In this episode, Dr. Brady Frank discusses the benefits of owning your practice, co-ownership verses hiring dentists as associates, and he talks about how to begin the process and how to map out the next steps in creating your DDSO.

 

 

Hey folks, super excited about episode five here, which is chapter three, if you’re following along in the book.

“Converting Your Practice or Group Into a DDSO”

So, what does that mean? Well, first of all, this means different things based on if you are a solo practitioner or you already own a bunch of locations and it depends on your goals as well. But in general, converting your practice or group to a DDSO basically means…

You’re going to take part in allowing other dentists to have ownership, stake in the practice, meaning you’ll stop going through the associate windmill.

You’re going to start eliminating – reducing first – and then eliminating your debt entirely.

You’re going to grow your practice, your business, your group – without taking on more debt or private equity or all that stuff.

So, you’re going to create sustainable growth without taking on more debt

And you’re going to do it in a way where it is all doctor driven.

So, many dentists as they add more doctors to their practice or even just one doctor, they get busier from a managerial standpoint, from an administrative standpoint. And so, when you form your DDSO, you’re going to start to have more total dental freedom, we call it.

Meaning, the five monkeys that are on our back, with practice management, from HR to marketing to everything that has to do with finance and your P&L, to the clinical side of dentistry, all that stuff is going to slowly be released if you build your DDSO properly.

And that leaves you to do more of the stuff in life that you really love to do, right?

If the business is one part of your life, and family, and your faith side, and all that stuff or other parts of your life, then the DDSO is meant to compliment all of them. And you can only have all those other eggs in your life basket growing and increasing if you, basically, have more time on your hands.

And so when you run a DDSO properly, you get those five monkeys off of your back, you get the debt monkey off of your back, you get the associate monkey off of your back and you basically get the financial freedom monkey off of your back, right? Continually trying to get enough so that you can actually retire, right? You create enough streams of income through your DDSO, and that includes both a D-DSO, your dentist-owned group, and your DDS-O, dentist owned organization, vertical companies. That includes both of those genres.

So, as you grow your DDSO your group practice, you’re naturally going to build multiple streams of income that lead to total dental freedom, which of course is not just finance, right? Not just finance, it’s every other bucket, important bucket in your life. We work as dentists to support the lifestyle that we want to live.

Associate to owner conversion

So, if you have a solo practice right here, your first step might be to add a trial partner and that trial partner ends up becoming an owner at some point in the future, whether that be a 25% owner, or a 33% owner, or 50% owner in that particular location. Let’s say you have a practice and you already have three associates and you’re saying, “Oh, I lost one associate two years ago, I added another and you know, I still have the same amount of debt or I’ve decreased it slightly and I’d like to own three more locations, but I feel like my problems would compound.”

So, if you’re in that particular boat then this is called an associate to owner conversion.

If you already have associates or an associate, you need to convert them to an owner through a trial partnership. And this is an easy thing if you know how to do it. So right now, you’re probably paying that a