The Dentist Guide to Scaling a Clinic - Scuba Steve Part 1
Shared Practices | Your Dental Roadmap through Practice Ownership
Dr. George Hariri | Shared Practices Network
4.9 • 559 Ratings
🗓️ 20 October 2025
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Welcome to Practice Underwater, where Dr. George Hariri kicks off part one with Scuba Steve to explore the gritty realities of becoming a practice-owning dentist.
Despite buying a messy, former Medicaid DSO-managed building, this ambitious dentist successfully transitioned into dental business ownership by immediately boosting collections from a historical $500,000 average to a $1.3 million yearly pace.
They debate the next phase of his dental practice management, comparing the merits of building a highly systematized solo clinic versus pursuing sustainable dental practice growth through a multi-doctor group.
This is a must-listen for any dentist charting an associate to owner transition who wants actionable insights on navigating the chaos of early dental practice ownership.
In this episode:
- Leaving a corporate-leaning job to purchase a 50-year-old, fee-for-service clinic.
- Overcoming massive due diligence hurdles, including locked software and missing digital access.
- Growing collections from roughly $500,000 to over $1.2 million almost immediately.
- Rebuilding a skeletal team after a legacy hygienist's retirement.
- Choosing between a highly profitable smart solo model and a multi-provider group.
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 another episode of Practice underwater. |
| 0:06.4 | And I have an episode I'm looking forward to where we have a guest here. |
| 0:11.0 | And I asked, you know, one of my typical pre-show kind of comments is, what are we going to call you today? |
| 0:16.2 | And this guest said, scuba Steve, because we're going way underwater today. And so, I mean, what a |
| 0:22.7 | great way to get started, right? I mean, I haven't really gotten to know scuba Steve all that well, but just get me started on that note. I'm quite excited. So welcome to the show, Scuba Steve, and hopefully we're going to have a great interview today. So how's it going, Scuba? everybody I'm doing good |
| 0:36.2 | I'm just excited to be on the show |
| 0:38.6 | well we're excited to have you |
| 0:40.7 | and so first name, scuba, last name, Steve. So we'll call you Scuba Steve, and I'll call you Scuba as we're going through it. So scuba, maybe you can just kind of get us started with, introduce yourself to our audience, not in any specific terms where they would know about you, but like, you know, maybe when you graduated from dental school, how you got into ownership, how long |
| 0:57.2 | you've been into ownership, those types of things. Just kind of help us get oriented into your |
| 1:01.1 | world. Yeah, I graduated 2018. I was lucky to have my dad who was a like old school dentist his whole |
| 1:09.6 | life. So I was around that forever. |
| 1:13.1 | And outside of school, I ended up taking my first job as an associate in New Hampshire. |
| 1:20.6 | Initially like a perfect setup. |
| 1:22.7 | All we, they brought me in, you know, saying ownership or like partnership, which is definitely |
| 1:29.4 | something I always wanted to do. And it was amazing in the beginning because it was just like a |
| 1:35.5 | husband and wife, kind of like mom and pop shop with amazing offices, just gorgeous. Every system |
| 1:42.3 | in place you can imagine, every technology, the patients |
| 1:45.1 | were pumped. It was great. We also had, it seemed like, unlimited amounts of patients. So in the |
| 1:51.7 | beginning, that was amazing because when you graduate, like, all you want to do is dentistry. |
| 1:57.0 | But then as the years went on, I kind of started seeing like they were definitely going more corporate. |
| 2:03.9 | Well, more like, not necessarily corporate, but more like production based and like higher turnover and like only caring about how much you can produce and how fast. |
| 2:13.3 | And it doesn't have been a big turnoff for me, but it was tough because I still love my patient. |
... |
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