Why Buying a Practice Is Not the Same as Building a DSO
Canadian Dental Services, one of Canada's fastest-growing DSOs, drives double-digit organic growth year over year. Their best practice managers have never worked a day in dentistry.
Jeremy Behar hired from Marriott and Starbucks on purpose. Every dental practice already has dental knowledge. What most are missing is the management instinct to turn patient volume into patient loyalty.
Our Guest: Jeremy D. Behar is the Founder and CEO of Canadian Dental Services Corporation, one of Canada's largest unsponsored DSOs. Before launching CDS in 2016, he spent 25 years running Sirrus Consulting Group, advising hundreds of dental practices across Canada and the United States on the business fundamentals dental school never taught them. He founded CDS on a single conviction: that the dental industry in Canada needed to be disrupted, and that removing the management burden from dentists was the path to a better patient experience and a better business.
The Problem: Most DSOs are optimizing for the wrong number. They count doors acquired, celebrate the close, and assume organic growth follows. It doesn't. The industry is full of organizations that bought EBITDA instead of building it, and are now managing the consequences: diluted culture, disengaged teams, and patient attrition they can't explain.
The Solution: Jeremy Behar built CDS on the opposite model. Organic growth is a decision before it's a result. It requires hiring for hospitality over clinical familiarity, defining what great looks like in every role before someone walks through the door, and telling acquired teams the truth on day one instead of what they want to hear.
Key Takeaways:
(0:00) The commercial real estate negotiation that pulled Jeremy into dentistry 25 years ago and what it revealed about how unprepared new dentists are to run a business
(6:27) Why CDS operates as Canada's largest unsponsored DSO by design and how governance structure shapes real growth strategy
(9:34) The change management philosophy: why repetition and why, not what, are the two levers CDS pulls hardest
(15:26) The "choose your own adventure" problem: why most DSO staff have no written definition of what a great day looks like and how CDS is fixing it with a one-page role rubric
(19:10) How CDS consistently drives double-digit organic growth: the decision that has to come before any tactic
(21:05) The Marriott and Starbucks hire: why CDS deliberately recruits practice managers with zero dental background
(25:02) "Don't trust me and everything's going to change": the acquisition integration framework Jeremy built after destroying team trust early in CDS's history
(28:14) The $100K EBITDA idea: identify the holes in your top-of-funnel patient acquisition bucket, map them, and plug them one at a time
Full conversation on Healthcare100.
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