Welcome to The Pivot Point, a student-led podcast that shines a spotlight on the vibrant city of Las Vegas while exploring the transformative journeys of students, professors, and executives. My name is Bardia Eivazi, an MBA student at UNLV. Join me as I delve into the stories of those who have embraced change, overcome obstacles, and made significant strides in their academic and professional lives. We're more than just a podcast - we are a community dedicated to empowering student voices and inspiring the next generation of leaders. Tweet us @pivotpointunlv!
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You're listening to locally produced programming created in KUNV Studios on public radio. KUNV 91.5. The content of this program does not reflect the
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Welcome to the Pivot Point, where we talk about all things pivot, all things business, and all things Vegas. I'm your host, Bardea. Let's get the ball rolling.
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Hello, everybody, and welcome back to The Pivot Point. I've got a special treat for you guys today. I have a man of many talents and many businesses.
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His name is Kevin Behchat. Thank you for joining me today. Thank you, Badi. It's an honor and a pleasure, and you really are overblowing. Thank you. No problem. So you have extensive business experience across a diverse range of industries, including real estate investing, technology, and dental group administration. Can you briefly just tell us about your professional story? Sure. Can you briefly just tell us about your professional story?
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Sure. I was in college and I was, actually one of the things you didn't mention was I was also in high fashion. Yes, for YSL I believe. For a number of years. But I was in college and this is 1986. And in those days IT as a business function didn't really exist. It was just the beginning of, you know, the computers in those days were 80, 86s. So I was doing an engineering degree, electronics and computing, but also I would like to refer to myself as a fashion victim. I liked high fashion. So when I graduated, I was working for one of these big fashion houses and a friend who was computerizing inventory management for YSL, Yves Saint Laurent, but Reeve Gauche part of it, which is really the high end. He came to me, he said he found a job and the company need to replace him. And would I be interested. So that's how I got into actually working with big fashion brand and also computing because in those days I'm going back a long time databases were very limited you had Ashton Tate's D-base 2 and some of the older list I don't think you have anybody maybe some of your lecturers would know what those programs are so we the program The program had been written in that, so I got a good feel for what they were trying to do. So I was with Yves Saint Laurent for about four and a half years, and then went to Fendi. But what I did with Yves Saint Laurent was kind of key because I really learned, because it was operating in such a niche market, I really began to understand what marketing is all about, and the use of IT in marketing, and the relationship in marketing with the rest of the business. So that was a good learning ground. And then I went to another fashion house, this is at Fendi, and I was with them for about a year, and they went out of business as a franchise. So, I've told this story a few times. A friend who was working for Ford at that time, they were producing those white vans that you see, the transit vans, and he approached me and he said, look, we're programming robots. And this is 1990, 1991. We're programming robots. Are you interested? down to Southampton in England, and the Ford plant, and they build those transit vans from scratch. And where they start is the plates for the base of the van, which sits on top of the chassis. And you weld these things together using spot welding robots. And I got involved in programming that, and the whole thing was very interesting, and took me back to my roots and I decided this is much more fun than the fashion industry. Most people say, what are you talking about? But it was. Because you really got to understand the functions that computing and programming and IT plays in everyday life and manufacturing business. So once that project was over, it took about six months, I went and joined a friend who had a computer company and within a year I bought him out and went from there to, and then I started one of these dot coms in 1999 which, like most other dot coms, didn't survive. but I had an opportunity to come to the States and my wife is a dentist so We lived in California for a year. I got involved in real estate. I those days I We bought a piece of land. I had a built sold it made good money and then flipped a couple of other pieces of property So I said this is a good game And my wife is a been a dentist and I got into real estate and this is 2003. Real estate business was really good in Vegas, so was dentistry. So we put everything in a van and drove up here in a U-Haul van and the rest, as they say, is history. And then that's how we got here.
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That's awesome. So talking a little bit about the technology part, I feel like that was really big for your just like whole entrepreneurial roots. So your company, because my technology knowledge cuts off at about a VHS tapes, floppy disks, and cassette tapes. So when you lived in the UK, your computer company grew to the ninth fastest growing company there of all any industry. So how do you feel that this honed you for the future?
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Sure. Virgin Atlantic, Richard Branson's company, sponsored the program. This is sort of early 90s. They wanted to see who were the companies, the future, because IT was really hitting in those days. So they did, they monitored from companies house, which is equivalent to the IRS if you will because they get all the company's revenues. They compile a list of, they call them the Fast Track 100. We were recognized as the ninth fastest growing company in 1997 for the work we've done between 1993 and 1996. It was really exciting. I ended up going to Richard Branson's house, sat across the table from him. The top 10 sat on the same table as him for dinner and it was kind of exciting times. But to answer your question, what I had learned in Yves Saint Laurent for the previous four or five years was really marketing, you know, what gets people kind of to buy. So those skills were useful. But when I got to the computer company, and it was my own, obviously nobody knew of my company. Eves & Aron was an international brand. I need to come up with ideas how we can get out there. This was kind of interesting. I don't know if your audience is old enough. PCs in the 90s were terrible. They were so unreliable. And any man and his dog could set up a PC company,
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and they did.
