retired from being teachers. We didn’t have much money, anything growing up and my dad was high school math teacher. My mom was a third-grade teacher. So they spent a lot of their life saying you know, man, once we retire, then we’re gonna go out and do things gonna be really fun. Then all of a sudden, you know, five years away from retirement, my mom gets cancer. She dies four years later, and my mom and dad never really got to experience this thing. So I just took a mindset of like, I’m gonna go for things. I’m not gonna wait. I’m gonna go for stuff. So with our kids, we have a couple of like core principles. of what it means to be a Cheathman. And one of the things we talked about a lot is that Cheathman’s go for things. We go for things. And so we’re going to screw it up a lot. And we’re not going to know what we’re doing at times, but we’re going to attack it and see what happens and then when we screw it up, we’ll learn and get a little bit better and we’ll screw it up again and we’ll learn and get a little better. I think that’s just a fun way to live. But the key is just not getting discouraged.
Dr.Bethany Fishbein: How did your practice grow from one to three?
Kyle Cheatham: Painful through several mistakes, but the big picture was it came down to the team that I had with me. It always comes down to that quite frankly I think because the one thing that E-Myth doesn’t tell you is that it’s great to think of the mindset of working on it, but not in it. That’s fun. But then once you start to get to the phase of working on it, you realize I need like as the business grows several different people working on it because my skill set is very limited. So I need other people on the team that are really good at other dimensions. And so we had one doctor, for example, I love strength space testing. I love doing like Gallup Strengths Finder and Enneagram like I’m a seven which is a visionary. I get really excited about building things. She wasn’t one she was an Enneagram she’s really good at details, right? So it was looking at the team I had and saying okay, this person’s great at patient care. She loves to do that. And then building a team with different people that had different skill sets. And so we just gradually went from one and opened up a second and then open up another one right after that. So it’s kind of bang bang bang. But the horrible part about that, Bethany is that a lot of it was during COVID in 2020 I had no idea that’s what was coming. So it was a little challenging at times.
Dr.Bethany Fishbein: That’s where the difference lies, though, right? It’s so many people during COVID got really paralyzed with fear of what was going to happen, that you didn’t know. So, so many of us kind of just internally shut down. And this is the time to go sit in your kitchen and make hot chocolate and just not make crazy business decisions because you don’t know exactly what that recovery is going to be. And I think that that personal value of we go for it. It’s interesting. There’s an episode that I just recorded with Adam Cmejla from 2020 Money Podcast, we talked about identity. We were talking about habit change and identity and at the point, you internalize something, it just becomes who you are. And so that makes decisions very easy. We talked about in the context of habit change. If you’re a great saver. You don’t have to think about am I going to spend this or save it. You know, you’ve just set up your savings because you’re a saver. And so that’s coming through here. Just if you’re someone who goes for it, and you’re faced with an opportunity and time is a little scary and every opportunity is a little scary, right? It’s the fear of failure, the fear of success, like both of those, but if you’re someone who goes for it, you just do it.
Kyle Cheatham: Yeah, I remember. I looked back on this and maybe it was a tad reckless but it ended up being one of the better decisions we made as a family. But when COVID hit one of the first things that hit my mind was there’s gonna be business opportunities that come from this just naturally because of the fact that it’s going to create a lot of uncertainty. Uncertainty creates opportunity. And so our family was for a while just kind of looking around thinking about moving and we had our eyes on an area of town that we loved and we drive through there a lot but there’s just no lots available. There’s just no opportunity there. And so we’ve kind of always go there, kind of my wife and I dreaming them out. That’d be awesome one day to live there. And then when COVID hit I just called every real or there’s four or five realtors in there and just said, Hey, if anything changes, let me know if anyone backs out of a lot or anything and within 10 days that had happened with a couple of lots and one of them was like our dream lot. And so it was a really big lesson for our family when we talked about going for things. And obviously COVID was horrible for a lot of reasons. So I don’t want to diminish that in any way. But it was just like, it’s just kind of a principle that we live by.
