Craig Hanks will be the first to tell you that sales is not his natural home.
He knows the theory. He spent years inside DBA building the podcast, the audiobook, the blog, absorbing every principle of practice acquisition before he ever talked to a buyer. He’s warm, easy to talk to, the kind of person who makes a conversation feel effortless. And those things do matter in sales. They just aren’t, it turns out, what sales actually runs on.
“Sales is not about conversations,” he said. “It’s about discipline and routine. Follow-ups, rigid structures, note-taking systems. Those are my mortal enemies.”
He ended up in the role anyway — partly because of who his brother is (Brian Hanks, the founder of DBA), and partly because after seven years of learning this business from the inside, he understood what buyers needed better than almost anyone. He gave it time. When it’s good, he said, it’s really good. He’s still figuring out the rest.
But something happened in those early months of calls that he didn’t expect. The conversations he kept having with dentists who weren’t ready to buy yet — who knew they wanted to own, who knew they were behind, but had no clear path forward — were showing him a gap nobody was filling.
Almost every one of them had the same problem. They hadn’t built the network.
“The buyers who find the best practices are the ones who have spent the last year or two letting people know their timeline, building relationships with other dentists, making themselves known in the community where they want to practice,” he said. “The ones who are counting on brokers to surface something good for them are going to wait a long time and see a lot of practices they don’t want.”
The solution to that problem is not complicated. It is just structured. And so Craig built a program around it.
The Practice Search Program
The program takes the thing successful buyers do informally over years and compresses it into a guided, structured process. Small groups of four to six dentists meet with Craig every week for six weeks. Between meetings, each dentist works through the actual search: mapping the community they want to buy in, identifying the owners and advisors they should know, making the introductions, and putting their timeline in front of the people most likely to hear about a practice before it ever reaches a listing.
Craig supplies the structure: the materials, the scripts, the tools, and the accountability of a group that expects you to show up having done the work. The dentists supply the effort. That division is deliberate.
“Nobody can build your network for you,” Craig said. “But almost nobody builds one without a system. That’s the whole program: I bring the system, you bring the handshakes.”
The best practices, he points out, often don’t even make it to a public listing. They change hands through relationships — an owner mentions retirement to their accountant, their study club, the associate down the street they’ve come to trust. The buyers in the room when those conversations happen are the ones who started building their presence a year or two earlier. The program exists to make sure you’re one of them.
The next group starts Tuesday, August 18, and pilot pricing for the founding cohorts is only $99. Spots are limited to keep the groups small.
Learn more and grab a spot here — or simply reply to any DBA newsletter with the word SEARCH and Craig will reach out directly.
The dentists who do this work early — who build their networks before they need them, who start their practice searches before they feel ready — consistently find better practices, move faster when the right one appears, and feel far more prepared when the time comes to actually buy.
Craig has talked to too many dentists who started too late. He has not yet talked to one who said they started too soon.
If you want to be part of the first group going through this program, reach out to Craig directly.
