You Built the Practice.
Let Us Help Build The Life.

When you’ve built something with your own two hands, it’s more than a practice. It’s a legacy. A reflection of your values, your people, your community. For some, partnership means growth. For others, it’s freedom. For all of us, it’s about what comes next. Life after partnership isn’t about letting go, it’s about leaning in. For my family, it’s time back to be present and to show up for the moments that matter. For my legacy, it’s knowing the work I started will outlive me and keep serving this community for generations to come. For my team, it’s giving them opportunity, growth, stability. Because when they thrive, our patients feel it. And for my practice, it’s the freedom to focus on the dentistry that I love, knowing that I have a partner by my side who believes in the same vision I do. This is life after partnership. It’s more than business. It’s balance. It’s impact. It’s legacy multiplied.

This is Life After Partnership.

Owning a dental practice is more than a career, it’s a dream you worked years to create. But along the way, the demands of running a business can start to overshadow the reason you started in the first place. At Imagen Dental Partners, we believe partnership should give you more than a payout, it should give you the freedom, growth, and peace of mind to design the life you want.

Imagen partners share how they’ve reclaimed their time, grown their practices, and planned their futures—without giving up what they’ve built.

Four Ways of Life After Partnership

For our partners, success isn’t just about more patients or higher numbers. It’s about time with family, empowered teams, future planning—and less stress doing it all.

Family

Discover how other doctors found freedom with Imagen.

Support That Brings You Home

Michael Snider, DMD

Leading a practice, taking care of a team, taking care of a family, and being that sole provider is an overwhelming weight that instills a quiet fear that no one talks about. You’re supposed to be the strong one, have it all together, and be able to handle any stress that’s thrown at you. And the only time you get that release is maybe when you’re traveling by yourself or on the car ride to and from work. In those few quiet moments, can kind of have a release of stress. What I have found is post partnership there’s no way to regain that quantity of time that I may have missed when I was running this practice by myself, when I was being the sole person. That the quality of time that I have with my family now is so much better than what it was five years ago. Maybe I have a few years less because my daughter is now eleven and not six. My son is nine and not four. And I can’t get that time back that I missed when I was the only person. But the time I spend with them now, I’m focused on them and on us. I’m not worried about did the supply bill get paid? Did the payroll get done? Who’s doing the bonuses this month? Who’s off? Who’s not working? Which patients are, you know, filling the schedule or not? All those things are being taken care of whether by my team that’s been trained up or by individuals that aren’t even in the practice that are in Arizona helping me load those weights without carrying it by myself. But it’s not just showing up, it’s being present when you show up because your mind’s not in a thousand other places. And that’s where I am now compared to five years ago.

Time Back Without Stepping Away

Casey Hart, DDS

I like running a business, but I like having a partner that can help me figure out the stuff I would have had to buy help from anyway. So I would have had to get a consultant to help me with marketing, but then I’ve got to interview every consultant and I got to figure out whether they’re good or whether they’re bad or whether they’re in my best interest. But the big pain points have always been for me the same things that I love about dentistry and its people. I don’t love dealing with staff issues, although I do love dealing with people. I don’t love having to worry about money and the financial side on a daily basis anymore. I feel like I got the business to a point where I was good and I didn’t want to keep spending time on that. But the biggest pain point I have is I have three young children and I was not wanting to spend time here doing stuff that just didn’t feed me in a psychological way. I just wasn’t getting the joy out of that anymore. So those were my pain points. Not enough hours in the day while still being able to take care of myself. So having someone else do that was very appealing to me. While I love numbers and I love the business side of stuff and I still love keeping track of all that stuff. I just wanted to move forward with learning some other things that I just didn’t have time for anymore if I was going to end up spending time with my kids. And I just get to be their parent once and so they’re only going be a certain age for so long. And now that I have three, it was easier when there was just one to figure out that time, but three’s a whole lot harder to figure out. I have a successful business in my mind. I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel. Do I really need to do this? Or what do I want in the second half of my life? I do feel like I have more time because I don’t, I have the cognitive capacity to look at other things. So everything I was focusing on business wise isn’t something I have to focus on. I keep track of it, but I’m not focused on it anymore. The dentistry is the dentistry, and I’ve always enjoyed the dentistry, and I can learn more stuff now because there’s more time.

