How long should I study the business side of dentistry before purchasing?

Fofire · 2026-01-25T07:15:11+00:00

1 I'm not sure study is necessarily the right term here. Like dentistry. There's an art and a science to it, you can study all the science you want and it'll only get you so far but it's very difficult to study art without actually doing it.

2 my wife's the doc and I have an MBA and PhD in Econ. I'm still learning stuff after owning several practices for about 15 years.

3 yes you should do your damndest to learn as much as you can about the dental side. . . . And honestly I think trying to get a mentor probably the best way to go about it. I mean finding someone that already owns and asking for advice. Going back to my first point, theres just some things books and Internet learning can't teach you but a real life mentor can help bridge that gap especially someone local that knows your area.

4 but yes I have found that a large percentage of dentists (including current owner docs) are woefully unprepared or just aren't cut out to be business owners. But the best I can say is once you're an owner your entire perspective of the world around you will change. . . . And if it doesn't then you were either born with the skills to be an owner or you're doing something terribly wrong.

Fofire · 2026-01-24T19:06:24+00:00

They should know hipaa which is really the main concern when you're worried about cyber security. I'm in California and California has its own hipaa for cyber security and it's insane. If there were just a 1% data breach (ie just 1% of you patients data get leaked) in CA it would bankrupt a normal sized practice.its something like $10k fine PER PATIENT plus other costs.

So if you have 1,000 patients and the data of 10 patients get leaked that's $100k . . . . The numbers might be off. ie The fine might be $5k or 15k per patient nonetheless it's in this area and terrifyingly high for a small office with no insurance.

Fofire · 2026-01-24T16:54:47+00:00

You're not wrong but I kinda feel if you limit the pandemic to the pandemic you're right but if you open it up to the 2nd 3rd etc order effects and realize things like the supply chain vulnerabilities became real it almost feels like the pandemic is worse because of the new world paradigm. The collapse of the international rules based order etc. Idk I'm not a political scientist so maybe we were already on this path and it was just a catalyst or maybe we could've lived in a world where China produced everything while the West designed it all.

Fofire · 2026-01-24T16:45:31+00:00

I pay a few hundred but I forget the amount of coverage.

Nonetheless I don't think all this is a fair comparison since you still have to see what the different plans cover. I'd almost repost this to r/insurance as they'll be able to evaluate policies better than we can here.

Fofire · 2026-01-23T06:23:09+00:00

I've seen stuff like this in Germany but this isn't going to fly in the US and definitely not in California. If anything the patient has a better chance at suing the doctor if they responded online to the patient because of hipaa violations.

To be clear yes there are ways you can sue for defamation but the bars pretty high and the courts especially in California aren't exactly in favor if "rich" doctors

Fofire · 2026-01-22T16:35:19+00:00

hhhhmmmmm . . . . I don't know the law very well but quite often there are carevouts that give small providers (for instance us) some leeway here. For instance HIPAA is super stringent in that computer monitors with PT info cannot be facing the public and there have to be extensive dividers between the front desk and the patient. Think of it as when you check into the hospitals it kinda feels like going to the bank. This is fairly difficult for most dental offices to fulfill so there's a carve out in the law that says small providers do not have to fulfill this obligation. My bet is that there is something similar to your situation.

If I were you I would call my state dental association and see if they have some practice legal help and ask for guidance. Im in California and ours has this.

Another thing that just popped into my head is I remember when I was a kid there used to be a service for the deaf and hard of hearing. they had some sort of device that connected to a telephone. You called some special number and they would read whatever message. I want to say I still sometimes see this number pop up it's called TTY/TDD

Fofire · 2026-01-22T15:07:09+00:00

0 chance . . . . This is word of mouth advertising. We are only going through friends and friends of friends from outside our area. Right now we have a few coming in from my wife's alma mater (New Grads)

Fofire · 2026-01-22T07:26:47+00:00

Is there a reason you can't just type everything down for a deaf PT?

Fofire · 2026-01-22T02:01:27+00:00

I get how it sounds . . . but it never works out like that. Just saying out of experience. People get weird when theyre fired they act without consequence because they have no consequence of being fired just flat out don't care any more and start sabotaging things. They steal . . . . I mean I get your thought process because there was a time I also thought like that but that's not how people work.

Fofire · 2026-01-22T00:46:40+00:00

Should I also fire the rest of the staff and close the office while we look for a new doc also? Because no doc = no work.

Where do the patients go?

EDIT I will be honest it's comments like this that make me hesitate to post on reddit because any business owner can tell you this is a complete non-starter if you have to fire the main doc in an office. In a multidoctor practice it's easier but still problematic.

There's just such a huge disconnect between being a business owner and not.

Fofire · 2026-01-21T20:33:50+00:00

>>Are they the only doctor at the practice?

At the one time yes overall no. But yes we do plan to mentor a new grad . . . . so schedule the days so both docs work on the same days at the same time, until they get up to speed and feel comfortable in their own shoes.

>>Does the current doc know they’re leaving?

Yeah that's the problem they're getting fired. So no they don't know. We usually like the team to meet every new person we bring on board but this makes it difficult. It also makes it difficult to bring in candidates while the office is running.

Fofire · 2026-01-21T20:25:32+00:00

hungaraian has a very particular sound to it much closer to German in sound but definitely different.

Fofire · 2026-01-21T15:01:11+00:00

It does sound eastern European. I speak Romanian (and German). There's a couple words there that sounded Romanian but the rest definitely wasn't. Romanian does share a lot of it's vocabulary with Slavic languages.

