If you play in the NFL, touchdowns are good. But no team in that league treats touchdowns as the goal. The goal is the Super Bowl.
Dentists have a Super Bowl too, and in my experience it isn’t income. If this doesn’t describe you, let it pass. But what I’ve generally found, across a lot of years of talking to dentists about their careers, is that the thing they actually want is control.
Financial control is part of it. But it’s also control over which procedures you do. How often you’re treatment planning a code because it’s right for the patient, not because someone above you set a target for it. Control over which assistants you work with, and which you don’t. How many days a week you’re in the office. How many weeks a year you can take off, and whether anyone gets to say no.
That’s the Super Bowl. Everything else is a touchdown.
The path that trades it away
Here’s where I think a lot of new dentists get bad advice, usually from people who mean well.
The public-health route, the one where you take a job that qualifies for loan forgiveness and wait it out, is sold as the financially responsible choice. The math might actually pencil for a few people, too. You might reach a measure of financial control at the end of it, though that depends on Congress not changing the rules between now and then, which is not a bet I’d want my career riding on.
But look at what the argument leaves out. For the entire length of that path, you are beholden to a boss. Somebody else decides what you do, when you do it, with whom, and for how long. You may end up with less debt. You will have spent the years getting there with almost no control over anything else.
That’s the error. It measures the touchdowns and forgets the game.
What ownership is actually for
I don’t think every dentist should own a practice, and I’ve talked plenty of people out of it. But if control is what you want, ownership is the only path that gets you there. Not because owners are richer, though they usually are, but because there’s nobody above you setting the schedule or deciding which composite you’re allowed to order.
The first year of being an owner is hard. The people who’ve done it will tell you that, and they’ll also tell you, almost to a person, that they wish they’d gotten into ownership sooner.
If that’s the direction you’re headed, the question to answer first isn’t “which practice.” It’s “am I ready.” Two places to start: this season of the podcast is built around that question, one owner’s story at a time, and the Ready Kit walks you through it on paper.
Listen: Practice Purchased, Season 9.
Start here: the Ready Kit at dentalbuyeradvocates.com/ready.
