067: Five Years Ago With Don Koontz DDS

Title: Five Years Ago With Don Koontz DDS

Guest: Dr. Don Koontz, DDS

Dr. Don Koontz: Most people at the end of their life, they don’t regret what they did, but they regret what they didn’t do.

Peter: Welcome to the Biz and Life Done Well podcast, where we explore what it means and what it takes to do business and life well. I’m your host, Peter Wilson. If you’re like me, you’re intrigued by stories of common people who have achieved uncommon success in business and life. Join me as I interview fascinating people about how they got started, their successes and failures, their habits and routines, and what inspires them. Today, my guest is Don Kunz.

He is a great dentist in Everett, Washington. He’s also my brother-in-law. I also want to mention that Don was the very first guest on this podcast, and we were just looking it up this morning. It was 09/28/2018. Almost exactly four years ago, we produced our first episode of Business Life Done Well and Don was my first guest.

Don, thanks for joining me this morning.

Dr. Don Koontz: Thanks, Pete. I just I feel really honored to be on the podcast again. I just want to say, congratulations on you. Last four years have been a really productive period for you. And I’m just impressed you’ve maybe done 70 podcasts.

Peter: 66, I believe. This will be number 67. My goal is to, my stretch goal, I should say, is to get to a 100 episodes this year.

Dr. Don Koontz: Wow. That’s terrific. You’re doing an amazing job.

Peter: Well, thank you. Wow. It’s been it’s been a lot of fun, and I really enjoyed that first interview we did four years ago. And the reason I had you here today, and I I’m thankful that you agreed to meet with me, is that we wanted to talk about what we did in the past five years. And I had written a blog post called five years ago…

And it was motivated by moving out of our Edmonds office. So my company bizmarketing.com had an in Edmunds. As you know, you’ve visited a couple times.

Dr. Don Koontz: Beautiful.

Peter: Nice spot on the water. After a five year lease, we moved out and it just felt like a real milestone and sort of a turning point inflection point. And I decided to stop thinking about the future for one moment and look back a little bit.

Dr. Don Koontz: Mhmm.

Peter: So I shared my recollections in a recent podcast about five years ago and kinda what happened over the past five years and I challenged business owners, folks who listen to the podcast to do the same thing. And lo and behold, I think I got a text from you saying, yeah, hey, that was a great podcast or that was a great article and been thinking about it so I immediately invited you to be on the podcast. So we could talk about five years ago looking at kind of where you’ve been in the past five years. So you’ve thought about it a little bit. Without further ado, what comes to mind when you think about five years ago?

I mean, I know there’s a lot of different, you know, sort of categories of things, but what what’s the first thing that comes to mind for you with relation to your business?

Dr. Don Koontz: Well, five years ago was September 2017. Yep. About five years previous to that about five years previous to that, I had, just built a new building, and it was a real labor of love, and it took me a lot of, had to move out of that building because it was in the space. It was it was in that 02/2010 when the economy tanked. Yeah.

And so it was a real, it was a real, stretch for me and it was a real great experience building that building. But, and I hired this guy named Peter Wilson to do my marketing for me. And so

Peter: I know him.

Dr. Don Koontz: Yeah. Between the building and the marketing and just I got some new staff members and the business really took off. Mhmm. So I just hired a young man named Nick Connolly, who’s still with me as a dentist, great dentist, great young guy. We had a lot of new patients, a lot of demand for our services.

And I was talking to one guy, I remember, think I it was a Boeing engineer, and he was kind of ticked off at me. He was like, you know what, Kunz? I’ve been coming to you a long time, and I’ve always been able to get an appointment. I’m pushed out three months. I can’t see the person I want to see.

And he said, you know, my job at Boeing is to, monitor capacity. You know, if we’re gonna sell things, we have to make sure we have the capacity to deliver the product. And he says, that’s what my job is. And he says, that’s what you’re not doing right now. You’re not dealing with your capacity issues.

And he was he was pretty serious about it. And so I just took that to heart and I said, okay. Thank you for your input. You know? Yeah.

Sorry. It’s taking you three months to get in. Anyway, so we’d had five operatories at the time. And one thing we did was we turned my little office into an operatory. My sister, Susan, was was working out of that office.

