The solopreneur trap in dentistry: brilliant, profitable, and hard to sell

Not choosing is what causes problems

There’s a particular type of dental business I see again and again. It’s clinically exceptional, financially strong, and admired locally. The diary is full. The reputation is superb. The owner is busy, valued, and (on the surface) winning.

And yet the business has a structural problem.

It is dependent. Not on a supplier, a lender, or even a marketing channel. It is dependent on one person: the principal fee earner.

I had a strategy session recently with a specialist clinic owner where the principal generates effectively all of the revenue. It’s an extreme example, but it’s not unusual.

The same pattern appears in general dentistry too: the owner is the magnet for high-value cases, the final clinical authority, the “only one the patients will see”, and often the person carrying the financial weight of the practice.

This model can produce excellent income. It can also create a trap.

Larger corporate buyers are becoming increasingly reluctant to bid for practices where a large proportion of turnover and EBITDA is produced by the principal. The reason is obvious: if the principal steps back, gets ill, burns out, or simply changes their mind, the revenue collapses. In these cases, corporate interest often drops away entirely, or the offer comes with a long earn-out designed to keep the principal in the building and protect the acquirer’s downside.

In the conversation I mentioned, we discussed what many corporates quietly regard as a threshold: principal dependency needs to drop dramatically (sometimes as low as 20% or less) before the business becomes genuinely “buyable” as a standalone enterprise rather than a personal service.

That’s the uncomfortable truth: a practice can be profitable and still be unsaleable.

Once you recognise the dependency problem, there are two honest pathways.

Pathway A: maximise and extract

You accept that the business is essentially a high-performing personal income engine. You maximise profit while you can, and you extract value into pensions, property and investments.

You may eventually close, merge informally, or sell only the assets and patient goodwill that can be transferred. This is a legitimate strategy, and for some owners it is the right one.

Pathway B: build to sell

You decide to convert a “principal-led practice” into a scalable enterprise. That means reducing your percentage contribution by design, not by hope. You recruit additional fee earners, you build a multidisciplinary offering, and you systemise standards so outcomes are predictable regardless of which clinician delivers the care.

In that same session, we talked about shifting from “the founder’s personal brand” to a service brand — think restaurant groups where the founder oversees quality but isn’t expected at every table. It’s the difference between being the product and owning the platform.

If you are the principal fee earner, you are not just a clinician. You are also the biggest risk on your own balance sheet.

Your job now is to choose: do you want a great income business that depends on you, or do you want a valuable enterprise that can thrive without you?

Either answer is fine. Not choosing is what causes problems.