Craig was on a call with a dentist who had found a practice. The numbers looked solid. The location was right. Everything on paper pointed toward yes. Craig asked him the question he asks everyone at that stage.
“Assuming the finances check out — what’s your excitement level about this practice, on a scale of one to ten?”
The dentist thought about it. “I’d say a six. Maybe a seven.”
Craig already knew how the story ended.
He didn’t say anything about it on that call. He kept going, did the analysis, worked through the process. But he had learned by then that a six almost never becomes a signed letter of intent. To actually close on a practice, to see it through the hard parts, the long nights, the conversations that don’t go the way you planned — you need to want it. Not kind of want it. Actually want it.
Craig Hanks is our Director of Business Development, one of the first people you’ll talk to when you reach out to us, and my brother. He’s been with DBA for the better part of a decade, which means he spent years absorbing this business from the inside before he ever picked up the phone with a buyer. He helped build the podcast, the audiobook, the blog. He knows the principles of practice acquisition as well as anyone I’ve worked with. Since moving into a full-time sales role at the start of 2025, he’s talked to somewhere between 200 and 300 dentists about ownership.
“It takes a certain level of excitement about the process and about the prospect of owning a specific practice to really see it through,” he said.
What the dentists who close have in common
After talking to hundreds of buyers, Craig has a pretty clear picture of what separates the ones who make it through from the ones who don’t.
The ones who close have been thinking about ownership for a while before they call. They’ve not only added procedures to their clinical repertoire but have also been focused on volume — putting in reps, building the kind of efficiency that’s going to carry them through a hard first year as an owner. And they’ve done at least some homework on what running a practice actually involves.
“They don’t need to be an expert,” Craig said. “But if they’ve done some reading or listened to some podcasts on management or small business, I know they’re taking it seriously.”
The ones who stall out are governed more by fear than by opportunity. A healthy amount of caution makes sense — you’re taking on a meaningful loan, a staff, and a patient base that’s trusting you to take care of them. But if the fear of ownership is drowning out the excitement, Craig said, the timing isn’t right yet.
“The only thing you should actually fear,” he told me, “is losing out on the money by not pulling the trigger as soon as you should.”
The fear he hears most often on a first call is losing patients and staff when the selling doctor leaves. Sometimes that’s a reasonable concern — if a practice has long-tenured staff who are deeply loyal to a retiring owner, it’s worth accounting for in due diligence. But more often than not, Craig said, it’s a fear that talks people out of good practices rather than bad ones.
What’s shifted in the market
Craig has watched the market change meaningfully over the past several years, and his read on where things stand now is worth understanding if you’re an associate who’s been paying attention to the DSO conversation.
The wave of DSO activity that dominated headlines a decade ago has settled. Corporate groups haven’t gone away, but they’ve found their lane. Private buyers, in Craig’s view, actually have better odds now than they did five years ago of finding a practice that isn’t going to get swept up by a corporate buyer, and of finding a seller who genuinely wants to pass their practice to someone local.
What has increased is competition among individual buyers. Graduating classes are larger than they were a generation ago, and more dentists are actively looking. That shift changes what it takes to find a good practice.
“The buyers who do what I’ve been preaching for years — network, build relationships, let people know your timeline — those are the people who are going to find the best practices,” Craig said. “The ones who are counting on brokers to surface something good are going to be left further back.”
The practices that never make it to a listing are found through relationships. Through a mentor who knows a doctor thinking about retiring. Through years of showing up in the right rooms and letting people know you’re serious about ownership. That kind of network isn’t built in a month.
The advice most associates aren’t following
When I asked Craig what he’d tell every nervous associate if he could get them on the phone for five minutes, he said three things.
Focus on your clinical skills. That’s what carries you through the first year of ownership and every year after, and it’s what builds the value of the practice you’re stepping into.
Pay attention to ownership while you’re still an associate. Watch how the practice around you is run. Take note of what you’d do differently. That’s free education and most people aren’t using it.
And use your commute. If you’ve got ten minutes in the car each way, that’s the time to be listening to podcasts and audiobooks on management, small business, and practice ownership. When you’re home, be home. When you’re at work, be at work. The in-between time is yours to use.
Then, unprompted, he added one more thing.
Unless you’re in your second year of dental school, it is not too early to start your practice search. Not to close — to start building the network that makes closing easier. If you wait until you feel ready to start looking, you’ll run into the frustration of not having enough options and not having the relationships that surface practices before they’re listed. Your search will almost certainly take longer and require more effort than you think it will.
“Don’t put it off,” Craig said. “Make it easier by starting now.”
He’s talked to hundreds of dentists who started too late. He hasn’t talked to one yet who said they started too soon.
If you’re thinking about ownership and want to talk through what the process actually looks like, schedule a free call with our team.
