“It’s a false trade-off. Great culture produces great results. You don’t get rid of culture and expect good results. They are intimately intertwined. What I’ve learned is that we have to convert dentistry from transactional to relational.”

DR. AMAN KAUR

Larry, thank you so much for being here, and welcome to The Executive Edge.

LARRY BENZ

Thanks. Wonderful to be here.

DR. AMAN KAUR

Larry, you are one of those people who is known throughout the industry. You’ve built companies, advised boards, invested in healthcare. Your résumé is so impressive it could take me all day to talk about it. But I want to focus on this: Who is Larry Benz? Give us a little of the backstory. Did you always know that one day you would be the CEO of one of the largest DSOs in dentistry?

LARRY BENZ

We’ll get to the dental world in a minute, but I’m Larry Benz. I’m a physical therapist by background, and I say that after having read a book by Ben Franklin a long time ago. At the end of his life, after accomplishing so much, his epitaph identified him simply as a printer. I think about that a lot.

I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, in a typical post-World War II baby-boomer home. A lot of those homes were VA-subsidized, and the big question was: How do you get out of the rat race? For us, it was through education. I became a physical therapist, earned a bachelor’s and master’s in physical therapy, and cobbled together some other degrees along the way, including a doctorate, an MBA, and a master’s in applied positive psychology. I was one of those people who never really wanted to quit school, and I did a lot of that education after I started my business, which was physical therapy clinics.

Over the last 35 to almost 40 years, I’ve built healthcare multisite platforms, as the capital markets and private equity markets would describe them. We opened a lot of locations, bought a lot of them, and in one case went public and then private. I left that company, started another with good friends and partners, and built Confluent Health to roughly 850 outpatient physical therapy clinics, contracts with about 120 hospitals and 1,100 occupational health sites, plus a robust education division.

That experience enabled me to understand healthcare from a clinical perspective. As I moved from founder and CEO to executive chairman and then into more of a founder role, I was asked to serve on several private equity boards. I had choices, but the only one that really intrigued me was dentistry. I had friends who were dentists. They always seemed to be in pretty good moods. Some were orthodontists, so they always seemed to have plenty of money. I thought, “I’ll try dental.”

As soon as I joined the board of Dental Care Alliance, which at the time was owned by Harvest and Mubadala, it became apparent that I was going to really love DCA. It’s a 35-plus-year entrepreneurial, founder-led business, and the founders are still involved to some extent. I joined the board and then became executive chair to work with the CEO. When he decided to return to the veterinary industry, the board said, “Larry, you’re going to be the CEO.”

I never thought I would return to the CEO seat. But the reality is that I love developing and managing people, and I love building businesses around culture, mission, and values. What I found was that dentistry is a lot like physical therapy. They’re twin sisters of different mothers. Both do meaningful work that impacts lives. Dentistry creates a lifetime of healthy smiles. People want to make a difference. That commonality drove me to become CEO, and that was about 18 or 19 months ago.

DR. AMAN KAUR

You said, “Don’t ask me why dentistry,” but I do want to know. Dentistry has a high level of stress and burnout, and it is such an intimate branch of medicine. We change lives by changing smiles. You’re working incredibly close to someone’s mouth, and a smile is deeply personal. So what drew you to dentistry? Was there anything about it that felt intimidating?

LARRY BENZ

It’s all intimidating. There are a lot of commonalities in the operating environment, but there are also differences. One of the differences I noticed is that dentistry can be very transactional. A patient comes in, spends a significant amount of time with the dental assistant and hygienist, and then often spends a relatively small amount of time with the dentist.

I also found that many dentists are introverted. There can be avoidance around the patient conversation, even though a large percentage of patients experience dental anxiety. You’re in a position of power. There are smells and sounds in the operatory environment. There can be pain. In psychology, we talk about the “meaning effect” of all those signals. And then there is this incredibly important relationship between the dentist, hygienist, assistant, and patient. Those dynamics fascinated me.

