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. Th...

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 ...

EBITDA. You'll see it in every DSO letter of intent. You'll hear it in every M&A conversation. And if you ask most practice owners what their EBITDA actually is, you'll get a shrug and a rough number that's almost certainly wrong. That's not an insult — it's just the reality. EBITDA is a financial c...

I've had this conversation a hundred times. A practice owner tells me they're "pretty sure" they're making money on their PPO contracts. They're staying busy, the schedule is full, and the collection numbers look reasonable. Everything seems fine. Then we sit down and actually run the numbers. And u...

Every dental practice owner gets a number eventually. It might come in the form of an LOI from a DSO. It might come from a broker during a preliminary conversation. It might be a figure your accountant throws out at year-end as a rough estimate of what your practice is worth. The question isn't whet...

The letter of intent arrived on a Thursday. It looked good — 7x EBITDA, a two-year earn-out with solid upside, rollover equity with a projected second-bite return. The dentist called his accountant, who said the number looked reasonable. He signed the LOI the following week. Eighteen months later, h...

If you run procurement for a dental group — or you're the CFO signing off on capital requests — you already know the problem I'm about to describe. I've spent more than 25 years working inside and alongside dental organizations of every size. And in all that time, one operational blind spot shows up...

I've sat across the table from a lot of dental practice transactions — as an advisor, as a consultant, and now as the person who built the software that tries to solve a problem I watched happen over and over again. Here it is: nobody actually knows what the equipment is worth. Not the seller. Not u...