Make Them Smile: Why Customer Satisfaction Is the Key to Rapid and Sustainable Growth

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.

Dr. Sulman Ahmed is the Founder, Chairman, and CEO of DECA Dental, the holding company for Ideal Dental, his dental brand with over 150 offices in seven states. Under Dr. Ahmed’s leadership, DECA Dental has become the vanguard of dental care through its unique patient-centered model. Since then, DECA Dental has won countless awards, including being named one of Inc. magazine’s Inc. 5,000, the fastest-growing companies, for several years, most recently in 2022. In 2019, The Dallas Business Journal also recognized DECA Dental as one of the top 100 companies in the region and the twenty-sixth fastest-growing company in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and named Dr. Ahmed one of the most-admired CEOs of 2022. Dr. Ahmed earned a Doctor of Dental Medicine degree from the Tufts University School of Dental Medicine in Boston and currently serves on their Board of Advisors.