About 70% of our dentists are general dentists, and general dentists have one of the most incredible scopes of practice I’ve ever seen. In medicine, I couldn’t have a primary care physician do orthopedic surgery or deliver babies. But a dentist can be upskilled in endodontics, periodontics, orthodontics, oral surgery, extractions, and more. That is something we have to leverage.

Dentists are incredibly smart. They want to learn, and they want to make a difference. So the organizational challenge becomes: How do you tap into that desire to learn, that desire to make a difference, and that desire to create lifetimes of healthy smiles?

DR. AMAN KAUR

You sound like the right person for that challenge, because you noticed something people often miss when they enter dentistry: the human element. A dentist, hygienist, and assistant have to operate like a well-oiled machine.

LARRY BENZ

That’s true. The dentist of today and the future has to have strong in-mouth clinical skills, but also strong out-of-mouth skills. AI and imaging are enabling better conversations with patients, and we have to teach dentists how to have those conversations.

DR. AMAN KAUR

That can be tough, because historically we’ve almost thrived on the fact that patients aren’t in a position to talk back while we’re working.

LARRY BENZ

Exactly, but that has also contributed to the transactional nature of dentistry. When you have 1-800 services, lead generation, and a conference floor full of booths promising more patients, it’s easy to think transactionally. In other parts of healthcare, you demand more from the relationship between provider and patient. There’s less switching. You build a relationship.

I came into dentistry as an outsider. A few years ago, I knew almost nothing about it. What I’ve learned is that we have to convert dentistry from transactional to relational. We have to help dentists build practices on credibility, clinical skill, human connection, empathy, and the ability to make a difference for the patient. It’s both the in-mouth clinical skill and the out-of-mouth human skill.

DR. AMAN KAUR

That’s where the real work is. Looking across your personal life and your career, has there been one consistent belief that has guided you through all of these different roles?

LARRY BENZ

One thing that has been consistent in both my personal and professional life is that I try to approach everything from a clinical perspective. I’m a clinician. I believe clinical skills are highly transferable: diagnosis, critical thinking, human connection, communication, high-quality relationships. I’ve never lost that.

If you look at dentistry, I believe first and foremost that you need clinical excellence. You need a provider who is a master clinician, well-trained, who has the reps and confidence. But you also need service skills. And the third leg of the stool is care and compassion.

It’s the combination of clinical and nonclinical skills. I try to bring that into every environment I engage with, but first and foremost I approach it from a clinical perspective because those skills are truly transferable.

DR. AMAN KAUR

You describe caring and compassion as a skill. Do you believe people can actually become more caring and more compassionate?

LARRY BENZ

Absolutely. Empathy is a muscle. You can train it and get better at it. The science and data support that. There are valid ways to measure connection, high-quality relationships, empathetic listening, and the ability to be relatable to a patient.

Those are often called soft skills or tacit-knowledge skills, but soft skills are the new hard skills. They’re the new smart skills. They are what take a dentist from being a master clinician to being off the charts with patients. If you take the time to build those skills, patients will come to you.

I fundamentally believe we have to equip dentists to do that. When you develop those human-capital skills, dentists are also more likely to stay. It helps solve retention problems. It makes work more enjoyable. Patients refer friends and family because of the connection, empathy, care, and compassion. But it has to sit on top of clinical excellence and strong customer service.

DR. AMAN KAUR

I ask that deliberately because sometimes people say, “I am who I am.” And my response is: That’s great, but now let’s do something about it.

You’ve built and led successful companies again and again. You’ve created environments where people genuinely want to stay and grow, which is a huge accomplishment. Across your career, is there one critical thing you’ve noticed that helps people stay?

LARRY BENZ

A lot of it goes back to human needs. People have a need to learn, live, love, and grow. I learned this the hard way through patient-satisfaction studies many years ago. We participated in a validated, multisite research trial, and what I found was that very few patient-satisfaction comments said anything about the physical therapist’s clinical skill. They talked about manner, behavior, friendliness, and how the person made them feel.

Think about any service business. You’re probably not going to call your cell phone company to thank the company for good service. But you might call and say, “Your representative Debbie was so friendly and solved my problem.” People distinguish between the organization and the individual.

