Becoming a CEO: Lessons in Patience, Grit, and Leadership

Michael Burcham: Welcome to Microcap Moments, a podcast from Shore Capital Partners that highlights the stories of founders, investors, and leaders who have taken on the challenge of transforming ideas and small companies The journey of building and scaling a business takes one down many unexpected paths. It’s a journey where we learn from our mistakes, fall down often, but have the entrepreneurial grit to pick ourselves up and persevere.

Within this series, we will share these stories of success and failure, of the challenges and the rewards faced by those who dare to dream big, and through their lessons learned, We hope to inspire others who are on a similar journey of becoming, growing, and leading.

In this episode, Anderson Williams speaks with Peter Roehmholdt, CEO of Great Lakes Dental Partners. The company focuses on dental services across Illinois and Indiana. Peter was promoted into the role of CEO following his tenure as the firm’s Chief Financial Officer. Peter began working with Shore Capital as part of the firm’s Shore Resource Team in 2021. and began his work at Great Lakes Dental as a project manager with the Shore Resource Team.

Prior to his tenure with Shore, Peter spent nearly seven years with KPMG, beginning there in audit services and was promoted into the deal advisory and strategy team. Peter describes himself as likely more entrepreneurial than many of the individuals working in finance, and he had a desire to move into operations leadership of a business.

Peter is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame. He and his family reside in Chicago.

Anderson Williams: Well, welcome Peter. Thanks for joining me today.

Peter Roehmholdt: Thanks, Anderson.

Anderson Williams: Will you just introduce yourself and say who you are and what you do and where you do it?

Peter Roehmholdt: Sure. My name is Peter Roehmholdt. I’m currently the CEO of Great Lakes Dental Partners, original dental platform here in Chicago. And yeah, previously CFO and worked at Shore Capital before that.

Anderson Williams: So how did you first get connected with Shore Capital when you joined the SRT? How did you learn about that experience or that opportunity?

Peter Roehmholdt: So I started my career at KPMG working with bigger deals and strategy. We did some integration separation work and worked with big, big transactions, huge businesses, 40, 50 person engagement teams.

And one of my best friends in that experience was Rachel Jonas. So I was actually watching her plants or husband’s plants. She’s one of my friends when they were down in Florida, working with Jaffe now PartnerCare on a 100-Day plan. And I was over there watching the house and it was during the pandemic.

And she’s like, if you want my plants, I’ll let you ride my Peloton. I’m like, deal. Okay, fine. No problem. Deal. And as I’m riding, riding a Peloton, she’s like, Hey, Pete, do you want to come work for Shore Capital? And I’m immediately thinking, I don’t know. I do not want to do fund accounting. Like I don’t want to leave KPMG, good job, good trajectory to just do some private equity accounting.

She said it’s not accounting, it’s this different role called the Shore Resource Team. I was like, all right, talk to me about it. And she’s like, this is a role where you can be an operator someday. You work with the small businesses in the early stage, you work with sell sides, work with company improvement, and then you have a chance to go be an operator someday.

And I was like, no, that’s interesting. I hadn’t heard of something like that before. And, you know, part of my background is I was always probably a bit more entrepreneurial than your average consultant at KPMG. I had a lemonade stand as a little kid. I ran a t-shirt business in college. I actually had a small photo booth business the first couple of years in Chicago.

So like I was doing a bunch of little stuff. None of these things were grand operations, but it was something that I was always interested in and working in like a big machine. was great to cut my teeth and I met a lot of awesome people and the technical chops I gained was awesome. But at this point, I’m like, it’s time to become an operator.

I wanted to be more responsible for results instead of just producing a product and tell other people to do it. I wanted to be part of the execution and I wanted to be as one person more impactful on the business.

Michael Burcham: In the following segment, Anderson asked Peter about how his journey took him from an inside advisor at Shore Capital to CFO at Great Lakes Dental, to ultimately the CEO of the organization.

Peter found opportunity to help the firm address some key operating issues and in doing so, began the journey of building trust with the team. Peter was partnered with an exceptional operating leader to further help him make the transition to CEO. Peter’s journey is a testament to Shore’s approach to investing in young talent to help them lead our companies.

