Impact
The Entrepreneur Must Be Able to Observe the Obvious Dr. Tony Urbanek
O
thers have called me a serial entrepreneur. I’m not flattered by that expression. I have been involved in founding businesses in medicine/dentistry, one classified as a medical device manufacturer. I hold a patent and separate FDA approvals for the device and its manufacturing facility. I have founded two third-world medical clinics, an aviation business, and led large organizations in aviation and medicine.
I like to fix things. When I was a kid, I liked to fix anything I could find around the house that was broken. Sometimes I was successful, and sometimes I wasn’t. I still like to fix things. Fixing things is the second most joyful pursuit in my life. Having and building my family is the first. I can’t always fix everything for everyone in my family. My favorite phrase with them is, “You’ll figure it out”. I have had some successes and failures in life. I went to college and hated it. They were teaching me things I would never be able to use. I almost quit and took up fixing real estate in Florida. But I stuck it out because I did not want to disappoint my father, whose sole purpose in life was to see his children educated. I graduated with a degree in Chemistry, and enough credits in Philosophy and Theology to have claimed them as my major. I graduated with a 2.7 GPA, precisely in the middle of my class. I
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thought college was a failure. My next step was dental school because my older brother was a dentist. Everyone thought he was successful. When I got to dental school I was immediately confronted by the “basic sciences.” Those are the first two years of training in how the body works, (Anatomy, Physiology, Histology, Neuroanatomy, Biochemistry). I was fascinated by learning how the body works. I thought this was information I could use. If I learned how the body works, I could fix it when it was broken. I excelled in dental school. I graduated at the top of my class Summa Cum Laude. I spent my senior year in dental school studying for a Masters Degree in Cell Biology/Anatomy and graduated with a DDS, MS My next stop was Vanderbilt in Nashville, where I received my MD and trained as an Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeon. I was even awarded a grant from the NIH/NIDCR to study how bone growth causes funny-looking faces. Besides fixing lots of funnylooking faces, cleft palates, and damaged nerves and bones, I learned how to fix damage to the TMJ. My training placed me on the cutting edge of the most current and complicated surgical procedures used to fix patients with the devastating symptoms of TMD/TMJ. The accepted symptoms of TMD/TMJ are frequent and recurrent headache, earache, neck pain, ringing in the ears, subjective hearing loss, (fullness in the ears), vertigo, upper DentalEntrepreneur.com