Dr.Bethany Fishbein: Is it personnel to ask what are the others?
Kyle Cheatham: The other principles?
Dr.Bethany Fishbein: Yeah.
Kyle Cheatham: No, not at all. One of the main ones is God first their our family dissipate too big part of everything we do. So it’s just remember, it’s not about us. It’s about other people. So just trying to surrender your life to serving other people and helping other people. And obviously, there’s times where we get selfish and times where we do make it about ourselves and so it’s just kind of this reminder of, you’re not going to be happy if you live that way. So trying to stress that in our kids and in our own lives a lot.
Dr.Bethany Fishbein: Awesome. Kyle, thank you so much for sharing your story. I know we talked before about not knowing exactly what we were going to be talking about and which direction we were gonna go but hearing your story and the success that you’ve created not only for yourself, but in creating opportunities for success for so many other people who you’ve served by taking those chances and staying true to who you are and building for the right reasons is really going to be inspiring to a lot of people out there who are still figuring it out. I appreciate you taking the time if someone wants to learn more about KMK if they’re a practice owner and they want one of these new grads, how do they reach you?
Kyle Cheatham: I’ll just give my personal email is this My name is Kylemarkcheatham@gmail.com. So just email me personally, that’s the email that always just go straight to me and I’d love to help. I know this is a stressful time for private practice Doc’s we’re battling some things we’ve never battled before. I used to feel like I still do private practice is amazing. It’s the best opportunity out there. But now we’re battling some things that make it really challenging a lot of noise that makes it challenging for people to see that for new grads to see that so I’d love to help. There are ways that can help. Let me know some of the fun.
Dr.Bethany Fishbein: Absolutely. And for more information on Power Practice helping you get the most out of practice ownership. You can reach out to us at powerpractice.com. Thank you so much for listening and we will see you next time.
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Kyle Cheatham: We go for things and so we’re going to screw it up a lot. And we’re not going to know what we’re doing at times, but we’re going to attack it and see what happens and then when we screw it up, we’ll learn and get a little bit better and then we’ll screw it up again. We’ll learn and get a little better. I think that’s just a fun way to live.
Dr.Bethany Fishbein: Hi, I am Bethany Fishbein, CEO of The Power Practice and host of the Power Hour Optometry Podcast. I think I’m probably showing my age a little bit. When I say that I did not know who my guest today was when I was first introduced to him. Somebody suggested that I speak to this optometrist, and I said, Sure, I’ll speak to him and had a nice conversation. And when I mentioned that I had spoken with him to my younger cooler associate. She says, “Oh my gosh, he’s like famous!”. And I admit I had absolutely no idea, but now I am in the know. And so I’m honored to have as my guest Kyle Cheatham, who is the CEO and Founder of KMK Optometry Board’s Review and also Vision Specialists, which is a three-location practice in Omaha, Nebraska. Kyle, thank you so much for being here.
Kyle Cheatham: Same, it’s fun. I’ve been looking forward to this.
Dr.Bethany Fishbein: Good and in the first 30 seconds I already told you you’re famous and got your ego going a little bit so.
Kyle Cheatham: I’ve learned over the years to laugh at that because it’s kind of a joke honestly, in the sense of being able to work with students over the years just been so fun. So I made me famous in this small little circle over the world. And it’s one that brings me a lot of joy and it’s really, really fun working with students and Doc’s throughout the country.
Dr.Bethany Fishbein: Yeah, and the stats, honestly from KMK Optometry are incredible. What was the number you work with, like 90 something percent of students use your board review course to study for boards.
Kyle Cheatham: Yes. We’re really fun. There’s like, I think 98% each year that’s been working with KMK for the last eight to 10 years or a year. It’s just kind of mind-boggling. Every year. People keep showing up and I’m like, gosh, this is so cool. Thank you for letting me do what I love to do.