Efficiency at Work, Presence at Home

Steven Alaniz, DDS

When you feel like you’re efficient, there’s that time of the only way I’m gonna make more money is to either charge more, work more hours. And I think what Imagen really helped us with is taking a fairly efficient office and streamlining it even more to the point where I could work the same amount of hours and produce more or I could actually work one day less and produce more because we were scheduling properly, putting the right team members in the right spots. The the most common saying you hear is like, if you’re a jack of all trades, you’re a master of none. I think, you know, we spent a lot of our time and a lot of our money going to become masters at what we do, but we’re trying to do something that we’re not masters at at all to an ability to where it it it just it it creates a very big life imbalance. And one of the most joyful things for me to be a partner, to know that I’ve got people behind the scenes that are way better at taking care of the stuff that I don’t need to focus on. And I think one of the important things to realize is like we all have the exact same amount of time in a day and figuring out how to take those hours and make them more efficient to where like you can spend more time with family, you can spend less time at the office. On your death bed, you tell yourself, gosh, I wish I would have worked more. Nobody says yes to that. And, you know, I’d rather be focused on, like, I’m a husband, I’m a dad, I’m a stepdad, I’m an uncle. Those are the things that I think are the most important and we get so caught up into chasing something that, you know, when I when I leave this earth, I don’t wanna be remembered as, oh, he was a great dentist. Like, that’s not my goal. But while I’m here, if doing that to the best of my ability allows me to get to be the dad and the stepdad and the husband that I want to be, then that’s the purpose that I have is you know, providing just great care to people and taking care of people. Because I think in in what we do, I don’t feel like we take care of teeth. I think we take care of people through teeth.

Presence at Home, Confidence in Your Practice

Theresa Lassetter, DDS

I just felt that no one could do it as good as I could. But I was also doing that until seven o’clock at night every night. I had three young children. I had a husband that felt neglected. I used to get to work around 6:30 am and I would stay here depending if payroll needed to be closed or whatever else. I’d be up here till 7:00 pm, 7:30 pm, 8:00 pm, like every night. The absolute best thing that happened secondarily to me joining Imagen is that my perspective on how important I was shifted. I was absolutely incapable of delegating anything to anybody before. And it turns out that’s a trust issue and whatever else. Imagen semi-forced me, coerced me, into getting an office manager. I would have never even thought that I could have benefit from someone else because my ego was too much for myself. That it wasn’t till Imagen held a mirror up and said, “If you can delegate it, you should.” I said, “I don’t know how to.” And they taught me how. And I have been given so much more of my life back because of that. And it just, it’s really unfair to your family to love the fourth baby that is your dental practice more than you love them. And time is love in my family and getting to be able to get to a point where at five o’clock I can step out and not feel extreme guilt, go home and feel good about the fact that I get to be with my family. I get to have dinner at the dinner table. I get to see them awake and not just kiss their little sleeping bodies good night. It’s really, really wonderful to get to be a present mom. And I mean, moms carry so much guilt anyway. And I would, I’d push that through to like mom guilt, you know, boss guilt, everything, dentist guilt, all the guilt. It’s just been able to be lessened a lot because I know that the supporting things are happening without me needing to direct them. Life after partnership has made managing a big team and a big part of my life a ton easier.

What Partners Say

“In addition to being a full-time general dentist, I’m also a mom to three very busy children. One of my goals in partnering with Imagen was to find better work-life balance. With only so many hours in a day, I wanted to focus on what I could do best: being a dentist and being a parent. That’s where Imagen came to the rescue. They helped my practice grow while handling the business side, allowing me to be fully present for my patients, and then fully present for my family at the end of the day. The challenges of being a dental practitioner will always be there, but knowing I have Imagen in my corner gives me peace of mind.”

“Thanks to Imagen, I’m spending more time with my grandchildren and family, and I’ve got more chances to enjoy golf and pickleball. When I’m at the practice, I can focus on clinical care without the stress of running the business. It’s been a game changer.”

Legacy

Discover how other doctors enjoyed the security of a guaranteed exit with Imagen.

