A money mindset isn’t just about managing finances—it’s about shaping a future aligned with your goals and values. In this episode, Trey Tippit, a successful entrepreneur in the dental industry, shares how embracing an abundant money mindset helped him take control of his financial future. Trey dives into strategies for aligning your spending with your goals, building confidence in financial decisions, and using mindset shifts to navigate life’s financial challenges. Whether you’re looking to eliminate debt, grow your wealth, or simply gain clarity, Trey’s insights provide actionable steps to transform how you think about money. Tune in to learn how to cultivate a money mindset that empowers you to live with purpose and freedom.
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Money Mindset Mastery: Cultivating Abundance And Financial Freedom
I have another special guest with me who’s going to talk to you guys about money mindset. Trey.
Wade, thanks for having me on.
You bet. I’m so glad to reconnect with you. It’s been a while since we’ve talked. How have you been?
That’s been the longest hiatus with us. I was thinking about that when you gave me a call and I thought, “When did we first connect?”
I’ve got the exact date. Do you want to know what it was?
I want to know what it is.
It was August 2017.
It feels longer. I don’t know if that’s good or bad.
I think it’s good. We were almost like blood brothers from the beginning, and we just resonated with each other. We totally appreciated each other’s deeper philosophical mindsets, and I think that’s probably why it feels like longer.
We had some phenomenal conversations over that time period. We still do. I learned a whole lot from our interactions and for that, I know we’ve talked about this before, I very much thank you. It’s a good reminder that you want to surround yourself with people that you can learn from and help build you as a person and help grow.
You want to surround yourself with people you can learn from and help build and grow you as a person.
Jim Rohn and maybe others have made famous the phrase that you become like the top five people you spend the most time with.
You bet. Great advice.
Readers, my friends, Money Masters, Trey has been a client. You started as a client in 2017. Even though he’s very successful in his life and his business, he still wanted some support. He hired me for coaching and we looked at all things personal finance. We looked at the business cashflows, looked at personal cashflows, debt investment strategy, protection strategy, and figured out where some deficiencies were. Tax strategy, I think, was a big deal as well. Trey, tell us a little bit about your business background, like what you grew up doing and how you became who you are now in business.
From Dentistry To CEO: A Growth Journey
My dad was a dentist. My mom was a dental hygienist, and I followed suit and went right into dentistry. Funny enough, you learn how much you didn’t actually know about it as you go through that process. I became a dentist. I graduated in 2008. That is where my training and background is. I went in with my dad and I was very fortunate to have a mentor I could trust right out of the gate. That was very valuable to me. I knew that’s what I needed to look for. I’m someone that seeks out coaching in every aspect of my life. That was a really fortunate place for me to come from and be born into. I bought his practice from him in 2011, and it just started growing. I opened my second one in early 2014.
I bought another one in 2016 and then was off to the races. At this point, I no longer practice dentistry. I run the company, I train, I manage, at this point, we have started twelve practices. I’ve sold one and we are looking at the horizon of where to go next. I’ve transitioned from dentist over to, I guess you would call it CEO, but my background is still in the medical aspect of it. Because of that, I have a very unique view on how I run the company and what I do. It’s been a lot of fun. I’ve had a great time doing it. I’ve put together a great team. I have a lot of great people around me, and we have a lot of fun together.
The Abundance Mindset: Creating Value And Growing The Pie
I don’t hear that from everyone who’s in business and who are running businesses, that they’re having fun. We’re in the topic of money mindset. Tell us about the role of having a proactive, positive, abundant, growth-oriented mindset versus the scarcity or poverty mindset that a lot of people fall into, or victim mindset that people fall into.
I will preface this with much of my mindset. I had something to do with being able to follow into a family practice. I was very fortunate to have, I mean, I was born into a very abundance mindset. I have found a lot of pieces of within that abundance mindset where I hold on to this scarcity piece and you find it within, throughout, that you have to go work to overcome or switch over into that abundance thinking.
It’s been an interesting journey because I’m very aware and I’ve reflected very much on my progress and how I do. It’s been fun going through the process, evaluating how I came to be where I am. I would say all of my success comes from that abundant mindset. I’m in the medical field, so my success, the more successful I am, the more people get helped. That’s become a big driver for me in the sense that I believe in what we do and I believe we do a great job.
