Ask George - Private Practice vs DSOs: Dental Practice Ownership for Wealth
Shared Practices | Your Dental Roadmap through Practice Ownership
Dr. George Hariri | Shared Practices Network
4.9 • 559 Ratings
🗓️ 2 June 2025
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode of Ask George, Richard Low and Dr. George Hariri map out the complete financial timeline of a dentist's career. For the ambitious professional, understanding the financial phases of dental practice ownership is essential to building long-term wealth. The hosts break down the crucial transition from wealth accumulation—where you grow the clinic and pay down debt—to wealth stagnation, where your practice's equity naturally plateaus.
Whether you are choosing traditional private dental practice ownership or considering a partnership with a DSO, this episode provides absolute clarity on how to maximize your net worth.
Here is your guide to mastering the financial stages of dental practice ownership:
- Secure a High Income First: Before aggressively paying off student loans, focus on securing a high income position to comfortably support your lifestyle while building initial savings.
- Maximize Wealth Accumulation: During the first decade of dental practice ownership, you build massive net worth by simultaneously growing your practice's value and paying down your bank debt.
- Navigate Wealth Stagnation: Recognize that once a solo clinic reaches its maximum capacity and debt is paid off, the equity value plateaus, requiring you to actively invest your high cash flow into other assets like real estate or index funds.
- Private Practice vs. DSOs: While private practice wealth is physically constrained to its four walls, partnering with a DSO allows you to trade practice equity for platform stock that continues to accumulate value as the larger company expands.
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 the shared practices podcast. |
| 0:05.2 | We have an episode today where we're going to be talking about some controversial stuff |
| 0:09.8 | and some things that people tend to care about, which is building wealth in a dental practice. |
| 0:15.7 | And what that looks like, what's possible? |
| 0:18.1 | This creates for a lot of our listeners, hope, excitement. It changes |
| 0:22.9 | what they realize is possible and the direction they're going and how fast they get there. |
| 0:28.0 | So these are the high-level conversations that I think are some of the most impactful to have. |
| 0:32.3 | They're also the most likely to cause like FOMO skepticism, like, I don't know if that's possible or, you know, |
| 0:39.5 | opting out in people's minds and I can't do that. So, George, you're here to stretch our minds |
| 0:45.9 | as to what's possible. Welcome, welcome back. Yeah, thanks for having me, Richard. And I think one of the |
| 0:51.1 | things that has changed a lot about dentistry since we've started the shared practices podcast is the emergence of the DSO landscape. |
| 0:59.2 | And so I almost feel like this is almost all the different seasons of the original podcast with taking in mind the modern industry that we're in. |
| 1:07.4 | Right. |
| 1:07.5 | We're in an industry where DSOs are a big part of it and private practice |
| 1:11.5 | is a big part of it. And so I almost want to focus on the wealth that gets accumulated through a |
| 1:17.9 | dentist's career and looking at the different stages and almost kind of just talk about both. |
| 1:24.1 | Talk about private practice, talk about DSOs, and help any dentist listening |
| 1:29.0 | understand where they are at relative to like a whole dentist's career. How do we think about |
| 1:35.8 | wealth at different stages of your career, also with different opportunities? Okay. Let's talk |
| 1:41.1 | about this. The reason this is always so exciting is like the gains, the potential to start here, to invest this much, whether it's a startup or an acquisition, and turn that into opportunities that you just kind of can't get anywhere else unless you're a really savvy business person in an industry where you've got a competitive advantage, |
| 2:02.2 | which is rare. So like, we have some amazing opportunities for wealth building. How do you think |
| 2:07.7 | about this? You know, we talk about this to our pre-owners at our courses and open their minds |
... |
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