Dr.Bethany Fishbein: That’s awesome. And really that’s what I wanted to talk about today. The idea of transformation of taking something that is a certain way realizing that it has the opportunity to be something bigger, better different, and having the courage and the bandwidth to take the steps and make it happen. And that’s honestly what I was really struck by when we spoke the first time so I’m hoping that we can just share your story a little bit and talk about how KMK got started. It’s a good origin story.
Kyle Cheatham: I was a student at Indiana University and honestly I wasn’t that smart. I was in the library studying for boards. We had like three months to study at that time. It was like my first day studying for boards and all my notes in front of me in everything. I didn’t know what I was doing. And this random girl walked by who I’d never seen before. I was like, Hey, can you help me study? And that was odd to me because I wasn’t the top student. And I later learned her story which was that she had failed boards three times. And she was I think just like aimlessly walking through the library hoping to find someone that would help. And I said sure, but I didn’t really know she meant like every day so she would show up every day and we’d study together. And as we got closer to the exam, she kept going to the bathroom because she wasn’t feeling well. I learned that she was getting sick every time she was just really riddled with anxiety. And so she went on to pass the tests and we don’t get the results back to like three months after boards, right? So it was one of these things where I got my scores back I was like really excited and then I was waiting and waiting and of course she got a call and then when she called she was in a church she had a priest open up her scores she started shrinking and it was one of those things that was like, so memorable because it really changed your life. And I remember thinking, this is fun. I want to do a lot more of this. So it really started with that one student it wasn’t this vision of we’re gonna start this big company or something. It was really trying to help one person and then it just kind of next year it was had other students from other schools call and say Hey, I heard you’re doing this thing. And so the first year it came we had one school and then went to four schools and seven schools and then 11 schools and it just kept growing. It was like I can’t believe this is happening. This is so fun. I love this I’ll spend the rest of my life doing this. This is like the most rewarding work because you’re working with people are crazy stressed and trying to just bring value to their life.
Dr.Bethany Fishbein: What year was that?
Kyle Cheatham: That was 2004.
Dr.Bethany Fishbein: So in 2004 you help this girl pass the board exams, you pass your board exams, I assume. How did that go from? I help this one person to where can I find more people to help? Like how did it start to take shape?
Kyle Cheatham: Yeah, honestly, it wasn’t some great master plan. It really started with the idea of like, how do you solve a problem? specific problem in bringing like a ton of value to a group of people. So that’s what I think about a lot in businesses like you got to think about what problem are you solving? And then how can you provide above and beyond value. When you solve that problem? There was one more variable that I’ve learned over the years is that you got to figure out what problem you want to solve. You want to deliver a lot of value. This isn’t what a lot of us think of naturally because we do things because most of the time we lead with our hearts, we’re not leading with how can we make money or something like that. But a lot of times the only caveat to that is you got to make sure that the problem that you’re solving and the value you’re bringing to people is to people that have the money to pay for it to that’s like the last variable I’ve learned over the years, but bottom line with KMK in that specific instance it was we helped that one individual she started telling her friends and all of a sudden the next year in Indiana there was every student in the class pretty much took it and the pass rate just kind of skyrocket and at one time it was like 65% and went to 92% and they just started telling it was word of mouth honestly, it wasn’t a great master plan and know anything about business at the time. I didn’t have a great plan.
Dr.Bethany Fishbein: When you were helping her. You’re really sharing your own notes or were you like tutoring? What made it into a program?