I want to do more of it and because of that, I want to push that forward into more people. You want to treat more people. Abundance has been something that I constantly think that that is a way to provide value my services that I offer and that value and that value exchange should be pushed. I know we talk money specifically and wealth strategy, but when you talk about just economics and the exchange of value and how currency has come about and whatnot, but you start to realize how fascinating that is providing and creating value in the world. That’s been a big driver for me. I’ve really enjoyed it. The abundance of thought process has been a key driver for it. I would not nearly be able to do what I do to this level if I didn’t believe in that thinking, that process.
I’m thinking we need to define what abundance looks like compared to scarcity and victimhood. It might sound obvious because you’ve been in it all your life, and I’ve had a more or less abundant mindset for a lot of my life as well. I want to just clarify. A lot of people view the world as either/or transaction. Somebody wins, somebody loses. There’s a finite grouping of resources that are out there. If I win, you lose and vice versa. In business in particular, that seems to show up a lot. “f the dentist down the street is successful, then he’s taking my patients away. I can’t be successful. That’s like the scarcity victim mindset. Have you seen others of your peers in the industry behave that way?
The Power Of Mentorship: Uncovering Blind Spots And Expanding Perspectives
Very much so. I think that mindset, which is the zero-sum mindset, there’s a finite amount of pie. My win has to equate to yours or someone else’s loss, and on a very individual basis, to go to the patient. My win of a patient is your loss of a patient. Think of the same thing. If my success in a practice is someone else’s loss, it can expand to whatever level you want to take it. I think what I was alluding to earlier with the aspect of value exchange and value creation is exactly that of I don’t believe in the zero-sum game, you create value and create more. You create a bigger pie. That’s the thought process of abundance in my mind when I define that, when we start talking about zero-sum game versus value creation.
Create a bigger pie. I think there are people reading who might not really appreciate what that means. Do you have any examples of how you’ve seen that play out?
Sure. A good example, let’s go to employment. As you create and grow, a single small practice becomes a larger practice. Let’s say you have five people on your team. Five jobs. It’s not like you hire one other person to six and someone else loses somebody. Create a bigger practice. Now you can hire more jobs. You’ve created that. There’s value creation. There’s more employment. There’s another job created from essentially nothing. It gets larger. Multiple practices, multiple jobs. Think of someone who starts a medical practice or a dental practice from scratch. Anything starting from nothing. All of that didn’t exist before. Now it exists. It’s not taking from someone else. It’s creating from the ground up.
That’s a really interesting perspective on the dental industry specifically, and I guess just in general. If you have an idea and you can solve a problem, and perhaps it’s a similar problem to someone else, but you can solve it in a more efficient way or a better way in a way that people appreciate and they’re going to come to you and you’re going to be able to serve them in the way that they want to be served. Their problem wants to be solved.
I think of it in terms of land. We live in the United States of America. There’s literally a finite amount of land. You look at a city, and a city has a certain type of model. Back in the day, it was farmland. Farmland was hundreds of acres. When we stopped farming as much and started to build cities, the cities only had a limited amount of space.
What did we do when the amount of space and the number of people coming to the cities was more than the available space? We got creative and we started to build vertically, didn’t we? We figured out how to deepen the value proposition. I think that’s a lot about what you’re saying, isn’t it? Instead of a single-family residence on a bunch of acres, we now have a multifamily on that same acreage. Maybe we have really dense populations in vertical high rises like New York City and other large cities.
That’s the type of thinking we want you guys to be in. How do we take the same amount of resource and make more out of it? That requires a little creativity. That often requires mentorship, to help seed ideas and talk through things. Have you seen that too? Have the mentors you’ve had in your life have helped you see the perspective of a greater outcome than you could see yourself?
Very much so. There’s tremendous value in that. You don’t know your blind spots. When you look at from that standpoint, everything that has made me, me to this point, creates both the positive and the negative. It creates the blind spots as well. I have my own biases because of the experiences that I’ve had throughout my life up to this point. You have different blind spots that have created. You’re biased, both positive and negative, up to this point.
