The Dental Truth Project

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...

Ash Toub, Co-Founder of Smile Data and Ponce Dental Studio, brings a rare dual perspective to dentistry, currently running both a dental group and a software company built for dental groups. After helping scale a 28-location DSO to $10–12M in EBITDA, he developed a proven 5-pillar framework for building dental groups that survive and scale. Most dental groups aren't failing because of bad marketin...

David Janash, Founder & CEO of Underbite Dental, built a 13-location DSO from the ground up in one of the most brutally competitive markets in the country: New York City.  He's made every expensive mistake in the book — and turned those mistakes into a data-driven operation that actually tells him what's going to happen before it does. David used to log into every single office manually, every...

Tonya Christal and Danielle Powell of Lee Dental Centers in San Antonio don't have a fancy training platform, a DSO war chest, or a playbook they borrowed from a conference stage. What they do have is something far rarer — a 40-year family practice, a sister who's also their business partner, and the hard-won clarity to know exactly who they are and who they're not. The hard truth? Most dentists a...

Sean Hamel, Founder & CEO of Art of Dental Marketing, tears apart the broken cycle that's quietly draining dental practices dry — and most owners don't even know it's happening. Every dentist has hired a marketing company. Most have hired several. And yet the phone still isn't ringing the way it should. Sean reveals why the problem was never your marketing budget — it was the message. When eve...

A Czech-trained oral surgeon walks into Wisconsin dentistry — and quietly becomes the guy everyone calls about implants. Dr. Jan Bublik has spent nearly 30 years watching general dentists hold themselves back from a procedure they're more capable of than they've been led to believe.  He pulls back the curtain on the unspoken rules that keep dentists small, and the community-first model that's chan...

Dr. Rehan Shahid, multi-practice owner, dental coach, and COVID-era graduate, reveals an uncomfortable truth about modern dentistry: dental school teaches clinicians how to drill and fill — but not how to run a business.  As a result, many highly skilled dentists unknowingly build practices that struggle financially because they lack leadership systems, data-driven decision making, and business fu...

Sarah Ruberg, CEO & Founder of Our Thrive Tribe, delivers an uncomfortable wake-up call to every dental professional playing it safe on the sidelines: the industry is full of people with powerful stories, hard-won expertise, and genuine wisdom — and almost none of them are sharing it. In a world drowning in AI-generated noise, your most underutilized competitive advantage might be the most hum...

Dr. Anushka Gaglani & Dr. Abhishek Nagaraj of Aero Dental Group exposes the uncomfortable truth about what's really breaking dental groups from the inside — and it starts the moment you make your first hire. Two dentists who grew from a single struggling $200K practice to a multi-location group share what they've learned the hard way: the new associate entitlement crisis is real, it's wrecking...

Bonnie Thompson, COO of Forest Family Dentistry and 37-year dental industry veteran, delivers an uncomfortable truth that no AI vendor wants you to hear: the biggest crisis in dentistry isn't technology — it's that leaders have forgotten how to lead people. While inboxes overflow with AI pitches promising to "fix" your practice, Bonnie exposes why practices keep burning through staff, why change m...

Jake Larsen and Clint Berry, Co-Founders of Kolla, exposed the dental industry's data hostage crisis: While Google made Gmail free to capture YOUR data and built an empire worth hundreds of billions, dental practice management systems are charging YOU to access YOUR OWN patient data - and in the age of AI, it's getting worse. The dirty secret? Some PMS providers are locking down data not because o...

Herb Ford, VP at Risk Strategies Dental Practice (Brown & Brown Company) and longtime insurance industry insider, exposes the silent killer of emerging dental groups: catastrophic insurance gaps that owners don't discover until the lawsuit arrives. While multi-location practices celebrate growth and expansion, they're unknowingly operating with fractured liability coverage - associates control...

JW Oliver, Founder of SupportDDS with 40 Years in Dentistry, Reveals Why Your Labor "Solution" is Making Things Worse: The dental industry's obsession with AI and automation is backfiring spectacularly - practices are hemorrhaging the human connection patients crave while throwing technology at problems that don't need tech fixes. Key Revelations: The AI Hype vs. Reality Check The question isn't "...

Thomas Passalacqua, dental leadership coach and former educator, reveals the uncomfortable truth about dentistry's hidden crisis: While practices obsess over financial metrics and operational systems, they're ignoring the emotional tsunami drowning their leaders—resulting in chronic overthinking, executive paralysis, and the industry's staggering attrition epidemic that no salary increase can fix....

Vince Dilley, Founder & CEO of Platinum Dental Services (bootstrapped DSO since 2012), drops truth bombs about dentistry's ticking time bomb: succession planning through private equity-backed DSOs.  While everyone chases valuation multiples and arbitrage plays, doctors are sleepwalking into retirement disasters - discovering too late that their 40% equity rollover is now worthless, the new ope...

The Membership Plan Trap: Why 88% of Your Cash Patients Disappear (And How Bad Accounting Is Killing Your Practice) Paul Lowry, CEO of Dental Menu, reveals the brutal truth about dental membership plans: Most practices are accidentally running discount Groupons instead of sustainable membership programs - farming PPO patients while hunting cash pay, watching 88% of uninsured patients vanish within...