Kyle Cheatham: Well, the national boards has what they call a matrix which is an 80 page document and one of the pages might say anatomy of the heart and you’re like geez are the top line on one of those pages. So it’s not very descriptive, but it was basically starting with this 80 page document. My wife who is pretty serious girlfriend at the time was you know I’m not very good. At all this stuff basically three parts everything to do with the eye, everything to do with the body, and then how the eye sees which is like optics, visual perception, etc. So I was like I can do the eye stuff my wife really good at the systemic disease, physiology, kidney all that stuff. And they were my best friends at the time. And he’s really good at optics. So let’s team up. Kyle, Melissa, my wife and Kevin. KMK not that clever, right? Each one of us are going to own one area. And so it started with us just starting with that matrix and breaking it down and writing a book off the matrix. And so each of us had our area of domination certainly wasn’t domination to start. And we just started writing off that outline and before we knew it, it was like 700 pages and I’m like wow, this is a big book and I still remember the day we took it to Kinko’s and got it printed. For some reason they printed this 800-page book and like 15 Page segments. So maybe a chapter is 50 pages long, but it would print the first 15 pages and there’d be like a blue piece of paper and then pages 16 to 32 sort of thing. And so we formed this big assembly line with my mom, my dad, my brother and sister and Melissa were in this living room and we had all these pages like segmented out one to 16,17 to 30 and then we would pass these binders down and everyone three hole punch and put it in there and I still remember like yesterday because my brother I felt like was goofing off too much. I was like Tom focus! And sure enough, we get to the boardroom for the very first time. And a student raises their hand in the middle of the lecture is like I’m missing pages 322 to 348 or whatever I was like, Darn it Tom. I know it was my brother’s fault. So it just cracks me up to think of those early days.
Dr.Bethany Fishbein: I’m thinking about the investment of time that it must have taken to write 700 pages like to take that outline and to turn it into teachable content, let alone take it to Kinko’s and put it all together and binders. Did you have customers when you made the leap to do it?
Kyle Cheatham: Yes and no. The one student that we helped that first year she started telling everyone and then the next year’s class I started to get kind of random messages from let’s say, five to 10 people in that class of ad saying, Hey, are you doing this, this year? And I’m thinking this is fun. Like let’s do it. And I didn’t really know we’re embarking on creating an 800 page book. So it was like yeah, I think there’s some people that would actually love this and we can help, you know, and then all of a sudden as we got into it, I was like man, this is a lot of work. Please God, hope some people do show up. And so wasn’t really until we got closer and closer was a six-month process to write that. closer to that deadline was like we started realizing more and more as we started telling people it’s close to being done. It was like boom, almost everyone in that class was like I’m game for this.
Dr.Bethany Fishbein: When did you feel like this is a business like now we’re going to do like business things like marketing and a budget and projections and stuff like that.
Kyle Cheatham: I can’t remember very specifically, it was in year two, because in year one, we went to Indiana, we created that book we had this grand idea of me, Melissa and Kevin are going to each teach our content to the students but there was like 75 students or something. So we’re going to split them up into three groups at 25. Instead of teaching all of them at once we want this to be personal. So we’re going to teach each group and so we were teaching these like 10-hour days for like five straight days over and over. And I remember at the end of that fifth day, I remember thinking like holy cow I don’t know if we thought the best way because we would just sit at dinner and like literally be like don’t talk to me because we’re so tired. We’d loved it. But we literally couldn’t talk. But even that was so fun at that time. I didn’t really think of like, oh, this is gonna be a really awesome business. It was like we’re just helping these students. I love this and when it became a business, we’re like, wow, this has potential to be something as the next year for schools called and I remember, one of the schools is Nova down in Florida. And we started with that class. And I remember standing in front of this podium and their lecture hall and the whole room was packed. It was like oh my gosh, this is so cool. This is like a legit business. And this is something I love to do so much. It feels like it shouldn’t even be fair, like I love this and I’m gonna get like paid to do it and it has a ton of potential. It’s like invigorating.
Dr.Bethany Fishbein: That’s the best kind of work right when doing the work gives you energy at the same time it takes your energy you describe that feeling and I so relate to that, because that’s how I feel about what we get to do. It’s so rewarding to help people and it’s exhausting. Like you have those dinners for sure where you just nobody talked to me and you can’t do that. But at the end of the day, it really feels great. What were some of the inflection points after that where you kind of had to choose, do you still go out and lecture to each group of people that does this or you don’t do that anymore?
