> Affiliations
The House That Affiliations Built Integrating new practices into your brand requires you to develop foundational systems. : By Dr. Samson Liu, MAGD, MBA, MSF
When I started SOHDental in June of 2018, I had a vision to own three locations within the first year. Somehow, after 14 months, SOHDental had 27 locations! It was not an easy or smooth journey by any stretch of the imagination, but it allowed me to develop a dental brand that benefits the patient through unique, customer-focused treatments and approaches.
SOHDental was built through affiliations. Building a business by affiliation is a risky venture for any industry if not done successfully. Part of what we initially struggled with was learning the process of buying and integrating practices. How could we establish our brand if we weren’t even able to master the art of acquiring practices? Therefore, we made a conscious decision that the only way to get good at something is to practice, practice, practice!
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Repeat the same process over and over again and make mistakes early and often, but then always use our best effort to learn from those mistakes. Some people called this process CANI (Constant And Neverending Improvement). That is essentially what we did in the first year. In addition, we quickly realized that there is little-to-no bargaining power with only two or three locations, so we developed an ambitious aggregation
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021 • DENTAL GROUP PRACTICE
strategy. First year, first step is focus on the customer. As a support organization, our customer base is dental practices, doctors, and their teams. Our priority was to aggregate as many customers as possible in the first year, while refining the engine of SOHDental.
Next steps In the second year, second step is worked on an operational efficiency strategy. We made mistakes in our process of buying a lot of practices over a short period of time, but we accelerated our learning curve significantly. Now with the operational efficiency strategy, we are working on perfecting the transitional period of the acquisitions
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