Anderson Williams: So I think it’s interesting, I know one of your projects when you were on the SRT was with Great Lakes Dental, you’re now the CEO of Great Lakes Dental. Talk to me about that project and just how you got from that to your current role in a really rapid period of time.

Peter Roehmholdt: Yeah. Kind of a interesting timing. So I was on a number of different 100-Day plans, some special projects with other short businesses, and it came up and this would have been fall of 2022. There were some issues going on with the business. And there’s one other person there, Zach Teichmiller, and then Riley Looser was there for a small amount of time.

And she was about to go on maternity. So like who is going to step in and take this larger role and kind of see what’s going on at this business. Some things were just, there was a little bit of smoke and we were trying to figure out what was going on. And it was supposed to be a. One month project. And now here I am almost two full years later as a CEO.

So there’s a lot of stories in between there, but it started out as a short term deal.

Anderson Williams: Well, and I think it’s important, you know, one of the things that Shore talks a lot about, whether it’s with the CXO program or the SRT or hiring so many first time CEOs like yourself, but across the portfolio that we invest in young talent and put them in positions to have impact and make decisions sort of beyond their years

And then support that young talent and de-risk that experience. You were stepping into a situation that was not a brand new platform. It was a platform that had grown, but was experiencing some growing pains. Will you talk just a little bit about maybe that first transition from SRT into CFO? And then I want to talk a little bit about the decision and the opportunity to step in the CEO role.

But as you went from SRT, you knew it from the inside. You knew some of the distress that was going on and what made you want to or seek that CFO role in that first transition.

Peter Roehmholdt: So when I first took the SRT role after that conversation with Rachel, honestly, my goal was to be CEO someday. And people were like, ah, that might be too big a goal is right off the bat.

But I figured a good route with my financial background was CFO. So I wanted to get a CFO opportunity first to get some proper operating experience. Coming from a consultant world, it’s hard to be a consultant straight to CEO, especially at this stage of my career. So I was like, okay, CFO is a good spot going back to that first project.

I come in, I’m intending on being there one to two months and we go in and we start digging into certain parts of the finance function, operations, even the culture of the business, we start finding some things that are just, uh, suboptimal and I start digging in, doing more analysis in the finance side.

And then we start pushing on certain things, things like doctor compensation and the way that the silos that were existing in the business. And there was just a few things that we applied a lot of pressure towards. And I was like, hey, I’d really like to see this, I’d like to see that. And right around Christmas, the CFO quit. At that point, we’re sitting here.

I’m still ramping up on this project where I’m supposed to leave the business to go do something else. There’s no CFO. There’s a finance team that’s a bit in disarray. And, um, I was given the opportunity to go in and, and be, at the time, it was going to be interim and then end up being full time CFO.

And it wasn’t a clean, new platform, right?. So there’s a lot to undertake, but I’m like, hey, I’m never going to learn it better than if I’m just in it, right? And if I’m doing, I roll up my sleeves, this is not a high level CFO position where you’ve got a bunch of minions. This is a lean team. So for me to understand it and coming into a business where I didn’t have the initial trust or I didn’t build it myself, I had to learn how to do everything myself.

So I ran, I mean, I’d go into the bank and I’d run the cash reporting. I would do the monthly reporting. We’d do the KPI dashboards. I was helping tie out recs during the audit. I was pulling out. AP support during the audit stuff that a staff level do it, but we had to be right. And the fact that I was able to do it and prove it, like you had to unwind so much in those early days.

Anderson Williams: And then how did the transition to CEO happen from that CFO role? You weren’t in that seat for too long.

Peter Roehmholdt: So when I took over the CFO role, that would have been in January of 2023. And between then and February, they ended up transitioning from the CEO, the VP of finance, the VP of strategy and Kevin Offel. Who is the lead independent director at the time of the board. He came down to be the CEO. So that would have been middle of February, 2023. So he and I kind of the new two leaders of the business coming in and just taking a new, a new look at how things can or should be run. So throughout that experience, it was great to learn from him.

