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dental schools, and I thought that was interesting. Many people go to dental school but
don’t necessarily have a relative or a mentor who they are going to work with. They are
probably a little bit daunted by the task of borrowing all that money and starting a practice
from scratch, whereas you’ve started a couple hundred practices from scratch. When
you said that you talk to dental students, is it more for associate positions? Or, if they can
line up the financing, does PDS ever take a chance on a recent graduate as an Owner
Dentist? Or does that not work out that well?
ST: We have a mantra in our organization: Hire owners. We’re looking for future
owners. That being said, the odds of a dentist coming right out of dental school and
being successful, day one, in a group-style model are very slim. I can’t think of one
we’ve done. We have had some dentists who had a prior business background, so this
is their second career. And these dentists became owners quickly — maybe within
months. But for the typical student, who came from undergrad and went to dental
school, they just do not yet have that leadership ability or the business knowledge.
Frankly, they are still working on some of their clinical competencies and efficiencies.
MD: So they are potential associates who might be good Owner Dentists in five years, or
something like that?
ST: Exactly. And what we’re trying to do is say: Look, in the large group practice
model, which is where we’re kind of lumped, most of the large group practices have
not invested — and this isn’t a knock on any of my competitors, by the way — in
the infrastructure and technologies like we have at PDS. We are the world’s largest
CEREC provider. We have a digital infrastructure that is second to none. We are the
first large group practice to go to all-digital health records, all-digital patient records.
I believe we are the first large group to be all-digital X-rays and all-digital panorex.
We’re now beta-testing several 3-D cone beam machines. So we’ve really tried to step
up not only the actual but also the image of a large group practice among the dentists
entering the marketplace. We’ve very carefully positioned ourselves there.
MD: You guys are really, in a sense, the anti-large group practice — at least from my perspective,
that of a dentist who graduated in 1988. The large group practices back then, the
Western Dental’s and others, were places you’d go if you had no other option. Maybe you’d
go for a year or two to improve your speed, but you’d get out of there as soon as possible
to start building your career. So there has always kind of been this negative connotation
associated with the large group practice.
I’ve always liked how none of the Pacific Dental practices are named Pacific Dental. They
are all named for the communities in which they are located. In fact, if someone looked
from the outside, I don’t think they would ever necessarily know it was a PDS practice,
except for the fact that the practice has every piece of high-tech equipment known to man.
ST: We’ve been very focused on our positioning in the marketplace. We are actually
calling it Private Practice + . The “plus” is all about the modern dentistry, infrastructure,
systems and support. But we view PDS as more on the private practice side.
Yes, we have structure. Yes, we have systems. But we look at it as a very autonomous
practice. The practices are locally branded. A local dentist owns it, and his or her
name is on the door. Typically, that dentist will even put the names of his or her
associates on the door, too. The dentist’s credentials are hanging in the office. Many
dentists hang pictures of their family on the wall. What I’ve found, after doing this
for so many years, is dentists want that. They want to feel like: This is mine. This is
where I practice, and I own it. The dentists we affiliate with don’t just want a job.
They’re looking for a fulfilling career, where they feel part of something bigger and
better, an organization that’s going to help them be the best clinician. And this is
true of most of my experience with dentists: Dentists want to be great clinicians.
I know there’s a bell curve in clinical skill with 150,000 practicing dentists. But in
Interview with Stephen Thorne33