So Nick and I were just in these little cubby holes. We didn’t have offices for ourselves, but that was fine because you don’t make any money sitting in your office. So five years ago, we’d done that, but that still hadn’t solved our issue.

Peter: So 2011 was when you opened your then new practice.

Dr. Don Koontz: Yeah, July 2011.

Peter: Before then, you had had a double wide office.

Dr. Don Koontz: What do

Peter: they call it? Modular office.

Dr. Don Koontz: Yeah. Thanks for remembering, Pete.

Peter: On that space that had been there for twenty years or Yes. Something like So it was 2011. I remember that because I was still working in the corporate world then

Dr. Don Koontz: Was that right?

Peter: It was You

Dr. Don Koontz: hadn’t started your own business.

Peter: Yeah, and it was 2012, early twenty twelve when we started. So, know, a little more than ten years ago that when you were the first client that we worked with. Oh. So I remember you had opened the new building. Mhmm.

And then you were like, hey, Pete. We you know, now that we got this capacity, got it And filled then of course you filled it up and then, you know, then you and Nick, you know, you changed your office into this into an operatory. So you really were kinda crammed in there. Mhmm.

Dr. Don Koontz: So at

Peter: the time you had five or six operatories and now you’ve got this Boeing engineer telling you, hey, Kuntz, you know, you know, you you gotta do a better job at this. Yeah. So then what happened?

Dr. Don Koontz: Well, I started looking around, you know, I said, how can I, I really can’t add on to any more space because, you know, I had a certain footprint of my land and there was a guy next door? He was kind of an old broken down building. I was gonna have to tear that down. And I was trying to think of some way I could kind of connect the two buildings, and that didn’t seem to be working out. I’d looked in other parts of town.

I’d looked in up in Marysville. I looked over at Edmonds. But I really liked that that space right there in in South Everett, right off of 120 Eighth. If there was a guy across the parking lot from me, he and his wife owned a commercial printing office, had a building that used to be a children’s world daycare. Oh.

And I’d I’d thought about buying that in in, 2000 or 2003 or whatever. Wasn’t able to buy it. They bought it. It was basically a big warehouse space. I talked to him.

Was a nice guy. We were friendly. And I’d talk to him every now and then and say, Hey, hey, Eric. You know, if you think about retiring or moving, let me know. Know, he’s always

Peter: So they had a print business and they owned the space?

Dr. Don Koontz: They owned the building and It they had a print was like a more of a warehouse space. Okay. It was just very basic. Yeah. And the building, he hadn’t done anything to the outside of the building because he wasn’t really a retail thing.

Was it was like a commercial. He was he was taking printing from other printers and doing it.

Peter: Yeah. So it was commercial printing.

Dr. Don Koontz: Yeah. He didn’t have any didn’t have any desire or need to make the building look good.

Peter: Didn’t have any retail. Just

Dr. Don Koontz: Right. Right. This was like in the latter part of 2017, ’18. And I was just talking to a real estate friend of mine. And he said, he said, Don, you know what?

That strategy is never gonna work. He’s like, what you gotta do is you got to get an offer on paper and present it to him. And you have to get a banker to say, yes, I will finance Don for this amount. So I made some phone calls and, got a banker to say they’d finance me. Yeah.

I had, my friend Aaron just present him an offer. I wasn’t really expecting much of it because like he’d always said, he was, you know, retirement was years off and Mhmm.

Peter: So this was in a casual conversation that you were having with him.

Dr. Don Koontz: Exactly. I’d never made any kind of formal offer to Got it.

Peter: So then when you put it in writing

Dr. Don Koontz: You put it in front of him and put it in writing and he, I think he was, you know, impressed about the the the amount. He kinda countered and we we we agreed on the price. Yeah. Sure enough, he ended up selling it to me.

Peter: How much how how much longer after you presented the initial?

Dr. Don Koontz: Right away. Wow. Yeah. He he like I said, he countered and then not a whole lot more. It seemed like a lot of money at the time, but looking back on the five years, it’s like, you know, now it seems cheap.

Peter: You’d love to buy

Dr. Don Koontz: Exactly. It for And he ended up carrying the, carrying the note for a couple of years too for me. So it worked out really well. And then I kind of, and then I was telling people about it and my staff and even family, and they were just kind of like confused. Like what this, they didn’t see how this was gonna be a nice building.

