The Dental Truth Project

Doug Fettig of TopCard Payment Solutions and Catherine Fettig of Dental Dollars & Sense, reveal a dental truth many practice owners overlook: the health of your practice may depend just as much on how you lead and care for your team as it does on the dentistry you provide. Doug, a CPA and leadership speaker, and Catherine, a master’s-prepared nurse focused on wellness, patient anxiety, and tea...

Kevin Cumbus, President and Founder of TUSK Practice Sales, shares what he’s seeing across the dental M&A market—and why practice owners may need to rethink what their business is actually worth. After more than $1.5 billion in dental transactions, Kevin discusses what buyers, lenders, private equity groups, and distressed DSOs are looking for—and explains why simply waiting for interest rates...

Matthew Godley, CEO and co-founder of Spendly and the son of a dentist and dental hygienist, exposes the uncomfortable truth about where DSO profits are quietly disappearing: 4 out of 10 vendor invoices contain billing errors, practice owners are overpaying on nearly every operating expense without knowing it, and the leak compounds silently for years - yet almost no one has the time, bandwidth, o...

Jordan Comstock, founder and CEO of BoomCloud, challenges one of dentistry’s most common revenue models: PPO dependency. He reveals how patient membership programs can create predictable recurring revenue, help practices reach break-even faster, increase treatment acceptance, and give owners a financial safety net before transitioning away from insurance. But there’s a catch—getting the numbers ri...

Dave Salciccioli, Co-Founder of Relay and a dental technology veteran, pulls back the curtain on one of dentistry’s biggest—and most overlooked—problems: the technology isn’t necessarily the problem. How the industry buys, implements, and adopts it is. Dental organizations have access to better technology than ever before, from AI to emerging SaaS solutions. Yet many DSOs are struggling to turn th...

Josh McSpadden, Mid Market Healthcare Group Banker at U.S. Bank, reveals why DSOs don’t just need a lender—they need a banking partner who understands the strategy behind their growth.  After working with dental groups since 2015, Josh exposes a costly mistake many emerging DSOs make: choosing financing based on the lowest rate instead of building the right financial infrastructure from the beginn...

Ken Kaufman and Ashley Penny pull back the curtain on the creation of their second book, Roll The Equity: How Smart Dental Founders Sell Their DSOs, revealing what inspired them to write it and how they worked together to turn complex dental finance and private equity concepts into an engaging story.  Their collaboration builds on the success of their first book while taking readers deeper into th...

Sam Rockwood, Founder & CEO of Woods and former actuary, exposes the hidden inefficiencies behind insurance payments. With roughly 70% of dental insurance payments still being paper-based, practices are stuck dealing with checks, virtual credit cards, hidden processing fees, and hours of manual work. And the biggest surprise? Free EFT is available—but many practices don't know how to access it...

Christine Diehl, a dental hygienist with 30+ years of experience, shares the uncomfortable truth about what happens when a dental practice transitions to a DSO—and why the biggest risk may not be the financial deal itself. When teams feel ignored, patients can follow them out the door. When buyers rush to change everything, they can destroy the trust and culture that made the practice successful i...

Courtney Staiger, Certified Fraud Examiner at Prosperident, reveals one of dentistry's most overlooked threats: 70% of dental practices will experience embezzlement, yet most owners don't have fraud prevention systems in place because they assume it won't happen to them. The real danger? It's rarely obvious cash theft—it's hidden in reports, refunds, insurance payments, and everyday processes that...

Kevin Henry, a dental journalist for 27 years and Editor-in-chief for DrBicuspid.com, exposes one of dentistry’s biggest missed opportunities: your dental assistants may be capable of far more than you’re letting them do. From staffing shortages and poor training to practices losing great assistants because they see no path forward. Kevin reveals why the problem isn’t always finding better people—...

AccruDent turns two, but this episode isn’t about celebrating the wins alone. For the first time, Ken and Dallin Kaufman take over the podcast to share the real story behind building AccruDent: the original business idea that was far too broad, the painful client failure that changed how they operate, and the realization that ultimately forced them to niche down. From trying to solve every problem...

Andy Steuerman, Vice Chairman at Golub Capital, and Dr. Victoria Yu, CEO & Chief Dental Officer of Elite Dental Partners, challenge one of dentistry's biggest assumptions: that dentists must choose between being lifelong employees or taking on crushing debt to become owners. They reveal why the traditional DSO model is broken, why new graduates are trapped by six-figure student loans, and how...

