Episode #65:

New Year’s Resolutions: B+ Is Good Enough with Darren McMaster

Today’s episode is all about what happens when things don’t go as planned. We’re coming off of the Holidays, and that means New Year’s resolutions are on everybody’s mind. It’s our human instinct to aim for a perfect start to the year, but has anybody ever told you that B+ is good enough?

To discuss things not going to plan and how to deal with these situations, I’m joined by serial entrepreneur Darren McMaster, creator of SurgerEase. Even the recording of this episode is an example of B+ work when things didn’t go as planned, but we’ve cleaned it up and I’m thrilled to bring you Entrepreneur Inspired with Darren McMaster.

Tune in this week to discover how to bring more revenue and abundance into your life during the challenging financial times we’re facing. We’re discussing everything you need to become entrepreneur inspired, and you’ll learn what it takes to try new things, bring ideas to life, and how to keep going when it feels like nothing is going to plan.

WHAT YOU’LL DISCOVER

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Why B+ is good enough.

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How Darren got started as an entrepreneur during his school days.

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Some of the challenges we’ve faced as entrepreneurs when things didn’t work out.

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How Darren came up with the idea for SurgerEase.

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What stops people from getting started with a new business or additional stream of income.

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How to stay inspired and keep going when entrepreneurship presents challenges.

FEATURED ON THE SHOW

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Darren McMaster: LinkedIn

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SurgerEase

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Medical Express

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Digital Freedom Productions



EP 1: Let the Becoming Begin



EP 39: The Emotions of Money with Hugh Hale

TRANSCRIPT

Darren: Since then I've started 20 businesses, and 18 of them failed miser-ably.

Dr. Crockett: Isn't that crazy?

Barry: But every single one of them have been opportunities for me to learn.

Welcome to Becoming Virtuosa, the podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Susan Crockett. You are listening to episode number 65: New Year's Resolutions: B+ Is Good Enough Baby/Entrepreneur Inspired. Please welcome my friend and entrepreneur Darren McMaster for a great discussion with me regard-ing what happens when things don't go as planned. Enjoy and happy New Year folks.

Welcome to Becoming Virtuosa, the podcast that encourages you to be-come your best virtuosa self. Each week Dr. Susan Crockett goes where the scalpel can't reach, exploring conversations about how to be, heal, love, give, grow, pray, and attune. For the first time ever, she's bringing the per-sonal one on one teaching that she shares with individual patients to you on this broader platform. A weekly source of inspiration and encouragement designed to empower you.

By evolving ourselves as individuals. We influence and transform the world around us. Please help me welcome board certified OB-GYN specializing in minimally invasive GYN surgery, internationally in the top 1% of all GYN ro-botic surgeons, a certified life coach, and US News top doctor, your host Susan A. Crockett, MD.

Happy New Year. Welcome back to the Dr. Crockett Show. I'm your host, Dr. Susan Crockett. The title of this show may be a little surprising to you because I think it's a little bit different than most New Year shows. This one is Happy New Year: B+ Is Good Enough Baby. That's what we're doing to-day.

So I, like a bunch of you, am coming off for the Christmas holidays. This is actually getting filmed on December 26. I just had an amazing holiday cele-bration with my family, but I spent five days getting ready for Christmas and cooked all the meals. It's awesome having my four mostly grown kids home. Can you hear my voice? It’s B plus today. We were supposed to do this big shoot with all of this New Year stuff and all the stuff we're going to do. I'm just kind of almost on empty.

So guess what we're doing? We're doing B plus is good enough. We're ac-tually going to show you an episode that we shot earlier in December with my really good friend Darren McMasters. It’s called Entrepreneur Inspired. The cool thing about this video is Darren and I are both entrepreneurs. He was one of my first five guests that we interviewed when we first started filming the show in the middle of the summer last year.

There were two episodes that I completely messed up when I was doing the uploads. See my voice, B plus. It's maybe C now, and that's okay because we're still getting it done. So it's not about the perfectionism. It's the about getting it done, having the relationship, having the communication, just like your resolutions. We don't make resolutions to be perfect. We make resolu-tions to give ourselves a goalpost to move towards. Then the point is just continuing to move and take the next step and do the B plus work and not worry about it being perfect. In the imperfection, sometimes we find perfec-tion.

Well anyway, I digress. So we're going to actually show you Darren's epi-sode. The first time we filmed with him, I lost the video. So I got ready to up-load everything to our producer and couldn't find it anywhere. I had the au-dio because we record our video on one camera and our sound on a sound disc.