So like it was an absolutely amazing mentor, the way that he evaluate businesses based on his experience at running another dental business, but also running other PPMs and other like provider businesses. It was really quite helpful to me because my background finance analysis, it was somewhat comfortable in that regard.

So it’s like you’re in the spreadsheets and you’re running this deal, are you running data are you running KPIs, et cetera. So like, it was almost a fairly natural transition from my KPMG days to SRT to CFO, and he kind of taught me what it was like to be more of an operator leader. So he didn’t come to the finance world.

He was an operator. He came through COO to CEO, where I was the CFO to CEO. And that’s a bit of a different skill set. Another path, right? And he would teach me like, okay, Peter, you’re going to do the month end close and you’re going to do that cash reporting, the data. Well, how does that help me with run my business?

Right. Like what. Okay, this is backward looking. So then I started adopting more of the KPIs, the forward looking metrics, trying to get people to be more data driven and more focused on using that data when they make their decisions, which was a new concept. There was a lot of anecdotal decision making being done.

Oh, this one person says that and the data maybe wasn’t clean or wasn’t available and people just make decisions and then you’d evaluate them after. Now, through the data we were able to produce and Kevin’s guidance, we were starting to make more decisions based on actual information that was coming out of the business and we had refined our power BI solution.

So we’ve got good data that’s actionable. And that was, I think maybe the first transition from being more of the finance leader, as I moved to the operation, started building out those chops and that kind of led me toward the CEO opportunity.

Michael Burcham: Next, Anderson asked Peter about the transition to operating leader and CEO.

Peter describes how he learned to engage his direct reports in one on one meetings, and how to use those sessions as a way to teach the team, empower them as leaders, and to master their own decision making for the good of the business. Peter also describes how, as going to every office and meeting the team, he was able to fully understand both the local culture, as well as the opportunity for improvement across the platform.

Anderson Williams: And when you talk about learning from Kevin, what it means to be an operator leader, what does that mean to you? What’s different about that than maybe what you knew or had experienced before?

Peter Roehmholdt: I was fortunate to see the way he interacted. reports. I think about that now. One of the most challenging parts about my job is having seven or eight direct reports that they bring me in our one on ones every week, only their most challenging, complex problems that they are unable to solve themselves.

So they bring me, I see a disproportionate amount of challenging items each week in our one on ones and seeing the way Kevin would deal with those conversations and I think he might’ve had this idea in his head or at least was willing to mentor me along the way because he would bring me into one on one discussions as early as like December of last year.

So this would have been three, four months before I was named. CEO where he’s like, I was with the one on ones. I was into the performance reviews. It was kind of like the show one, do one, teach one mentality. And he was great at that. So I saw the way that he interacted with the direct reports and the way he solved problems, the way he gathered data from other folks and then move forward and made the decision.

And this is something I try to emulate is I like to empower my team. I want the best direct reports I can, and I want to micromanage them. I want to talk with them, teach them, and they go forth and conquer. And he did a really nice job of that. And the move from CFO to CEO has been much more of a people and operation centric move.

And I know a lot of folks are excellent in the finance side of things. And the one critique of a CFO becoming CEO is can they get out of the numbers? Can they start being more forward looking and can they deal with the human side of having seven or eight direct reports that are going to drive the business?

Like it’s easy to slip into that old job. Because I was a really good CFO or I love this analysis, but that’s not your job anymore, right? You have to be focused on what’s the issue with the marketing team. How’s my clinical leader doing? What’s going on with revenue cycle? And I can’t just be hiding behind the spreadsheets in my finance analysis.

Anderson Williams: How have you done that? I mean, just in your own personal growth in a relatively short period of time, what you just described as not a small shift, it’s almost a way of seeing a shift in worldview in some ways.

Peter Roehmholdt: One of the biggest things I did when I was making that transition from CFO to CEO was getting to all of our offices.

So I’ve been to a number of them, but I was like in this time period when I was announced CEO. To the next board meeting, which is like a six or eight week period, I was able to go to all of our offices at least once. And that makes it come alive more than just what the data shows me about the office, what the profitability is.

I get to meet the lead docs, the hygienists, the office managers, the staff, and I get to see what this office is all about. I get to understand what the office feels like. What’s the building like, how are the patients, what’s the flow. I get to understand a lot more about than what just is the output from that practice.

