Editorial Policy

Last updated: July 23, 2026

Dental Strategy Institute publishes business and clinical intelligence for an audience that makes real decisions with it — DSO operators structuring a deal, practice owners planning an exit, hygienists weighing independent practice. Getting it wrong has a cost. So here’s exactly who writes what we publish, how we check it, and what we do when we get something wrong.

Who Writes What We Publish

Everything published under the DSI name is written or directly reviewed by the two people whose names are on it. We don’t run a content mill, and we don’t publish under bylines that don’t correspond to an actual person.

Pete Volk, Founder. Pete has spent 25 years inside the dental equipment industry — working directly with practices, DSOs, and dental groups on the hardware and infrastructure side of the business: chairs, units, lights, cabinetry, and the office-design decisions that go with them. That vantage point is unusual. Most people writing about DSO strategy or practice valuation have never sat across the table during an equipment buildout or watched a multi-location group standardize its operatories. Pete has, repeatedly, over two and a half decades. He holds a CEAS (Certified Ergonomic Assessment Specialist) credential and writes DSI’s content on DSO strategy, M&A and valuation, dental office design, insurance and reimbursement, and operational infrastructure.

Susan Volk, RDH, Co-Author. Susan is a Registered Dental Hygienist and co-author — not merely a reviewer — on DSI’s hygiene and clinical titles, including The Independent Hygienist and Myofunctional Therapy as a Career. Content written for a hygienist audience, or that touches clinical practice, direct-access law, or myofunctional therapy, carries her byline or her direct review before it publishes. Pete and Susan are based in Belmont, North Carolina.

Neither of us claims expertise we don’t have. When a topic falls outside both our backgrounds — tax law, for instance, or state-specific licensing detail — we say so in the piece and point to a primary source, rather than guess.

How We Research and Fact-Check

Every DSI article, book, and tool follows the same discipline:

We go to primary sources first. For anything regulatory — state dental board rules, CMS guidance, IRS rules on retirement plans or depreciation — we cite the actual regulatory text, not a trade association’s summary of it or a newsletter’s paraphrase of it. Those two things drift apart more often than people expect, and we’ve caught real gaps between what a dental association says a rule means and what the adopted regulation actually says. When we can’t verify a claim against a primary source, we either cut it or flag it clearly as our professional opinion.

We use specific numbers, not vague ones. If we cite a benchmark — an overhead percentage, a multiple of EBITDA, a DLR figure — it’s tied to a named source or to Pete’s direct industry experience, stated as such.

We update content when the underlying facts change. Regulatory content in particular has a shelf life; state rules move, tax law changes, CMS guidance gets revised. When we’re notified of a change, or catch one ourselves, we update the published piece and note the revision date at the top.

Editorial Independence

DSI publishes sponsored white papers in partnership with dental industry manufacturers and suppliers. Every sponsored piece carries this disclosure, in full: “This white paper was produced by DSI with support from [Sponsor]. DSI retains full editorial independence.” That’s not boilerplate — it means a sponsor pays to fund the research, not to shape the conclusion. If the data doesn’t support a sponsor’s product or position, the piece says so. We turn down sponsorship conversations where that condition isn’t acceptable to the sponsor.

The same principle applies to our own tools and books: a calculator or a chapter never exists to justify a predetermined answer. It exists to give the reader a real number they can act on.

Corrections

If you find an error in something we’ve published — a stale rule, a wrong number, a broken link — email [email protected] with the page and the specific issue. We review every correction request and update the piece if it’s warranted, typically within a few business days. We don’t quietly edit a factual error and pretend it wasn’t there; substantive corrections get a note at the top of the piece with the date it was updated.

Questions About Our Content

Reach us any time at [email protected] — whether that’s a correction, a question about a source, or a request to expand on something we’ve published.