Creating a Legacy Beyond the Business

Jerome Gildner, DDS

So my name is Jerome Gildner, and I practice in Mequon, Wisconsin. It’s a suburb of Milwaukee. We’re about twenty two miles north of downtown. I I think prior to my, association with Imagen, I was spending more than fifty percent of my time dealing with the business, whether it was insurance problems, lab problems, paying the bills, the checkbook, taxes, whatever it was. I was spending an inordinate amount of my free time dealing with the business side of my business because from eight to five I was having to see patients. And over forty one years what I found is that I was stressed out in the clinical dentistry side because I was consumed with the business side. As we all know dentistry is a business. And so when I partnered with Imagen and I was able to relinquish all the business side, all the HR problems, I didn’t have to deal with two girls fighting, I didn’t have to deal with hiring and fighting. When I could relinquish all that to someone else who had the experts in their field to do so, I could concentrate more on the clinical side and I was a lot less stressed out in the clinical side because I wasn’t dealing with everything else. Someone asked me this the other day, at your funeral, what do you want someone to say about you? I said my answer to that question was, I hope somebody says that Dr. Jerry made a difference. I hope that he made a difference in a child’s life. I hope my hope is that I could create a generation of people who are not afraid to go to the dentist. But I think by relinquishing all those other things, I can now focus on that task, albeit forty-one years of practice. I always enjoyed the patient care. I always enjoyed the patient interactions. Now I can focus all my attention on that. So I enjoy going to the office because I’m able to do what I want to do. I go home free of all the stresses of the business side of my business, and I can enjoy my free time.

Designing the Legacy You’ll Leave Behind

Meena Barsoum, DMD

Partnership with Imagen has really changed how I lead. For me, the operational support has been really a lifesaver, honestly. I was the leader and the practice owner that would do everything. I would check payroll. I would go through accounts and pay bills and do all this stuff. And to me, it was not the best use of your time as a clinician that should be treating patients and producing in the practice. Prior to Imagen, I was a control freak and I wanted to hold everything. So if I had to work late to, you know, to do stuff to work on the practice versus in the practice. So what I would tell a practice owner or a dentist today, if if you’re thinking about family and you’re thinking ten years down the road, what is your life like in ten years as a solo practitioner running a large practice? You’re going to be dealing with the administrative burden of running that practice, you’re gonna deal with the leadership struggles of running that practice, but you’re also not going to have a way to exit that practice when it’s time. And that becomes the sad part of it is I don’t wanna be, you know, coming home to my kids upset and miserable because I don’t like my work life, because I sold to a DSO that’s making me do all this stuff that I don’t like doing, and now I’m taking out that frustration on my family. Like, I would never want that, and that’s never gonna happen here because I’m still the partner in the practice and, you know, I’m the leader there and I drive the culture. So I think that’s something that dentists need to think about is what do you want your last five years to look like in your dental practice and dental career? Is it working for a DSO as an employee, where you’re being told what to do? Is it being a true leader in your practice and leaving on your own terms?

I wanted to, when I came out of dental school, wanted to start my own business. I started, I just hung a shingle up, you know, in Chandler, Arizona. I just hung that out and started with one or two patients. The stresses of all that trying to make things happen, being not only the provider, a dentist, providing for patients, but also hiring, firing, payroll, HR, all those things. And I was alone. I mean, I was a private dentist. Man, dentistry's an awesome profession. I didn't enjoy the management part of it. I can do dentistry great, but the management part of it. I just started pulling back from that, and then your business starts doing different things, you know. I probably missed out on a lot of things with my kids and and what was important. I'm getting in those later years. I got to figure out what I'm gonna be doing, but I wanted I wanted some help. I needed help with the management part of things, HR, the payroll, the marketing. That's what kind of brought me into Imagen, was just trying to get some relief and help and have an excellent strategy for that time when I'm ready to stop practicing. I would encourage someone who's struggling through that or like I was that, boy, just do the things that are important. And what are those things, that is being true to yourself, your family, your patients, your staff, people you work around, that's what's important. All the other stuff, yeah, really is important.