Your lens is different than mine. Your paradigm is different than mine. When I pair up with you as a mentor, basically, you tell me what you are looking through that paradigm that I’m not seeing. It uncovers blind spots that are incredibly helpful to then look at and realize, “We can do this,” or, “You’re thinking like this. Let’s look at it in a different way.” Value is huge in that respect.
As you’re speaking those words, a book comes to mind called As A Man Thinketh by James Allen. I found a little quote in here I want to share with you guys exactly related to this. It says, “Circumstance does not make the man. It reveals him to himself.” That’s that blind spot stuff you’re talking about. The circumstances of our lives are a function of the choices that we’ve made. Sometimes, we’re blind to the fact that we are the ones who are the reason for our circumstances.
It says, “No such conditions can exist as descending into vice. Its attending sufferings apart from vicious inclinations or ascending into virtue and its pure happiness without the continued cultivation of virtuous aspirations.” That’s the abundance thinking, virtuous aspiration. “A man, therefore, as the lord and master of thought, is the maker of himself, the shaper and author of environment. Even at birth, the soul comes to its own.”
“Through every step of its earthly pilgrimage. It attracts those combinations of conditions that reveal itself, which are the reflections of its own purity and impurity, its strengths and weaknesses. Men do not attract that which they want. They attract that which they are.” Now that this is our deep thinking. We’re back into it from 2017 to now. This is what we go. This is what we do. This is our MO. How do we not attract what we want, but what we are? What do you hear in that?
The Tornado Effect: How Mindset Shapes Your Response To Challenges
I’m going to focus on that last little bit, but abundance thinking will create more abundance thinking, so that which you are will create, or you are attracted to more of what you are. As that thought process becomes more prevalent in your mindset, you will drive towards that in your actions, which will then create that emotion and that belief system that creates more of the actions in that direction. It’s the success begets a success thought process.
Hold your mirror up to yourself and realize that whatever you’re driving towards is going to be that. It’s present in what you mentioned earlier in the five people around you. If you want to know what you’re like, look at your five closest friends because you’re mirroring. You’re chasing what you are. I think that’s very powerful in the thought process, and it’s important to be abundant in your thinking. It spirals the other way, too.
In what way? What have you seen in the opposite spiral?
We’re talking about abundance, and obviously, we’re pushing towards that abundance, but think about when you hear the phrase mediocrity in one area of your life that seeps into every area of your life. You can go in the other direction where that scarcity mindset leads to more scarcity thinking and more scarcity thinking. What you believe is very important. How you view the world is very important because it’s going to translate into how you navigate this world, choices and decisions you make in this world, which will then create more of whichever direction you’re going.
I’ve seen a diagram of what you’re talking about, and it looks a lot like a tornado. Wide at the top, narrow at the bottom. Don’t think of the destructive nature of the tornado, just the shape, like the conical shape of a tornado. It is a spiraling thing. There are interesting analogies to this because things are constantly in motion in our lives, and sometimes, it’s chaotic and things aren’t going as planned. Maybe the financial resources have come down.
Maybe you’ve had a major health issue show up. Maybe a family member passed on and you needed to help them financially. Maybe an accident took place. There are all kinds of things. Maybe you lost your job, or maybe your business is crumbling because of some outside circumstance. In fact, I was just with a guy who’s a land developer and he said that his first fortune, which he built from about 27 to 35, 40 years old, was depleted due to what he called a technicality.
He had a lot of land development in Houston where you’re at. He said that a hurricane came through, and due to the nature of that hurricane, a lot of his land was there. Even though he had insurance, it was just a myriad of things for a period of time before the hurricane had occurred. This was 2008 to 2009, by the way, when this thing was happening. All of his revenues from outside business activities went away.
It was in a space where a lot of healthcare practitioners. I guess they were paying him consulting fees and things to learn whatever he was teaching. I think it was all land development stuff. The coaching and mentoring that he was doing, and everyone’s payments, they were struggling in business due to the circumstances. There are certainly circumstances outside of our control that can impact us that caused diminutions of financial resources.
Thereby, that affects our thinking. He got into a mode that he was like, “I can get through this,” and then the hurricane. He had the resource. He was going to make it, and then the technicality of the hurricane was one more thing out of his control. It literally took him away because it took a year for the insurance company to even audit what had happened. There was so much devastation and he had to surrender to it and recognize that there were things out of his control.
