Take PPO Power Back for Dental Practice Profitability: Clint Johnson’s Guide to Smarter Contracts
Shared Practices | Your Dental Roadmap through Practice Ownership
Dr. George Hariri | Shared Practices Network
4.9 • 559 Ratings
🗓️ 3 November 2025
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode of Shared Practices, Richard Low sits down with Clint Johnson to unpack high-level dental business strategies and the core metrics driving true dental practice profitability.
They dissect the exact financial impacts and administrative burdens of heavy PPO participation, revealing how properly organizing fee schedules can add $330,000 to a two-doctor bottom line over an 18-month timeline without having to work any harder.
The core strategic debate centers on whether to add more insurances to drive volume or drop bottom-tier plans—like those under 3% of total collections—to optimize dental practice management and elevate long-term dental practice profitability.
Whether you are tuning into this dental startup podcast for pre-launch tips or are deeply entrenched in dental practice ownership, this is a must-listen for anyone ready to master their PPO game and secure lasting dental practice profitability.
In this episode:
- Why PPOs are often the most expensive form of marketing.
- The hidden administrative and emotional costs of low fee schedules.
- Dropping plans that make up 3% or less of total practice collections.
- Climbing the PPO profit ladder over a realistic 18-month timeline.
- Starting the credentialing process five months before a new startup opens.
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
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Shared Practices podcast. We have a phenomenal guest and friend, long-time partner |
| 0:09.2 | of Shared Practices. Clint Johnson on the podcast here today, and we're going to be talking about |
| 0:14.4 | something that everyone's always wondering about and they're feeling like they should be doing more. |
| 0:19.0 | There's some unlock, there's some hack to get more out of their PPO's, but they don't know how to get there. So, Clint, you're going to help us today. Welcome to the show. Thanks, Richard. It's good to see you. And it's good to be on the podcast. I absolutely love your podcast. I listen to it on a regular basis when I'm going back and forth to work, actually. And I learn a lot from you and from the other guests. So it's always a pleasure to be on with you. |
| 0:41.1 | Well, thank you. basis when I'm going back and forth to work actually. And I learn a lot from you and from the other |
| 0:37.6 | guests. So it's always a pleasure to be on with you. Well, thank you. And honestly, likewise, |
| 0:43.3 | the thing that surprises me is that like 700 episodes in, I'm still learning things on each |
| 0:48.5 | episode. And George and I or Caitlin and I or guests and I are like, oh, I never actually thought |
| 0:53.6 | of it that way. |
| 0:54.6 | And you wouldn't think that you could keep talking about this and learning, but there's just so much to do. |
| 0:59.5 | I think dentistry is just awesome. |
| 1:01.2 | There's so many ways to succeed. |
| 1:03.2 | There's so many tools and resources and things to learn that it's just really a profession where from day one until the day we can just |
| 1:11.9 | keep learning every day. And it's just fun. I think both you and I share a trait where we love |
| 1:17.4 | learning. And so I get up every day with a level of excitement. What's going to happen today? |
| 1:22.8 | What are we going to learn today? Or what can we share with others to help them? So yeah, |
| 1:26.7 | I love being able to spend time |
| 1:28.3 | with you. Awesome. It's fun. We had a little hypothetical conversation before this, and I threw out |
| 1:34.1 | a couple scenarios, and one was a doctor who, you know, is looking at dropping insurances for whatever |
| 1:40.9 | reason, whether they're maxed out in their current space. And so they have more |
| 1:45.0 | demand than they have supply or they're just doing that from the start coming into an acquisition |
| 1:51.8 | startup. You know, they're looking to someone who's looking to drop PPO's versus someone who's |
... |
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