Protecting Everything Built Through Dentistry

Kevin Otteson, DMD

I wanted to, when I came out of dental school, wanted to start my own business. I started, I just hung a shingle up, you know, in Chandler, Arizona. I just hung that out and started with one or two patients. The stresses of all that trying to make things happen, being not only the provider, a dentist, providing for patients, but also hiring, firing, payroll, HR, all those things. And I was alone. I mean, I was a private dentist. Man, dentistry’s an awesome profession. I didn’t enjoy the management part of it. I can do dentistry great, but the management part of it. I just started pulling back from that, and then your business starts doing different things, you know. I probably missed out on a lot of things with my kids and and what was important. I’m getting in those later years. I got to figure out what I’m gonna be doing, but I wanted I wanted some help. I needed help with the management part of things, HR, the payroll, the marketing. That’s what kind of brought me into Imagen, was just trying to get some relief and help and have an excellent strategy for that time when I’m ready to stop practicing. I would encourage someone who’s struggling through that or like I was that, boy, just do the things that are important. And what are those things, that is being true to yourself, your family, your patients, your staff, people you work around, that’s what’s important. All the other stuff, yeah, really is important.

What Partners Say

“My first four-plus years with Imagen have been the most enjoyable and rewarding of my 19-year career. I only wish I’d partnered sooner. I’m proud to be part of this amazing community.”

“Partnering with Imagen reminded me: I don’t have to do this alone. For years, I practiced and celebrated solo. Now, I’m part of a group where success is shared, and we’re all moving toward the same goal: growth, together. With two strong associates in place, I’ve finally been able to slow down while watching the practice thrive. Like any partnership, there have been ups and downs, but the ups have far outweighed the rest. I’m confident in the future of my practice, my team, and my legacy. And I’m genuinely excited about what the next few years will bring before I retire.”

“Partnering with Imagen has given me a renewed sense of energy and vision. For the first time, I have a clear exit strategy for the end of my dental career. Imagen has created a pathway for success. Not just for today, but well into the future.”

Team

Discover how other doctors empowered their entire staff with Imagen.

Stability for Your Team, Practice, and Patients

Eric Burgess, DMD

My practice is my biggest asset in my entire life. I only can take it so far with one person to maximize earning potential and so forth. I started realizing, well, if I’m going do this last phase of my life, how do I want to do it? I wanted something where a lot of the management could be taken off my shoulder because I was essentially a de facto office manager. Everybody came to me with every little problem all day long. And I wanted some separation from that because that was the most depressing thing at times during the day was dealing with staff. And so at that point in time, I started looking around at different organizations that were available to join and become part of. And what really got me with Imagen was they wanted me to be the same way I was. They wanted me to stay my own little way. They appreciated the uniqueness of what I offered and how I was operating, and they just wanted to help me maximize this potential earnings wise and so forth, and also retirement wise. For them really saying, hey, we’re gonna let you be you. And so that’s one of the things that they always promised me and they always really delivered on. They’ve really let me do my thing and just offered suggestions to me. But it’s great having something in the background that’s really looking at the bigger picture for me that I don’t always see. One of the things I always look at is I have a family, right? I have my own family. I worry about them. I have insurance for them. I want to make sure they’re taken care of if something were ever to happen to me. My other family is my practice, staff, and my patients as well too. I care about them too. I want my patients to know one day that whoever is here besides me, they’re going be taken care of the way I would take care of them. I wanted to know that both my families were taken care of, that everybody was safe and secure. If something ever happened to me, Imagen would kind of jump in and handle the situation. The bills would get paid. We’d temporarily staff the doctors in here, and then everybody would keep chugging along. My wife wouldn’t have that burden on her. My staff wouldn’t have that burden on them. And they could just worry about what their daily worries are and not worry about beyond that. So for me, it gave me peace of mind knowing that the people I care about the most are taken care of both personally in my house and also personally in my practice.

