Ask George: Solving the Painful Realities of Dental Business Ownership
Shared Practices | Your Dental Roadmap through Practice Ownership
Dr. George Hariri | Shared Practices Network
4.9 • 559 Ratings
🗓️ 8 September 2025
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dr. Richard Low welcomes back Dr. George Hariri for an "Ask George" episode focused on the painful underside of dental business ownership.
The duo discusses why acquisitions in dentistry often fail when buyers lack due diligence, leading to negative equity and the stress of "building on top of broken" systems.
Using Practice Underwater principles, George explains how to fix dental practice management and your dental business ownership by identifying the root cause of profit loss.
This is a must-listen for clinicians struggling with dental business ownership who need a tactical exit strategy or a "worst case scenario" reality check.
In this episode:
- Analyze commercial real estate feasibility to ensure assets exceed the high costs of construction and debt.
- Stop "building on top of broken" by confronting toxic partnerships and premature associate hiring decisions.
- Write a detailed "worst case scenario" document to mentally de-risk professional failure or bankruptcy.
- Shift from a "long, slow bleed" to break-even by laser-focusing on the single source of monthly loss.
- Leverage expert perspective and dental moneyball metrics to avoid buying tapped-out practices with low growth.
Whether navigating an associate to owner transition or vetting acquisitions in dentistry, this is your survival guide. Ready to scale your dental practice ownership?
Visit https://sharedpractices.com/ for our "Free Look" service and follow our social channels for roadmap updates. Join the community and turn your clinical skills into a thriving business.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Shared Practices podcast. We have back with us today, Dr. George Hariri, the Ask George episode. I love throwing the doctor in there because it pisses him off. George, how's it going? |
| 0:15.1 | Good. It actually doesn't make me mad. Not my preference, but yeah, I mean, I'm really excited for this episode because i think that we have a lot of |
| 0:21.4 | our episodes are about encouraging growth and talking about like wow you know we're going to grow |
| 0:27.4 | we're going to tell you why growth is awesome we're going to talk about that and there's also this |
| 0:32.0 | underside that comes with when growth isn't going well or when growth is not working or maybe |
| 0:37.3 | when somebody took on |
| 0:38.3 | expenses of growth that didn't have the demand to support it, like the stress that comes with that. |
| 0:44.3 | And so I think this will be a different tone to the episode, which is how to navigate the very |
| 0:49.8 | hard situations that nobody talks about. And so I'm really excited to bring this content out there |
| 0:55.1 | so that people can understand that like, no, these are real things that people go through. |
| 0:59.0 | This isn't stuff that doesn't exist. Like, these are real conversations that need to be had. |
| 1:03.4 | And it's not always fun. And this is where like season one of the podcast originally, |
| 1:08.6 | the archived one now at this point, talking about this idea of |
| 1:11.6 | like, it's okay if ownership isn't right for you. And sometimes it doesn't work out, especially |
| 1:16.9 | if someone bought uninformed. They didn't do the due diligence. They get themselves into a situation |
| 1:23.7 | that they're in over their head, or they partner with someone who ends up not being a good fit. And they're in over their head or they partner with someone who ends up not being a good |
| 1:29.5 | fit. And there's so much pain and shame in kind of admitting defeat in like realizing either practice |
| 1:39.9 | ownership isn't right for me and I need to get out of this situation or I've over expanded. I went to a |
| 1:45.5 | second location. I've bought the wrong practice. I feel now so behind. You know, I'm five years |
| 1:50.8 | behind in my career. Everyone else who bought the right practice and who's succeeding and crushing it, |
| 1:55.1 | like they're so much further along. And it's really painful. And therefore, a lot of times we don't |
| 2:00.3 | make the hard decisions. We kind of limp along and we struggle really painful and therefore a lot of times we don't make the hard decisions. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Dr. George Hariri | Shared Practices Network, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Dr. George Hariri | Shared Practices Network and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.