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But our approach, or my approach, was completely, when I say different, we went into the PC business from a different angle. We were selling cards. These are RS-232 cards and cards that you can put inside a PC to get information like digital I-O cards, analog to digital converter cards. This is for instrumentation. So if you're measuring the amount of gas going through a pipe, that information is analog. So you want it to be able to convert that to digital to use it, so dump it into Excel or whatever. So we were selling these cars, and they were highly profitable. We were buying them for $9 each, and we were selling them for 50 pounds. So we were making, killing on this. But it was a very small market. It topped at about 80,000 pounds a year at best. So it was a small market. So some of these people that we were selling to approached us to ask us if we could manufacture the machines for them as well, the actual PC. So we went and found small frame computers that the size of a book so we could put these cards in and make that work for them. And that kind of made us, forced us into the PC market. And then when we went full-blown PC offering, networking and everything else, we found that these machines are really unreliable and it wasn't us everybody else in the same boat so this is I think was one of our six a couple of the reasons why we're successful one I Made the decision to go and become an ISO 9000 credited company ISO 9000 is a kind of standard that is used all around the world for a company's quality control. I think they have the equivalent here. I don't know. I haven't been in manufacturing, but I think they have this. But basically it forces you to put systems in place and document those systems. So if there's ever a failure anywhere within the process or within the company, somebody else can pick up and run with it. So that was kind of important. So we systemized the process and the company. And then the other thing was, we needed to have a good reputation. And because these machines were so unreliable, especially with the sampler computer, send it off to a customer. By the time they receive it, your PS guy had thrown it around. So cards would pop out of their slots. They would break, all sorts of issues. So we made a decision that we were going to look after the customers by just going above and beyond. So an example of this would be if you go and buy a TV from Best Buy and you pay your $500 for this TV, you take it home and you expect this to work. If it doesn't work and you say, I have to deal with this problem now. But if you take that TV back to Best Buy and they say, hey, no problem, here's a new one gift card for your troubles, you're going to become a lifetime customer because they went above and beyond. So you think, okay, if there's ever an issue, they're going to help me out with this. So we kind of took that approach. And the combination of these two really helped us kind of go up the ranking. And we went from revenues of literally 80,000 pounds a year to by the time we finished, we were doing something in the region of 18 million pounds in revenues. So it was a big, steep growth.
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And I imagine these same exact techniques helped you with your general practices.
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Yes, to some extent, certainly the marketing side helped. The first practice that we had, we bought the office in December 2003 and revenues were between $18,000 and $19,000 a month, which if you were on a practice, you cannot work there. To the extent that my wife had to get a second job as a dentist, had to get a job elsewhere to just pay for the bills. But within five months, we had taken the revenues to five times that. And then I thought this is a good business model because I was in real estate and I'd flipped a couple of homes. But I thought, hang on a minute, flipping dental offices is actually much more profitable because you actually can make good money while you're building the practice to a point where you can sell it and you cannot do that in a house. If a house is waiting while you're remodeling, you're actually losing money because you either pay mortgage or you're not collecting rent or whatever the case may be. With a dental office, if you run it well enough, you can actually make money as you grow the practice. I had a goal of getting the practice to seven figures and then we would sell. I did that four times before we finally sold the practice.
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I don't know how much you can reveal on this, but how do you see the dental industry in Vegas changing in the next few years?