So it took me six months, five months to get him back in the studio where we had time together to shoot an episode together. We did that on December 7. We used the framework from the audio from the original show, and the sec-ond one was even better. It was amazing. We got to the end of it and guess what? The audio didn't record.

So I have the filming that's on the video card. We have the ambient mic, which is kind of the sound from the room mic from the camera that's the backup sound on it. But the mics from here didn't record. So sorry about the sound effect being a little bit different on that one. I'm sure my audio guys from Digital Freedom Productions are going to do a wonderful job on mak-ing it sound as close to this as they can.

But we thought about not airing that show at all. Then we decided no, you know what? Part of life and entrepreneurialism and moving forward whether it's with your New Year's resolutions or your business or your relationships, part of it is just doing the work, accepting the B plus, and moving forward anyway. That's part of the creative process is what you do with things when they don't go perfect. So that's what today's episode is literally. So y’all en-joy.

Dr. Crockett: Hi y’all this is Dr. Crockett. Welcome to the Dr. Crockett Show. I'm your host, Dr. Susan Crockett. I am really excited today to have my real-ly good friend Darren McMaster here with me. Welcome, Darren.

Darren: Thank you very glad to be here.

Dr. Crockett: Y'all, I can't lie. I can't hide this from y'all. This is actually a reshoot, which is so much fun. I wasn't going to tell you all that at first, but we've had so many upgrades and improvements that I'm kind of excited about that. Take two.

Darren: Yeah, take two.

Dr. Crockett: Did you notice my cute little gnome?

Darren: I just saw that.

Dr. Crockett: He's lit up because it's almost Christmas time.

Darren: Perfect time. Yeah.

Dr. Crockett: So the first time we did this shoot was in July.

Darren: Yeah. Wow, has it been that long?

Dr. Crockett: It’s been that long. It's been five months.

Darren: Well, you're busy.

Dr. Crockett: So are you Mr. Serial Entrepreneur.

Darren: Yeah, that’s true.

Dr. Crockett: So the first shoot we did, and it was really great. It was only like the fourth or fifth shoot that I had done. The audio we captured beauti-fully, because it's on its own little zoom SD card. Guess what, y'all? I lost the video. I went back to upload it, and I had accidentally cleared the disk or something and it is gone. So we've been trying, I'm so sorry Darren.

Darren: That’s okay.

Dr. Crockett: We've been trying for this many months now to get back into the studio. So the cool thing about coming back and doing this a second time is we went back and listened to the audio about the things that we thought were important then. We've had this nice little conversation down-stairs. Now we're able to bring in a little bit more of what's been going on. So this is a really special thing for me.

Darren: Yeah, no. It's fun being able to do it again after we just went back through it. I thought the previous one was good. So let's see if we can.

Dr. Crockett: Get going.

Darren: Yeah, we can replicate that.

Dr. Crockett: Yeah. So I know Darren and his wife, Kelly. Kelly is a rep for a product that I use in my operating rooms. Darren is the cocreator and own-er, founder, of an app called SurgerEase that I use for my surgery schedul-ing. It is just the most amazing thing in the world. Yeah, it's so cool. I don't know what I’d do about it at this point.

So we're going to talk a little bit more about that. But we thought we would start today, we wanted to talk about entrepreneurism. Specifically, I want to encourage our listeners who are thinking you know what? The economy's hard. Inflation is going up. I'm feeling the squeeze. I want to figure out how to bring more revenue or more abundance into my life. Well, that whole abundance thing could be lots of different conversations, right?

Darren: That's a whole nother episode.

Dr. Crockett: It's a whole nother episode. But we thought we would do this episode and just encourage them. So we're going to start with a little bit of background on both of us because we both had way too many businesses started. So Darren, why don’t you tell me a little bit about your early back-ground into entrepreneurism?

Darren: Absolutely, yeah. So it's been a long time that I've been on the busi-ness side starting businesses. We'll get into that. My very first business that I ever created was actually at the age of 13. It was my first experience in en-trepreneurism.

Dr. Crockett: This was, what, junior high?

Darren: Junior high.

Dr. Crockett: Yeah.

Darren: Exactly. I was in junior high. One of our friends had a wholesale business.

Dr. Crockett: A wholesale. Just like that.

Darren: So he was basically buying product in bulk. Then he would then sell it at retail in eaches.

Dr. Crockett: So he would buy it at a low price because he was buying wholesale, and then he would mark it up and provide the distribution. So he would make a profit on the markup on the.

Darren: Exactly.

Dr. Crockett: Okay.