Dentistry is both a service business and a relationship business. So how do you improve service and relationship? You understand people on a personal level. What are their needs? What are their development needs? Don’t bring me a problem without also thinking about what development is needed and how we can solve it.

I’ve never had an employee who didn’t want to learn or grow. If they didn’t, they usually didn’t stay. When you are an organization inspired by learning, development, and new skills, people are attracted to that. Retention improves. Patient attraction improves. Patient retention improves. And treatment-case acceptance improves. Everything gets better with strong relationships, connectivity, and culture.

DR. AMAN KAUR

I’m glad you brought up culture. You’ve run profitable companies, and Dental Care Alliance is private-equity-backed. We’re in an economic environment that requires a lot of creative thinking around capital and financial discipline. When pressure rises, culture can be the first thing to go out the window. The thinking becomes, “Let’s just make sure we deliver on the bottom line.” How do you walk that line?

LARRY BENZ

I think it’s a false trade-off. Great culture produces great results. You don’t get rid of culture and expect good results. They are intimately intertwined.

You develop an organization that is mission-oriented. People in dentistry want to make a difference. They want to create a lifetime of healthy smiles. Build on that. Culture becomes a source of influence and a kind of currency around trust.

Organizations always ask how to measure culture. You can measure it through EBITDA and profit, but you can also measure engagement, retention, lack of turnover, growth in visits, and growth in treatment-case acceptance. Those are all proxies. Culture itself is difficult to quantify, but you can use engagement surveys and other measures, and you can feel it. You know when you walk into a good culture.

My belief is that without that culture, you will not produce good EBITDA or good long-term results. The financial results are byproducts of having strong culture and operating discipline.

Dentistry and healthcare services are also in a lower part of the investment cycle. There haven’t been many large platform acquisitions in the last several years, and interest rates remain high. So what makes the difference? Good operating companies.

I think you’re going to see the best operating companies distinguish themselves. A good operating company ultimately has better margin. Margin may not be the mission, but it is oxygen. Without enough oxygen, you can’t expect a provider who is gasping for air to deliver compassionate care and great clinical results. You need margin.

But if your clinicians are doing the right things—clinical excellence, customer service, care, and compassion—they will create an attractive service. This isn’t a difficult business to understand. The metrics aren’t that difficult. It’s complex because you’re dealing with human beings and relationships, but the nuts and bolts are straightforward.

The best operators will show steady growth, good margins, low turnover, and fewer staffing shortages. Those organizations will distinguish themselves, and they will earn better investment and better valuations.

DR. AMAN KAUR

Let’s say you walk into a company with no survey, no dashboard, no financials. What tells you the temperature of the culture? And how do you make sure financial discipline enhances culture and patient care rather than stripping the people element out of the business? DSOs are often scrutinized around that.

LARRY BENZ

I’m going to get to know the front desk pretty well. After I establish a relationship, I’m going to ask a few questions. Are they proud of their company? Do they believe the company produces the best at what it does? Do they believe it delivers excellent general dentistry or specialty care? And do they believe it is a great company to work for?

It’s the work, the worker, and the company. If you can get to a point of genuine pride, that tells you something about the culture. How long have people been there? How much turnover is there at the front desk? How much turnover is there in the practice-manager role? In my experience, the practice manager is the linchpin of a dental practice. If you see a lot of turnover there, it is usually a data point telling you something else is going on.

You also look at the dentist. Are they a benevolent dictator? Are they arrogant? Are dental assistants turning over constantly? Those are the kinds of things I want to understand.

Culture is hard science informed by good data, but it is also soft science. Do people care? Is there compassion? Whether you have 400 locations or 10, people tend to live and work inside the local team. They don’t think much about the other 399 locations. So who is setting the tone inside that clinic? Microcultures evolve. Corporate culture can help or harm, but local linchpins establish what the culture actually feels like, with support from the broader company.