He had a proactive, abundant mindset, so he was like, “I’m going to get through this.” He lost his wife through that mess, and he had some kids, and he’s been rebuilding since then. I’m meeting him now on the second wealth that he’s built, and he is sharing these stories going, “I got through that because of the mindset that I had of abundance.”
He could have totally shrunk and said, “Screw it, man. The tornado has hit. It’s taken everything away. My life is worthless. I’m not worth it.” In the end, some people take their lives in circumstances like that. The end result of the worst spiral down of scarcity is when we actually take our lives or we blame life so heavily, we never get back to a productive life. We’ve seen that from time to time.
I’ve had some clients that have come to me wanting to possibly work with me who just said, “Society’s taken all my money away.” I’m like, “No, society’s not doing anything to you. You are doing a thing to you the way you believe about it.” He didn’t want to hear it, and he walked away because he just didn’t share the mindset. He didn’t want to allow that he had control over his life.
Guys, we have control over a lot of the circumstances, particularly how we think, and thereby the emotion that comes with that and thereby the action that we take and thereby the result that we get. That’s a trait. Thanks for bringing that up. That’s so powerful what you shared. I’m curious what other thoughts you have on it.
Overcoming Adversity With An Abundance Mindset
In response to that popped something into my mind that has been very prevalent in the conversations I’ve had with people in my business. Actually, I was having one exactly of this nature. Things happen. A tornado, for example. Things are out of your control. Houston flooding, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and all these tsunamis. You have all these natural disasters throughout the world that you are not going to be able to actually affect whatsoever but you certainly can be affected by them.
The concept of your sphere of influence, and I know you’re familiar with that concept, but for those of you that aren’t, a sphere of influence, think of a circle and everything within that circle, you have control over. Everything outside that circle, you don’t have control over. An earthquake, a flood, a tornado, acts of God, so to speak, are outside of that circle. Things happen that are out of your control. To some extent, you are a victim of those circumstances, but some things happen outside of that circle that you can then pick up and put right inside of that circle.
Once it is inside that circle, you are able to address that issue. From a business perspective, when you’re coaching or leading people and you talk about mindset in that regard, the idea is, and fault is a very negative word, so I don’t mean to use this word, but it’s the easiest for people to understand, make everything your fault.
If you make it your fault, you can now fix it. It’s within your control, it’s within your circle of influence. Now you have the ability to change it. What people fight back on when this is a new concept, they come in and say, “Everything was destroyed. A tornado came in. Flood happened. All my buildings were flooded, or my building was flooded, my practice is gone.” Whatever the issue is. My home and insurance isn’t coming in for a year. You’re not even talking. You’re last on the list, it feels.
Those things you can’t control, but what you can control is your mindset. The most positive aspect of that sphere of influence is that mindset. When you think of things through an abundant lens and you look at it as, “I can recover. I can control how I believe and how I act and how I respond to this.” It doesn’t make it easy, but it is possible. When you start believing that and pushing that, you can overcome those things.
I love the story that you just told because although you have destruction and all this wake of a spiral of catastrophes happening after this, he’s back on the second round. That doesn’t happen without that mindset of, “I can beat this. I can handle this. I can move through this. How I view it is what’s going to take me forward.” I love that. Hearing that is a phenomenal example of what you do have control over. There’s plenty you don’t, but you always have control over your mindset.
Focus On What You Can Control
I absolutely agree with that. And I like the analogy of the circle. In the world of personal finance that I live in and the coaching that I do with people, oftentimes, those natural disasters you’re talking about, we can move some things inside the circle. We can’t affect the actual natural disaster, but we can have liquidity in our life. We can keep our cash in a position where if something goes awry, we can deal with making payments for 3 months, 6 months, 1 year or 2 years.
We can have insurance products that help protect against that. We only come out of pocket with a few thousand and they come out of pocket with the hundreds of thousands to help recover some of those losses. We can have business entities in place that help protect against liability if we get sued. We can have estate planning in place that makes the transition at our deaths easier for our heirs, whether it’s a spouse or children.