Darren: Exactly. So I had numerous discussions with him because I wanted to just learn about the business and how he was making money because it's always intrigued me on how people make money over and above just earn-ing it from a job.

Dr. Crockett: Yeah, it's fascinating.

Darren: So I went to him, and I said so tell me some of the stuff that you're selling, what's working. Ironically enough, the big seller at the time, and I'm going to totally date myself here, is banana clips.

Dr. Crockett: Like the hair clips?

Darren: The hair clips and they.

Dr. Crockett: Yeah, cool.

Darren: So I went to him and I said can you get me like a couple packs of those, and I'm going to go sell them? So I bought two packs of maybe 50, put them on my backpack, went to school, and started walking the halls go-ing hey, hey, wait, wait, I got banana clips. Who wants banana clips? I sold out. I sold out of the banana clips.

Dr. Crockett: That’s amazing,

Darren: Like it was it was a couple days. That was my first time that I really went through and said this is fun. Like I enjoy the entire process up number one, making money but number two, pitching something to somebody, get-ting somebody to buy from you. That whole component kind of hooked me into kind of the art of selling. So that was my first my first real entrepreneuri-al adventure.

Dr. Crockett: Adventure. Yeah, so trying to think about mine. I, like you, have started quite a few businesses over the years. One of my first ones was in like 2004. I actually took a year off of medicine to be a stay at home mom, and that was like a massive fail. Because I mean, I love my kids.

Darren: That wasn’t a massive fail. You have awesome kids.

Dr. Crockett: I have awesome kids. Yeah, they are incredible kids. I think it was an important experience for me to try to do that. But I just found myself getting into all kinds of other things to do. Back then I was into Creative Memories, which is a scrapbooking company. This was before digital media really took off. It was kind of on the cusp of it. I would get together with some of my besties. In fact, I just had a birthday this week, and six of those same besties took me out for dinner. So.

Darren: It was your 35th birthday.

Dr. Crockett: It was my 35th birthday, yes that works. Plus a few. But it was just really special to me to have friends that last that long. It's really cool. So those are my scrapbooking friends. When we were that age, we had young kids, and we all y'all were into photography. We would do these beautiful scrapbooks and go on retreats. The scrapbooks are cloth. You could have them imprinted with foil imprints. Like old books have the titles on the spines or the year. On the front of them, you could do a design, and that was called a die.

There were very few people creating the dies. Creative Memories didn't have that many. So I noticed that this was the onset of forums and the inter-net, that was pretty new. I had access to other die imprinters. We were kind of on this list where we were talking about imprinting, and I realized I had a market.

So I learned how to create the dies using vector graphics. I would take the orders of I put them into this huge vector graphic design and ship it off to the die maker. I found the die maker. Then they would create the metal dies and send them back to me for the foil imprinting, and I would box them up and ship them out. So I took my wholesale was like yours. It was like create the product, do markup so that I have some profitability, and provide a service to it.

I remember one day I needed to talk to the manufacturer about something. I call them on the phone, and they were talking to me like who are you? What's going on? Did you know that you're like the 10th biggest die distribu-tor creator in the country? I was like no, I'm just this housewife in Texas. What I'd done is figured out scaling without really realizing what it was. I'd hitched into some new tools that were available. All of a sudden me, by my-self, could be like the 10th largest die creator in the country.

Darren: It was you and Amazon.

Dr. Crockett: Me and Amazon. So anyway, that was a fun one. I eventually sold that business and went back into medicine because it's my true calling, right? It’s like fixing people or creating dies. They were a little bit.

Darren: Yeah because you're really, really good at the medicine one.

Dr. Crockett: Yeah. So that was one of my first forays into entrepreneurship. I had lots of other businesses that I tried and failed. Like lots of different it-erations that just didn't work out. I know you did too. I wanted to talk a little bit about how you started. Because I think one of the biggest thing people fear is getting started in jumping into it.

So tell us a little bit about, aside from the banana clips, because we went from banana clips to medical sales and then SurgerEase. Like little jerk, jerk, jerk, you know. So what made you decide to go that route?

Darren: So I started after junior high into high school. My job in high school, really into college, was working at Kinkos Copies, everybody knows that now as FedEx Office. I was the night manager. I would come in at basically 3:00 p.m. I'd work to midnight and then I would turn around and actually go to school the following day.

I learned then that I was making a whole lot of money for somebody else, and I didn't want to continue to do that forever. I didn't like the idea of work-ing for somebody else and making them a ton of money. How can I do this?

Dr. Crockett: How can I be on the other side of this?