One of the things I found at Dental Care Alliance in my first year was that dentist turnover was about 70%. It’s now around 20%. We didn’t get from 70% to 20% without thinking seriously about a Dental Care Alliance Academy, upskilling, learning, creativity, training dentists in both in-mouth and out-of-mouth skills, human connection, compassion, and customer service. And then you have to place people in an environment with mentorship, where somebody cares about their growth and development and where, at work, somebody has a good friend.

Those ideas sound like common sense, but they are not always common practice. What we’re trying to do at DCA is make common sense common practice.

DR. AMAN KAUR

From 70% turnover to 20% in 2026, when it feels like everyone wants a better job, a bigger title, and more money every three months—that’s remarkable. How are you doing it?

LARRY BENZ

It’s multifactorial. First, you attract a dentist into an environment where there is a pathway to partnership. You come in, and one of the first things we ask is: What are your interests? Are you interested in extractions, implants, orthodontics? What drives you?

We do some level-setting and then clinical residency or certification work to help that dentist become a master clinician. As clinical skill and confidence increase, the schedule gets busier because the dentist has the reps, understands how to connect with people, and realizes, “I am the builder of my practice. I am the builder of my own destination.” If you are unwilling to accept those responsibilities, this may not be the organization for you.

Along the way, if you become so good that the organization depends on you, we want to make you a partner. We want you to have an equity position in the clinic. We know that ownership can improve margin, and it creates a compelling long-term reason to stay. Compensation then becomes a combination of what you produce, distributions, and growth in equity value, similar to holding a stock.

And then there is psychological income and intellectual stimulation. Dentists are smart people. They want to keep learning and getting better. You should be in a collaborative team environment where you love coming to work.

DR. AMAN KAUR

It sounds like a dream. How are you actually making it happen?

LARRY BENZ

It’s hard to execute. You have to build the environment, and I think the biggest obstacle is capital. Most people think, “I want my capital to invest in a new location, buy a clinic, or buy more equipment.” Do you need to do those things? Yes. But the best value-creation investment you can make is in your dental professionals.

Our dental hygienists have 16 coaches. Those coaches go to our locations and work collaboratively with hygienists. They coach them on new techniques, professional growth, and personal development. They act as exemplars for the profession.

On the dentist side, we have the dental academy and a variety of ways to help clinicians get better and upskill. Then on top of that, people go through customer-service training and our Called to Care compassion training. That takes money, effort, and capital. But if you make those investments, everything downstream gets better.

If you only buy things, only buy equipment, or only open new places but don’t invest in the human-capital and talent-management lever, the other investments don’t matter.

DR. AMAN KAUR

You don’t sound like the stereotypical CEO of a private-equity-backed company. Private equity is often associated with speed and return. You are delivering returns, but you keep coming back to true value creation and building a strong operating company.

LARRY BENZ

EBITDA is a byproduct of doing everything else well. If you chase EBITDA, you’re missing the point.

My private-equity experience has not been about multiple turns and teeing everything up for the next transaction. I don’t want to work in that environment. Remember, I’m a clinician. I care about people. I want people to develop. I want people to be nurtured and mentored.

When you do those things the right way, the financial outcomes follow. You won’t meet many private-equity executives who have had as many successful transactions and exits as I have, and I did it because I wasn’t chasing the transaction. I was chasing how to build the company the right way.

DR. AMAN KAUR

If you had to name three non-negotiables for building the right company, what would they be? People talk about “the people piece,” but is there a secret sauce you prioritize differently?

LARRY BENZ

I don’t think any of it is a secret. I think it’s about what you choose to prioritize and emphasize. There’s an old management adage that you get what you measure. I don’t completely agree. I think you get what you emphasize.

If you emphasize talent and development, human capital, customer service, empathy, compassion, upskilling, and clinical skills, that is what you are going to get. And you have to put your money where your mouth is.

Yes, you will train some dentists and they will leave. But to borrow the old Zig Ziglar line: What’s worse than training people and having them leave? Not training them and having them stay.

You want to become an organization where people come to learn and get better. Then it is my job to keep them here through a pathway to partnership and a true bilateral relationship. We expect a lot in return. There are dentists who don’t want to work in that environment, and that’s okay.