Kyle Cheatham: I got to a point where I can’t do it anymore because you want to invest in your team and we have about 15 different instructors. A lot of them honestly a lot younger than me and hipper and connect with this. I love the part of being on campus but I realized that it was taken away from my ability to invest in the company in the way I needed to. I remember reading the E-Myth years ago. I love that book. And it described the idea that when you run a business, you need to be in the technical stuff, but also be a manager and you also need to be a visionary. You need to be three people in one. And I remember the time you like I can’t be three people, but it broke it down in a real simplistic way of like, I think it was 60% of the time you need to be visionary. You need to be leader you need to be setting the tone of where you want to go. Next thinking of the next idea thinking of the next way to innovate your business. And then around 30% of your time you’re managing or overseeing managers and then 10% of the time, technical. The technical in this business is the teaching. And so I still do a lot of online stuff, but just not as much in the schools because I’ve really tried to follow that 60-30-10 format on the business and making sure that culture is great making sure we have the right people in the right spots, kind of the same columns of first thing is get the right people on the bus and hire the right people and then once you have it like you need to constantly figuring out are they in the right seat? Are they motivated? Are you engaging your top people? Are you empowering the right people? So I spent a lot of time thinking about that and doing that.
Dr.Bethany Fishbein: Any screw-ups that you remember along the way of going from being that 100% technician role doing the work to transitioning in a leadership role, because it’s so relevant to practice. It’s how practice owners start out we’ll talk about your practice in a minute. But that’s a common point where people struggle, they open an office, maybe they open cold, they’re seeing all the patients, they’re ordering the glasses themselves. They’re dealing with insurance, and then they go home and they’re figuring out their own Google ads like they’re doing it all and they grow to where they can’t do that, or they have to choose to do something else to keep growing. Any big mistakes that you learned from?
Kyle Cheatham: Oh, yes, several. I’ll give you my top one is that I don’t manage people very well. I’m a horrible manager. I’ve learned that so where that became relevant for me and where I think a lot of you guys listening today if you’re in an eye care office, you’re trying to transition to seeing patients less it was the idea of Yes. Okay, this transition I’m not going to be as much in the technical day-to-day but man I kind of love the day-to-day stuff. I love seeing patients. In this case I love teaching this whole company came from was my passion to teach like so I’m going to do that less. So you kind of go through this at least I did a little bit this little bit of a mental identity crisis. I’m like, I have to switch I have to kind of be something different for this company to help the most people and so when you finally when I, I shouldn’t speak for anyone else, when I finally made that transition, and then it was like okay, I’m not going to be the one teaching as much. It’s having that right person that’s great and overseeing that as opposed to like, Okay, I’m free from that. I’m not going to be doing that as much but I’m gonna hire people and I’m gonna get out of their way I’m gonna empower them. I think some people are more micromanagers if they hired someone else, they want to watch their every step. That’s not my problem. I erred on the side of almost hiring right people getting out of the way so much you have, oh, they got this. They got this and not giving them enough support. In short, it’s meeting with those people weekly. It’s having a short meeting where you’re checking on them, how’s it going? What can I do for you? What problems are you seeing? It’s being more present? And I realized over the years I’m not good at that.
Dr.Bethany Fishbein: KMK has gone through another transformation recently. You found an unmet need that now your graduated students are having talk a little bit about what’s gone on in the last few years.