Peter: So you’ve got, yeah. So you’ve got this beautiful at the time, beautiful office.

Dr. Don Koontz: Only five, six years old.

Peter: And and everybody’s like, what? So and then you go look across the parking lot and you see this kinda old not old, but just a a building that with no no street appeal at all. It’s old. It’s just

Dr. Don Koontz: a big box. Big rectangular box. Yeah. So I, ended up hiring the same guy that, designed my building to design this one. I kinda wanted the same look.

Yeah. I got some financing, which I was grateful to get, you know, because I it was taking a lot of money. You know? I had to I had to pay for the, well, had already had the note for the for the building that had to basically rebuild the place, turning into a a dental office. Right.

Had to pay the county, a very high mitigation fee for traffic. Did we tell you about that?

Peter: How’d that feel?

Dr. Don Koontz: You know what?

Peter: It’s Feel like a shakedown?

Dr. Don Koontz: Hard to do in business, I guess. I don’t think it’s really relieved traffic much, but anyway, that’s another subject. Anyways, there’s just lots of costs, lots of, lots of, you put a lot of money into it before you actually get the financing for the, you know, for the building. So you put a lot of your own cash into it. It was a stretch, but first building, the first building, it just really kind of gave me an idea of you have this vision for something and you work towards it, and it really stretches you, and you really realize how much you can accomplish by doing that.

I’ve tried to tell it to my kids. I say, you know what? Don’t be afraid to take risks in life. And make sure there sound risks, but set a goal that’s, like you were saying, of a stretch thing so it really makes you work for it and makes you really up in the morning thinking about it. You think, you know, it’s always on your mind.

And It really makes to me, it makes life fun. You know? It makes life fun to have something to shoot for, have a mountain to climb, have something to really strive for. So that that whole process, actually, when I talked to you on the podcast last time, I just purchased the building in 2018. Yeah.

And it seems like both both times I’ve built buildings, we’ve had this economic crisis in the midst of the building. The first one was in the whole downturn of the, you know, real estate recession. Yeah. Dentistry was You know, hadn’t had any patients. This one, had COVID breakout in the middle of the building.

Peter: Forced shutdown. You guys were forced

Dr. Don Koontz: by was the forced state to shut shut down for three months.

Peter: Three months. Right in the middle of

Dr. Don Koontz: Right in the middle of building. And the builders were forced to shut down too.

Peter: You know? Wow.

Dr. Don Koontz: Yeah. That’s, I’m a person of faith, I did a lot of praying at the time. And, yeah, I’ve always felt very blessed in that respect. So we got we got our doors open October 2020, just after that. The pandemic was kinda still raging there.

Peter: One thing I’m impressed with is the way that you all, I mean, we’re not just, you know, focusing on the building itself, but one of the things that I was impressed with in the new space, you were able to take some lessons learned with your old space and kind of create the ideal flow. You know, like the way patients come in one way and they go out the other way. They don’t.

Dr. Don Koontz: Yeah. Actually it was funny because we wanted to have more of an open concept like the, like our old building, the fire marshal, or the fire inspector didn’t go for that. He wanted us to have it. We had this basically a corridor because of the fire issues, but it turned out that actually worked out very well for COVID because we found that patients actually wanted to have more privacy. They wanted to have, to feel more contained.

Yeah. So it was actually a blessing in disguise. Uh-huh. I love the old building. I I like I love that concept.

I just think now it’s just it does give a better, I think, patient experience to have more privacy.

Peter: Right.

Dr. Don Koontz: So if I were to build another building, I’d probably build it that same way with kind of more closed in operatories rather than really

Peter: So where are you at now? What is the count? So you went from x number of operatories to y

Dr. Don Koontz: We have 11 now. Have six to 11, so we almost doubled. We hired another, dentist, young man from the area. And we have, we went from like three hygienists to some days five, some days five hygiene. So we’ve increased our capacity.

So that guy that, that was busting my chops, you know, I’ve tried to, tried to, alleviate that problem. I think we’ve done a pretty good job and, we’re getting, you know, we still have problems getting people in sometimes, but we have a lot more front desk people. Yeah. Just a lot of, a lot of good people working there and it’s a great space. And I’m just glad we’re able to serve more people.

