By Dental Strategy Institute | June 2026 | 7-Minute Read
Right now, in the summer of 2026, demand for dental practices is high and supply is low. DSOs are hungry. Sixty-nine percent of them expect to increase their acquisition activity this year, and many report relying more heavily on brokers beca...
By Dental Strategy Institute | June 2026 | 7-Minute Read
Most conversations about retirement benefits in dentistry focus on what the practice has to build, fund, and administer. That is the right conversation—and it is one DSI covers extensively. But a new executive order signed on April 30, 2026...
Every equipment manufacturer ships their product with a recommended maintenance schedule. It's in the manual. The manual lives in the filing cabinet. The filing cabinet hasn't been opened in three years.
That's not unusual. It's the default state of dental practice maintenance management — and it's...
At some point in almost every dental practice sale, someone asks: can you give us a list of all the equipment?
The seller goes to the office manager. The office manager pulls up whatever they have — maybe a list from the last equipment finance application, maybe a service contract from a few years ...
Let me tell you how most used dental equipment pricing works in a practice sale.
The buyer's team walks through the operatories. They take notes. They go back to the office and apply rough age-based estimates to the equipment list — numbers drawn from a dealer rep's memory and whatever feels right ...
Here's how equipment capital planning works in most dental groups: a chair breaks at Location 7. Someone calls the service company. The service company comes out and says the pump motor is gone. The office manager calls the regional director. The regional director calls the CFO. The CFO asks why thi...
Walk into almost any dental practice transaction and you'll find the same blind spot. The seller has a number in mind — usually based on collections and EBITDA — and the equipment is essentially an afterthought. The buyer's due diligence team walks through the operatories, notes that the chairs are ...
The Question That Costs Practices Thousands — Answered Wrong The service tech just told you the repair is $2,200. The chair is 9 years old. Should you fix it or replace it? Most practice owners answer this question by feel. Below is the actual framework — so the answer is a calculation, not a guess....
There's a piece of equipment in almost every dental practice that's older than it should be. Sometimes it's the compressor, running warm and loud in the utility room. Sometimes it's a delivery unit that the rep keeps telling you is "totally fine" even though the chair-side assistant is holding the h...
Most dental practice exits are reactive. An offer arrives, or a health event forces the issue, or the owner hits a point of professional fatigue and starts looking for a way out. The transaction happens under time pressure, with preparation that was done in a hurry, and the outcome reflects that.
T...
The conversation usually starts the same way. A practice owner has just run the numbers on their PPO contracts — or they've been handed a 4% fee reduction notice from a major plan — and they're thinking, seriously this time, about whether there's a way out. Going insurance-free is one of those ideas...
There's a version of this conversation that happens constantly in dentistry right now, and it almost always goes the same way. A practice owner gets an offer. Or a recent graduate is evaluating associate paths. Or a mid-career dentist is trying to figure out whether to build, buy, or affiliate. And ...