What Opening McKinney Has Taught Me About Growth, Leadership, and Community

Opening a new brush365 location feels very different to me now than it did earlier in my career.

There’s more confidence because we’re not building from scratch anymore. We have stronger systems, better infrastructure, experienced leaders, and years of lessons behind us. I know what tends to work, what tends to break, and where we need to pay attention.

But experience has also made me less likely to assume that a successful formula can simply be repeated somewhere else.

McKinney is its own community. We can bring the strength of what we’ve built across DFW, but we still have to earn trust here. That part can’t be shortcut.

Growth Has Made Leadership More Important, Not Less

When brush365 was smaller, I could personally touch a much larger percentage of what happened in the company. I could be in more conversations, make more decisions, and influence the patient and team experience more directly.

That becomes less realistic as you grow, and I think that has changed me as a leader.

I’ve become much more focused on choosing people who understand the kind of company we’re trying to build and who naturally carry the qualities that matter most to me: ownership, kindness, integrity, and pride in doing things well.

You can teach someone a process. You can train someone on a system. It’s much harder to manufacture the way someone shows up when nobody is watching.

So my role now is less about being involved in every decision and more about building leaders I trust to make good ones.

That has also changed how I think about growth itself. Earlier in my career, it was easier to look at the obvious markers: patient volume, production, another location, another milestone.

I still care about those things. A business has to be healthy. But now I also care about what growth is doing to the organization underneath the numbers.

Are our standards staying intact? Are patients getting the same level of care and hospitality across locations? Are our doctors and team members able to build meaningful careers here? Is the company becoming more capable as it gets bigger, or simply more complicated?

Those questions matter a lot more to me now.

McKinney Has to Become More Than a Location

The other piece I’ve been thinking about is what it actually means to belong in a community.

Opening the doors is only the beginning.

Getting involved with the McKinney Chamber and meeting other local business owners has been meaningful because I have a real appreciation for people who are building something. I know the amount of time, money, energy, and belief it takes.

The grand opening reinforced that for me. People came out, met our team, celebrated with us, and gave us their time. That meant a lot because nobody owes a new business that kind of welcome.

Now it’s our responsibility to keep showing up.

A few years from now, I don’t want people to think of us as the new dental office in McKinney. I want families to know us. I want kids to grow up coming here. I want our team to recognize patients when they walk in and to be genuinely connected to the businesses, events, and causes around us.

If that happens, I’ll feel like we’ve done something more meaningful than simply open another location: We’ll have actually become part of McKinney.