One of the big surprises for me in dentistry was new graduates. You can graduate from dental school and still not be fully ready to practice independently. Post-COVID, many graduates did not get enough reps. They lack clinical confidence, and many have not learned how to talk with patients.

So a new dentist comes into a clinic on a guarantee for six months. The guarantee may be relatively modest, and then in month seven they flip to percentage compensation. If their schedule and confidence aren’t there, they can actually make less money, so they take their talents somewhere else.

Our response was: Let’s extend the guarantee to a year, but in exchange we take responsibility for training. We give them reps. We build clinical confidence. We teach them how to talk with patients.

Technology is also transforming dentistry. AI and radiographic interpretation have changed the conversation. What used to be, “Let’s wait and see what happens,” can now become, “There is something going on here, and I need to explain it to you.” I hope AI enables more conversations with patients and allows dentists to be more human. If AI does its job well, it should increase humanity in care.

Any time you have high tech, you need high touch. Right now, I’m emphasizing the touch because I believe the softer skills win and development wins. I don’t just believe it; I’ve seen it.

DR. AMAN KAUR

Dental Care Alliance is also one of the organizations leading the DSO industry in AI. Everyone is talking about computer vision, insurance claims, and other use cases, but DCA seems to have a very top-down, AI-first approach. How are you thinking about AI without forcing a square peg into a round hole?

LARRY BENZ

First and foremost, you need a lens for how you evaluate AI. Am I buying a program that simply creates another SaaS dependency? Or does it enable dentists and dental professionals to spend more time with patients? My lens is: Does it enable them to be more human?

On the technical side, radiographic AI and companies like Overjet and Pearl are doing unbelievable work. One thing I’ve learned is that dentistry is an underdiagnosed profession. I come from medicine, which in many ways is overdiagnosed. I’d rather be on the underdiagnosed side of that equation, but the goal is accurate diagnosis.

What moves underdiagnosis toward accurate diagnosis is the conversation. AI can turn “We’ll wait and see on this tooth” into “There is something here, and I need to explain it to you.” That means the dentist has to spend more time using out-of-mouth skills.

The second thing is that you need a culture of innovation. I don’t run all of our AI through the CTO or CIO. We work collaboratively with them. They establish the rules around cybersecurity, privacy, and what can and cannot be shared. But innovation cannot live only inside IT.

I have a marketing team member who is basically an AI engineer. I’m a CEO who knows how to code. I code as a hobby and have been doing it for about three years. With large language models, I can now build the equivalent of what might have taken five people years ago.

My intercompany newsletters are driven through a dashboard and systems we coded. Information that goes to the board can be produced through AI. Our locations receive AI-produced reports, but the point is not the data. We already had the data. The value is the insight, and then the insight has to lead to action.

I think of it as data, insights, actions. If you are using AI only to produce insight and there is no action, you have not completed the loop. The action is the human part.

There are also plenty of API vendors in revenue-cycle management, lead generation, and marketing, and you have to be careful. I do like some of the business-processing applications. If you look at where AI has had the biggest impact in business so far, it has often been in processing rather than completely new discovery.

AI can also change the workforce. Do you need as many financial analysts as you used to? What happens to a call center or preauthorization process? The technology has the ability to disrupt those areas. It is not fully there yet, but it has that ability. I’m very excited about AI, but again: high tech, high touch. You have to emphasize the touch.

DR. AMAN KAUR

I don’t know many other CEOs who are coding the insight reports that go to their board. It’s impressive to hear how you’re leading in such a fast-paced environment and, in some cases, staying ahead of it.

LARRY BENZ

I’ve got a great team behind me, and we’re working very diligently. We’re also having a lot of fun.

DR. AMAN KAUR

You’ve talked repeatedly about human touch and how it has become just as important as revenue. When you bring investments in people to the board and investors, what do those conversations look like? Do you ever think, “If I go back with this ask one more time, someone is going to throw something at me”?

LARRY BENZ

It’s non-negotiable. I can’t be part of an organization that doesn’t invest in its people first. And ideally, I should not have to ask for those investments as special requests. They should already be part of the value-creation plan.

