DEO's Growth Secrets for Dental Organizations

Are you still the one approving every PTO request, answering every staff question, and making every tough call? Emmett Scott sits down with Dr. Keith Harrison, owner and CEO of Harrison Dental Group, who bought two more practices during COVID before he had the leaders to support them. Soon he was driving an hour between four offices, doing payroll himself, and watching everything run through him....

Why is your best team member still typing insurance payments into your PMS by hand?   Jordin McEntire sits down with Max Shore, head of practice partnerships at Lassie, who grew up working in his mom's orthodontic office, watching the business side of dentistry wear her down. Today, Max helps practices fix those same problems by moving insurance payments to free direct deposit and using AI to post...

What if you followed your employee handbook perfectly and still got hit with a legal claim? Leslie Espinola and Brooke Young kick off DEO's new HR series with a real client story every practice owner needs to hear. After a workplace complaint was investigated and resolved, a key team member's performance dropped fast. The owners followed every step of their warning process, and 45 days after letti...

What would you do differently if you had to start over with your dental practice? Emmett Scott sits down with Dr. Steve Broughton, CEO of Light Dental Studios, who started with a small dental practice in a converted mobile home and spent 30 years growing to 32 locations. In the early days, he lived on a fraction of what he earned, stayed in the chair, and built a 30-year relationship with his bank...

How much are you paying your team in overtime just to finish clinical notes at the end of the day? Kendall Hussein sits down with Daniel Bessonov, CEO and founder of Avora, an AI documentation and case acceptance platform used by more than a thousand clinicians. Daniel explains what ambient documentation actually means and how practices are saving 40 to 45 hours a month by getting notes, charting,...

What if your Google Business Profile already brings in more new patients than your website and ads combined? Jordin McEntire sits down with Bill Donato, co-founder of dentalmarketing.com, to unpack why just three specific signals control 70% of a dental practice's Google ranking. Bill breaks down why a Google Business Profile alone can out-convert a website and paid ads combined, and the exact num...

What if your body is willing to sacrifice your teeth just to protect everything else? Brooke Young sits down with Dr. Rachaele Carver, a biologic dentist in the Berkshires of Massachusetts, to unpack how she diagnoses oral disease by looking well beyond the tooth. Dr. Carver breaks down why fluoride isn't the fix conventional dentistry claims it is, how gut health and toxicity quietly drive decay...

What if the practice you've spent years growing isn't actually worth what you think it is to a buyer? Jordin McEntire sits down with Brannon Moncrief, CEO of McLerran & Associates, to unpack what's really happening in today's private equity and DSO market. Brannon breaks down why crossing $3 million in revenue changes your options, what buyers actually screen for before they'll bid, and how EBITDA...

What if the secret to filling your hygiene schedule isn't chasing new patients, it's calling your existing ones? In this episode, Kendall sits down with Greg Brooks, Managing Director at Global Strategic, to talk through how remote staffing is helping practices fix one of their biggest blind spots: hygiene reactivation. Greg breaks down why local teams struggle to keep up with consistent outreach,...

What if the reason you're still buried in emails has nothing to do with how many hours are in your day? Jordin McEntire sits down with Jackie Brown, Global Head of HR at SupportDDS, who spent years working alongside doctors at a DSO with 75 practices and 200 clinicians. She kept seeing the same thing play out. Owners were still managing their own schedules, still answering their own emails, long a...

Your front desk didn't sign up to be an insurance department. So why are they buried in one? Kendall sits down with Louis Chan and Vere Whittome, co-founders of Kaylie AI, to break down the walls between insurance verification, treatment coordination, and claims management. Louis explains how five-star doctors at his old oral surgery group kept getting one-star reviews, why most practices react to...

What happens when the laws governing your practice change every few months, and you find out the hard way? Emmett Scott sits down with Eric Scalzo and John Saran, partners at Holland & Knight, to break down the wave of new state regulations reshaping dental practice growth in 2026. They walk through the recent California settlement making headlines, why non-competes and ownership disclosures are u...