Know, our revenue’s gone up. We’ve been able to impact more people in our community.

Peter: Right. So do the rearview mirror. What would you have told yourself five years ago? What would you tell the five year younger you?

Dr. Don Koontz: You know, it’s just like life. You go through a lot of stress and you do a lot of worrying. It’s all gonna work out, you know? That’s that’s kinda my thing. It’s it’s just put the time in, you know, put the effort in, and it’s gonna work out.

And it’s it’s just, you know, going back to what said before, it’s just about giving yourself a chance to really expand your network, expand your reach. You know, I was hearing a guy talking, this isn’t new to this guy, but he was saying, you know, most people at the end of their life, they don’t regret what they did, but they regret what they didn’t do. It’s like, I could have actually done this if I just stretched myself a bit. Mhmm.

Peter: So That’s good advice. Obviously, your location, you’re pretty much in the same your address is like a half of your old address, right?

Dr. Don Koontz: Yeah, it’s right across the parking lot.

Peter: So you didn’t really move.

Dr. Don Koontz: Yeah. And that old building I have leased out to an orthodontist. So it’s still being utilized. It’s still being used well. We refer patients back and forth to each other.

It’s still a nice place.

Peter: I mean, some of the other things I think about is in terms of like services, your people, you know, your clients or patients. I mean, that was one of the things that I kind of touched on looking back at, you know, five years ago, we didn’t have, Chris Goldman wasn’t working with us at the time. Emily had just had her one year anniversary. Tim had, Anne had been with us for three years at the time. We’d had not hired a full time designer.

Now that person has moved on and now we have Marcel as our designer. So I think about, wow, over the course of the last five years, I’ve seen a lot of changes in personnel and people

Dr. Don Koontz: and

Peter: things like that. So are there any things in, like people or services that you think are worth mentioning? That we’ve added? Yeah. Or changed or whatever.

Dr. Don Koontz: Yeah. You know how life is, go, people come and go. I’ve lost some people. One of the things that’s been kind of cool is two of my assistants have gone to dental hygiene school, and they both, said they were just super encouraged by me and some of their staff members to really, you know, kind of stretch their horizons. And they’ve gone on to further their education, and, one of them is just about to graduate right now.

So that’s something I’m I’m I really feel good about and just providing it. And, obviously, they’re the ones that’s doing the work. But Right. I think they felt the encouragement from from me and my staff to, hey. You know what?

You can do this. This is something you should really think about. So it’s just neat to see people advance their careers. Another of my hygienists is teaching part time at a hygiene school. Yeah, Melanie.

So then she’s very, very ambitious too. And then like I said, we hired Doctor. Gulveo about a year ago. He’s a young man from from South Everett. He went to Mariner High School right down the street.

He’s a good guy, it’s just fun working with him, seeing his energy. You you and I, we’re kind of, let’s say we’re more mature than we were five years ago. And I think that’s something

Peter: I’m 61, Don.

Dr. Don Koontz: Yeah, yeah. Well, I’m 58 tomorrow.

Peter: Yeah. Getting ready to go to

Dr. Don Koontz: your high school reading. Yeah. It’s just like you think of yourself as young, though. Right?

Peter: Of course. Yeah.

Dr. Don Koontz: Of course you do. Yeah. But you look around, all your patients are, you know, most I mean, we have a lot of mature, older patients, but a lot of them are in their twenties and thirties. Right. And what I think it’s cool is to have a lot of different ages in our staff.

Absolutely. You know, we have young dentists. We have young hygienists. We have older hygienists, we have older dentists. And so it’s just, it’s really good, I think, as you go along in your career to be able to add youth to your staff in my perspective, because then it just, it makes your patients, I think, feel more connected.

Where if everybody, they say the problem with dentists is their whole staff just kind of ages

Peter: Ages with

Dr. Don Koontz: them, now you have this

Peter: And then your patients do if you’re not paying attention.

Dr. Don Koontz: Exactly. So it’s good to have guys like Doctor. Goveo, Doctor. Conley’s young. Yeah.

