Managing People vs Mastering Dental Business Strategies During the Associate to Owner Transition
Shared Practices | Your Dental Roadmap through Practice Ownership
Dr. George Hariri | Shared Practices Network
4.9 • 559 Ratings
🗓️ 16 February 2026
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode of Coaches Corner, we dismantle the myth that clinical excellence alone is enough to scale a practice. As you move from solo clinician to the head of a growing group, your dental business strategies must evolve or your systems will shatter. Dr. Andrew Clingan and Caitlin Embree dive deep into the "Ugly Duckling" phase of ownership—that volatile period where adding an associate reveals every crack in your foundation. Transitioning into dental practice ownership requires more than just hiring more hands; it demands a total shift in how you view dental practice management. If you are out-producing your problems rather than solving them with systems, you are sitting on a ticking time bomb.
For the future dental practice owner, this episode serves as a survival guide for the associate to owner transition. We discuss the hard reality of "losing" high-value cases simply because your team wasn't trained on the right codes or verbiage. We explore dental business strategies that focus on empowering an Office Manager to lead, rather than the owner micromanaging every $15-an-hour task. This is the core of sustainable dental practice growth: building a culture of leadership where your team is self-accountable and your dental practice profitability isn't solely dependent on your time in the chair. We break down the "Time and Energy Audit," a tool designed to help you buy back your time and focus on the high-level dental business ownership tasks that actually move the needle. Stop acting like an employee in your own business and start implementing the dental business strategies that allow you to lead with vision and clarity.
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 back to the Shared Practices podcast. I'm Caitlin Embry, and today I am joined by Corey Pinniger. He is the CEO and founder of REACH. Thanks for being here, Corey. |
| 0:13.3 | Thanks for having me back on. I appreciate it. |
| 0:15.8 | How's it going? We're so excited to talk to you today about what REACH does, what it can offer, and just learn a little bit more about virtual assistance and the industry and how they're changing dental practices. |
| 0:26.5 | I'm excited. So tell us a little bit about your background. You have kind of a cool story. And I think, you know, a lot of our audience is very entrepreneurial and you are a young, successful entrepreneur. |
| 0:41.9 | So I want to hear just kind of how you got to where you are today, a little bit of the story of reach. |
| 0:42.9 | I will do my best to give the 90-second microwave version of my nine-year entrepreneurial journey. |
| 0:52.3 | But I live here in Salt Lake City, Utah, was raised my teenage |
| 0:55.6 | years and beyond. I come from a entrepreneurial but operating father. So my dad really |
| 1:01.7 | specializes in running, you know, 1,500 to 5,000 person teams, leads a publicly traded group out |
| 1:08.6 | of New York right now, but started his career as an |
| 1:11.0 | entrepreneur. So I think I grew up in kind of that business-minded home. And when I was going to |
| 1:18.1 | Brigham Young University in Utah, I got a call one day saying that there was a startup company named |
| 1:23.5 | Weaves, and they needed help cleaning out one of their closets, |
| 1:27.7 | and they were willing to pay 500 bucks to do it. |
| 1:30.5 | So I worked for Weave for, and keep in mind, |
| 1:33.0 | this is when Weave is like 15 people. |
| 1:35.5 | Like tiny, the phones were down 24-7. |
| 1:39.2 | Like, it was a dumpster fire inside of a dumpster fire, |
| 1:42.8 | and it was a really, really fun time. But I worked there |
| 1:46.4 | for, I think, around a year. And the company was burning an incredible amount of cash at the time. |
| 1:55.5 | And so the investors told the two or the founders that they either needed to lay off 40% of the company, |
| 2:02.6 | or they would get fired as the founders. And this is in December of 2016. So in December of |
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