Make Them Smile

Learn to scale your organization to grow your impact and create sustainable wealth with this inspiring book from the Founder of DECA Dental Group.

Highly specialized service providers—such as doctors, lawyers, dentists, physical therapists, and consultants—are often limited in their growth and earning potential by their notoriously difficult-to-scale industries.

As a dental student at Tufts University School of Dental Medicine in Boston just four years after leaving Zimbabwe for America, Dr. Sulman Ahmed was already looking ahead to an alternative future to private practice, determined to help as many people as possible, innovate within a stagnant industry by putting the customer experience first, and maximize his earning potential. 

In Make Them Smile, Dr. Ahmed shows readers how he scaled his customer-centric services and built a national brand—known as the “Starbucks of dentistry”—and offers guidance on how to:

- Identify the ideal gap to fill in your market

- Leverage your expertise as your competitive advantage

- Become a compassionate, highly capable leader

- Standardize operations and scale

- Navigate the various financing vehicles available at different stages of growth 

- Build sustainable wealth while creating a legacy of improving customers’ lives

For hardworking and dedicated professional service providers, Make Them Smile offers a way out of the grind of living hour to billable hour, providing a road map for how to build a scalable, standardized brand that provides a consistent, repeatable, and high-quality customer experience.

Author Bio:

Dr. Sulman Ahmed is the Founder, Chairman, and CEO of DECA Dental and the influential leader shaping and motivating DECA Dental’s growth, strategy, and culture. In 2008, Dr. Ahmed opened his first dental office with a vow to establish a truly patient-centered model. His passionate belief in putting patients first is the fundamental backbone of DECA Dental’s core values in delivering patient care. He continues to be a prime visionary in providing exemplary training for doctors, quality materials for patients, offering weekend hours, and being an early adopter of a multi-specialist model within a single practice.

His natural ability to scout talent and cultivate strong leaders has allowed him to architect a first-class organization of leaders from the top down. With Dr. Ahmed’s leadership, DECA Dental has become a vanguard as one of the industry’s fastest-growing and well-respected organizations. DECA has been awarded several honors, recognitions, and awards in just over a decade, most notably Inc. Magazine’s Top 5000 fastest-growing companies in the nation, several years in a row. The Dallas Business Journal also recognized DECA Dental as one of the top 100 companies in the region and the 21st fastest-growing company in the Dallas-Fort Worth region.

In his career, Dr. Ahmed has achieved many honors and awards, including being named Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year (2017) and Glassdoor’s Top CEOs list (2021) with a 98% approval rating. He is also an in-demand speaker at national leadership, entrepreneurial, and motivational conferences. Another one of Dr. Ahmed’s notable achievements is being appointed as one of the most admired CEOs in the Dallas Business Journal’s 2023 list.