Education Membership
Dentists are taught to practice. Almost nobody teaches them to own.
Four years of clinical training and none of it covers where the money actually goes between the chair and the bank account. Revenue cycle, reading a profit and loss statement, building a team that runs without you, and knowing what the business is worth.
Why this exists
Advice is abundant. Operating discipline is not.
Owners are not short of information. There is a course, a coach, a study club and a conference for every problem a practice has. What is missing is a way to work through the whole business in order, with the same discipline, alongside people running businesses at the same stage.
Two things are true of nearly every owner who walks in. They describe a marketing problem, and what they actually have is a revenue cycle and leadership problem. Money that was already produced never arrives, and nobody in the building is accountable for the gap.
Almost nobody tells the truth about their business until the third session, which is why a weekend seminar cannot do this and a year can.
This has been built before
Not a new idea. A proven one, rebuilt.
Eric Nuss founded and ran the Dental Business Institute inside Henry Schein, a year-long, cohort-based business program for practice owners. He wrote the four textbooks that became its curriculum and led the classroom himself for eight years.
More than three hundred owners participated in the program, which expanded nationally during its run. Forbes covered the program in 2016 and Dental Economics recognized its national rollout.
What follows is that curriculum, eight years of iteration, and everything learned about why owners actually change, rebuilt and brought current.
The curriculum
Plan. Build. Grow. Repeat.
Four movements, run in order, then run again. Revenue cycle runs through all four, because it is the only system in a practice that touches production, collections, the team, and enterprise value at the same time. Everything else is downstream of it.
What you want the business to make possible, what that requires it to produce, and the honest distance between that and today.
The infrastructure a business needs to hold weight. Revenue cycle first, because nothing else survives a broken one, then facility, technology, people, and finance.
The gap between what you produce and what you collect, the capacity already in the building going unused, and what it takes operationally to capture both.
Measure what moved, decide what happens next, and run the cycle again against a business that is no longer the one you started with.
Who it is for
Owners who want to run the business, not just work in it.
The material assumes you already know how to practice. It assumes you do not yet have a system for the rest of it.
New owners
You bought or built a practice and inherited a business you were never trained to run. Learning it deliberately beats learning it expensively.
Owners at a plateau
Production is fine and the money is not there, or growth has stopped and nobody can say why. The answer is usually a system, not a tactic.
Owners building something larger
A second location, an associate track, or a group. The discipline that runs one practice well is what makes more than one survivable.
The format
A one-year commitment. Then you decide whether to run it again.
A cohort of twenty-five to thirty owners meets four times across a year, three days each time, offsite. Between sessions the work continues against your own business and gets reviewed when the room reconvenes. Twelve days in the room, and the other three hundred fifty-three doing the work.
The owner and the office manager, together
The owner writes the check and the office manager decides whether anything changes. Programs that teach only one of them fail on implementation, every time. Both seats come as a pair.
Your own numbers, not a case study
The Practice Review that opens your membership becomes the baseline. Every exercise runs against those figures, and by the fourth session you can see what a year of work actually moved.
The room does the work
Behavior changes because of who is sitting around the table, not because of what is on the slide. Twenty-five owners at the same stage will ask each other questions no facilitator can.
Ninety-day priorities and a scorecard
Each session ends with a small number of commitments for the quarter and the measures that will show whether they happened. Those get reviewed in front of the room at the next session.
Accountability is the mechanism
Adoption fails from lack of accountability rather than lack of understanding. Almost every owner already knows two of the three things they should be doing.
Practitioners at the front
Sessions are led by people who have run the function being taught, with outside specialists brought in where the depth is genuinely theirs.
The years after
The room you sit in is earned, not bought.
Most owners renew, and the ones who do not renew are usually the ones who did nothing between sessions. That is the point of the design. What moves you up is not another payment, it is what happened in your business over the twelve months you were in the room.
Year one, the foundation
Revenue cycle, the numbers, the team, and the operating cadence. Nearly every owner has the same gaps here regardless of size, which is why the first year is common ground.
Year two and beyond, the ratchet
Advancement is by what you executed, not by tenure or by what you paid. Owners who did the work move into a room with owners who also did the work, and the conversation changes accordingly.
Bigger rooms, bigger operators
Later cohorts are multi-location owners, groups, and people who have taken a business through a transaction. The material advances because the room does, and at that level the peers are worth more than the curriculum.
The cohort is the asset
You keep the room. The relationships built across a year of working on real numbers together outlast the program, and for most participants they turn out to be the durable part.
Two ways in
Depth for owners. Standards for teams.
The cohort program
The full year. Four sessions, twelve days, owner and office manager together, run against your own business. Limited seats by design, because the room stops working above thirty.
Certification
A shorter certification track for team members in defined roles, with validation on completion and annual continuing education to maintain the standard. Built for practices that want a standard rather than a seminar.
What comes after
Owners who want the plan built rather than taught move into the Blueprint. Owners who want it run move into Operations Management. Neither is required and neither is assumed.
The membership
One monthly fee. Everything in it.
This is a membership rather than a course, because the work does not stop when a session ends and neither does the access. It opens with a full diagnostic of your business, includes rooms and meals for both of you at every session, and runs against your numbers for the next twelve months.
Includes the owner + one office manager
No session fees, no materials fees, and nothing sold from the front of the room.
Forty-five percent off for additional people from the same practice. Additional attendees book their own room.
- A Comprehensive Practice Review to start. A $5,500 diagnostic of the whole business, run before the first session, so every exercise for the next year runs against your real numbers.
- Four sessions a year, three days each. Twelve days in the room, offsite, with a cohort of twenty-five to thirty.
- Eighty hours of instruction. Earned on site across the year rather than chased separately.
- All meals included. Every session. Nothing about the room is run cheaply.
- Rooms for both of you at every session. Twelve nights a year for the owner and one office manager, inside the fee. Additional attendees book their own rooms.
- Additional attendees at forty-five percent off. The owner and one office manager are already included. Bring additional leaders from the practice for $1,348 per month each. Additional attendees book their own room.
- Ten percent off every XpoNential service for as long as you are a member. The Practice Review, the Blueprint, Operations Management, and transaction work.
- The cohort. Twenty-five owners working on real numbers together for a year, and they are yours to keep.
The next cohort is being scheduled.
Tell us where the practice is and what you want it to become, and we will tell you plainly whether this is the right thing for you or whether something else would serve you better.