> Growth
Onboarding Locations DecisionOne leaders discuss lessons learned during their organization’s growth.
DecisionOne Dental Partners is a clinician-led firm that is designed to drive all decisions towards the best outcomes and processes for the patient. DecisionOne works with dentists at all stages of their practices, whether they are just getting started or looking to retire. By changing the way dentistry is done, the DecisionOne team is looking to improve the lives their patients and team members. In the following panel, DecisionOne leaders discuss their organization’s growth with the DEO. Participating in the discussion were: > Cheryl Rytina is the Director of Operations at DecisionOne Dental Partners. Rytina works with the due diligence in the acquisitions process, ensuring that the transition between the acquisition manager and the ops team is seamless.
> Michael Lovergine is the transitions manager for DecisionOne. He helps to assimilate new practices into the group, acting as the communications liaison between the practice and DecisionOne.
> Kristy Walter is the insurance/AR manager for DecisionOne. Walter works out of the support center at DecisionOne, centralizing their insurance, AR, and verifications processes.
> Mike Olson is the Senior Director of Mergers and Acquisitions at DecisionOne. Olson works with general dentists who are looking to transition their office, either to begin a retirement plan or to grow and strengthen their existing practice.
The DEO: Let’s get started with how your team is structured as a whole. Were you before? How has the team evolved? Cheryl Rytina: In the very beginning, it was one and the same. Dr. A.J. Acierno was CEO and a practicing dentist, and he was going out and finding practices. Mike Olson, we were very lucky to have a relationship with him early on when he was working for a bank. That
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relationship goes a long way back, and we are lucky to have him on the team at DecisionOne. At first, he was helping us to identify good practices to buy and seeing the lending support behind that. All three of us would deploy to an office and do what we did best – forming relationships with the teams, finding out what they were looking for, and what success meant to their office. We would help implement systems to bring them to the next level and then we started building our own infrastructure as we continued to grow. At some point I did marketing, someone else did the recruiting and payroll and those kinds of things. So, it really was “Here, whoever’s available, do it,” at one point. It grew quite quickly from one office to another to another. The DEO: Can you walk us through the order that you split the team into different positions and how you made those decisions? Rytina: I think the order went in what the teams needed to be supported. It started with accounting, which we always looked at it as a result of what the offices are doing. After that, we realized that marketing was a really big part of getting results for the offices. How are we going to get out there so people know the great things that Dr. A.J. and Dr. Mike are trying to do for the profession? We quickly learned we needed insurance.
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