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Dentistry as a business has gone through massive changes and it's not just here, it's nationally. People in Wall Street have sat down and decided this is a recession-proof business which is worth between $160 and $180 billion a year and they want a piece of it. this time, I was looking at figures, there's over a trillion dollars in private equity money available to acquire dental practices. So when you have that amount of money, people want to go out and acquire because they think dentistry is going to grow more. And I kind of agree with that because penetration in terms of, as a market penetration, everybody goes to the dentist, but only 40% of people go to the dentist regularly. So if you look at cell phone penetration, it's like 80% or whatever. So industry analysts are sitting there going, this is going to grow. And I kind of agree with that because the more people realize how many systemic diseases disease are connected with your gum and your teeth and how you eat and all those are a quick example. People who have teeth tend to live seven years longer by average. So when people realize the actual usefulness of your teeth and oral health, I do think this market is going to grow. So to talk about Vegas as a city or valley, the whole thing is being magnified because if you look at the valley, it's kind of isolated place in the middle of the desert. So it becomes a really good testing ground for a lot of these larger, what are called DSOs, these are called dental support organizations, where they want a piece of this. And some of them now have 1,700, 1,800 dental practices and revenues of in excess of four billion dollars a year so these are big companies and these are you know these are and with a lot of people working with them you know and this is where it's going to so there's a lot of interest in in having part of Las Vegas because it's growing and all those. So what we've seen in the past, since 2016 when I really noticed this, was a lot of these bigger companies or even smaller companies out of California and Arizona come in here setting up shop trying to have multiple practices. So yes, that is, I'm not too hot about this. Some of it is good, but some of it, what we're seeing is, traditionally, you go to a dentist and he'd be your dentist for 20 years and he'd be a nice guy and the place would smell like cloven. You know the office manager. All of that's going out and it's become much more a retail product. It's not going to a shoe shop. You make a decision of where to go on what you see, as it were. So that's kind of changing. It's changing nationally, but it's definitely changing here. If you look at every corner now in town, every street corner, there is at least one, maybe four dental offices.
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Yes, as the city has expanded so much. So talking a little bit about your real estate ventures, I'm just curious, why real estate? Why not, I mean, clearly you saw the potential in it, but why not something like stocks?
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Well, you know, I have this, my dad, that's probably the reason, from where I come from, you know, you always buy real estate, you know, you buy and then you never sell. That's the mentality you buy and hold because that's how you grow wealth. So that was part of it. And anybody I'd looked around, even in my computer days, people who were actually... Because you have two things. You have wealth and you have income, right? And one of the best ways to build wealth is through real estate because that wealth can produce income for you as well. Whereas if you buy stock, unless you're buying dividend paying stock, a lot of it is speculative that you're hoping that it will go up. And also, you're not really in charge, whereas with real estate, you have a lot more saying than in stock. And also, the other thing I looked at, if you sit down and talk to stockbrokers and people who are keen on securities and say, oh, if you look at historic, you know, stocks have gone up more than real estate. Except they're not telling you the full truth. So if you buy a house for let's say $100,000 and you're collecting rent at a rate of $500 a month, so you're making 6% annually on that. But the price of the home has also gone up. So these people are not telling you the full, they're the company, the price of the home with the price of the stock, but then discounting that 6% that you're making annually. If you compound that over the years, it will just wipe the floor with stocks. This is why, as I said, income was coming from dentistry, building wealth comes from real estate. That's how I saw it. It's a very simplistic view, but that's why I did that.
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Right, exactly. The reason I ask is we know that Las Vegas has expanded so much in the past few decades, or even just the past few years. I myself have seen these communities, these homes being built all the way in Lake Las Vegas towards Boulder City, all the way to the foot of Mount Charleston. I mean, it's really crazy how much I've seen Las Vegas grow just in my lifetime. How do you see these factors changing
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the real estate market in town? I mean I think I think this is great because seriously I really do like Vegas. I think it's a great place and we offer a lot than a lot of other places and you don't have the traffic and the expenses of California. But as this city grows like any other place, you know, you need to look at infrastructure and one of those worrying things is water. This is on everybody's mind and I think this could you know this could be a factor although I've been assured that you know they're looking at bringing water from Mississippi River and then the north and so on so that could be a factor but and I think I don't know if you're going with this, but I'm going to try to jump the gun here. Traditionally, Vegas, you know, if you go back 20 years, you had the big employers, the big hotels, who employed hundreds of thousands of people, and you had lots of mom and pop shop type businesses, what I call small businesses, you know, five and below. And then you have these massive employers. And what we need, and I've always said this, we need more medium-sized businesses, from five to 99, or 99 to 400. Those kind of businesses are actually the engines of the economy, because those are the guys who will try and compete with the bigger guys, and they employ more, and they'll do more medium-sized business I mean him so and I think that this is what we want if you go to Southern, California You will see a number of it's just you only need to just drive down the 15 in California or 90 or any of those Roads and you will see so many companies which you know are of a substantial size They're not huge, but they employing people and paying them in a six figure salaries. Here we don't have enough of those and I think that's what we need. As the population grows, that's what we're going to need.
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Absolutely. So you did actually touch on a topic I would love to get to and I'll give some data for anyone who's interested. So a recent study at the UNLV Center for Business and Economic Research found that the total number of people moving to Nevada surged last year, over 96,000 people. And that was measured by people surrendering their licenses to the Nevada DMV. Of course, we all know the states with the greatest migration, the highest was California, but people also moved in significant numbers from Florida and Texas. And the most interesting part for me was that people are also, like you said, bringing their businesses. And they're contributing to the business landscape of Las Vegas. So, going back to what you said about medium-sized businesses, how do we encourage growth of these types of businesses? Is there an evolutionary process behind small to medium to large? Well, yeah, of course there is.
