Last Thursday morning, in a lecture hall in Las Vegas, a dental resident raised her hand and asked me the best question I’ve heard in a while.
I was at UNLV’s dental school, talking with their students about the financial side of buying a practice. We’d covered what banks look for, how to spot a lemon, what ownership actually costs. And then this resident put her hand up and said, more or less:
“Why would I go into debt for a million dollars to run a business, when the last job I had before dental school was cocktail waitressing?”
The room laughed. She wasn’t joking.
And I loved the question, because it’s the honest version of the thing every associate feels and almost nobody says out loud. Strip away the specifics and what she was really asking was: I have never run anything. How could I possibly be ready for this?
The answer I gave her
The answer is that there are certain things you can never be totally ready for, before you actually try to do them.
I’m a dad. Before my first kid was born, I took parenting classes. I read the books. I practiced the swaddle and installed the car seat twice. And when they handed me that baby, I did not feel ready, because I wasn’t. No parent is. You become ready by being a parent, one confusing day at a time.
Twenty years into marriage, I can also tell you I had no clue what I was doing when that started either. And neither did she, or anyone in that lecture hall, on their first day of dental school. Nobody arrives knowing how to be a dental student. They figured it out, because that’s what capable people do when the thing in front of them matters.
Here’s the pattern underneath all of it: some things in life are teachable, and some things are only learnable. Clinical dentistry, mercifully, has a teachable phase. You practiced on mannequins before you ever touched a patient. But business ownership has no mannequin. There’s no practice-mode version of a staffing crisis or a lease negotiation.
The only thing that gets you ready for ownership is being an owner.
Why this matters more than it sounds like it does
Most people hear that and think it’s just an inspirational pep talk. It’s actually just math.
If readiness only arrives after the purchase, then waiting to feel ready before purchasing is waiting for something that structurally cannot come. And that waiting has a price. Every year spent as an associate who wants to own is a year of associate income instead of owner income (average difference: $151,000/year), a year of building equity in someone else’s practice. Over the prime buying years of a career, that gap compounds into well over a million dollars.
The resident’s fear was real. Her last job really was cocktailing. But look at what her fear was actually made of. Never managed people? If you work chairside with an assistant, you’re already managing a person. If a front desk builds your schedule, you’re managing a person. Ownership doesn’t introduce management to your life; it gives you authority over the management you were already doing. Never run a business? Neither had any first-time owner in history. Worried about the debt? Banks consider dental practices one of the safest things in America to lend on, and they underwrite the practice’s cash flow, not your student loan balance.
What’s left, once you take those apart, is just the feeling. And the feeling never comes. Not for her, not for you, not for any owner you admire. They all signed without it.
What I told the room, and what I’d tell you
Stop asking whether you feel ready. Ask whether you’re prepared. Preparation is a real list you can actually finish: a year or two of clinical speed, a modest cash cushion, a clean credit history, a careful eye on a practice’s numbers, and good people around the deal. The feeling is not on the list, because the feeling isn’t available at any price on this side of ownership.
Twenty years ago, someone handed me a baby I was not ready for. Every good thing in my life since then came from not waiting until I was.
If you’re a few years into an associateship and the honest version of your question sounds anything like hers, let’s talk it through. We’ll look at real numbers from real practices and figure out what prepared would actually look like for you.
[Set up a complimentary strategy call with the Dental Buyer Advocates team today.]
Not quite ready for a conversation? Start with the free chapter of How to Buy a Dental Practice — it covers the first steps most dentists get wrong, including waiting too long.