We can put together financial strategies to minimize taking on consumer debt. We can manage our spending. There are so many things we actually do have control over that are often thought of as out of our control and that help us build wealth. There’s a certain amount of confidence that happens when we do those things. With the confidence, then we can think more creatively about problem-solving.
As we think more about problem-solving, whether we’re employed by somebody or running a business, we can then create better solutions that create more value, which brings more money, which gives us more opportunity to be a steward over those dollars and apply them well in our lives, take care of our local families, take care of the community around us. We can make sure that if we have gotten into old consumer debts, we have funds to pay them off.
Life happens. We have so many ways to get through that stuff. Wealth comes in five tracks. It’s not just money, but physical, mental, spiritual, and social. My spiritual side gets me through a lot of things, including the belief I have in a higher power and that I’m here for a reason. At these circumstances, although not enjoyable, can still be for my good if I allow it to.
If I think of how this is happening for me rather than to me, that subtle one-word shift, how this is happening for rather than to me, helps us see that in the light. I think what you were saying earlier, if it’s all my fault, I have some control over it. If this is happening for my benefit, what lessons can I learn that can help me move forward and that allow me to be a better version of myself as I get past whatever the circumstance Is.
Extrapolate that to a larger picture. Zoom out of exactly what you just said. I know you and I have talked about this, and I think I’ve actually used this more than any other small piece of mindset to apply. That is all of life happens for you, not to you. It just takes everything and shifts that over as what can you find in this? There’s the old cliché, silver linings. The silver linings. There’s always something. I love that. It’s a beautiful way to look at life in general.
All of life happens for you, not to you.
It takes practice though. It’s not easy. It gets easier, but I don’t think any of us in our circumstance that’s difficult automatically says, “I’m so glad this is happening for me.” We all go into victim mode, at least temporarily. “I can’t believe this is happening right now. This sucks. This is the worst. I hate this.” It’s because we have experience in the past that said, “I’ve had tough things happen, I’ve gotten through it,” our mindset can start to shift into that more abundant thinking of, “What if I think about how this is happening for me?”
It gives us just a little bit more hope. That hope leads to positive action and it builds and builds. Of course, if we have a good sphere or circle of people, spouse, children, parents, grandparents, siblings. Maybe you live alone. I have a neighbor whose son lives in New York City in a 300-square-foot apartment, basically by himself. If something happens to him, who does he turn to?
He’s got a church community that he spends time with on Sunday. He’s got some people. He’s got his work group, and he’s developing some friendships. Even though he lives alone, is alone, his family’s all here in Utah, he has people he can turn to for support. Maybe we’ll wrap and if you have any more thoughts on that, I’ll let you open up. I have one more thought that I think will let us dialogue for just another minute here. There’s this idea that I want to have something, so I better do the activities that I need to do to have that, or I want to be like the millionaires, so I better do the behaviors that they do so that I can have what they have.
People who read this want to accelerate wealth, and they often think about the financial means of their life. They look to people like you, even twelve practices. There’s a lot of dentists out there who just have one who maybe have ambition to do that, but don’t know how. They’re thinking, “Trey’s got the holy grail, but he’s got the life I want to live.” They try to do the things you do to have the things you have, but they aren’t necessarily the person they need to be yet.
There’s this flipping of this. We have to be the person that we need to be or learn what the characteristics are of the person that we want to be like, which then causes the behavior, the doing activities, which then allows us to have. It’s really be, do, not have do, be. You don’t become that person after you have it. You get it after you’ve become the person who’s worthy of it, who’s capable of managing it and receiving it. How have you seen that play out in your life?
Be, Do, Have: Aligning Your Actions With Your Goals
That goes back to your five aspects of wealth. When you talk about the five aspects of wealth and how you can build around you, not just financial piece, you’re creating who you are. You’re creating you from the inside out, and then that shines through. That thought process and that environment you have now created is now responsible for actions and decisions that you’re making and whether you know it or not, whether they be positive or negative.
You start to focus on who you are. You focus on building those aspects of the five, building the five aspects of wealth that you mentioned in whatever is appropriate for you. As you do that, the rest is going to fall in place from the standpoint of what you have is the last piece, and let’s apply it specifically to finances. How you view money, how you view time, decisions you’re going to make. That’s typically an inverse relationship, but how you’re going to make decisions and have that balance in your relationships. How does that play in and where does that skew the seesaw from one of those to the other? The spiritual aspects of how you view money, what to do with it, and the value of money are also important. Those things are all going to be an afterthought of what you have because of who you are. Be, do. Very important and very powerful.