Kyle Cheatham: Yeah, so our posture, I mean, if I could look at the audience right now look at you, obviously I see you but our posture as a company is like warm around somebody my right hand out, like I’m putting my arm around somebody. So our culture that our company we talk a lot about behind the scenes is like it’s all about the students all the time. So with our instructors with our team, it’s like we’re not here for us. We don’t get them from the students to try and impress them. It’s all about them. So we’re constantly thinking about what problems do they have, that we can meet to provide substantial value in their lives. And so thinking about a new grad coming out of school, it was really about the mindset of how do we empower them to find their dream job and to really find a great spot from the moment they get out. Not like for many of us where you waste the first three to five years of your life just kind of finding something. How do we help them find their dream job? So we started the process this past year where all the people that go through KMK now have the ability to meet with us individually. We have them fill out data that basically says where they want to go, what is their specialty that they want to do? A lot of them are saying I want to be in private practice and I really would love to go to a private practice allows me to do ocular surface disease or I’d love to be in a practice that allows me to buy in and own a practice one day, right? So it’s on the front end, they spent about five to seven minutes filling out data in our portal. And then after that it’s kind of phase one. Phase two is we meet with them individually on Zoom, and we learn more about the details what they’re looking for. And then we go out and meet with practice owners and develop relationships and help match them. But our philosophy really comes from the student’s perspective of helping them find their dream job and helping solve their main problems and some of those problems are not just finding a job because a lot of people can help you with that. But it’s also we have an attorney on our team that reviews their contract, we have a data compensation tool that helps them be realistic and what they’re looking for in their first-year salary. So we’re really trying to help guide them and find a great match. Since I’ve owned a private practice for years. I know the struggles of this so I love it from the perspective of other private practice Doc’s who come up to me all the time or I see him like how do you help me find a new grad or help me find a new doc like I’m starving for a doc like it’s a great situation. Sometimes I listen to them talk about their practice and like that is a good situation. Like why isn’t their no one knows about this? And then when you talk to their private practice doctor, like I’ve tried this, this, this, this this, there’s just I’m not dissing anything else out there. I’ve noticed the problem for years. There’s just a missing link between that and so KMK we’re really pumped about helping to match awesome private practice docss with new grads that want an opportunity and it’s not just new grads, because we’ve worked I think there’s 40,000 of ODs out there. KMK has been around 18 years. So we’ve worked with 26,000 Doc’s out there. So we’re excited to welcome in our campaign alumni in the near future, but right now we’re just starting small and trying to get really good at what we do, and then we’ll expand after that.
Dr.Bethany Fishbein: I like what you said about the posture of your company being putting your arm around somebody and kind of guiding them. I hear that through what you’re speaking about, you know, first guiding a student to pass a board exam and then guiding a young doctor to find a great opportunity. Eventually probably guiding older doctors to go through that process of bringing a young doctor successfully into their practice, whether for employment or partnership or purchase that really carries through. And the idea also that you shared about how do you solve a problem and provide enormous value to people who have the money to pay you to do it comes through as well. The problem we need to pass boards, we’re freaked out about it. And then the problem of how do we land in jobs that are the right fit for us from the start. So it’s neat how the philosophy carries through the transition and the company. Talks about how those same principles guided you in your career into private practice. It sounds like you’re busy enough teaching and doing your things like you could have chosen to not practice optometry at that point.
Kyle Cheatham: I felt like the whole principle of the E-Myth of a really successful businesses have people working on the business and people in the business right. I really felt like when I was going through KMK we work with all these students that I see so much potential in so many of them to have a great career and I was thinking like, I don’t have to make the same mistakes. I made the first five to 10 years out when I was in I was doing KMK and a private practice at the same time. I saw a lot of people doing private practice. First-year out I worked in like six different places a half day on Monday here half day, here on Monday afternoon, it was all these different places. I saw these different variety of things. I thought, man, what an opportunity if like you could set up a private practice and have a new doctor go into it that if you can take care of the business stuff and just allow the business to thrive by being the visionary a lot of them were coming home to speed the technician. So that was where all this started. It’s really all around the word empower. How fun is it to empower people and put them in a position where they can use the way God made them to just attack what they’re really good at but I learned over the time to Bethany, I didn’t know a lot about private practice. I screwed up that several times too. It took me years of all this like you make so many mistakes. You’re like well probably shouldn’t have done that. So it’s been a journey and mastered it by any means. It’s a fun challenge of like, how do you take that mindset of empowering and empower people by giving them an opportunity? And then if they want to buy into it and only one day Great. That’d be kind of a fun story. Look back on your life you feel like because of your understanding of business, you can set up other people to have a better life. That’s really where the real motivation comes from.
