> Emerging Group Spotlight
Getting By with Help from Your Friends The story of Blueprint Smiles : By Pete Mercer
Success in any industry doesn’t typically happen without some help along the way. Collaboration is a huge part of success, and finding a supporting partner is a crucial step in any journey. For the dental industry, support can come in a number of different ways. For Dr. Dipesh Patel, it came in the form of Blueprint Smiles, a DSO he started to help practices grow.
The Blueprint Smiles management team: (left to right) Prince Joseph, Dipesh Patel, Vic Naik (center back), Ravi Patel, Hans Patel.
Blueprint Smiles started about 8 years ago. Dipesh had just finished dental school and purchased a practice, but he had very little experience and no knowledge of what to do next. He reached out to some friends from his years as an undergrad to build a website to help his business grow. Dipesh said, “I put a team together and said, ‘Hey, I’ll pay you guys based on profit that we have. Help me create this.’ I knew I couldn’t be the only one that was going to be in
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this boat, buying a practice and paying student loans.” Dipesh used the services that Blueprint Smiles offers to help grow his original practice. Dr. Ravi Patel, who serves as the Chief Operating Officer and Clinical Director for Blueprint, was Dipesh’s roommate in dental school, and was in a similar situation with his experience. Dipesh convinced Ravi to buy a practice as well, promising to help him get started. “I told him, ‘Well, I’ve already messed up about a year.
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2021 • DENTAL GROUP PRACTICE
I will make sure you don’t mess up for at least that same time period.’ So, he technically became our first client.” After growing his practice, Ravi joined the team at Blueprint. Dipesh pushed his team to move into acquisitions. With an IT specialist, a lawyer, and an operations specialist, Dipesh and Ravi started growing Blueprint Smiles by purchasing three more practices. Ravi described the motivation for growing Blueprint Smiles, saying, “These practices that we grew, they were grown with the intent to make our own lives easier. We built these organizations to serve us and give us a quality of life that we could enjoy, which embodies our motto ‘Work, Life, Thrive’. Once we got these organizations to where we felt like they were successful, we knew that we weren’t the only ones that could go through this process of practice growth. If two guys that probably aren’t the smartest guys in the room can do it, there have to be other folks out there we can help support.” Ravi and Dipesh wanted to replicate their success for other dentists, partnering with them in order to give them the same quality of life and success they had both experienced. This approach is what makes Ravi and Dipesh unique in the industry. They developed a formula that not only works for who they are and what they do, but they have proven that it works within their own practices.
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