And we’ve got some young, hygienists. We’ve got some young assistants. And it’s just, it’s really neat just to have that mix. We have different, a lot of different ethnic groups. We have, different languages spoken in our office.

Know, South Everett is a very diverse ethnically area. So I think we’ve really matched that, which is great.

Peter: So trying to reflect

Dr. Don Koontz: they’re just surrounding great area. Yeah. People, you know? And it’s just it’s just makes, makes a nicer place to work, think. I think thinking back, you know, way back when I just it was just me and a couple assistants and a hygienist and it was just so much it’s so much more fun having other people there.

We can do events. We have lunches a lot. We went out to dinner cruise this year. Have That was

Peter: a blast.

Dr. Don Koontz: Yeah. It’s just fun to have a bigger staff, I think. It’s fun to have other dentists to balance things off of. I would not want to be working in clinic where I’m just the only dentist anymore. It’s just too lonely, you Yeah.

I’d ask Doctor. Goveu and Doctor. Conley about different things. Hey, what would you guys do in this case? And it’s just such a more collegial atmosphere.

So the more we grow, just the more fun it becomes and the more connections we can have with other people. Mhmm.

Peter: Yeah, that totally makes sense. One thing that I was thinking about as you were speaking about younger folks is I just read the other day that there are digital firsts and analog firsts. So folks that are 35 and younger are digital firsts. They’ve never known a world without you know, digital and the internet and phones and all that. Whereas all of us are analog first.

So when we talk about shopping, for example, we, the analog first, will say, know, I went shopping but if I go buy something online, I’ll say I was online shopping. Right?

Dr. Don Koontz: That’s your default is is going to the store and buying Yeah.

Peter: But but when I even talk about it, if I did buy something online, I’ll make mention of, well, I was online shopping. I’ll I’ll I’ll say, well, it was it wasn’t really shopping. It was online shopping. Right? Whereas digital first don’t make a distinction.

They were shopping.

Dr. Don Koontz: Exactly.

Peter: Whether in fact, if you go to the mall, they’ll say, oh, well, I, you know, they’ll they’ll have some reference to, well, I was actually, you know, went to the Yeah. Went in person.

Dr. Don Koontz: IRL.

Peter: Well, here’s the funny thing. According to this, what I read, there are a 134,000,000 analog firsts and there are a 140,000,000 Oh. Digital firsts.

Dr. Don Koontz: So we’re outnumbered.

Peter: Yeah. We’re outnumbered. So it’s time for us to Yeah. You know Well Pay attention.

Dr. Don Koontz: Yeah. And in that same vein, I mean, you guys have helped us out a lot with our with our patient communication. You know? Right. A lot of it’s in texting now.

Yeah. Text messages, people pay on you know, through our website. So I think that’s you’re right. That’s that’s something the younger generation really wants and really and they they wanna they check you out on their phone first. They read reviews.

You’ve done a really nice job of kind of being able helping us organize those reviews.

Peter: Right. Yeah.

Dr. Don Koontz: And that’s yeah. That’s crucial, I think, these days in any kind of business. Have to be able to tap into that digital mindset.

Peter: Well, the you know, related to that, we look at the numbers. I remember when they were saying that searches on mobile devices would overtake searches on desktops. And this was was more than four years ago though, like five Today, years we look at the search volume numbers online. It’s 70 to 80%

Dr. Don Koontz: mobile first. Mobile. Interesting.

Peter: And I personally, I will, just because I’m lazy, I’ll grab my phone to search for something. And then if I find something interesting, maybe I’ll go to my desktop

Dr. Don Koontz: to just

Peter: have a better experience to look at a website or,

Dr. Don Koontz: you know, if I’m trying I should probably know this, but do you have to tweak our web page to make it mobile friendly?

Peter: We’ve we’ve done that, like, several years

Dr. Don Koontz: ago. Yeah. Yeah. I’m just saying that’s that’s what you do because you know that most people are looking at us through our

Peter: Yeah. You wouldn’t you wouldn’t really build a website these days if it wasn’t mobile optimized, you know, where Yeah. Where it actually it changes depending on the size of the screen Mhmm.

