Solving for Dental Practice Profitability: Scaling to $8M With Dental Practice Acquisitions - Part 1
Shared Practices | Your Dental Roadmap through Practice Ownership
Dr. George Hariri | Shared Practices Network
4.9 • 559 Ratings
🗓️ 2 February 2026
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode of Practice Underwater, Dr. George Hariri sits down with "Bob," a mega-group owner who successfully scaled from a single solo clinic into an $8 million powerhouse spanning 17 operatories. For the ambitious dentist, Bob’s journey is a masterclass in aggressive expansion and mastering dental practice profitability. He shares how he temporarily abandoned traditional accounting advice, allowing his profit and loss (P&L) statements to look "ugly" while investing heavily in staff and marketing to secure unprecedented growth during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The conversation shifts to evaluating true dental practice profitability. When Bob ran out of physical space in his flagship office, he leveraged his centralized infrastructure to seamlessly acquire an adjacent 2,000-patient practice. George breaks down Bob's margins on air, revealing that keeping management costs at a lean 3% while heavily funding the clinical team is the ultimate secret to sustaining dental practice profitability at scale.
Here is your survival guide to mastering dental business strategies through rapid expansion:
- Embrace the "Ugly Duckling" Phase: Temporarily accept high staff costs (like Bob's 36%) and a skewed P&L in exchange for explosive patient flow and long-term equity growth.
- Build Infrastructure Early: Establish a centralized call center and administrative team before you actually need them, ensuring your management costs remain incredibly low as you acquire more locations.
- Target "Ready to Grow" Clinics: Accelerate your timeline by acquiring underperforming offices with massive, untapped patient bases.
- Assess the Grind: Evaluate whether your current infrastructure can absorb another location before deciding to push forward or pause for operational optimization.
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. And today we have a very exciting episode of |
| 0:09.0 | Practice Underwater. We have our guest today, real doctor, fake name is Bob. Bob, we're going to go |
| 0:14.7 | ahead and just jump right in. Bob, welcome to the Shared Practices podcast. Thank you, George. It's |
| 0:19.6 | great to be here. So maybe let us know |
| 0:21.7 | a little bit about your journey. So maybe, you know, introduce yourself to our audience, allow our |
| 0:25.1 | audience to just get to know you, Bob. Sure. So fake name Bob. I've been a practice owner for about |
| 0:31.1 | 11 years now. I started out with a solo practice. And I have over time using some of the ideas and principles of shared practices |
| 0:42.5 | growing it to a mega group and it's been kind of a wild ride as far as that goes but it's been |
| 0:50.9 | something that has been really rewarding and giving me what I actually wanted, which was freedom from being clinical all the time and building a leadership team that can handle running the practice without me having to be that bottleneck. |
| 1:07.1 | That's awesome. |
| 1:08.4 | And Bob, if you could take a step back and talk through, you've been our dentist for a longer period of time than our audience typically. So like maybe walk me through your whole career just at a high level. Like what did you do when you got out of school? How did you get into ownership? How long have you been owning your Vega group? I mean, just kind of like help me understand some of those details. After dental school, I had the Air Force scholarship during Donald School. |
| 1:29.8 | So I did three years in the Air Force. |
| 1:32.7 | And then I came back to my hometown. |
| 1:35.6 | And I practiced as an associate. |
| 1:38.1 | And so that was for 10 years. |
| 1:41.3 | So three and a half years in the Air Force and then 10 years associate. |
| 1:46.8 | Got it. 10 years as an associate. Yes. Then you opened up your practice. Walk me through, |
| 1:53.0 | you know, how did you get into your big office and how did it start and all of that? |
| 1:58.1 | So I decided to go out on my own back in 2015. I found a space in an office park, |
| 2:06.2 | built it out, and put in six operatories, and started as a solo practice and probably had |
| 2:15.3 | maybe seven, 800 patients at the time. And I knew I wanted to really create |
| 2:23.0 | something much larger than that. And that was one of the main reasons for going out on my own. |
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