How One Decision Can Change Your Trajectory: A Dentist Guide to Dental Practice Ownership Reality

Shared Practices | Your Dental Roadmap through Practice Ownership

Dr. George Hariri | Shared Practices Network

Business, Practicemanagement, Dental, Businessofdentistry, Management, Entrepreneurship, Dentalpractice, Dentist

4.9 • 559 Ratings

🗓️ 23 June 2025

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this episode, Richard Low sits down with Dr. Brian Belsterling to unpack his journey from a VA hospital residency to successful dental practice ownership. Many ambitious young professionals feel pressured to rush into buying a clinic, but Brian proves that strategic patience pays off for the modern dentist. By prioritizing clinical maturity during his associate years, he avoided combining clinical anxiety with the heavy administrative stress of immediate acquisition.

Whether you are actively searching for an acquisition or currently navigating the hurdles of the associate to owner transition, Brian’s story is the ultimate blueprint for mitigating risk in dental practice ownership. To succeed in dental practice management, you need an objective perspective when evaluating clinics and transitioning operations.

Here is your survival guide to mastering dental business strategies during an acquisition:

Build Clinical Confidence First: Use your associate years to master high-value procedures, such as surgical extractions and implant placement, before taking on the administrative burden of dental practice ownership.
Stockpile Liquidity: Save personal cash to weather inevitable transition bumps, such as cash flow dips caused by insurance re-credentialing delays.
Eliminate Emotional Buying: Utilize buyer representation services to objectively validate opportunities and prevent costly, emotion-driven mistakes.
Modernize Wisely: Prepare to upgrade legacy systems, like transitioning from paper charts to digital software, while actively managing your team's morale.

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.
0:04.7	We have today an amazing guest who is kind of fresh off their journey of having bought and run a practice for the first time ever.
0:14.4	These interviews, this is like the essence of shared practices because just this morning before this call, I had a conversation
0:21.8	with a dentist outside of Chicago land. He's like looking for a practice. He's nervous. He's
0:27.8	thinking about it. He's feeling overwhelmed. And I like talked him through some really high level
0:31.8	stuff. And I was like, but at the end of the day, as soon as you find something that you're like,
0:35.4	this is interesting, just hop on the phone with Suzanne and get her to look at it because the difference between buying a lemon and buying a ready-to-go practice is night and day. So I want to welcome today, Dr. Brian Bell-Steirling, to the show. I think I didn't butcher your name. Is that correct? No, that was correct. You got it. You got it there. Awesome. Welcome, man. Yeah, yeah. Great to be here. Thanks for having me on. Cool. Well, I purposely didn't ask your story beforehand because we're just going to talk about this live. Tell us a little about yourself. Where do you live? Where did you go to dental school? And when did you graduate? Yeah, I'll start with a quick life story here. So I was born and raised in Pittsburgh.
1:14.0	I went to undergrad at University of Pittsburgh, continued through dental school there.
1:19.4	I did a one-year GPR at the Washington, D.C. Veterans Hospital before coming back home to the Pittsburgh
1:25.9	area. How was it? Like honest, how was it?
1:29.8	Pretend like your program director will never, ever hear this interview. I thought it was great.
1:33.7	There are some unique benefits and difficulties to working at a federal hospital. All of the veterans
1:42.6	who qualify for coverage, you know, pretty much get 100%. So it's,
1:47.3	you know, there's no financial limitations to what you're able to treatment plan. So it gave me a
1:52.3	greater sort of scope of perspective. And I also met a lot of excellent clinicians on the way who
1:59.4	still remain friends and a great support
2:01.9	system.
2:02.9	So actually, yeah, I really would recommend residency based on programming goals.
2:09.9	Cool.
2:10.9	Yeah, I always get on a little tangent there.
2:11.9	I wrote an article for DentalTown.
2:13.3	This is like before anything ever dental school, because that was the problem I was facing.
	...

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