Dr. Don Koontz: That

Peter: you’re viewing on. And there are certain elements that we’ll even add or subtract depending on the device. For example, at the bottom of your website, if you look at it on a phone, we have a little footer there that’s always said that says call us, book appointment. Okay. It’s little buttons, right?

Yeah. But if you’re looking on a desktop, you don’t see that.

Dr. Don Koontz: Mhmm.

Peter: Because that obviously you’re not gonna click on a button on a desktop. Yeah. Yeah. So that’s so that when I when I saw that about this analog first digital first, oh and by the way, here’s another sobering statistic. We’ve been analog first more or less for the last hundred and forty thousand years.

Dr. Don Koontz: Right? Mhmm.

Peter: Digital first, last thirty five years. You know, you and I are sitting kind of in the middle this crossroads. Right?

Dr. Don Koontz: What are you saying, Pete? We’re we’re dinosaurs? No.

Peter: It’s just a it’s an interesting time to be alive. It is very interesting.

Dr. Don Koontz: And you know, it’s it’s changed dentistry too. I mean, about when we moved into our old building eleven years ago, we went all digital charts. Went We all digital x rays. There’s some offices that still have paper charts. We we started doing Invisalign, and we use, digital scanning for that.

Sometimes there’s things I still like to take an impression with a, what’s called a polyvinyl impression. I just think you get a better result. Mhmm. I tried the CEREC for a while, but I just, you know, digital things are just transforming the business. Mhmm.

Peter: You know? So even if probably it changes the way you work with your suppliers, I would imagine.

Dr. Don Koontz: Vendors, Yeah. For We can scan things to the lab. Yeah. The vendors. Yeah.

You can obviously search for things online, make your orders online, that

Peter: kind Looking of at the last five years, is there anything else that comes to mind with respect to the business or just the way you look at it from a personal perspective, you know, where it fits into your life overall?

Dr. Don Koontz: I think I’ve really, you know, really come to appreciate it more, you know, and just come to realize how much I real how much of my life it is. You know? I mean, the older I get, you know, I’m I’m thinking about the next chapter, you know, eventually. The great thing about I tell these young dentists, the great thing about this is my thirtieth year in dentistry. Yeah.

And, and I’ve been pretty much in that same corner for thirty years. And the great thing about that is you, as you being a general dentist, you see these people every six months and you, and you see, I’ve had people come in that have kids and say, yeah, Doctor. Poonce, you were my dentist when I was a kid, you know? And you, you, and it’s, that’s what the fun part of, for me is just, is just connecting with these people every now and then and just seeing how their lives progress and trying to be a small part of their, you know, health care and then and then the staff members too. So I really like I said, I’ve just really come to really realize how much that, my business means to me and just the people, you know?

Of course, when you’re building a business, it’s stressful and whatnot, but I’m just trying to really appreciate every day that I get to work there. And, the neighborhood has changed, you know? They’ve built a lot of buildings around. We’ve, I think that area I was reading over the past, like, I don’t know what, maybe ten years. It’s been the largest growth section in the state of Washington.

They said we added we added us the equivalent of the size of Walla Walla to that area. Wow. Isn’t that crazy?

Peter: Wow. That’s lucky location.

Dr. Don Koontz: I’ve been fortunate to be in a very growing location. Feels good to to be able to to, I think, improve the area. Know, we we built those two buildings and Well, yeah. Did. Cleaned My up a bunch of homeless, old, you know, disregarded homeless camps and I think people have said that.

They say, hey, know, Koons, thanks for making our neighborhood look better. So that’s been cool.

Peter: Yeah. So I think I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring up what you went through last weekend.

Dr. Don Koontz: Oh. Oh, yeah. My Triathlon? My punish self punishment. Yeah.

Yeah. I did a half Ironman down in Santa Cruz, California. My my brother-in-law, who you know, Ray, he’s always been very good about encouraging me to stretch myself. And Mhmm. About, I don’t know, six or eight months ago, he said, hey.

I’m doing this half Ironman in Santa Cruz in in September. Why don’t you do it with me? I hadn’t, been training a whole lot. I was kinda having to hon, then I finally just one day signed up for it. You know how you know how it goes.

Once you commit, once you commit, then you have to really work for it. So I started riding. It was a, you know, it’s a half. So it’s a 1.2 mile swim, 56 mile bike, and 13.1 mile run. So that was last weekend.

