Since the beginning, we’ve been dedicated to breaking down barriers to care and empowering dentists. It starts with a deep understanding of who the Aspen Dental patient is and what their needs are, while also creating a culture of collaboration and support that attracts dentists and team members who want to deliver life-changing care every single day.
Everything started with ‘Yes’
Aspen Dental was built on a foundation of “Yes”–yes to an easy and convenient patient experience, yes to rewarding careers and opportunities for dentists and team members, and yes to embracing the best protocols, treatments, and technologies available.
After starting his career in a dental office in New England, Aspen Dental founder Bob Fontana couldn’t help but notice the multitude of friction points for patients and providers alike.
He wanted to solve the problems inherent in the traditional dental practice model to deliver a better experience for both patients and providers, which meant finding ways to break down barriers to care, both emotional and practical. For patients, that meant more convenient locations with extended hours; scheduling patients with urgency and accepting walk ins and emergencies; onsite labs that enabled quick turnaround on treatments like dentures; as well as transparent billing and affordable patient financing solutions. It was all about designing a model that would eliminate as much of the friction from the dental experience for patients as possible.
Equally important as designing a model that patients would choose was developing one that works for providers. That means The Aspen Dental model would also make things easier for dentists, by offering comprehensive, non-clinical business support, promoting opportunities for growth, enhancing job satisfaction, and fostering a stellar culture steeped in collaboration, mentorship, and fun–not to mention better incentives and payment.
In 1998, Bob turned this hypothetical model into a reality by opening the first Aspen Dental office in Greece, New York. Every piece of the Aspen Dental consumer experience was based on a deep understanding of the patients, from where they want to go, to how they want to be seen, to how they want to pay for their care. We got to know Aspen patients as consumers so we could meet them where they were at, finding creative ways to solve their problems conveniently and quickly.
As we grew in those first few years, we also worked to elevate the provider experience. Clinicians value flexibility, freedom, mentorship, and lifelong learning, and that’s what we sought to deliver. As we scaled the business, we continued to find new ways to help empower providers, introducing the Managing Clinical Director (MCD) program to our supported dentists in 2002. The MCD program was designed to help treat dentists as owners, recognizing their role as leaders in the practice and aligning goals for the entire office. We wanted to reignite dentists’ passion, energy, and commitment to the business while also breaking down silos between dentists and team members. As dentists became more engaged, our supported practices’ turnover decreased, while their income, practice profitability, and patient satisfaction all increased.
The results were so impressive that we quickly realized we needed to not only empower our supported dentists as clinicians–but we also needed to promote a complete path to practice ownership for more dentists.
The ownership inflection point
By 2004, Aspen Dental had grown to just over 60 locations. From the MCD program, we’d learned how to better align dentist and business interests, as well as how to best meet the needs of clinicians. We realized, however, that we needed to do more than help our supported practices to just give dentists jobs–we wanted to promote and empower broader ownership of highly successful dental practices. To do that, we created the Practice Ownership Program (POP).
POP allowed new and established dentists to realize their ownership dreams much faster than they would at traditional practices, waiting decades for the current owners to retire. With POP, we could help dentists build lifelong careers at Aspen, supporting them “from hire to retire.” Bob credits creating POP as “the single most important decision in Aspen Dental’s history.”
With POP, we could continue to better align dentist and practice interests, working together to grow this business with clinicians. Empowering more dentists through real ownership opportunities helped us both attract and retain top talent, which further fueled our growth.
The results quickly spoke for themselves. Offices with POP dentist-owners proved to be all-around more successful: better team member engagement, better workplace culture, better patient satisfaction, and better business outcomes. POP is a ‘win-win-win’–dentists build practice equity, patients receive better continuity of care, and the business as a whole performs at a higher level.
Even though we had to radically transform our business model to introduce POP, this revamp made all the difference to Aspen Dental’s trajectory. From 2004 onward, we started gathering momentum. We held our first annual meeting in 2005, and continued growing our small family into a larger and larger one. We used our momentum to power through the 2008 recession; at its height in 2009 and 2010, we were hiring between 800 and 900 people per year. If there was any doubt about the benefits of the POP model, our success silenced them. We even surprised ourselves; we thought, at first, that Aspen Dental would be a small- to medium-sized regional company. With the introduction of POP and our rapid growth thereafter, we realized we had a national company on our hands.
The culture inflection point
As we ballooned from 60 practices in 2004 to 400 in 2013, we reached another inflection point. With nearly 5,000 team members, we worried about keeping such a large group both engaged and connected to our core values. At this point, our biggest challenge was determining how to build a great culture at scale.
In the early days of Aspen Dental, everybody knew everybody on a personal level. It was easier to be aligned, and all team members were clear about Aspen’s mission and purpose. But given the rapid growth of the organization, we could no longer rely on a handful of people to accomplish that colossal task–we needed systems and a structure in place to get the job done.