Dr.Bethany Fishbein: So did you open a practice cold? Did you buy an existing practice? How did you get into it?
Kyle Cheatham: Well, I started working at one of those six places, whatever that I worked at my first year out was this optical that was like 700 square feet had like handmade signs. It was ran by an optician who is like in our late 60s And I remember I’d be in the exam when the exam was too short. So every prescription I’d have to add a minus quarter to it means that type of place and then the walls are really thin and she kept telling this story to patients about how she was in a tornado and it almost blew off one of her thumbs. She was holding on to the wall like as the tornado was. So I mean it’s very humble beginnings of your like, do not tell that story again. You’re killing me, but it was at that place and I started off seeing patients like a half day a week and then it grew to like a day and a half and then two and a half minutes. He retired on the spot that practice and so we didn’t have anything so I had to learn everything from scratch about how you do billing and credentialing and all that stuff. I made basically every mistake in the book. And I realized throughout all those mistakes I was making, like if you just keep plugging along and keep learning, you can figure it out. It’s not crazy hard, but you just got to keep going. I think that’s probably one of my best attributes is I’m a learner at heart who believes that kind of course you’re gonna mess up and you guys just keep going you gotta keep working. I think the biggest thing, especially this post-COVID time and it’s just easy to get really discouraged. I see a lot of my colleagues is down about life. They’re discouraged about things. That’s okay for a spell, but then it’s just kind of getting the mindset of Alright, let’s go live short. This is all gonna be over before you know it. My mom passed away when she was 53. I remember when she was 49. Her and my dad they were almost retired from being teachers. We didn’t have much money, anything growing up and my dad was high school math teacher. My mom was a third-grade teacher. So they spent a lot of their life saying you know, man, once we retire, then we’re gonna go out and do things gonna be really fun. Then all of a sudden, you know, five years away from retirement, my mom gets cancer. She dies four years later, and my mom and dad never really got to experience this thing. So I just took a mindset of like, I’m gonna go for things. I’m not gonna wait. I’m gonna go for stuff. So with our kids, we have a couple of like core principles. of what it means to be a Cheathman. And one of the things we talked about a lot is that Cheathman’s go for things. We go for things. And so we’re going to screw it up a lot. And we’re not going to know what we’re doing at times, but we’re going to attack it and see what happens and then when we screw it up, we’ll learn and get a little bit better and we’ll screw it up again and we’ll learn and get a little better. I think that’s just a fun way to live. But the key is just not getting discouraged.
Dr.Bethany Fishbein: How did your practice grow from one to three?
Kyle Cheatham: Painful through several mistakes, but the big picture was it came down to the team that I had with me. It always comes down to that quite frankly I think because the one thing that E-Myth doesn’t tell you is that it’s great to think of the mindset of working on it, but not in it. That’s fun. But then once you start to get to the phase of working on it, you realize I need like as the business grows several different people working on it because my skill set is very limited. So I need other people on the team that are really good at other dimensions. And so we had one doctor, for example, I love strength space testing. I love doing like Gallup Strengths Finder and Enneagram like I’m a seven which is a visionary. I get really excited about building things. She wasn’t one she was an Enneagram she’s really good at details, right? So it was looking at the team I had and saying okay, this person’s great at patient care. She loves to do that. And then building a team with different people that had different skill sets. And so we just gradually went from one and opened up a second and then open up another one right after that. So it’s kind of bang bang bang. But the horrible part about that, Bethany is that a lot of it was during COVID in 2020 I had no idea that’s what was coming. So it was a little challenging at times.