I didn’t break any records, but I guess I a personal

Peter: record. Finished.

Dr. Don Koontz: I finished.

Peter: So what was the total? Was it 73 miles?

Dr. Don Koontz: 70.3.

Peter: 70.3.

Dr. Don Koontz: Yeah. Wow. And it was just cool to have my family down there. Yeah. Yeah, it felt, actually the run, the swim and the bike felt really good.

It felt really not very hard, hard, But then when I got off the bike and started running, that’s when I really felt it. So, you know, if and when I do another one, I’ll really work on the run more. So maybe we’ll do it with him someday,

Peter: Pete. No. No desire.

Dr. Don Koontz: It’s a hard no.

Peter: No desire. But hats off to you. When was the last time you did something like that?

Dr. Don Koontz: Well, I’d I’d done a full, iron length triathlon in, gosh, must’ve been around twenty, twenty years ago, maybe twenty five years ago. Wow. With Ray. So that was like the last time I’d done something long. And and this this felt, I don’t think quite as tough, but I mean, obviously I’m I’m twenty years older.

Peter: You’ve done shorter distance.

Dr. Don Koontz: Yeah. I’ve done some sprints, some Olympic versions. Yeah. And, those were fun too, but this was a nice cause it really focuses you on really working out. And and the place where you did it was beautiful.

It was we we rode up Highway 1 up the up PCH, you know, just these beautiful coastlines.

Peter: So so what are you thinking while you’re out there? Maybe I don’t wanna know.

Dr. Don Koontz: What’s going through your mind? That’s the challenge with these races, Pete, is they don’t allow any kind of electronics. Oh. No headphones, no AirPod, no ear earphones, no AirPods. So you’re really stuck with your thoughts there.

And so it’s funny because on the run, when I was really struggling, I would just meet these guys and just kind of run up beside them and just start talking to them and saying, what’s going on? And I met this one guy from Vancouver, Washington, Oh,

Peter: right on where we grew up. Yeah.

Dr. Don Koontz: And then I met this one guy, this one engineer for Google. Finally he told me, you know what, could you quit talking to me please? I’m running out of breath. So I said, okay, fair enough. And then at the very end, my son-in-law or my future son-in-law, Andrew, he kinda came up and jogged beside me for a couple miles.

And he said he said, I’ll just, you know, jog beside you. Is is is whatever you want me to do. And I said, Andrew, just start talking to me. Said, he’s about what? I said, don’t care.

Just tell what you did today. I just wanna take my mind off my leg.

Peter: How about the Mims?

Dr. Don Koontz: So we just did that for the last couple of months. That really helped me. But it was, yeah, part of it is just a mental thing because you’re just stuck there with your thoughts. Most of what you think about is, know, the next How much it hurts. Next water break.

And what I’d do is I’d stop at the they have these little everybody milers. So they have like a water station. It was pretty it was pretty hot actually. It was hotter than I thought it was gonna be. Uh-huh.

So you just pour ice down your back and pour water over your head and stuff. So that kind of keeps you going.

Peter: Wow. Well, hats off.

Dr. Don Koontz: Thank you. It was, I’m not sure it was fun, but it was it was rewarding.

Peter: Well, I’m I’m I’m blown away and, just amazed and inspired by you. Well, Don, I appreciate this look back at five years ago. Can’t wait to have you on the podcast again to talk about

Dr. Don Koontz: Let’s do it in five years, Steve.

Peter: Let’s not like wait that long but thank you so much. Yeah, maybe we’ll have you on for maybe when we hit the episode 100. We can think something.

Dr. Don Koontz: That’d be great. I really enjoy listening to your, I haven’t listened to all of them, I listened to quite a few and it’s just, it’s encouraging just to hear a lot of business owners and people from different walks of life and it’s a good thing you’re doing. So keep up the good work.

Peter: Appreciate it. It’s a joy, thanks. Thanks for listening to this episode of Biz and Life Done Well with Peter Wilson. You can subscribe to us on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and most of the other popular podcast platforms. Please tell your friends about us and leave us a review so even more people will find out about us.

Thanks again. We’ll see you soon.