I think it’s been one of the most powerful things I’ve ever come across over the years. It’s those three words. Be, then do, then have. Some of the mentors I’ve had, both actual and virtual, have used the phrase, “You need to act as if.” We create a vision for what our future might be. We write it down, we speak it out loud, we start to create it through those words that we have first thought, which then become words both spoken and written.
As that happens, we can start to attract that to ourselves. We start to become the person worthy of those things. We start to do the behaviors that cause those actions to take place. People come into our lives that we may not have recognized as teachers and as mentors, again, paid or unpaid, but people that can support us in working through that vision.
The way it has to be written is in the present tense, as if it already exists. Speaking the words, I am wealthy versus I want to be wealthy. I am an abundant thinker. I am a value creator. I have a certain size house. I have a certain amount in the bank account. I am a business owner. I am a leader in my company. If we speak right in the present tense as if it already exists, then we go act as if it already occurs. There’s a little bit of pretending that kind of exists in that, but it’s training the mind to believe it.
I don’t have the exact study on this, but I was informed over the last few years about the idea of muscle repetition. Somebody playing the piano, go practice a certain piece for an hour, physically, actually typing it out on the keys to practice, versus somebody who sits at the piano, closes their eyes and simply visualizes themselves practicing the piano.
What they found was those who practiced in their minds had measurable progress, even though they didn’t actually touch the keys. This, to me, illustrates the value of the mind. Our visualizing faculty in the mind starts to build actual outcomes by practicing what you say, by practicing who you are, visualizing what you want in your mind, you start to actually have it occur.
There’s a guy named Joe Dispenza that I came across. He’s been doing a ton of training on this topic. What he says is your personal reality. That’s the definition of personality. Your personality is your personal reality. If you want your personal reality to be different, you wake up in the morning, you grab your phone, you go to the bathroom, you have your coffee, your water, you have your certain routine. Everything we do throughout the day, if we did the exact same thing in the morning as we did yesterday, we’re likely to get the exact same result as we did yesterday.
If you want something different, you have to act as if. You get up and you don’t do the same exact routine because that causes the same exact neural pathways in the mind to start triggering the same exact feelings, which then cause the same exact actions, which then you get the same results. Maybe you need to wake up and read a book. Maybe you need to wake up and do an affirmation. Maybe you need to wake up and read your vision statement to yourself, and then feel what it feels like to be in that space and then start your day off in a more productive way than what you’re used to. The only way things change is if our thinking changes. That’s what I’m learning. I’m curious if you have kind of parting thoughts on that as we wrap up?
The only way things change is if our thinking changes.
Your beliefs lead to your actions. Act as if is a phenomenal way to say that, or paint that picture. You mentioned a word or a version of a word many times in what you just said. It’s vision. Your vision needs to be very vivid. It needs to be very well defined. I believe there’s a lot of ways to do this. I do agree with you in the sense that you need to be very specific in your vision, and it needs to be in the present tense because of everything you just said, because you’re already there. Act as if, and it’s a roadmap and the vision is where you’re headed. You have a destination. Act like you’re already there and you’re going to get there faster.
Act like you’re already there and you’re going to get there faster.
Thanks so much for being with me, Trey. I have loved having you as guest. I’m sure we’ll do this again if you’re willing. Are you willing?
Absolutely. I’m willing.
I wish we had a live audience because I would ask them if it was fun having Trey on. Give a fist pump to yourself if you did. Make a comment and let me know and do a review of the show if you’re liking this stuff. I just love you, guys. I love the audience here. I love that you’re here because if you’re reading this, you’re already kind of in the process, if not really deep into the process of personal development. You’re becoming a better version of you, which means you are likely attracting more opportunities to create wealth. I hope what we’ve been talking about on money mindset’s going to be helpful for you. You got to be who you need to be so then you can do the activities that need to be done so then you can get the results that you’re looking for. Thank you for reading, and we’ll catch up with you in the next episode.
Episode Resources
About Trey Tippit