Darren: Correct. Yeah, I wanted to be the business owner as opposed to the employee. It's a lot harder to make that transition than really the people on the internet tell you, right? So since then, I've started 20 businesses. 18 of them have failed miserably.

Dr. Crockett: Isn't that crazy?

Darren: But every single one of them have been opportunities for me to learn.

Dr. Crockett: Fail forward, right? Fail faster, learn faster, do the next itera-tion.

Darren: That's exactly right. So that transition from having an idea, building the business, and then having it not work has always been one of the things that's motivated me to go to the next opportunity.

Dr. Crockett: You know, it's interesting that you say that it motivates you be-cause a lot of people try once and then it doesn't work out, and they give up. So that's a mindset. That's on mindset going into it where you're like I'm go-ing to figure this out. Whatever doesn't work, I will figure it out the next level and keep going.

But during all of those iterations, you had to have had some kind of suste-nance behind it. Because to just leap out and have a failure and not have a revenue stream develop when it's your only revenue stream. Most people try to do it that way. It is scary and it doesn't work, although that fire in the belly for having to make it work sometimes drives us to work harder at it. But most of the time when I've started businesses, they’ve been side hustles.

Darren: That's exactly right. Pretty much all of these have been side hustles. So when I first got married. Well, prior to marriage, one of my side hustles was designing websites. This was back at the time when I had to explain to people what a website was. Why they needed a website. I would, I would go and meet with a company, and they wanted me to figure out how to get them on the AOL thing.

Dr. Crockett: Oh.

Darren: So, that's how long ago it was. One of the companies that I did a website for was a medical device company. When I first started with them, I did the website, sold them on it. Afterwards, they're like you're pretty good at this. You want to come sell for us? I'm like well, what do you guys pay? I'm like yes. All right.

Dr. Crockett: Cool.

Darren: So that was my entrance into the medical device side. Working on the medical device side has been a true blessing because I've worked with a bunch of great people and a bunch of great companies and obviously a bunch of great doctors.

Through that, I've had the opportunity within each of those to have the free-dom to be able to start side hustles because pretty much every one of those were commissioned based businesses. So that's what I wanted. I wanted to be able to make an unlimited, don't cap me on that commission. Let me go sell. Let me go hustle. I get to keep the revenue out of that.

But at the same time, because of that, it gave me the freedom to be able to create these side hustles. That's the best way to start a business is to obvi-ously generate enough money for you, your family, raise a family, kids, house, all that. But then it also gives you the freedom to be able to create a side hustle.

Dr. Crockett: Super cool. So your two primary businesses now that haven't failed. One is the SurgerEase.

Darren: Correct.

Dr. Crockett: The other is the medical device company that you do for or-thopedics?

Darren: Correct. Correct. Yes. So I've been in the orthopedic side now for 25 years. I've just been, again, really blessed to be able to work with great doctors and provide for my family. MedX was an opportunity that I had about 10 years ago. Since then, I've had the opportunity to actually buy the company. So because of that, I now run MedX with a business partner. We work with physicians across the state in orthopedics, and that was really the Advent for SurgerEase in the side hustle.

There was a need within the market to be able to create a shared surgical calendar. We had people all over the state trying to find and chase down surgical cases. As you know.

Dr. Crockett: Very complicated.

Darren: Get canceled, get moved, get changed facilities, and we're sending people and resources all over.

Dr. Crockett: Yeah. So just to give y’all a little bit of background, in my office when I see a patient and decide they're going to have surgery, I give an or-der to my surgery scheduler. Then she sets in place all the insurance au-thorizations. So she's dealing with insurance companies. She's dealing with the patient directly. She's dealing with the hospital for surgery scheduling. She's dealing with all the reps that have to come in for the special equip-ment, my assistant, and the OR itself. So there's this whole slew of people just for one case.

I book five to six cases a day now. Four to five is probably more reasonable, but can you imagine all those moving points? So like about 10 points per pa-tient. If you move one thing, the old way of doing it was by hand where she would have to pick up a phone and call everybody and move them. If you moved one patient, you had to call all the points on all the other patients around them.

So when your product came along and had that all on an app where we can just tweak it and send an email or text to everybody and have everything notified at once. It is a game changer for being able to handle all of the detail with scheduling. It's an amazing app.

Darren: Thank you.

Dr. Crockett: We're going to put the links down below, by the way.

Darren: Yes. So that entire business model, again, as with all of them is a challenge. Everybody who starts a business has a fear of starting a busi-ness. Fear plays a huge role in taking people who could be great entrepre-neurs, ending it there. They have a huge fear of starting, what other people might think. So being able to overcome that fear is a big step in trying to start that next side hustle.

