The Dentist Guide to Scaling a Clinic - Scuba Steve Part 2
Shared Practices | Your Dental Roadmap through Practice Ownership
Dr. George Hariri | Shared Practices Network
4.9 • 559 Ratings
🗓️ 27 October 2025
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Welcome back to Practice Underwater, where Dr. George Hariri sits down with Scuba Steve to unpack the operational hurdles every dentist faces when transforming a chaotic clinic into a thriving enterprise.
Despite growing collections from a $500,000 baseline to a $1.3 million yearly pace, this dentist's journey into dental practice ownership reveals aesthetic challenges, missing systems, and team misalignment.
They debate essential dental practice management tactics, highlighting how an intentional team reset can foster sustainable dental practice growth and shift the administrative load away from the dentist.
This is a must-listen for any dentist navigating the associate to owner transition who wants to finally fall in love with their clinic.
In this episode:
- Overcoming aesthetic hurdles in a historical building without a dedicated consult room.
- Scaling collections from a $500,000 baseline to a $1.3 million yearly pace.
- Transitioning a mature team toward a comprehensive, fee-for-service vision.
- Hosting a strategic office reset meeting to acknowledge progress and align future goals.
- Building strong administrative systems to reduce owner burnout and increase clinic pride.
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 back to Practice Underwater. I am here again with Scuba Steve. And Scuba Steve and I, |
| 0:09.5 | we have gone deep last week. And, you know, if you didn't listen to the episode last week, |
| 0:14.5 | I'd recommend go back and take a listen. Practice Underwater is always fun because I always |
| 0:18.8 | like to start with understanding the story of how somebody got into ownership. |
| 0:22.6 | And I really do think that scuba has a very unique story on how scuba made its way into ownership. |
| 0:29.6 | And so I'm going to kind of just use a few minutes here to kind of recount that. |
| 0:33.6 | And then once we're kind of caught up to speed, then we're going to get back into it. |
| 0:36.6 | So if you haven't listened to the episode last week, I'd encourage you to pause this recording, go back to part one with Scuba Steve and listen to the full episode. But let's just say you choose not to do that or you listened and you just wanted a little reminder. I'm going to kind of go through it and give you an update. We're just a recap on that episode. So our guest, Scuba Steve here, graduated dental |
| 0:55.9 | school in 2018 and initially went to an associate ship, great office, great job, super busy, |
| 1:02.2 | just like an abundance of patients, really doing a ton of dentistry and really enjoyed it. |
| 1:08.1 | And for five years, had a great time. Well, four years had a great time. And then I |
| 1:13.3 | think the corporate element started kind of coming up, like pushing production, you know, being told |
| 1:18.4 | what to do, you know, all the stuff that people sometimes complain about with corporate |
| 1:21.5 | dentistry. That started coming up into scuba's life. And scuba made the decision, I have to leave. |
| 1:26.7 | And so then there was like a kind of a final year that wasn't ideal, a lot of phasing life. And Scuba made the decision, I have to leave. And so then there was like a kind of a |
| 1:28.1 | final year that wasn't ideal, a lot of phasing out. And Scuba ultimately decided to go back home |
| 1:33.5 | where they have family. And Scuba ultimately got into an office. And this office was really unique. |
| 1:41.2 | It was a fee for service practice for like 50 years. And the dentist, who was like the longtime owner, had actually sold it to about a Medicaid |
| 1:49.5 | DSO, maybe about a couple years ago. And so there was a little bit of workback period, but scuba |
| 1:55.0 | never met that original doctor. But one of the things that scuba talked about is like the |
| 1:59.4 | quality of dentistry that he walked into was like really high. And so the office historically had done between 500,000 and 700,000 in collections. And you know, Scuba came in and there was a lot of chaos. Like a lot of like team members were turning over. You know, not a lot, but like there was three team members and two of them turned over. And so there was really like just not a lot of stability. And we had a new hygienist now. |
| 2:22.0 | We have a new assistant. We have a floater. And so scuba has like a four person team now. |
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