Dr.Bethany Fishbein: That’s where the difference lies, though, right? It’s so many people during COVID got really paralyzed with fear of what was going to happen, that you didn’t know. So, so many of us kind of just internally shut down. And this is the time to go sit in your kitchen and make hot chocolate and just not make crazy business decisions because you don’t know exactly what that recovery is going to be. And I think that that personal value of we go for it. It’s interesting. There’s an episode that I just recorded with Adam Cmejla from 2020 Money Podcast, we talked about identity. We were talking about habit change and identity and at the point, you internalize something, it just becomes who you are. And so that makes decisions very easy. We talked about in the context of habit change. If you’re a great saver. You don’t have to think about am I going to spend this or save it. You know, you’ve just set up your savings because you’re a saver. And so that’s coming through here. Just if you’re someone who goes for it, and you’re faced with an opportunity and time is a little scary and every opportunity is a little scary, right? It’s the fear of failure, the fear of success, like both of those, but if you’re someone who goes for it, you just do it.
Kyle Cheatham: Yeah, I remember. I looked back on this and maybe it was a tad reckless but it ended up being one of the better decisions we made as a family. But when COVID hit one of the first things that hit my mind was there’s gonna be business opportunities that come from this just naturally because of the fact that it’s going to create a lot of uncertainty. Uncertainty creates opportunity. And so our family was for a while just kind of looking around thinking about moving and we had our eyes on an area of town that we loved and we drive through there a lot but there’s just no lots available. There’s just no opportunity there. And so we’ve kind of always go there, kind of my wife and I dreaming them out. That’d be awesome one day to live there. And then when COVID hit I just called every real or there’s four or five realtors in there and just said, Hey, if anything changes, let me know if anyone backs out of a lot or anything and within 10 days that had happened with a couple of lots and one of them was like our dream lot. And so it was a really big lesson for our family when we talked about going for things. And obviously COVID was horrible for a lot of reasons. So I don’t want to diminish that in any way. But it was just like, it’s just kind of a principle that we live by.
Dr.Bethany Fishbein: Is it personnel to ask what are the others?
Kyle Cheatham: The other principles?
Dr.Bethany Fishbein: Yeah.
Kyle Cheatham: No, not at all. One of the main ones is God first their our family dissipate too big part of everything we do. So it’s just remember, it’s not about us. It’s about other people. So just trying to surrender your life to serving other people and helping other people. And obviously, there’s times where we get selfish and times where we do make it about ourselves and so it’s just kind of this reminder of, you’re not going to be happy if you live that way. So trying to stress that in our kids and in our own lives a lot.
Dr.Bethany Fishbein: Awesome. Kyle, thank you so much for sharing your story. I know we talked before about not knowing exactly what we were going to be talking about and which direction we were gonna go but hearing your story and the success that you’ve created not only for yourself, but in creating opportunities for success for so many other people who you’ve served by taking those chances and staying true to who you are and building for the right reasons is really going to be inspiring to a lot of people out there who are still figuring it out. I appreciate you taking the time if someone wants to learn more about KMK if they’re a practice owner and they want one of these new grads, how do they reach you?
Kyle Cheatham: I’ll just give my personal email is this My name is Kylemarkcheatham@gmail.com. So just email me personally, that’s the email that always just go straight to me and I’d love to help. I know this is a stressful time for private practice Doc’s we’re battling some things we’ve never battled before. I used to feel like I still do private practice is amazing. It’s the best opportunity out there. But now we’re battling some things that make it really challenging a lot of noise that makes it challenging for people to see that for new grads to see that so I’d love to help. There are ways that can help. Let me know some of the fun.
Dr.Bethany Fishbein: Absolutely. And for more information on Power Practice helping you get the most out of practice ownership. You can reach out to us at powerpractice.com. Thank you so much for listening and we will see you next time.