In private equity, a board should work with the management team around a value-creation plan. In our case, we have four pillars.

The first is human capital and talent management. That won’t surprise you.

The second is what I call the real-time enterprise. I want to develop an organization where, if one patient cancels, another patient can immediately fill that opening; where one data point triggers the next action in real time. We used to measure at the end of the month: How many visits? How much revenue? That’s too slow. We need to operate in a much more real-time environment. It sounds technical, but it is really an optimization strategy.

The third is clinical and operational excellence. We want to be a company that manages our unit economics with pride and teaches people how to make good operating decisions. I don’t need a huge number of managers. I need people who have confidence in their decisions because they understand the economics and take pride in operational excellence. This is not a difficult business from a unit-economic standpoint. Execute on it. The people who manage best often manage least. You empower people to make decisions, and then you stand by them when every decision is not perfect.

The fourth is what I call omnichannel marketing. In dentistry, all the lead-generation noise can drive me crazy. I want 80% of our patients to come from friends, family, and former patients. I want to build a referral machine based on a dentist’s conversations and ability to connect with people. That is the fourth value-creation pillar.

DR. AMAN KAUR

And those are often the best patients. They are compliant, they refer others, and they’ll also tell you when you’re not doing well. They genuinely care about the business and their own care.

LARRY BENZ

Exactly. They also tend to produce better case acceptance. There’s no question about it.

DR. AMAN KAUR

You’ve also written some great books. Before we talk about your new dental edition of Called to Care, I want to go back to your previous work in medical care. Where did that journey start?

LARRY BENZ

We had been on a long journey in healthcare trying to understand placebo and nocebo effects and the nonclinical factors that influence clinical success. In healthcare, why might a workers’ compensation patient have a different clinical outcome than someone paying out of pocket? We knew there were psychosocial issues influencing outcomes, so I spent years digging into them.

I eventually went back to graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania and studied with founders and leaders in positive psychology, including Dr. Marty Seligman and Angela Duckworth, who wrote Grit, along with other outstanding faculty. The question was: What nonclinical factors or psychological interventions can you bring into healthcare to improve clinical outcomes?

That journey culminated in 2019 when I wrote Called to Care, focused on humanizing the patient experience. The book came out around the beginning of COVID, and I had to rewrite the foreword. Then healthcare moved dramatically toward virtual care, and a lot of the human-connection component was lost. At the same time, burnout became increasingly visible. Medical students were burning out while still in school, and dentistry has a major burnout problem as well. I wanted to understand those factors.

The book became a number-one bestseller on Amazon. About a year and a half ago, the publisher asked me to update it for the world of 2026. We now have AI, telehealth, and other changes, and burnout is still prevalent. So I updated the clinical interventions and expanded the book by about 25%. The updated and expanded version of Called to Care is getting ready to publish.

While I was in the middle of that, I started this dental role. I thought, “Why don’t I take Called to Care, add a few dental clinical vignettes, and make a dental version?” That was a bad idea, because dentistry is very different. The operatory environment is different. There is more pain, more dental anxiety, a different power dynamic, a unique hygiene relationship, and different placebo and nocebo effects. I essentially had to write a new book.

It has been approved and is under manuscript review. I’ve had dentists, including you, reading it. My publisher actually likes it even more than the original Called to Care. The title is Called to Care: The Dental Professional’s Guide to Humanizing the Patient Experience.

DR. AMAN KAUR

Thank you for sharing the manuscript. It is rare to see a book so embedded in data. As clinicians, we enter healthcare because we care about people. How do we lose that human element so quickly?

LARRY BENZ

I think we get patterned into a system. Burnout begins for some dentists and physicians while they are still in school. People start with an idealistic belief about meaningful work, and then they enter practice and hear: The insurance company needs this. The unit needs this. The DSO needs this level of production. This person needs that. There are external influences everywhere.

If you’re not careful, those external influences can move you away from meaningful, purpose-driven work and toward a narrow focus on units and production. Incentives shape outcomes. If all the incentives are financial and metric-driven, burnout is a predictable outcome.

