If you spend enough time on dental Facebook groups or Reddit threads, you could be forgiven for thinking private practice dentistry is on its way out. DSOs are consolidating. Student debt is climbing. Insurance reimbursements are not exactly generous. I hear the worry from young dentists every week.
I want to offer a different view. I work as a dental accountant and buyer's advocate, which means I sit next to dentists while they make the biggest financial purchase of their careers. From that seat, the picture does not look like an industry in decline. It looks like one of the best moments in a generation to own a dental practice. Here are three reasons why.
1. Patients keep choosing people over platforms
From the boom in podcasts, to the craft beer revolution, to the exploding bean-to-bar chocolate movement, and on to boutique fitness -- consumers are consistently choosing to consume from businesses that have a more personal touch. Big, consolidated brands carry some consumer suspicion. Dental patients are no different.
Earlier this month I was featured in a local news article about independent dentists in Utah competing against corporate ownership. The article drew more than 80 reader comments in 48 hours, and the pattern in them surprised even me. Instead of debating whether corporate dentistry is more efficient, readers told stories about their own dentists, and the loyalty ran deep. One commenter urged people to find a dentist who owns his practice because that dentist builds a relationship and needs your return business. Several others said they specifically seek out offices where the person treating them also owns the place.
Here is the part the consolidation story tends to skip: patients are not actually better off in the corporate model. Care is not cheaper for them and clinical results aren't better. Dental patients can tell. Multiple readers in that comment thread described visiting corporate-owned offices, being quoted extensive treatment plans and feeling like a number, not a person. It matches something associates tell me privately all the time: in some DSO settings, they feel pressure to present treatment plans they would not choose for a family member patient. I can't verify any individual story, and there are excellent dentists working in DSO settings. But the perception is the point. Patients are actively looking for a dentist whose main agenda is caring for the person in the chair, and ownership is what makes that promise credible.
2. Dentists are too smart to hand over control
Think about what it takes to get into this profession in the first place. The GPA, the DAT scores, the work ethic, the years of delayed gratification. The same qualities that get someone through dental school make them hard to fool about their careers. When a corporate recruiter promises big things and delivers a fraction of them, dentists notice, and they talk to each other.
What ownership really buys is control, and control is not abstract. It is which patients you cater to. Which employees you keep, and which you don't. The hours you're open. How many weeks of vacation you take. Which insurance companies you're in-network with. Ownership puts every one of those decisions in your hands. A DSO takes every one of them off the table, and then the pressure for profits starts deciding things for you: more nights, more weekends, more pressure to treatment plan differently than an owner might.
Associates feel that loss of control in their day-to-day, and they chafe at it. Every associate who chafes is a future practice owner. The desire for control is the permanent pipeline to private practice.
3. Dentistry is a relationship between two human beings, and that doesn't scale
Fundamentally, the business of dentistry is a connection between two people. That is a wonderful thing to build a career on and a very hard thing to build a corporation on.
Think about the owner-run businesses you visit in your own life versus the chains. When it's a five dollar hamburger, corporate employees are fine, because the stakes are low. When it's a multi-thousand-dollar procedure happening inside your body, you want to meet the doctor. You want to feel that a real person, with their name on the door, is responsible for keeping you healthy.
The same logic runs through the whole practice. The assistants and hygienists your patients interact with either build the doctor-patient relationship or erode it, and a corporation hiring and training that team from a regional office will never care about a patient's experience the way the solo owner does, because the owner is the one walking into that room next. Even the financial promise of scale is weaker than advertised. In my experience looking at the numbers, the economies of scale that corporate ownership promises rarely materialize until well past a hundred locations, all buying identical supplies and using identical labs. Below that, you have the overhead of a corporation with the economics of a small practice, minus the relationships that make a small practice work.
The bottom line
Dentistry has heard predictions of decline for as long as anyone has been keeping score. Through all of it, dentists kept building practices, taking care of their patients, and creating financial security for their families. Patients keep telling us they want a person, not a platform. Dentists keep proving they are too sharp to trade their autonomy for someone else's promises. And the heart of this profession, one human being caring for another, remains the one thing no corporation has figured out how to mass-produce.
If you are an associate wondering whether ownership still makes sense, the answer from someone who watches these deals happen every week is this: the future of private practice is bright, and there is likely a seat in it with your name on it.
About the author
Brian Hanks, MBA, CFP®, is a dental accountant and the founder of Dental Buyer Advocates, where he helps dentists buy practices with confidence. He is the author of How to Buy a Dental Practice, now in its fifth edition, and was named a USA Dental Report Key Opinion Leader for 2026.