In 2013, we built that structure and put systems into action. We created a 20-week program to help reengage everybody with our core values and our purpose, and we introduced the “Words to Live By” campaign, which helped fuel our passion, boosting engagement by 19% year over year. Our goal was to make everyone feel like a vital part of Aspen Nation, because we know that the patient experience will never exceed the team member experience. When Aspen team members can “bleed blue” and come together to support our larger purpose and mission, then an incredible patient experience naturally follows.
Our annual Leadership Retreats reinforces our mission and strengthen our relationships. The first Aspen Dental retreat was at the Turning Stone Resort & Casino in Verona, New York in 2005, and since then, our retreats have gotten bigger and better. From Las Vegas to Chicago to Miami, we gather at world-class destinations to have fun, get together, reflect, celebrate, and remind ourselves why we are dedicated to what we do. We also take the opportunity to let loose, whether that be through talent shows, performances, standup comedy, Lip Sync Battles, and dance competitions. We’re able to all connect on a different level, and this spirit of lightheartedness further contributes to our enriching culture. Aspen team members leave refreshed, reinvigorated, and maybe with an ASPY (Achieve Superior Performance Yearly) award in their suitcases.
In addition to providing a fun release valve in the form of Leadership Retreats, we also introduced another pillar to our cultural foundation–service. We recognized that providing care is a wonderful thing, but providing care to those without access is also vital to our mission. We started the Healthy Mouth Movement in 2014 so dentists and their teams could give back to their communities, both locally and globally.
The Healthy Mouth Movement started with the Aspen Dental MouthMobile, a dental practice on wheels, that brought much-needed care directly to underserved communities. We also introduced a Day of Service to provide free care to veterans. Finally, we set our sights internationally, planning service trips to countries such as Haiti, Tanzania, Guatemala, and Mexico. Aspen dentists and team members have provided free dental care to communities all over the world. To date, the Healthy Mouth Movement has donated over thirty million dollars worth of free care. Providers who participate in any aspect of the Healthy Mouth Movement often say those experiences are some of the most rewarding of their lives.
During Aspen’s first fifteen years, we grew by about 28 new locations each year. After strengthening our cultural foundation through campaigns, programs, retreats, and community service, we started growing by closer to 60 new locations a year, even during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Even today, we’re continuing to refine our culture. The strength of our relationships with dentists is critical, and in our business
planning sessions, we still discuss new ways to make dentists’ and other team members’ lives easier and more meaningful, with increased support, new service programs, advanced training, and more. This organization is better when we have the right model and deep relationships with providers.
Rebranding and expanding
Aspen Dental was headquartered in Syracuse, New York, for nearly 20 years. However, as we continued to grow and spread across the country, we realized we needed a larger and more central location. In 2018, we relocated our headquarters to Chicago’s West Loop.
Our original West Loop building didn’t contain us for long; in 2021, we opened a brand-new, larger office in Chicago’s Fulton Market. In conjunction, we invested six million dollars to establish our TAG Oral Care Center for Excellence, a state-of-theart facility that serves as a central place for gathering, training, giving back, learning, and growing.
Growing our organization requires a solid recruitment funnel, given that we open a new location every three to four days. We want more dentists to join our ranks, so we routinely offer new opportunities. In fact, over the past few years, we have put over twenty million dollars toward learning and development for Aspen dentists and team members.
By the time we moved into our new home in Fulton Market, we had matured from our humble beginnings in upstate New York to a national organization encompassing a family of brands, including dental, urgent care, medical aesthetics, and veterinary care.
As a reflection of that growth, in 2021 The Aspen Group (TAG) was born. While TAG may operate in four different healthcare categories, our brands are united by one singular vision: To bring better care to more people.
Nationwide, TAG supports 20,000 team members, 5,200 clinicians, and 1,350 locations. Despite all this growth, we’ve never lost sight of who we are and what we stand for.
Staying on the cutting edge
We didn’t get to where we are today by resting on our laurels, and we don’t intend to start now. We’re always looking for new ways to bring the best possible care to patients, from free new patient exams for patients without insurance, to online appointment scheduling, to denture money-back guarantees, to our patient financing promise.
We also enthusiastically embrace new technology. We’re working to incorporate everything from artificial intelligence to 3-D printing as we continue to transform the business to be fully digital. Being able to scan a new patient’s mouth during one visit and then deliver a 3-D printed set of dentures a day later is revolutionizing both the patient and provider denture experience–and that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to incorporating new technology into provider workflows.
We’ve built this business by being committed to our core values, nurturing relationships, elevating the patient and provider experience, meeting people where they are, and embracing change. We care deeply about Aspen team members and patients, and every decision we make takes their needs into account. We’ve worked hard to grow a company-wide culture that makes team members excited to come into the office every day, and that excitement invariably trickles down to patients.
The past twenty-five years have been a time of incredible growth, learning, and innovation. We can’t wait to see what the next twenty-five will bring.