Bite-sized dental wisdom in under 2 minutes.

So as most of you know, after I sold my practice in California, I moved to Colorado and opened a startup.

But the goal wasn’t just one office. The plan was to build 10–12 practices around Denver and create a mini DSO. Because apparently opening one office wasn’t stressful enough.

To do that, I partnered with a consultant. The idea was simple: he would help handle a lot of the operational structure: outsourcing, insurance verification, staffing, and I would run the clinical side and produce.

Divide and conquer. Except… that’s not exactly how it played out.

My parents raised me to always know where the money was going. I was probably the only 10-year-old who knew how to balance a checkbook, so when the practice started producing, I checked the numbers every day.

And I’m so glad I did because the outsourcing team the consultant hired wasn’t doing a great job. Cash payments, insurance checks, deposits, adjustments, nothing was reconciling. So little by little I started pulling those systems back in-house. I needed control over what was happening.

Six months in, it became pretty obvious that the “division of labor” had turned into me doing most of the work.

Then the situation changed again.

The consultant sold his portion of the practices to another dental group. Their strategy was acquisitions. Mine was startups. Not exactly the same playbook.

After about a year of trying to make it work, we both realized we weren’t aligned anymore. So we decided the cleanest solution was for me to buy them out and move on.

Which is where I made one of the biggest mistakes of my career.

Instead of negotiating what was actually fair, we split everything down the middle.

Production. Revenue. Cash.

All of it.

Which meant I wrote a check for about $250,000.

And here’s the part that still irritates me:

My lawyer didn’t push back.

He knew I was the one seeing the patients, generating the revenue, and fixing the operational problems that kept popping up.

And the worst part… I didn’t push back either.

A few years later, Eric ran into someone who had worked for that acquisition group, and they told him the part that still makes me sick.

We had all the leverage. If we had pushed harder, they would have folded.

But the real lesson wasn’t about the money. It was this:

Your lawyer works for you, but they only fight as hard as you tell them to.

At the end of the day, no one is going to advocate for your business the way you will.

-Dr. Alex

P.S. I have nothing against lawyers. I just think you need one who’ll fight in your corner and be willing to get eaten by a dinosaur if they have to. Milo can’t help with the dinosaurs, but it can help protect your office with better systems. The waitlist is open, click below to join.