Parkview Dental Partners is confident in its ability to expand its network and add value to practices throughout Florida despite some of the great challenges facing DSOs this year.
The DSO, which is backed by Cathay Capital, recently hit its 25-practice network milestone.
CEO Rene Sauerteig recently spoke with Becker’s to discuss the company’s growth and goals for 2025:
Editor’s note: These responses were lightly edited for length and clarity.
Question: How would you describe Parkview’s growth since its inception in 2018?
Rene Sauerteig: The growth is really focused on two fronts. The first is to partner with high quality dental practices within our targeted geography, where they can benefit from the administrative and clinical support functions we provide. Since our founding in 2018, we’ve grown from eight to 25 clinics. The second growth area is on supporting those clinics to help drive additional patient growth [and] cost savings, all while supporting our doctors and support teams to enable them to be able to provide the highest quality dentistry possible.
Q: What sets Parkview apart from other DSOs in the industry?
RS: What makes Parkview special is three different things. One, we are geographically focused on the Gulf Coast of Florida. That geographic concentration brings a large number of operational and marketing benefits to us and to our partner practices. The second is we are heavily focused on building relationships with our doctors and our other partners. We don’t just want to be a financial investor. We don’t want to be anonymous. We definitely want to build long-term relationships with everyone we work with. We think that just builds a better situation, a better environment, and it’s more fun as well to have that foundation of relationships in place. Thirdly, we are very operationally focused. We’re not scared to go and roll up our sleeves and work with our doctor partners to help drive clinical and operational improvements. Our model is very much a support model. We’re not going to come in and mandate the changes on day one, but obviously through our long years of industry and operational expertise, we’ve got certain recommendations and best practices which we’ve found to be more effective, and we typically have conversations with our partners and clinical teams and get their support to go and implement some of the best practices.
Q: Are there any advantages that come out of operating in the Florida market and expanding your network in that state?
RS: Myself and our financial sponsors are very bullish on the Florida market. There are just a large number of population trends and tailwinds that drive a good amount of both patient demand as well as labor availability that we’re finding is helping to go and drive growth and create opportunities that might not exist in other parts of the country. By all means, Florida is not alone in some of these population and geographic trends, but we think there’s definitely an attractive base for us to go and operate out of and be locally focused and locally based. We find it does create easier conversations to have if potential partners were not out of state. We’re not a remote team. We’re there on the ground. They know us and they see us, and the doctors are actually able to go and connect with their peers in the Parkview network, which allows us to hold and conduct clinical training events, and allows us to hold a large number of in-person events. It also allows us to be very present in the offices. It’s not just phone calls and emails. We’re physically there building those relationships and holding their hands, walking side by side with them.
Q: What are some of the goals your company has for organic and inorganic growth this year?
RS: We’re definitely focused on both organic and inorganic growth with our existing clinics. We’re actively growing additional patient volumes. We’re also very focused on introducing an internal referral network of specialists, and truly being that one stop dental home for our patients. On the inorganic side, we are actively growing our footprint of clinics through acquisitions and other partnerships. We’ve added five clinics in roughly the last five months, and are looking to continue to grow as we go forward. We’re not setting any type of artificial cap on our growth here, so as many of these quality clinics within our geography that we can identify, we’re definitely interested, and we’re excited to continue growing. We’re not going to sacrifice the quality of partners to go and achieve that. We’re definitely confident in both the pipeline of opportunities as well as our reputation and ability to go and create value for the clinics here.
Q: What is the biggest challenge facing DSOs and MSOs today?
RS: In every conversation I have with leaders and other DSOs or MSOs, the number one topic of conversation is driving same-store sales growth … The cost to operate between labor and non-labor expenses increasing is driving a lot of margin compression in the industry, so everybody’s focused on driving same-store sales growth. I think we feel fortunate that some of the challenges which might exist in other geographies are not as present in our geographic footprint of Florida. There are positive population trends, so good patient demand, and we also are highly confident in the operational playbook we generated to help go and drive good amounts of same-store sales growth, both within our existing platform as well as new clinics that join our network.
Q: What trends are you following in the dental industry right now?
RS: I’m closely following the evolution of [artificial intelligence] as an efficiency tool. It’s obviously not just an opportunity in dentistry but really any industry out there. I think everyone needs to keep in mind that today’s version of AI is the worst it will ever be. It will only improve from here, and that could be additional support for our dentists, customer service support and revenue cycle support. There are a lot of ways to help leverage this to help [team members] be more effective and more efficient, so Parkview is continuously monitoring the AI space for new opportunities.
