Ask George - Practice Management vs True CEO Dental Practice Ownership Strategies
Shared Practices | Your Dental Roadmap through Practice Ownership
Dr. George Hariri | Shared Practices Network
4.9 • 559 Ratings
🗓️ 18 August 2025
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode of Ask George, Dr. George Hariri and Richard Low redefine what it actually means to master dental practice ownership. Many dentists get trapped acting as the lead clinician and the daily manager, constantly playing whack-a-mole with operational fires. However, mastering true dental practice ownership requires stepping completely out of the "Technician" and "Manager" roles to become the visionary CEO. This episode provides a survival guide for the future dental practice owner, showing you exactly how to make the critical leap from clinician to executive.
You cannot achieve sustainable dental practice growth if you are bogged down by routine dental practice management. George explains that a CEO’s primary job is not fixing the day-to-day issues, but effectively allocating three limited resources: time, money, and focus. This means evaluating your metrics to identify the true bottlenecks in your operation. For example, if you are planning an associate to owner transition, your focus must be relentlessly locked on increasing patient flow rather than getting distracted by case acceptance seminars. Elite dental business strategies require the discipline to know exactly what to say "no" to.
We also explore the compounding power of micro-interactions. If you want a team-led office, you must stop answering every question your staff brings you and start redirecting them to your Office Manager. Every time you step in to solve a problem that belongs to your manager, you erode your own dental practice ownership and stall your progress. By utilizing frameworks like Shared Practices | Your Dental Roadmap, you can align your daily decisions with a long-term vision that serves your life, not just your schedule. Learn how to stop managing and start leading.
Ready to take the next step in your dental practice journey? Visit https://sharedpractices.com to learn more about our Buyer Representation and Coaching services, designed to help dentists buy, grow, and optimize profitable practices. You can also use our Free Look to evaluate dental practice opportunities with real data before making a decision. For daily Dental Moneyball insights, strategy tips, and updates, follow us across our social channels.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to shared practices. I'm here with my co-host and good friend, Dr. George Hariri. |
| 0:09.1 | George, how's it going? Good. I'm excited for our topic today. I think that it's always a good day when you and I get to record on the shared practices podcast. So happy to be here and excited to talk about some good CEO leadership topics today. |
| 0:21.9 | Yeah. |
| 0:22.2 | Well, and this one like instantly brings some like, man, I wish this episode had been out three years ago before I tried to be a dental CEO and kind of stumbled at it. |
| 0:32.1 | So this is very relevant at a single practice level, this idea of being the chief executive officer and acting |
| 0:40.4 | like a business owner of a single practice can make all the difference in the world. And there's |
| 0:47.2 | no CEO training in dental school. There's just not. Not even practice. I mean, because practice |
| 0:52.9 | management and executive thinking |
| 0:55.5 | are two very separate things. Would you agree? Totally. Talk to us about that. What makes that |
| 1:01.4 | special of just like how to operate a dental practice and manage it versus how to be a CEO? |
| 1:07.2 | Yeah. So I think we've talked about this on the podcast before, and I think that I want to approach |
| 1:13.8 | the conversation from a slightly different perspective, where I think that this conversation can |
| 1:18.5 | be very vague. And I honestly think that that's the best way to have this conversation, |
| 1:24.1 | because I think once you go too specific into the conversation, you really |
| 1:30.0 | stop being a CEO and you start really just being a management type. Like it's just management, |
| 1:35.3 | right? Yeah, it's just the manager. And so I think that like, you know, if you think of like the |
| 1:39.1 | e-myth is like a very famous book that talks about the technician, the manager and the entrepreneur, |
| 1:44.1 | I think that if we were to |
| 1:45.9 | kind of have the whole podcast be focused on a system or a process, that's really management. To be a |
| 1:53.1 | true, like, CEO of your business, it's really the leadership piece that is the piece that you are |
| 1:59.4 | providing. And that's not necessarily something that we can |
| 2:04.1 | just say, like, you can listen to this podcast and I can give you like six or seven things that |
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