It was early on a Friday morning, and I was sitting at my kitchen table doing something I tell everyone never to do.
A few days earlier, a Utah news station had run a story about independent dentists competing against corporate ownership, and I was featured in it. The piece was getting real traction, so I grabbed a drink, opened the article, and started reading the comment section. All 80 comments of it.
Somewhere around comment thirty, I set the drink down.
A practicing dentist had written something I’ve heard whispered in private conversations for years but have rarely seen said out loud:
“As a dentist, I’ve told my kids to not even consider this field.”
He laid out his case, and it was not a rant. Health insurance premiums paid entirely out of pocket. Retirement funded alone. Student loans. No PTO. Always on call. Reimbursement rates dictated by insurance companies with no interest in negotiating. He wrote that his neighbors who went into the trades are doing better financially than he is.
If you are an associate dentist thinking about buying a practice, a comment like that lands like a punch. Here is someone who already made it, telling the world he regrets the whole thing. Every fear you have about ownership, confirmed in two paragraphs by a stranger with a dental license.
I want to tell you why that comment did not discourage me, and why it should not discourage you either.
The other dentist in the thread
A few comments down, a different reader shared a story about his neighbor, who also happened to be his dentist.
That dentist owned his practice for about 18 years, and he ran it deliberately, keeping his team small and staying selective about which insurance plans he participated in rather than accepting every contract that landed on his desk. According to his neighbor, he earned several times what the first commenter described, year after year. When health issues eventually forced his hand, he sold the practice and stepped away on his own terms.
Two dentists in the same profession, in the same state, reacting to the same article, arriving at opposite verdicts on whether any of it was worth it.
So which one is telling the truth? The answer is both of them, and that is the entire point.
It was never about the field
Read the first dentist’s complaints again, slowly. Insurance companies dictating his income. No control over his costs. No leverage, no options, no exit. Every single thing he described is what dentistry feels like when someone else holds the steering wheel, whether that someone is an insurance company, a corporate office, or a senior doctor whose practice you happen to work in.
Now look at the second dentist. He faced the same insurance companies, the same overhead pressures, and the same market, but he treated those forces as problems to manage instead of weather to endure. He chose his payer mix, designed his cost structure, and decided for himself when the story would end.
The first dentist experienced dentistry as something that happened to him; the second one ran it.
I wrote recently about a client of ours, Dr. Zachary, who watched half his front desk quit at 4:00 PM on a Thursday and calmly went about fixing it, because as the owner, fixing it was his right. This is the same lesson wearing different clothes. The hard parts of dentistry find you in every seat. Ownership does not expose you to them; it hands you the tools to deal with them.
One more thing from that comment section
Here is what struck me most, and it had nothing to do with dentists at all.
The most popular comments in the entire thread came from patients. They told stories about the dentist who owns the place: relationships built over decades, treatment plans they trusted because no third party stood behind them. Several described leaving corporate offices after getting second opinions, then searching specifically for a practice where the person treating them is the person whose name is on the door.
Eighty strangers argued about insurance, private equity, and the economics of root canals. Underneath all of it, the loudest signal in the whole thread was simple: patients want an owner to work on their teeth. If you become one, those patients are out there looking for you right now.
The test
So here is the comment section test. When you read a dentist saying he would warn his own kids away from this profession, ask yourself which version of dentistry he is describing. Almost every time, it is the version where someone else holds the wheel.
If that version scares you, it should. Just don’t confuse fear of the passenger seat with fear of driving.
If you are three or four years into an associateship and starting to wonder whether the people warning you off ownership are describing your future or just their own past, let’s talk it through. We’ll look at real numbers from real practices and figure out what ownership 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.
