Launching a New Dental Practice Is a Challenge in This Economy

What most people inherently know but don’t think about is that unless it’s an emergency like a throbbing toothache or a facial swelling that requires immediate care, dentistry competes for discretionary dollars. What sort of discretionary dollars? New clothes, vacations, jewelry, presents or even that new car. Being mindful that this is not a good economic environment to start a dental practice, Dr. Alan Winter still decided to leave his periodontal group practice and strike out on his own. In order to achieve this goal, a number of thought processes were critical in how he went about this daunting task. The first step was to find a suitable office.

In New York City, this is not easy. He had to be in mid-town, and he had to be centrally located to both his referring dentists and to public transportation. He also had to find a building willing to take on a dentist as a tenant, because many buildings look unfavorably on dentists due to the traffic of patients, water needs, and the smell of medicaments (even though this is ancient history). As luck would have it, a colleague, Dr. Marc Beshar was in the market to transfer his lease and existing dental office to a dentist so that he could move his cosmetic practice a few blocks over to a landmark building. Dr. Beshar’s needs turned into the first cornerstone of Dr. Winter’s plan: find an existing office to minimize dollars required to build out a new facility.

In this case, Dr. Beshar had four operatories and a laboratory that was in a room large enough to be turned into a treatment room. In addition, he had already negotiated a new lease with his building’s landlord, paving the way for another dentist to continue in his space. When Dr. Winter learned of this opportunity, he jumped at the chance of taking over the lease in a favorable location with a landlord committed to a dental tenant. Dr. Winter bought the existing equipment from Dr. Beshar and an added benefit was to turn the laboratory into a fifth treatment room.

As soon as the deal was struck, Dr. Winter next searched for associates to form a group that would offer a full range of periodontal treatments, including periodontal (osseous) surgery, gum grafts, dental implants, laser gum surgery and more and help pay for the expenses to run the office. Dr. Winter put an ad in the New York State Dental Journal, and within a month had met and interviewed three outstanding candidates. Rather than pick one, he selected all three who were young and eager to start periodontal practices in Manhattan, but did not have the means or opportunity do to so these tough economic times. So within three months, Dr. Winter went from considering starting a new periodontal practice to not only acquiring and readying a new office, but forming Central Park Periodontics, that will immediately impact New York City dentistry and periodontal care as it is launched on July 1, 2010.