And with that understanding of being there, plus the financial data, the KPIs, I can have a better view of how I want to drive change in these businesses. I can then be a better leader to talk with my operations team, my regional directors and say, hey, this is what I’m thinking because I’ve been there.

And it’s funny, a lot of times the numbers will confirm exactly what I see. But when you see in person, that was the shift from being the finance guy to the operator.

Michael Burcham: In the following segment, Anderson asked Peter a very compelling question. What did Peter have to let go of as the CFO so he could optimize his role as CEO?

Peter describes this journey of learning to delegate responsibility to others. He also talks about choosing to invest in the individual professional development of the team to help each of them become their best self in their individual roles.

Anderson Williams: So, Peter, as you think about that transition from CFO to CEO, what did you have to do to let go of some of those things you were doing as a CFO?

How did you enable yourself to get out of some of the financial weeds, some of the places that, candidly, you were comfortable working, to fully embrace this new opportunity?

Peter Roehmholdt: One of the biggest critiques of CFOs that move into the CEO role is that they’re unable to delegate and get out of the financial analysis and the part of the business that they have grown up doing as a CPA or an auditor and get to be a CEO.

So for me, I was very fortunate to have Jacob Sorger on the team. So he came in as my finance leader and he helped build that team up and make it run, I would say almost more smoothly than it was when I was CFO at the time. We hired a new accounting manager. We kind of refined the team, they’ve made close smoother.

They’ve made the numbers continue to be accurate and we’ve got additional cuts of data. So I’m able to fully trust him and without being able to trust him pulling the data away. Of course, I’m close with the numbers we talk about it each month and every week, but be able to trust him, having him run the team.

It’s allowed me to focus on the other functional areas that need a lot of my attention, more in the operations business, running the company, being more forward looking. If I know the numbers are right and the audit’s going to be clean and closes going quickly. That’s a huge advantage for me to try to make the business better as I look forward.

So very fortunate to have that team to be able to delegate that to Jacob, to that squad. So I’m able to focus on making the business better as we look forward.

Anderson Williams: You know, one of the things, Peter, that you’ve done early that I’ve been really impressed with that I would love for you to talk more about in context of your overall approach.

To rebooting the culture a little bit at GLDP is investing in your people. And so I know you’ve invested in your office managers and doing some training with office managers. I know you’re investing in doing a doctor development and kind of leadership development day with your doctors. Talk a little bit more about why and how that fits into your kind of overall vision of how you’re trying to lead the company.

Peter Roehmholdt: This has been something where we’ve been historically very underinvested from perspective from GLDP historically is not having the individual being thought of as someone that needs to develop in their career, more like a cog in the dental wheel, where there’s a lot to be said about developing each of these people, not only the corporate staff, but doctors, hygienists, office managers, et cetera.

So we’ve been doing overall more training on like a basic dental level, but what’s been missing is that professional development. So through the partnership with Shore, we’ve been able to do some pretty amazing stuff. So we’ve got three people on our leadership team in the Shore’s Peak Performer Program.

We’ve got five that went to Shore U, we have an office manager wide training that’s been long overdue. So these office managers have, it’s kind of almost been a sink or swim for a little bit, and they’ve been able to, a lot of them have done really well. So, but they haven’t had this personal career development training.

And luckily we have the gift of you and your team to help put that on and design it for us. And it was just, I mean, it was remarkable the kind of feedback we got where they thought it was going to be some GLDP shove some stuff down their throat where this was just, hey, how do you develop your own career?

How do you deal with conflict resolution? How do you deal with building a team? What about one on ones? Have you thought about this? This is formal management training for these office managers who we rely on so heavily that they’ve never had. So like, we’re very, very grateful for what y’all put on and just the feedback we’ve had has been great.

And then we actually had a few office managers that said, Hey, we had such a great time with Anderson’s training. I’d love my doctors to get this. Like, I wish my doc knew this because at the end of the day, like, these docs, they set the culture for the office and a lot of doctors are quite smart and they’ve gone through their training at dental school and residencies and some specialty training, but many of them never had formal management training either.