Dr. Crockett: Yeah, so the fears of starting, failing, and what other people think are the three big fears. So that goes to mindset about money and be-ing able to manage your mind around money. We actually have a really good episode. If y'all haven't seen it, I think it's the third episode with Hugh Hale about the emotions of money. So if you're looking for some help in fig-uring out how to be steady through the ups and downs of navigating some of this and be grounded in that, that's a really good episode to go watch.

The fear of starting, failing, and what other people think will knock every-body who's not prepared for it down, right? So it's important for us to devel-op those mindsets. So what mindsets are you using to overcome those fears? Why does that not bother you anymore?

Darren: I don't know. I really don't know. I've always not been afraid of what other people think and so I've just I've always been let's just go do it. Like it's just a mindset of I like this idea. Let’s try this idea. Let's go do it. I've got an awesome wife who I.

Dr. Crockett: She is awesome, Kelly.

Darren: For the last 25 years, I'm always coming to her with hey, I got an idea. So I'll pitch her my ideas. If I either get the thumbs up or the thumbs down, that kind of gives me a direction on whether we're going to do it or not.

Dr. Crockett: That’s awesome. Y’all are such a great team.

Darren: Thank you. Yeah, I believe we are too. But it's just it's working through that initial, I've never been afraid. I've never had the fear of what other people think of me, and I've never had the fear of failing, even though it happens all the time. So.

Dr. Crockett: So, I have. So when I started the show, it started originally as a podcast during COVID in 2020. It was from the life coaching education that I was doing, certification. The very first podcast, y’all can go listen to it, epi-sode one. It's on just that. Like how to start, like overcoming the fear of start-ing. I talk about I've never been on a public platform like this before, and just the fear of stepping into the arena and what's the backlash going to be. What are the people are going to say? Changing that mindset into hey, I'm a podcaster now.

Then when we started the video show for the Dr. Crockett Show, which is added onto that now, that was another big step at because now it's not just what other people are hearing. It's like the whole judgment of what we look like and what are people going to say. I have carried that. I've done a lot of work on that in my life as a matter of fact. So, for me, it's just getting to the point where the idea of serving people with the message is greater than my fear of what people are going to say or think.

Darren: That’s powerful. I think you hit it on the head. It's a change of mind-set.

Dr. Crockett: Yeah, so the starting thing is you just have to take that first step. The fear of failure is the other mindset that I've done a lot of work on. Being somebody that's a high achiever and type A personality, I was like that straight A geek at school. Like I didn't fail. When I started working on businesses and having them not work and having things in my life not al-ways work, that was a rude awakening to me as a high achiever. So over-coming that fear of failure and turning it into the mindset of all that was just a yes or no, does it work or not kind of thing.

Neutralizing that as a kind of a yes, no switch. Yeah. Yes, it works. Keep do-ing it. No, that didn't work. Replace it with something else. That pivot. That's a constant thing in business.

Darren: Absolutely.

Dr. Crockett: You think that you get your business going and the revenue streams going and then blip, something happens.

Darren: We're in the process of that right now on both companies. We're heading in a specific direction, something within the market changes, you get another opportunity. You have to be able to go okay, this actually makes more sense and be able to turn on a dime and make a pivot and continue on.

Dr. Crockett: Yeah, I think that's critical. So it's so inspiring to be able to sit down and have a talk with you. That’s why I'm calling this entrepreneur in-spired. Right?

Darren: Well, yeah, we would do this all the time.

Dr. Crockett: Yeah.

Darren: It's every time we would see each other we're like hey, I got it. What are you doing?

Dr. Crockett: Yeah. In fact, I've got one to share with you after here. But first off, thank you for coming on the show today. Thank you for just the amazing discussions that we have together and for your friendship and yeah.

Darren: Absolutely thank you.

Dr. Crockett: Yeah, you're welcome. Thanks for coming back doing this as a second take. That's just, you know.

Darren: Are we going to do a third?

Dr. Crockett: I hope not. I hope it came out great. Thanks, you guys. I love you guys. Thanks for tuning in. I hope you learned something. Y’all take care. I'll see you next Tuesday.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Becoming Virtuosa. To learn more, come visit us at DrCrockett.com, or find us on YouTube for the Dr. Crockett Show. If you found this episode helpful or think it might help someone else, please like, subscribe, and share. This is how we grow together. Thanks, and I'll see you next week. Love always, Sue.

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