Growing Your Practice with DSOs

When acquiring multiple practices, dentists traditionally rely on private equity firms and landing gigs with large companies. At the Dykema conference in June, David Lopez, an entrepreneur and president of Tralongo, told DMD this system needs a facelift. Watch or read below about how Tralongo is changing the game for multiple-practice ownership.

RELATED: More from the Dykema Conference

• Ask an Expert: DSOs and Labor Laws
• How Dental Hygienists Can Benefit from DSOs
• Why DSOs Should Consider Specialized Legal Counsel

Interview Transcript (Modified for Readability)

"If I'm a dentist, and I want to expand and buy multiple practices, the norm that people follow is: They're going to buy a few practices and sell them to a private equity firm or a private equity firm-backed group of practices. It's kind of just the thing to do — you go to college, then you come out of college and you want to get a degree and hope to get a job for a big company. That's the norm, and that's kind of the environment and the landscape that exists today with the dental practices. I don't necessarily agree with that, I think there are better ways to go about it. If I'm a dentist, what I'm actually looking for are solutions so that I can go from one practice to 10 practices, and the reason I would sell to a private equity firm is to have a liquidity event, or to take money and put it away in the bank accounts so I can have financial security for my family. If you just take those challenges that the dentists actually have and you focus on building a solution to what they need, that's what Tralongo has done. We've figured out a way to help them grow so they don't need to worry about the operations, or answering the phones, or the insurance or the billing and the accounting and all the other stuff that comes along with acquiring multiple practices. We do that, and then instead of having to sell your entire company to a private equity firm, when they're ready to sell, we'll buy the practice and work with them to continue to do the same thing over and over again instead of requiring them to work for us with an employment contract."

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