So yeah, we have an upcoming doctor development day, which will be all the doctors come together. We’re clearing their schedules and invest in them. And we’ve got early stage docs that just came out of dental school and we’ve got docs that have been around for 40 years and I’m looking forward to seeing what they all get out of it.

Anderson Williams: Well, and I think the approach that you’ve designed is, you know, those office managers being invested in is also an investment in the doctor. I mean, they touch so many parts of the business as you described that if they feel even more confident or more supported or have some new skills or just feel that much more connected to GLDP because GLDP has invested in them, their performance is going to play that out. Right?

Peter Roehmholdt: When I think about my best offices, clinically, financially, culturally. They all have great office managers. They got great lead docs that set the culture and they’ve got great office managers that permeate that culture through the rest of the office. Like you walk into these offices and you can feel it.

I mean, it’s kind of cliche, but I have a couple offices in my head where you walk in and you’re like, wow, this is a place I want to get my teeth clean. This is somewhere I would trust. If they say you need to get X, Y, Z, dental treatment, you’d say, of course, doc. And like, it’s clean. It’s organized, it feels like a home, and it’s just amazing, like, the way that a great office manager can really set the culture for a whole office.

Michael Burcham: In the upcoming segment, Anderson asked Peter to talk about what advice he would give others looking to make a similar journey. Peter talks about how his own self assessment had led him to his current pathway. He also describes the need to have patience for the right opportunity to emerge. He speaks about the fusion of working hard and being ready for the right moment in time. Basically being prepared when the opportunity presents itself.

Anderson Williams: Peter, as you think about your experience, are there a few key pieces of advice that you would offer someone like yourself who’s young, who’s hungry, who’s motivated, who’s got skills, who’s looking for the right opportunity about how to get where you’ve gotten in a short period of time.

Any advice that you would offer as to how they might approach their decision making, their career choices or otherwise.

Peter Roehmholdt: When I think back three and a half years ago, being at KPMG, I remember sitting down with my wife. I put a piece of paper down and I said, what do I love about my job? And I wrote down a bunch of stuff that wasn’t necessarily part of, I have to be at KPMG for.

And I was like, what do I want to do? What do I want to be when I grow up? Right. And it was more like running small businesses. entrepreneurial, maybe starting my own thing, maybe working with a different group of employees where I can affect change in others. And I was like, okay, well, maybe this is not a thing.

I mean, I could have had, you know, maybe gone around the path and been a partner at KPMG, that would have been great, but I kind of wanted to do more than that. I wanted to be an operator. I wanted to run my own business. So when the opportunity arose to do something that was a more clear path, I was really excited for that.

And it was an opportunity to go and. Just get a chance. I feel like what I’m doing, if I go through life as opportunistically, where can I get a better chance at what I think I want to do? And Shore Capital was a much better chance at getting to what I wanted to do than it was a KPMG. So I’m like, okay, so I made the move to Shore Capital.

And when I’m there as a very impatient guy, it’s hard to be patient. And I know when you look back and you tell your old self this, like I would encourage people to be patient as well. I remember one of my early meetings with Jeff Williams at Shore when it was like one of these check ins and he’s like, you just going to have to be a bit more patient.

And it’s very hard to hear when you’re an impatient person, you want to get there tomorrow. But I think back on it and he was exactly right. Like you just have to be a bit more patient and think about those opportunities that you get along the way. When I got the chance to work at GLDP, I’d be lying to you if I said I was over the moon excited for it.

But I said, all right, let’s give it a shot and let’s be fully immersed in it. I wasn’t just doing the financial analysis. I was getting to know the whole team. I was going to offices in those early days. I was spending more time with them. They saw me as more than just a consultant from the private equity firm.

And I think that’s something I try to embody more and try to make an impact on not just the financials, but also the people. I think that’s what helped me get to the CEO role is I had the connections with the people and Kevin could see that as he recommended me to take over this role when he recommended to the board.

But it’s not just the finance piece. It’s growing the business. It’s the ops side. You kind of need people all marching in the same direction and it’s hard to do. And it’s been something I’ve been struggling with, especially as I make the move from CFO to CEO. I’d say it’s all about working hard and being opportunistic in the right time.