Adrian Lefler, CEO of My Social Practice, reveals why most dental organizations are already falling behind, and they don't even know it. AI isn't just changing marketing tactics; it's completely rewriting how marketing teams should be built. While many DSOs are still hiring yesterday's roles, the companies winning tomorrow are replacing repetitive work with AI automations and creating entirely new...

Angie Hopper, Chief Operating Officer of Premier Dental Center, breaks the industry's favorite rule: go fee-for-service or lose out. While the loudest voices in dentistry preach dropping insurance to protect margins, Premier Dental Center did the opposite — went deeper in-network — and grew one location from 4 operatories to 12, added a 10-op and a 6-op site, and now runs on 80% insured patients....

Dr. Vinni Singh, founder of DentScribe and practicing dentist reveals why many dental practices are chasing the wrong growth strategy. While owners pour money into attracting new patients, they're overlooking the biggest revenue opportunity already sitting in their chairs. She explains how overlooked clinical notes, forgotten patient conversations, and inefficient workflows quietly cost practices...

Frank Clayton, CEO & Founder of RedThread Solutions, Former Practice Owner and PE Advisor — de novo practice founder turned DSO insider — spent 23 years building a high-performing practice, sold to a DSO, and then watched the machine from the inside during a two-year earnout. What he saw confirms what many DSO operators quietly suspect: the people problem is the real operational crisis, and mo...

George Hariri, Chief Financial Officer and Co-Founder of Shared Practices, exposes why most multi-location dental groups are quietly bleeding value: the "economies of scale" pitch is a fallacy once you factor in higher debt costs and bloated central teams, centralizing functions just moves expenses around instead of cutting them, and the GP acquisition model has an identity crisis — everyone's buy...

Most dental leaders only share their wins. Dr. Hardik Chodavadia, Co-Founder of Enamel Dentistry, does the opposite — and that's exactly what makes this episode required listening.  A highly capable, deeply trusted team member stole a significant amount of money from Enamel Dentistry — and the worst part? They saw the warning signs and couldn't act because he was too embedded to remove.  From a tr...

Secure Dental CEO and working clinician Dr. Nazish Jafri has sat across from enough new graduates to see the pattern clearly: the clinical skills aren't the problem. It's everything nobody taught them — how to talk to a patient, how to read a treatment plan, how to understand what they actually need to earn just to survive. They're not failing because they're incapable. They're failing because no...

Dave Gaspar, CEO of Smile Partners USA, exposes the hiring blind spot that's quietly killing dental careers: practices have obsessed over clinical skill and chairside personality for decades — but nobody's testing for the one quality that actually predicts whether a dentist survives the hard days.  When the CBCT crashes, the assistant calls out sick, and patients are walking out the back door, IQ...

Mark Haddad, Endodontist and Co-founder of Specialty1 Partners and ScoutIQ, pulls back the curtain on what private equity actually wants — and why most dentists walk into a deal completely unprepared. At the heart of every PE transaction is one defining decision: do you take the cash and walk away, or do you roll your equity and bet on a bigger payday down the road? If you've ever thought about se...

Corey Hastings, CEO of Blue Sage Management Group and practicing pediatric dentist, exposes the uncomfortable truth most multi-location dental owners refuse to admit: scaling from one to seven locations almost broke him — not because of bad dentistry, but because he couldn't get out of the chair. The clinical skills that built his practice became the very thing holding it back. Key Revelations: Wh...

Virginia Jones, CEO of Village Family Dental (14 locations, 400 employees) & Gary Salman, CEO of Black Talon Security reveal the silent threat that could shut your practice down — not a bad review, not a slow month, but a cyber event you never saw coming. Post-Change Healthcare breach, dentistry is still 3–4 years behind the rest of healthcare on cybersecurity — and the hackers already know it...

Randa Seif, COO of CaliDental, issues a stark warning to every dental practice owner scrolling through AI vendor ads: handing over your patient data to the wrong company isn't just a bad business decision — it could be a legal and ethical catastrophe.  After personally vetting vendors from Australia, Amsterdam, and across the U.S., she reveals why most AI companies knocking on your door have no bu...