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I mean, most people who are business people, entrepreneurs, they go into this field because they want to grow. Because if they wanted to just have a limited company, they'd go and get a job. Because there would be a ceiling to what they could earn and where they would go. So there are a number of things that are, and probably one of the most important was, the most important thing is you know i think small businesses you know the life mhm line to these uh... it is having funding and i think and if we put what's happened the past year aside with what's going on with interest rates and so on uh... nevada's always been a really high i never had difficulty finding uh... funding within the local banks and local uh... uh... credit unions and so on. They've always been going above and beyond. The other thing is that we don't have the tax systems that exist in California. That's also a good thing. Us being the kind of state that we are, regulations and red tape, these could stump the growth economy. You talk to people from California and they will tell you there's so much red tape in doing things. We do have some of this and you do need regulations for safety and so on. I'm not one of those people. There needs to be regulations. But sometimes red tape can stump a growth. And then R&D. I think another thing that we are doing here in the state is R&D. UNLV is a good example. I don't know if you remember a few years back Governor Sandoval was encouraging funding to come from Reno to here. So all of that was good. All of that was good. And all of those things are positive things for the state and hopefully people coming here and investing and building. Absolutely. I have some fun questions for you. Sure. If you'd like to answer them. And you can take your time with this one if you like. Are you a leader or are you a follower? And do you think one can turn into the other? Hopefully I'm a leader and I'm going to lead and these are going to be the standards that I go with. The standards that you set will determine how successful you are. Yes, yes, definitely people who are followers can become leaders and there's definitely room for everybody can be a leader you don't have to be a shouting type and you know that's not that's not being a leader. A leader is determining where it's going and making sure everybody understands where they have to go and how to follow you know you don't have to be the guy who shouts and tells
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people what to do and then. Exactly what do you think about the other way around leaders turning into followers. Do you think that ever happens?
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I mean, I'm sure it happens. And there are, especially as I get, I'm looking at, I'm 60, and I'm looking at, you know, next five years. Yes. And there is a good chance that if I don't want to be in that position of being a leader. I'd much rather as I get older but if I'd much rather let somebody else do that but you can still be a leader but it doesn't have to be what's the word the the lead what's how do I explain you don't have to be the guy who's pushing all the time yes you can be a leader you can set example you can set tone in another business goes and let others follow you. But in the pecking order, you don't have to be first. You can go second, third, or fourth. I think that's what people take. Certainly me, I'm looking at my future. I don't want the burden. You want to, because I think I've paid my dues over the years. Yeah, exactly. I think it's interesting that you bring about the idea of different points of your life. Like I myself as a student probably fall more into the follower. I see myself as a leader in, I like to see myself as a leader in other things that I do, taking initiative, but followership is really important I think for like things like mentorship, you know, so the the idea of constantly always learning, I think leaders could always have a follower side to them or something like that. You know, they can always be learning from the next person or the next invention or the next, you know, mentor. So thank you. Thank you for that. So just closing out the show here, what advice would you give to a new entrepreneur student or even to your younger self? What would you say if you would have liked to have known years ago? Don't be lazy. Every time I look at the time, because I mentioned to you, I was very lucky that at the time, this is the 90s when I was in my early 20s, sorry mid 20s, the opportunities kind of not being lazy and trying to find out more and try and read more and try and discover more about you know where the trends are where things are going I would have been a lot more quote-unquote successful I mean both monetary and having the satisfaction of you know thinking I did something and I made a difference but laziness is different. And by laziness I don't mean just missing lectures. Follow it, follow what's going on, be proactive in what's happening as opposed to just waiting for something to happen and fall on your lap, you know what I mean? Which goes back to what you were saying about being a leader. Going after it, making sure that, see yourself as a leader.
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I think that's key and crucial. And don't be lazy. It's true. It's true. I always struggle with the idea of enjoying my youth, things like that. But I also think about my future a lot of the time. And really, it can weigh you down, but I feel like it's a proactive thing to do. It's a really important thing to do as well. So I want to thank you so much for being here today, Kevin. I had an amazing, stimulating conversation. Thank you so much.
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Well, thank you. That was really fun. I enjoyed it. All the best with the show and hope to see you soon.
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Thank you so much. And anyone who is listening, remember you can always find us wherever you find your podcasts on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or any other platforms as well. Thank you so much.
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Take care, bye.
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Thank you all for listening to The Pivot Point.
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You can follow us at Pivot Point UNLV on Twitter, all one word. You can follow us at Pivot Point UNLV on Twitter, all one word.
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And hope you enjoyed the show.