Dr. Kimes, 45, was born in Miami in 1969 and was adorned with a most unusual first name: an adjective that at first caused her angst coming up in South Florida.
“My name is Heavenly. It has always been a controversy for me … ‘Heavenly Father, full of grace.’ And as I got older people would pick at me. They would ask if that was my stripper name and stuff like that,” she said.
It wasn’t until Kimes transitioned into adulthood that she realized the wisdom of her parents christening her with the name “Heavenly,” but also how much of a boon to her business it would become.
“It has been a blessing for me because people always remember me and remember my business, because a lot of times when people are looking for a dentist, they will see Heavenly Dental, and they will say ‘The Lord steered me in the right direction.’ So I have always used it as leverage. It has been a conversation piece; so I didn’t like it as a child, but it’s been working for me, Dr. Heavenly. I think I was just a blessing to (my parents) and they were so happy … Heavenly.”
Heavenly originally planned on becoming a doctor, but was later convinced that being a dentist would better suit her other goals. “There was a recruiter who came to my school to talk about dentistry,” Kimes told Black Enterprise in an interview last year. “He made dentistry sound so rewarding, because as a woman I knew I wanted to be married — I wanted to have kids —and he made it seem like I could do that because I wouldn’t have to do a long residency. I could set my own hours rather than being on call as a medical doctor. Because of that I said, ‘Hmm, let me look into this dentistry thing,’” she explains. She graduated at the top of her class with a doctorate of dental surgery from Meharry Medical College.
After completing dental school, Heavenly attended an advanced education in general dentistry program in Memphis, Tenn., and then worked as an associate dentist for over 3 years. Her husband, Dr. Damon Kimes — a board-certified physician, co-signed for her first practice loan, and since that time Heavenly has owned seven different dental practices, including the four she still owns today.
As a matter of fact, Kimes’ real business isn’t being a dentist, but being in the business of dentistry. She buys troubled dental practices, rebuilds them, and then “flips” them for a profit. “What I’ve learned through practice transition and running different companies,” Kimes told Black Enterprise, “is that I can build them up to a maximum capacity, which takes about seven years if you start them from scratch, and then sell them at top dollar.”
Kimes was 75 pounds heavier and lost the weight over two years. She describes the process as a struggle and took extreme offense from comments Jacqueline Walters made about another woman’s weight.
Kimes’ experiences flipping dental practices has made her quite the knowledgeable businesswoman with a real estate license, an insurance license and a Series 65 certification. She even shared some of her wisdom and savvy in her book, Heavenly’s Business Prescriptions: You CAN Have It All! She also started Dr. Heavenly University to help aspiring entrepreneurs (especially aspiring female entrepreneurs) gain perspective and achieve their business goals and will conduct a seminar in May entitled “Year to Step into Success:”
Kimes explained to rolling out, why, despite her many business interests, along with being the wife of a doctor and the mother of three children, she would consider joining the cast of “Married to Medicine” and exposing her private life to the world.
“You know what? I thought that they needed something different, someone with more humor, someone who could actually bring the ladies together in a positive light,” she explains. “I know that sometimes reality TV can have a stigma to it. And I thought that I could come in and make things better, make it more classy, make it more funny, interesting, entertaining.
“I was impressed with the fact that I had never seen a reality show — and Dr. Simone pointed this out to me — that every cast member on the show, including the husbands, were educated. Everyone had at least a bachelor’s degree. Half the cast members have doctorate degrees. And they were down to earth. They were family people. I wanted to be a part of that.”
