It’s 5 p.m. on a Monday, and I’m walking into my boss’s office to ask for a raise.
I’ve thought about how to open. I’ve thought about the number. I have four kids at home under the age of ten and a wife who has put her whole career on hold to raise them, and I’ve done the math on what a raise would mean for us. I’m 38 years old. I’m a little nervous, the way you are before a conversation you’ve rehearsed, but mostly I’m confident. I’ve earned this.
I walk out of that meeting fired.
I’ve told this story a few times now and people tend to rush past it to the part where it works out. It does work out. But it didn’t feel like it was going to work out at 5:20 on that Monday. I remember standing in the parking lot, realizing I was locked out of my email. I also remember trying to figure out how to tell my wife that she was married to the biggest loser of all time. That’s basically how I felt.
The failure wasn’t getting fired
Looking back, I see multiple failures. Getting fired was the small failure. It was a failure to do my job well enough to keep it, let alone deserve more money for it, and I own that. But it wasn’t the one that changed me.
The failure I really regret now was this: from the time I was in my early twenties until that Monday at 38, I knew I wanted to run my own business. That’s eighteen years. Eighteen years of knowing what I wanted and being too scared to go get it.
I bring this up because I spend a lot of my life telling dentists they’re waiting too long. I’ve put a number on it – five years. Associates today, on average, wait about five years longer to step into ownership than dentists did 15-20 years ago. The average practice owner out-earns the average associate by about $153,000 a year, so an associate who waits five years past the point they were ready gives up something like $1.1 million over a career. I say this in lectures, in this newsletter, on the podcast, to residents who look at me like I’m describing a country they’ll never visit. I say it with conviction.
And someone should have said it to me. Because I didn’t wait five years. I waited eighteen.
Most dentists need a nudge. I needed a shove.
Here’s what I’ve noticed from a decade of watching dentists decide to buy. Almost nobody does it because they woke up feeling ready. They do it because something in their associate job stopped being tolerable. A boss who takes credit for their production. A DSO that changes the schedule without asking. A practice where they’ve been promised a partnership track for three years and the track keeps getting longer. The discomfort gets big enough that the fear of ownership finally looks smaller by comparison, and they move.
That’s the nudge. Most dentists need one, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. It’s how humans work.
What I needed was bigger. A nudge wouldn’t have done it. I’d had eighteen years of nudges and had found reasons to ignore every one of them. What it took was a Monday afternoon where the decision got made for me, at the worst possible time, with the most people depending on me that there had ever been.
That’s not a story about courage. I want to be clear about that. Steve Van De Graaff, who was on the podcast last week, bought a practice as a D4 because he wanted to and figured he’d learn the rest. That’s courage. I started Dental Buyer Advocates because I got fired and had four kids to feed. That’s a shove. I’m grateful for it now, but I didn’t choose it, and I’d be lying if I pretended otherwise.
Three failures, one lesson
When I recorded a short version of this story for Michael Arias’s Fail Forward series, he asked what the failure actually was. I gave him three.
The first was the job. I wasn’t doing it well enough to keep it. Whatever I told myself about the boss or the company, that part was mine.
The second was the wait. Eighteen years is not a reasonable amount of time to know what you want and not try. If a dentist told me they’d been thinking about ownership since dental school and they were now 46, I would have some very direct things to say. I would have deserved to hear them.
The third is the one I think about most. I never got honest with myself about what I was actually afraid of. I had a hundred practical reasons to wait, and every one of them was a way of not saying the real thing, which was that I was scared of finding out I wasn’t good enough. As long as I never tried, I never had to find out. That’s a comfortable place to live for eighteen years. It’s also a very expensive one.
Listen to the Fail Forward episode, here.
What this has to do with you
This whole season of the podcast is about one question: how does an associate actually know they’re ready to buy? I’ve asked brokers, coaches, and dentists who just closed. The answers keep pointing the same direction. Steve’s version was the sharpest: you can tell in a few minutes whether someone is a problem solver or a problem finder, and the problem solvers are looking for reasons to do it, not reasons not to.
I was a problem finder for eighteen years. I was good at it. I could find a reason not to start a business faster than anyone I knew.
So when a dentist tells me they don’t feel ready, I believe them, and I also don’t think it matters very much. I didn’t feel ready either. Nobody does. The feeling comes after the information, and the information comes from doing the work: pulling a practice’s numbers, talking to a lender, sitting across from a seller and asking a hard question. Readiness is not a mood you wait for. It’s a byproduct of motion.
If I could go back and talk to the 25-year-old version of me, I wouldn’t tell him to be braver. I’d tell him to go find out what he was actually afraid of and say it out loud to someone. That usually shrinks it. And I’d tell him that the shove is coming either way. The only question is whether you get to pick the timing.
You get to pick the timing. That’s the whole advantage. Use it.
If you’ve been thinking about ownership longer than you’d like to admit, a 30-minute call with our team is a good place to start saying the real reasons out loud. We’ll look at where you actually are, what a purchase would take, and what the next step is. Schedule a free call with our team, here.
Brian Hanks, MBA, CFP®, is the founder of Dental Buyer Advocates and the author of How to Buy a Dental Practice and Taxes for Dentists. He has advised on more than 1,500 practice transitions across 49 states.
