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MailAugust 2022--At the 9th Dykema Definitive DSO Conference, Amol Nirgudkar, CEO of Patient Prism, interviewed Lee Provow, CEO of Oak Dental Partners. Oak Dental Partners is a fast-growing DSO supporting 49 partner locations across the country to serve the dental and orthodontic needs of children, teens, and families.
“Oak Dental has grown a lot over the last two years in particular,” says Amol Nirgudkar. “You’ve more than doubled your number of partner locations. What is your growth story?”
“You start a business and you never know where the journey's going to take you,” says Lee Provow. We got into the industry about ten years ago and became serious about the industry in 2015. In March of 2021, we recapitalized the business with Ford Equity Partners. They’re a great group of people, very supportive. And since then, we've gone from 21 locations to 49 locations. We've gone from 4 to 8 states. We've gone from about 250 employees to a little over 800 employees, and we have 88 doctors. So, it's been phenomenal growth.”
Their growth strategy is to maintain focus on the patient experience
“We want to keep our teams happy (existing and newly onboarding) and simultaneously focus on our guests," says Provow. "That’s what we call our patients to remind us we are there to always provide the highest quality of dental care and create a positive experience. If you create positive experiences, they're going to continue to come back to you. and they'll tell their friends, and that's a great way to drive referral growth.”
How big does the organization want to grow?
“We’ll grow as big as we can,” says Provow, “as long as we can continue to put ethics and integrity about everything else. We want to do the right thing by our stakeholders.”
Oak Dental values quality over size
In the last year, Oak Dental brought its teams together with industry experts to examine its core values.
“One of the things that I always have admired about you and your management team is your focus on values, doing the right things,” says Nirgudkar. “What are the most important core values of Oak Dental?”
“We had a set of core values that were a little dated," says Provow. "So, we challenged ourselves in every aspect, like who are we? What do we want to be known for? And how do we want to be viewed by our guests and by the industry? We spent a lot of time discussing the impact of individual words on our stakeholders.”
Provow sums up Oak Dental’s core values as “the desire to provide the highest quality of dental care and create a positive experience for the guests and their families that we have the honor to serve.”
He continues, “At the company office—our support center, we will take care of all the administrative functions and tasks behind the scenes to help free the doctors and their teams to really serve their guests. And if you have a servant's mentality, you're probably always going to do the right thing. We put that ahead of everything we do…how we act…how we think…and how we interact with our guests and the communities we are in. We want to continue to be viewed that way by our peers and competitors as we grow.”
Advice for emerging DSO owners and partners
“You have to start with the right ideas, which is we want to do the best,” says Nirgudkar. “We want to be the best possible human beings first. And then, yes, we are in the business of dentistry. That's great. We want to make money, but not at the expense of sacrificing our values, our integrity, our ethics, or any of those things that matter way more than the EBITDA or the valuation that we will ever achieve.”
Provow couldn't agree more. “If you do the right thing and you serve your stakeholders, the profit will come and that should be secondary in your approach. I know DSOs need to provide a return on investment for investors, but you need to make sure that you've got investors that have the same thought process and focus as you do. They need to be willing to invest to ensure that you're delivering the best experience possible and you're creating the right culture within your organization. And as Amol just said, you're taking care and focusing on all your stakeholders. If you do that, I absolutely believe the profits will come. If you put profits first, then it’s difficult to grow, and the positive influence you can have on the industry is diminished.”
Oak Dental Partners has been a Patient Prism client for years.
They currently use our solution in 16 of their locations and are seeing growth with the help of Patient Prism.
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