Partnership That Supports the Whole Team

Shivi Gupta, DMD & Tony Hatch, DDS

I mean, this was a practice that we built that we loved. It’s almost like a child. Like, every aspect of this office I’m sitting in, I have a hand in. My team members, my patients. I just had so many responsibilities besides just being a dentist that were tiring me. It just got to be too much. And I went into dentistry because I love patient care. I love the actual act of fixing teeth and making new teeth. And all of it started to get really tiring. But I have now this team of people that are helping me with all these aspects that I never had before. My team and my office manager are so empowered to do the things that I’m really not at the skill set. Like, taking care of those problems is not in my wheelhouse. And then comes in Imagen, and all of that, when I mean all of that, has been taken off of my plate. I still get to be a part of it, which I enjoy. I get to make decisions, the ones that I want to. The ones that I don’t want to, I don’t have to because I have a team that is knowledgeable and better at it than me. You know, now I’m doing larger cases that I didn’t get to do before. I feel like my dentistry’s improved because I’m spending more time with my patients. I’m spending more time designing my crowns. I’m spending more time doing all these little things on the actual dentistry that I never got to do for quite a while now when I was running my practice managing the business. My wheelhouse is sitting with a scared patient, getting them through their fears, delivering the care that they need. My wheelhouse is not figuring out who to call at seven in the morning when my hygienist is sick and I need to make up, figure out like what do I do with ten patients? Like I don’t know, that’s not my wheelhouse. And so that wheelhouse is now taken and I never should have been driving that ship anyways.

What Partners Say

“Partnering has allowed me to return my focus to what I love most: clinical dentistry. More importantly, it’s given me true peace of mind. I know that if something were to happen to me, both my family and my team would be protected. My wife could focus on our family and healing, without the burden of managing the business. And my dental team can feel secure knowing the practice will continue, their jobs and paychecks steady, and a doctor in place to care for our patients.”

"Imagen has been excellent in providing strong associate doctors, taking the pressure of recruiting off my shoulders and ensuring continuity for my team and patients."

“With two strong associates in place, I’m excited to finally slow down and give them the opportunity to grow. It’s rewarding to step back and watch our team thrive while the practice continues to grow as a whole.”

Growth

Discover how other doctors achieved growth of over 20% with Imagen.

Scaling Your Practice While Staying Chairside

Alexa Benzel, DDS

I bought my office. I bought an under producing office, and I was really happy to watch it grow. And I liked seeing growth, but with growth, it translates into more responsibility, more hours. And so you go to dental school thinking, I’m gonna work four days a week, and it’s gonna be great. And that’s your dentist part, but your business owner part is more than that. And so you take a little bit of work home so that maybe you’re not helping your kids with their homework or you’re not being an engaged spouse. And then sometimes it gets a little bit more and you’re like, okay, well I’m just gonna go in on Saturday and do a little bit of work. And then you went from being a four day a week dentist to a seven day a week business owner. Imagen was a good recipe for me because they could do IT and they could do marketing and they could do HR and they do help me look at the numbers and forecast growth without translating into more hours or, a lot more effort. So by working the same, I still see my practice growing. And I see it growing with good intention and with good patient care and not compromising the quality that I want. I’m not embarrassed to run into my patients in the community and feel like things have changed since partnership. As a dentist and a solo practitioner and a business owner, you might be chairside focused on your patient, but IT’s on the phone, or, you know, your accountant’s calling because you have, you know, your 550’s are due, or whatever. With Imagen, all that’s in the background, but you can go to work and be that dentist.

Focused on Dentistry, Growing With Purpose

Steven Hernandez, DDS

There comes a time when you just want to be a dentist, and you don’t want to be HR, and you don’t want to be payroll, and you don’t want to be all the other hats. So that’s when I heard about Imagen. Yeah, saw it as an opportunity. A risk? Sure. But life’s a risk. I trusted them, and I knew that I had good people at the helm. And so far, it’s been good. You’re going to hear it again from all the partners. It’s just better. I am a better clinician. I have more time to focus on that. I am not worried about HR. I’m not worried about payroll. I’m not worried about implementing changes to insurance, negotiating fees. I just don’t have to worry about that. In the past, it wasn’t my forte, but I still felt as though I had to keep a thumb on it, just to still be an active participant. And to do that meant I had to wear all those hats, some more than others. Now I’ve gotten really good at just saying, I’m gonna let that go. I know the office manager has the Imagen corporate to back them up. And so if there are questions, they’re not coming to me anymore because the only answer I could ever give them was never a qualified answer to begin with, given that which is great for me because I can focus on my passion. And so all I can do is focus on myself and the practice that I want to have, the procedures I want to do, work the days I want, I get the autonomy. Stress is self induced. It really is. Most of the stuff we fear in our mind is what we are afraid of what’s going to happen, the consequences that potentially might come and oftentimes never materialize.

