Six weeks after having her daughter, a dentist in Los Angeles got a phone call from the owner of the practice where she’d been working for two years. He wanted to know when she was planning to come back. She told him what she’d already told him: once her OB cleared her at eight weeks postpartum, she’d phase back in. He said that sounded great and he was excited for her return. Her path as a female dentist buying a practice would turn out to be unlike anything she had planned.
One week later, he called back and laid her off.
The reason he gave was that the practice had moved to a new office space during her two months out, and the new location couldn’t accommodate another provider. What he didn’t mention was that he had been planning that move for two years. He had known about it when she told him she was getting married, when she told him she was pregnant, and when she told him her due date. Two years of plans, all made while knowing she was temporary.
She took another position almost immediately, because she had a newborn and needed income and didn’t have a better option. The ten months that followed were the hardest of her career. The environment was difficult in every direction — how she was treated, the working conditions, the patients, the staff. She came home miserable most nights. She had lost something she hadn’t expected to lose: the part of her that loved dentistry.
Her family watched it happen, slowly, over those ten months. And somewhere in that stretch, she made a decision.
“I knew no one was going to look out for me,” she said. “And that I had to do it myself.”
A Female Dentist Buying a Practice on Her Own Terms
She grew up in California and graduated from Tufts University School of Dental Medicine in 2018. She stayed in Boston for a couple of years before COVID brought her back home, and when she returned to California she started looking for a practice to buy — though not quite yet. She had personal plans to take care of first. She was getting married. She wanted to start a family. And she had watched enough female practice owners struggle through new parenthood to believe that having a baby would be easier as an associate than as an owner.
So she worked as an associate while she waited for the timing to be right. She went through five different practices, none of which felt like a good fit, and she made peace with the reality that there was never going to be a perfect practice — there would always be something. She thought she had set herself up carefully. She had been transparent with the people who employed her. She had believed them when they said they’d support her.
And then she found herself at home with a six-week-old, laid off by someone who had been planning her departure for two years.
The practice that found her
After those ten months, she started looking seriously. She reviewed a few practices and didn’t find the right one. And then the owner of a practice where she had been working part-time since 2020 — a female dentist who wanted to step back and focus on her young daughter — approached her.
She wanted to sell.
It wasn’t something she had been expecting. This dentist had built a startup from scratch, equipped it, hired staff, and built a patient base over years. She was fairly young. But she was ready to move on, and she wanted to pass the practice to someone she already knew and trusted.
“It was like someone built my dream practice, equipped it, staffed it, and found the patients,” she said, “and I just needed to run it.”
We worked alongside her through the transition, and from where we sat, she was someone who had waited for the right moment — not out of fear, but out of intention — and then moved decisively when that moment showed up.
What the first year actually looked like
She will tell you it hasn’t been smooth. There’s the loan, and the equipment that breaks at inconvenient times, and the staffing decisions, and the patient relationship-building that takes longer than you expect. The stress has multiplied in ways that are real and ongoing.
But there is something different about it now. The stress is hers. The decisions are hers. The practice is hers. After years of showing up to someone else’s office, following someone else’s systems, trusting people who did not ultimately protect her — she is running something that is entirely her own.
“I’m much happier now working for myself,” she said. “But that’s not to say it hasn’t been a very, very bumpy year figuring out the business aspect of dentistry while still keeping up with the clinical aspect and juggling my now toddler. There’s definitely a multifold increase in stress. But at least I know I’m doing things my way and not relying on other people to look out for me.”
For the associates reading this who are waiting for circumstances to align, waiting for employers to keep their promises, waiting for the moment when ownership finally feels safe — The story of this dentist doesn’t offer a guarantee that the road will be easy. What it offers is something more useful: the understanding that nobody is coming to make it easier for you. The dentists who build something of their own are the ones who stopped waiting for someone else to do it first.
If any of this sounds familiar, the first step is simpler than it feels. Download the first chapter of How to Buy a Dental Practice, 5th Edition free, or book a no-pressure consultation at dentalbuyeradvocates.com.
