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Twenty minutes, with a dentist — not a recruiter.
Partnership spec
A dentist who did this
“I bought the practice I'd been associating in and spent the first year doing payroll at eleven at night. Eighteen months after partnering, I haven't opened the books once. I see more patients and I'm home for dinner.”
Dr. Marisol Vega · Torrey Pines Family Dental, San Diego · partner since 2023
New patients per month
Take-home compensation
Admin time returned per week
Two-minute audit
How much of your week isn't dentistry?
Tick what you personally handle. Not your office manager — you.
Your result
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Working days a year, off the chair
Of your own production, at {{ auditRate }} an hour
Run your own numbers
What a partnership is worth, on your production.
Two figures from you, three assumptions you can change. Nothing is sent anywhere until you ask for it.
Your practice
Associates are commonly 28–33%. Owners: use your take-home after overhead.
Assumptions
Illustrative model, not an offer or a projection. We build a real one with your P&L in the second conversation.
Against {{ currentCompY5 }} on your current arrangement.
{{ ownership }}% of a practice worth {{ practiceValue }}.
Cumulative compensation plus equity, versus staying as you are.
Cumulative value, five years
Want this modelled properly?
We'll build it against your actual production and overhead and email it back within two days.
If you already own a practice
The first ninety days, hour by hour.
The fear isn't the economics — it's disruption. Here is exactly what changes, and when.
Nothing visible changes
Same schedule, same team, same software. We shadow your operations and payroll cycle without touching them.
The back office moves
Bookkeeping, payroll, credentialing and compliance transfer to our team. Your office manager stops being an accountant.
Growth work begins
Marketing audit, recall and reactivation campaigns, supply contracts renegotiated, open roles posted.
First quarterly review
One page: production, new patients, overhead, team. Then we agree what the next quarter is for.
What happens to your team
Lower commitment than a call
Request a valuation of your practice
Send last year's production and overhead. You'll get a written valuation range and the assumptions behind it — whether or not you ever want a partnership. Most owners have never seen one.
Confidential. No mailing list, no broker introductions.
If you're buying or starting
From associate to owner, in four moves.
Most dentists stall at financing. It is the part we've done most often.
Find the practice
Yours, or one from our pipeline. We value it and tell you plainly if it's a bad buy.
Get the loan
Lender introductions, a package that gets read, and terms negotiated by someone who has seen a hundred of them.
Close it
Diligence, lease, credentialing and the hundred small items nobody warns you about.
Open supported
Back office staffed on day one. Your first month is patients, not paperwork.
What we can help you afford
Based on the last eleven practice purchases we have supported in San Diego County.
Mentorship, specifically
A practicing dentist, on your phone
Not a course, not a portal. One named dentist who has run a practice for years, who takes your call about the molar endo you're not sure about, the associate who isn't working out, or the month production dipped and you don't know why.
What stays yours. What we take on.
Yours
Every clinical decision
Treatment planning, materials, labs, the pace of your day. No corporate protocol overrides a diagnosis.
Your team
You make the hire. We source, screen and carry the paperwork behind it.
Your name and character
Patients keep the practice they chose. Nothing gets rebranded out from under you.
Ownership
Equity in the practice, and a say in what happens to it.
Ours
Recruiting
Pipeline for every role, before you feel the gap.
Marketing
New-patient flow and the reporting behind it.
Human resources
Onboarding, benefits, reviews, hard conversations.
Compliance
OSHA, HIPAA and board requirements, audit-ready.
Accounting
Books, payroll, tax and a monthly read on the practice.
Operations
Scheduling, supplies, credentialing, systems.
Financing
Lenders, structure and someone on your side of the table.
Clinical mentorship
Practicing dentists to call, one to one.
The part most groups won't print
What a partnership costs you.
If the terms only appear at the term sheet, that tells you something. Here are ours, up front.
An equal partnership — same upside, same risk, no silent majority. Written into the operating agreement, not a handshake.
With a defined exit at fair market value. You are not locked into a decade.
No production targets, no treatment scripts, no vendor mandates on clinical materials.
Same three terms for every partner, whether you're buying your first operatory or your third practice.
Three honest options
Associate, solo owner, or partner.
Two of these rows go against us. We've left them in — you'd find them anyway.
| Stay an associate | Buy solo, run it yourself | Partner with Del Mar | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Capital required | None | A seven-figure loan and a personal guarantee | The same loan, structured and negotiated with you |
| Admin hours a week | Almost none | Ten to fifteen, most of them after hours | One or two |
| Clinical control | Your employer's call | Total | Total |
| Hiring your team | Not your decision | Yours — sourcing, screening and firing included | Yours, with a recruiting pipeline behind it |
| Income, year one | Predictable and capped | Often lower than associating — debt service bites first | Competitive from day one |
| Income, year five | Roughly flat | Solo winsHighest of the three, if you're good at the business | Compensation plus accruing equity |
| Wealth at exit | None | Solo winsThe whole practice — if you can find a buyer | Your equity share, with a buyer already at the table |
| If it goes wrong | Find another job | Personally liable for the note | Shared — we're paid on collections, so we feel it too |
| Who you call at nine at night | Nobody, but nothing's your problem | Nobody | A dentist who has run a practice for years |
If you want to run the business and you're good at it, solo ownership pays more. That's just true. A partnership is for dentists who'd rather spend those hours in the chair — and who'd rather not learn payroll tax the hard way.
Footprint
Where we're active
One market, on purpose. Every practice we support is within an hour's drive, and so is every person supporting it.
Currently operating in
Close enough that your accountant, your recruiter and your mentor know the practice, the neighbourhood and the referral network by name — not from a dashboard three time zones away.
The questions dentists actually ask
Usually in the second half of the call, once we've stopped being polite.
Are you private equity? Am I going to be flipped?+
No. Del Mar is owned by the dentists who practise in it, alongside two founding partners who are also practising dentists. There is no private-equity fund behind us, no roll-up mandate and no five-year clock counting down to a sale. If that ever changes, every partner has a right of first refusal written into the operating agreement — you would be the buyer, not the inventory.
What happens if I want out?+
There's a defined exit at fair market value, written into the operating agreement before you sign anything. You can buy back our interest, sell to another partner dentist, or sell the practice outright. Nobody is held in by a clause they didn't read.
Who owns the patient records?+
The practice does, and the practice is yours. Del Mar is a service organisation — we never hold the clinical entity, the patient records or the provider licence. California law requires that structure, and we think it is the right one regardless.
Will anyone tell me how to treat a patient?+
No. No production quotas, no treatment scripts, no mandated materials or labs. Our mentorship is available when you want a second opinion — it is never an instruction, and it never comes from someone who doesn't practice.
What if my practice underperforms?+
Then we've both got a problem, and we're paid on collections, so we feel it too. That alignment is deliberate. What doesn't happen: a quota conversation, a consultant flown in, or pressure to change how you treat.
I'm not ready for years. Is a call a waste of your time?+
No. Most of the dentists we partner with talked to us a year or two before anything happened. Knowing what a purchase costs and what a practice is worth is useful whether or not you ever call us again.
Twenty minutes, dentist to dentist.
Tell us where you are. We'll tell you honestly whether a partnership leaves you better off — including the times it doesn't.