I think you’re not going to luck your way into a spot like this, but it’s something where if you’re willing to work hard and roll up your sleeves, this early career energy is something that Shore was able to identify and rewarded me for it. I think about a time when I didn’t get a promotion in my previous job and they said, you’ve done everything right. You just need one more year.

I cannot tell you how frustrated that is. Tell me I did something wrong. Please tell me something. I need to improve on this, but it’s just one more year. I’m like, Hmm. And Justin Ishbia has been big on this. He said, you know, I’m ready to reward early career energy and athletes. I mean, he likes people that are actually athletes, but I’m talking about business athletes as well.

And it’s like, okay, I felt like I was someone that could fit that mold of working hard and just getting the job done and doing what other people didn’t want to do. And, um, I’ve had a couple of good breaks along the way, but I feel like I’ve been fortunate because of that attitude.

Michael Burcham: In this final segment, Anderson asked Peter about any myths that have been dispelled for him.

He describes one of those myths is the things you will no longer need to do once you’re CEO. He uses an example from one of the locations he visited where his willingness to do whatever needed to be done that day not only built trust with the team but also built greater engagement with the local team.

Peter also talks about his primary role now as being a relationship manager, building intimacy and trust with the team across the platform.

Anderson Williams: So I’m curious, Peter, if there are any particular myths about being a CEO that have been dispelled in your experience. You obviously always wanted to be a CEO. You’ve probably read books by and about CEOs and what it means to be a CEO. Just any thoughts on myths that have kind of dispelled in your time as CEO of GLDP.

Peter Roehmholdt: Some of the myths of being CEO. Is that you won’t have to do things that you feel are below a CEO level. One of the things that I try to do is servant leadership, and that’s something I’ve done at the CFO level and CEO and prove that I’m not an ivory tower CEO.

I want to get in the field and say, I’m willing to do stuff. And I remember going to this one office and through some issue, there was a billing problem with one of the janitorial services and there was garbage that hadn’t been taken out and after my meeting with the doc, I took all the garbage out and cleaned up a bunch of stuff in the bathroom area and brought it back to the dumpster.

And this isn’t to say like, oh my gosh, what a great job I’ve done. It’s just to prove this is the little stuff that you still end up doing as CEO. You’re still like going down into the details and doing stuff that’s maybe more, maybe not something that a public company CEO would do. So you’re, you’re rolling up your sleeves, you’re getting your hands dirty.

And it kind of in a way endears yourself to folks where the office manager is like, oh my gosh, the CEO is taking out the trash. That piece has been interesting, but there’s definitely pieces of the business that there’s still a lot that you have to do as CEO, you’re not immune to the minutia. So there’s some days where I will spend a lot of time talking to individuals, dealing with more people issues, helping with, you know, with doc, with our corporate team and resolving those problems.

And if I can resolve that, that will solve more problems down the line, where my old role during the day, I would be doing more analysis, doing more work product. I spent a lot of my days problem solving, talking with people, a lot of human interaction. And that’s been a big shift from CFO to CEO, a lot more talk, a lot of human, a lot of meetings, a lot of one on ones problem solving together and less product creation.

And I think that’s a big one going from banking or consulting to SRT is, and even a CFO to CEO, less product creation. If you’re just trying to get stuff out the door and be like, I’m done with this. CEO is a tough roll through because it’s kind of never done. It’s like, it’s very much operations. You’re always trying to improve.

You’re always, I mean, every good day, you’re like, oh my gosh, tomorrow, how am I going to make that better?

Michael Burcham: This podcast was produced by Shore Capital Partners with story and narration by Michael Burcham. Recording and editing by Austin Johnson. Editing by Reel Audiobooks. Sound design, mixing and mastering by Mark Galup of Reel Audiobooks.

Special thanks to Peter Roehmholdt and Anderson Williams for today’s great conversation.

This podcast is the property of Shore Capital Partners LLC. None of the content herein is investment advice, an offer of investment advisory services, nor a recommendation or offer relating to any security. See the Terms of Use page on the Shore Capital website for other important information.