If the incentives instead reinforce human quality, care, clinical upskilling, compassion, empathy, and high-quality connection, you create a clinician who cares, stays, and does excellent work. Then the profits follow. You have to get the incentives right.

DR. AMAN KAUR

You’re so right. My son originally wanted to go into medicine, and I told him, “If you’re going into medicine only to take care of people, you may be disappointed. And if you’re going into it to make a lot of money, you may also be disappointed. Let’s get to the real reason you want to be in healthcare.” I believe most people go into healthcare because they genuinely care for people. When that gets taken away, it creates a constant internal conflict.

LARRY BENZ

Absolutely. That conflict becomes a foundation for burnout.

One of the saddest data points I’ve read came from a survey of roughly 6,000 physicians. Fewer than 10% said they would recommend their profession to a family member or loved one. To me, that is incredibly sad. I think it reflects a gap between what people originally wanted to do and the external forces that have influenced their internal desire and intrinsic motivation.

What I’m trying to do as an organization is reestablish that intrinsic motivation. That is really what Called to Care is about.

DR. AMAN KAUR

Healthcare can be an incredibly satisfying career because of what you can do for people, but external factors can remove that joy very quickly. Was there one unexpected emotional difference you noticed when writing the dental version compared with medicine?

LARRY BENZ

The biggest thing was discovering how many patients experience anxiety when they go to the dentist, and how powerful the environment can feel. There’s the operatory, the smells, the equipment, the possibility of pain. There are more environmental signals than you often have in other parts of healthcare.

That forced me to spend a lot of time in dental offices, which I ended up loving. I saw great things and not-so-great things and watched how teams responded to those dynamics.

The second thing that surprised me was how much more time the patient spends with the hygienist than with the dentist, and how compressed the dentist’s interaction can become around production. That shocked me.

The third was technology. AI, wellness scans, and screening tools are becoming part of the standard of care, and I think they should be.

DR. AMAN KAUR

Larry, what drives you? You are so accomplished. You could be watching the sunset from some cool yacht. What keeps you going?

LARRY BENZ

I find all of this fun. I’m driven by finding a better way, taking something complex and making it simple, and building trust and relationships in the process. Right now, that just happens to be in the dental world.

I get joy from having meaningful impact on companies and on the people I’m trying to develop. I do this for fun. I’ve never felt like I worked a day in my life.

What’s interesting about DCA is that it isn’t a company I started or owned. I wanted to see whether my healthcare playbook would transfer. That is the only reason I’m the CEO right now. I was originally asked to be an interim CEO. After a few months, they took “interim” off the title, and 18 or 19 months later we’re not even talking about a replacement. I’ve found the role incredibly enjoyable, and it has brought me a lot of joy to see that these business concepts can transfer.

DR. AMAN KAUR

If a clinician is watching this and thinking, “One day I want to be an executive who develops a playbook I’m proud of,” where should they start? Your joy in how you lead is contagious.

LARRY BENZ

Start with curiosity. There are tremendous books on leadership and management, and I hope to contribute more on the operations side. But I would also tell people to find exemplar organizations. Who do you believe is doing things the right way? Spend time with them.

One of the things I’ve discovered is that dentistry is the most fraternal sorority I’ve ever been part of. People genuinely try to help one another. The group of CEOs and leaders I’ve met—the Greg Whites, Steve Buults, Pat Powers of the world—have been incredibly helpful. If I’ve had a question, they have been willing to share how they think about unit economics and what drives the business.

It is an incredible community to tap into. What you’ve developed with Women in DSO is another example. We’ve tried to model some of that at DCA in collaboration with you, and it has had an incredible impact, particularly as the majority of our dentists are women and that trend is only going to continue.

I’m thankful organizations like yours exist. If somebody has a genuine interest, call people and ask. This is a very helpful, supportive environment.

DR. AMAN KAUR

I agree. The dental industry has some of the greatest collaboration I’ve ever seen. Larry, thank you so much for being here. It has been such a pleasure.

LARRY BENZ

This was so much fun. Thank you.