In a living room overlooking a quiet pond. Four times a year. Something unusual happens. No PowerPoint presentations. No vendor booths. No name tags or forced networking. Just twenty-some of dentistry's industry leaders sitting in a circle, sharing truths they can't say anywhere else.
This is The Collective, and for the past several years, it's been our industry's worst-kept secret — a gathering where Chief Clinical Officers admit they're drowning, where DSO executives confess they don't know how to develop people at scale, where practice owners acknowledge that growth has become a prison instead of freedom.
Between us, we've spent over three decades in the trenches of dentistry. Eric built and exited two dental groups, personally hired triple-digit associates, and coached over a billion dollars in DSO revenue. Josey became one of the most respected voices in clinical hygiene before becoming a certified EOS implementor, helping practices build the operating systems they desperately needed.
The statistics tell part of the story: 30 percent annual associate turnover in many groups, forty to one hundred thousand dollars in lost revenue per empty chair per month. But the numbers don't capture the human cost — the associates who leave dentistry entirely, the clinical leaders suffering burnout, the practice owners who thought hiring associates would give them freedom but instead gave them headaches. Here's what we've learned: this isn't a people problem. It's a systems problem.
PE-backed dentistry often optimises for the wrong things. Acquisition speed over integration quality. Revenue metrics over patient relationships. Exit timelines over sustainable excellence. The result is associates treated as interchangeable parts, clinical leaders without the tools to actually develop people, and teams that feel the mission drifting from deliver excellent care to hit the numbers.
That question led us back to each other and back to our roots. Eric and Josey's partnership was forged in the early days of building a fast-growing DSO together — long days in the trenches, solving problems no one had solved before. We learned that sustainable growth requires something most consulting firms don't talk about: you have to fix the clinical systems before you can develop the dentists.
The industry needs heart, not just hustle.
We're building for dentists who want to perpetuate what they've built, not just cash out. For DSOs that measure success in decades, not quarters. For leaders who know sustainable excellence comes from purpose, people, and playbooks working together. This isn't anti-growth. It's pro sustainable growth. It's not anti-business. It's pro business with soul.