Growth That Honors Your Priorities

Mona Patel, DDS

What I was experiencing at Bayshore Dental, it wasn’t like one tragic thing that was making me burnt out. It’s death by a thousand paper cuts. It was small, small, little, little things all day long, and I just kept on staying busy because of that, and I wasn’t focusing on the big picture, and that’s, you know, I wanna be a really good clinician, and I need to grow the practice more to fulfill the financial obligations that I had. I just, I wasn’t even touching any of that because I was focusing in on the little, little things. And then home, and running a home, and and getting groceries, and taking care of your kids, and being you know, checking in with your college girlfriends that you haven’t talked to in six months, and oh, yeah, so I I have to take care of yourself a little bit too, and physical fitness, and you wake up and you’re forty years old and you’re just grinding go go go, getting, you know, drinking three cups of coffee to get through the day and you’re just always tired and I was like, at what cost is all of this success worth it? At what cost can I say that I’m very proud of the practice that I built and the dentist that I am and I’m very proud of how my family is doing and that they’re thriving? So I think I asked myself that and saying at what cost? Then I realized that the cost wasn’t worth it at all. So I had to start making some changes and those changes simply put was just cutting out the things that were not your top five priorities to you. And but many things are doing better now because I am in that more positive mindset, and I can now focus on things like more growth of the practice because I’m not just putting out little fires all day long. And I’m getting more fulfillment because I’m chairside clinically a lot more and doing less admin. Some really smart people at Imagen that are ensuring that that happens.

What Partners Say

“Before partnering with Imagen, I was on cruise control. Comfortable, but not growing. Since joining, our production has increased nearly 50%, and we’ve completely outgrown our space. Now, we’re building a brand-new facility with room for associates and a clear growth plan. Imagen gave me the confidence and support to take that leap. It’s not just about seeing more patients; it’s about building something sustainable with a long-term exit strategy I can feel good about. For the first time, I’m thinking about life after dentistry, and I actually feel ready for it.”

“The support we get as practice owners is incredible. From education and mentorship to the Support Center, Imagen has resources for every aspect of growth. Whatever your practice needs, they have a way to help.”

"With Imagen’s support, I was able to open a state-of-the-art, 9-operatory office. It took a little over two years to iron out the kinks, but I can’t imagine navigating that journey without Imagen’s help. It would have been a nightmare on my own!"

"I started a scratch practice in 2008 and experienced phenomenal growth until 2015 when we hit a plateau. We tried countless strategies with little impact and a lot of effort. Partnering with Imagen gave us the right partners and systems to get back into the growth game. It's been a game-changer!"

"In our first four years of partnership, we’ve grown by 44%. But more importantly, we’ve matured operationally and clinically by embracing the Imagen Way and deepening our commitment to clinical excellence."

What Kind of Partner Are You?

We all want different things from life. Take this quick quiz to identify what matters most to you in a partnership – Family, Legacy, Team, or Growth – and see how like-minded doctors reached their goals with Imagen.

Why Imagen DPO?

Your Life After Partnership Starts Here

A confidential conversation is the first step to exploring your options. No pressure. Just possibilities.

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You Built the Practice. Let Us Help Build The Life.

This is Life After Partnership.

Four Ways of Life After Partnership

Family

Support That Brings You Home

Time Back Without Stepping Away

Efficiency at Work, Presence at Home

Presence at Home, Confidence in Your Practice

What Partners Say

Legacy

Creating a Legacy Beyond the Business

Designing the Legacy You’ll Leave Behind

Protecting Everything Built Through Dentistry

What Partners Say

Team

Stability for Your Team, Practice, and Patients

Partnership That Supports the Whole Team

What Partners Say

Growth

Scaling Your Practice While Staying Chairside

Focused on Dentistry, Growing With Purpose

Growth That Honors Your Priorities

What Partners Say

What Kind of Partner Are You?

Why Imagen DPO?

Your Life After Partnership Starts Here

Thank You!

You Built the Practice.
Let Us Help Build The Life.