What if growing from one office to ten was never really about the locations at all? Dr. Ronald Taylor sits down with Kendall Hussein to share how he built Trident Endo Dental into a multi-state endodontic group, and why none of it would have worked without putting people first. Ron opens up about a ransomware attack, hiring the wrong people more than once, and the moment he realized his job wasn't...

What if your biggest profitability opportunity isn't a new patient or a new location, but the revenue you've already earned and never fully collected?   Kendall Hussein sits down with Shreyas Parab, who grew up running every job in his mom's small dental practice in Philadelphia before founding Daydream, one of the most AI-driven RCM companies in dental today. Shreyas breaks down why collections a...

What if patients aren't saying no to treatment, but saying no to how you're asked to pay? Jordin McEntire sits down with Luke Johnson, Chief Revenue Officer at HFD, to break down what's really happening when patients leave without scheduling. Luke's family bought HFD in 2017, not as bankers, but as entrepreneurs who saw a gap most lenders weren't willing to close. They spent the next 17 years buil...

What if the single biggest money mistake you're making has nothing to do with marketing, overhead, or your fee schedule? Emmett Scott sits down with Dr. Brett Wells, CEO of Loren Dental Partners, who built nine locations — eight of them de novo startups — and spent six years grinding solo while leaving a fortune on the table. Brett shares why he waited way too long to bring in a second doctor, how...

What if every conversation in your operatory is already telling you where your production is leaking...and you just can't hear it?   In this episode, Jordin McEntire sits down with Danny Bessonov, CEO and co-founder of Avora, to break down why most dental groups are flying blind on case presentation, team performance, and patient experience. Danny shares how ambient AI turns every appointment into...

What if the thing that finally pulled you out of the chair wasn't a plan, but a crisis? Emmett Scott sits down with Dr. Alex and Bobby, co-founders of Halex Pediatric Dentistry and Orthodontics, a 15-location pediatric dental and orthodontics group they've built together over nearly two decades in coastal Virginia. Bobby spent years as the lead producer while Alex ran the business. Then a sudden o...

What if you had to sell your dental practice tomorrow? Would it be worth what you think it is? In this episode, Brannon Moncrief, Principal and CEO of McLerran & Associates, pulls back the curtain on what dental practice buyers are actually looking for right now and why so many owners are unknowingly setting themselves up for a disappointing exit. With 35 years in the industry and roughly 400 prac...

What if the data you need to grow your dental practice is already sitting right in front of you...you just can't see it yet? In this episode of DEO's Growth Secrets, Emmett Scott sits down with Emily Ryba, Co-Founder and CEO of OSDental, who started her career as a CPA specializing in dental and spent years watching practice owners make major decisions without the full financial picture. After bui...

What if the cracks in your dental practice were always there...and growth just made them impossible to ignore? In this episode of DEO's Growth Secrets, Kendall sits down with Karen Gray, Chief Customer Officer at Oryx Dental Software. With nearly 20 years of executive experience across vertical SaaS, Karen is a proven customer leader with a front-row seat to what actually happens when dental pract...

What happens when you do everything right...build the practice, hire the team, open a second location...and then it all starts falling apart? In this episode, Emmett Scott sits down with Dr. Nada Elsadig, a multi-location practice owner who went from a $200K acquisition to $1.2M in her first year, only to face a health crisis that left her practice vulnerable, her team working against her, and her...

What happens when your practice is growing…and then a lawsuit or claim hits that you thought you were covered for? In this episode, Herb Ford and Kyle Wallace from Risk Strategies break down what most dental practice owners don't think about while they're focused on growth. You're adding a provider or opening another location, and naturally your attention stays on production and keeping everything...

Why does your dental practice get harder to run the moment you hit three locations? In this episode, Chris Hadziev from Planet DDS shares data from over 8,000+ practices on why some offices grow nearly three times faster than others. New patient flow is one of the key drivers. But the deeper story isn't just about getting more patients in the door. It's what happens next. Chris shares how one grow...

If your marketing agency is leading with traffic, clicks, and impressions... they're measuring the wrong things. And while you're nodding along to their monthly report, your business stays flat. Most dental practices don't have a marketing problem. They have an accountability problem. In this episode, Daniel Sosa, CEO of OM Performance Marketing, breaks down why traditional dental marketing is ble...