You’d open an office. You’d build relationships with other dentists. You’d serve the patients well …

And as your reputation grew, the referrals would come in. Your practice would grow and thrive.

In turn, that allowed you to focus your energy on providing the best possible care for your patients. They would recover and thrive, too. It’s why we became dental specialists.

Then one day that began to change …

General dentists began to offer periodontal services. You’d get a call in difficult cases, often when “it’s too late” or nearly too late.

Meanwhile, group practices became more common … and these groups would hire their own periodontist and other specialists to work 1-2 days a week. Keeping things in house became more common.

Periodontists and other specialists who built their practice on referrals found their practices growing slower and that referrals were harder to come by … and when the referrals did come, they were often “late in the game.”

Other times, frankly, specialists had to stand by and watch their good professional work get undone by lower-quality dentists.

There had to be another way to treat patients effectively (before it’s too late) and grow a specialist practice in the new business environment ….

And that is why my office manager and I founded the Institute for Dental Specialists in 2014.

I am a practitioner–I run my own specialist practice and absolutely love it and my patients.

That’s what sets IDS apart from other continuing education courses and from organizations that teach one-size-fits-all business skills. I am on the front lines and I have faced all the challenges we all face, one by one, and learned a way through the external forces that besiege our specialty … ones we all know about.