The #1 Reason Dental Practice Ownership Enters an Ugly Duckling Phase and How to Survive It
Shared Practices | Your Dental Roadmap through Practice Ownership
Dr. George Hariri | Shared Practices Network
4.9 • 559 Ratings
🗓️ 23 March 2026
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Adding an associate to your team should be the ultimate win for dental practice ownership, but it is often the exact moment where your existing systems begin to break. In this episode, Andrew Clingan and Caitlin Embree unpack the "ugly duckling" stage—that uncomfortable transition where your previous business strategies no longer scale to support multiple doctors.
If you are navigating the complexities of dental practice ownership, this episode is your survival guide for the inevitable systems failures and team tension that occur when scaling toward a sustainable dental practice.
As we discuss in this segment, entrepreneurship for dentists is about developing people as much as it is about fixing teeth. Andrew gets vulnerable about the "super solo" trap: trying to out-produce your problems rather than fixing the underlying systems. We dive into the specific financial management for dentists necessary to weather the "stings" of growth—like losing $15,000 cases because the team wasn't ready to present new clinical codes.
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. |
| 0:05.6 | I'm Caitlin Embry, and I have here with me, Dr. Andrew Klingen. |
| 0:09.2 | Welcome back, Andrew. |
| 0:10.7 | Hey, Caitlin. |
| 0:11.8 | So today we're coming to you guys live from the ugly duckling phase that Dr. Andrew Klingin is currently living in. |
| 0:19.7 | I told him a lot of times we have dentists on kind of as they're looking ahead at growing into a group practice. That's part of the vision, but it's a little bit further down the road. And then sometimes we have them on after they've successfully grown to a profitable group and they've got a full-time associate and the right amount of hygienists |
| 0:38.7 | and they're kind of where they wanted to be and looking at what's next, it's rare that we get to |
| 0:44.0 | talk to somebody kind of right in the middle of those growing pains and that transition and what we |
| 0:49.7 | call the ugly duckling phase. So I asked him to come on today and just kind of chat with us about |
| 0:54.9 | what this experience has been like, you know, recently recruiting an associate, onboarding an |
| 1:00.4 | associate in a part-time basis. So Andrew, I'm going to let you take it from here. Give us a quick |
| 1:05.2 | catch-up on your practice itself. You've been on before. You've told us your journey, but a quick |
| 1:09.9 | synopsis and then what this last six months has been like for you. Just real fast. Yeah've been on before. You've told us your journey, but a quick synopsis and then |
| 1:11.0 | what this last six months has been like for you. Just real fast. Yeah, been a practice owner for two |
| 1:15.6 | and a half years, stepped into a practice that was underperforming by quite a bit. And just when |
| 1:21.4 | it as a new grad wasn't doing a lot of things perfect, but just changing a few things. We |
| 1:26.4 | doubled that practice in a year, right? |
| 1:28.4 | That story's been well documented. Another year and a half later going on towards year three |
| 1:34.1 | of practice ownership, we've just kind of continued to be growing. And what's interesting |
| 1:38.4 | about practice management, Caitlin, and growing a dental practice, there's so many levers to turn, |
| 1:42.7 | right? And I'm the kind of personality |
| 1:44.8 | that it'd probably be good to go, hey, here's the things we're going to focus on, but I just look at it and I go, well, no, let's just do it all better. Let's just do it all right. And that's where Caitlin helps me out sometimes and helps me get a little bit more focused so we can concentrate our efforts. But over the last year and a half, I kind of lived in this like |
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