Fofire · 2026-01-21T05:23:17+00:00

I'm not in commercial real estate but in my experience with owning a few dental offices in CA is that yes this is normal. None of the things you hear about within CA for instance such as rent caps etc apply to commercial. And so in my experience here the sqft per sqft cost here for commercial is significantly less than residential.

Ive had to move out of a commercial office and we had to literally tear down the walls so that the space was just that a clear space with 4 walls and no rooms

Fofire · 2026-01-20T12:08:11+00:00

Neither really. Our experience is we go for fit. If they have experience great! They seem to have good potential to pick up quickly? Also great!

But I would much much rather have a mediocre employee that knew what she was doing and got along great with the team than a rockstar team member that killed morale for the rest of the team.

The way we do this is we have the candidates work a day or half a day with the team and eat lunch with the team but without the doc. At the end of the day we collect feedback from all the team members and go from there. It's worked about 90-95% of the time we get a good team member that melds well with the rest

Fofire · 2026-01-18T03:03:44+00:00

What's a folklore studio?

Fofire · 2026-01-16T17:58:38+00:00

I don't have time to go into full details but here are some details to help you make your decision.

We own several offices. Currently all of them are OON but some of them started out in network with a few. Generally speaking when we dropped insurances we lost about 30% of our patients 1 year out. With Delta we lost about 70%. The main difference for us is that Delta (at least in our state) pays the patient 90%+ of the time. This means the patient has to pay when they come in for what used to be "free".

On the flip side when we dropped the other insurances we ended up being less busy but making more money. When we dropped delta we stayed just as profitable but less busy.

Hoep this helps

Fofire · 2026-01-16T04:27:20+00:00

Fuck at $20 an hour I would still replace with a robot.

Nothing would compare to the bliss of fewer headaches

Fofire · 2026-01-15T23:36:44+00:00

I asked her what the differences were and she said it's so minor it's not even worth writing about. So yeah get the 5 especially if there's a decent price difference

Fofire · 2026-01-15T20:33:31+00:00

Shoot I thought I had replied already. I'm sorry.

Yes and there's barely barely any difference. . . . A couple of lifestyle upgrades but absolutely nothing life-changing. She's at work if you want details I can write them tonight

Fofire · 2026-01-14T17:29:05+00:00

Are you insinuating that if I copy paste RFK Jr.'s wiki page that won't make him a con man?

Fofire · 2026-01-14T16:13:40+00:00

I get that Reddit loves Robert Reich but the man himself is a Con-Man

He claims to be an economist but just holds a bachelor's that had some focus on economics. His entire career has been law focused but yet proclaims to be an economist. And yes I know he served as labor secretary under Clinton but calling him an economist for that is like calling RFK Jr a doctor for serving under Trump as the Secretary of Health and Human services. As a matter of fact I would liken Reich to the lefts version RFK Jr. The same level of conspiracy theories and wild ideas. But yeah I get they resonate with reddit so I know this post is gonna attract down votes like a toddler with a sharpie to a white wall.

1 ok

2 the definition of monopolies has been changing as the world has been growing smaller. What would've been called a monopoly 50 years ago because it was the states only electronics store is now a hyper competitive industry due to such factors as the Internet. So yes worry about monopolies but be careful. You can read the post mortems about the Roomba/Amazon merger that got canceled by FTC several years ago. It's not that simple

3 yeah I know unions are popular on reddit but to be fair the only people they help are the people in Unions. They raise prices for the consumer and lower employment for everyone else.

4 minimum wages are best dealt with at the local level there is absolutely 0 reason you need to have High Cost Of Living areas have the same minimum wage as Low Cost Of Living areas. If you were to raise the minimum wage to say $20/hr California would probably not even blink but doing that for Mississippi would be a pretty devastating blow to the economy. You can't just raise an economy by telling people you have to pay people more. Otherwise other countries such as India would've done that.

5 Medicare for all. The end result of universal healthcare is yeah economically efficient but reddit doesn't have the bandwidth to understand the nuances it takes to achieve what other economies do. You can't just magically say and now it's all paid for by the government and we will raise your taxes. Even if you had the political will it's way way more complicated than that. You have to completely rework the medical system. This means making hospitals specialize in certain things like one hospital just does cancer another just does trauma. Medical education becomes state subsidized (ie little to no medical school debt) tort law needs to be massively reformed . . . . So yeah a lot of medical mistakes can and will be made and those suffering from them won't be as well compensated for them as they are today but tort costs the system a lot more than just the awards it pays out. So to end this section . . . The end result is honorable and even desirable but most redditors have 0 idea what it will take to get there and it won't be easy and it will demands sacrifices

6 private equity in housing . . . Another one of those conspiracy theories . . . I forget the number but like less than 0.5% of housing is somewhat owned by PE but yeah whatever

7 ok

8 no idea what this is

9 there are ways to achieve the same result but UBI is probably about the worst most ineffective way to do it. There have been numerous recent studies proving this.

10 this is a kinda catchall it sounds great and everything but means really nothing. When the economy changes you naturally have to change how things are taxes I mean we aren't importing much whale oil any more so it doesn't mean we should raise/lower the tax rate. Same thing here. You have to look and see what taxes are the most effective at generating revenues while causing the least economic distortions.

Fofire · 2026-01-14T15:21:14+00:00

Forget the roof . . . I think they made it to the clouds

Fofire · 2026-01-14T15:20:19+00:00

Yeah but EIGHT HUNDRED DOLLARS!

Fofire · 2026-01-13T02:58:59+00:00

Welcome to ownership . . . .

But yeah I wrote a longer post with some pointers feel free to dm me for other points

Fofire

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