PDF Version - Glidewell Dental Labs

Dr. Michael DiTolla: Steve, for those readers who haven’t heard of Pacific Dental Services,
how would you describe the services that your company provides to dentists?
Stephen Thorne: Pacific Dental Services is a B2B business. We’re really the backbone
of a well-run, well-distributed group of high-performing, decentralized dental
practices. PDS provides a full scope of business services to dentists: accounting, real
estate, payroll, specialty systems, services and capital, to name a few.
MD: That sounds pretty much A to Z. Just as a little background for our readers, our dads
went to dental school together. Then I went to dental school, and I know your brother went
to dental school, as well. You did not go to dental school, but you ended up in dentistry anyway.
Was that by design? Or did your career path just happen to unfold into this profession?
ST: What I do now is the service business. And how I got started in dentistry was by
helping my father out in his dental practice. It was 1989, and my dad needed some
help putting in a computer system. He also needed help with billing, collections and
other things. It wasn’t planned. It just evolved from helping my dad out for a short
period of time 22 years ago.
MD: How long did that evolution take? Were you helping in his practice for a couple weeks,
a couple months, a couple years?
ST: I worked for my father for a couple years and helped him develop a total of five
practices. I discovered there was a real business need there, and that I could help
more dentists with the business services in their practices to help them get started.
I branched out in 1993 and started Pacific Dental Services in 1994. The first practice
we affiliated with was in Costa Mesa, Calif., in June 1994.
MD: Did your dad already have five practices when you came onboard? Or was he expanding
as you were there, giving you the opportunity to see what it takes to open a dental office
from scratch?
ST: When I started working for my dad in 1989, he only had one practice. Between
the two of us — I was helping run the business side and he was running the clinical
side — we opened four more practices.
MD: That’s pretty amazing. There aren’t many dentists, I’d say less than 2 or 3 percent of
dentists in the U.S., who have the opportunity to open a second practice — let alone four
more in addition to that first one! That just sounds like an amazing education on what it
takes to start a dental practice.
ST: I learned from the ground up. I started working as a receptionist and pulling
charts. I was on the old pegboard system; that’s probably around the time you started
practicing dentistry. I helped clean rooms. I helped sterilize instruments. I worked in
a dental lab. I owned my own lab for many years. Getting my hands wet at the very
base level of dentistry really helped me understand the operations of a dental office.
MD: It sounds like, short of spending four years getting your dental degree, that’s about
the best education you could have gotten. Not to just observe, but to actually work in all
the different positions in a dental office. And to work in and then own a dental lab, as
well, so that you could see the other side of what goes out of an office and how that affects
quality and profitability in the office.
When you started PDS in 1994, did you know there was definitely a need for something
like this in the dental market? Was it just a matter of finding dentists you could work with?
Or was it something where you said: If this doesn’t work out, I can always go back and do
something else?
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