The Group Dentistry Now Show: The Voice of the DSO Industry – Episode 209

Ranked the #1 DSO Podcast!

Welcome to The Group Dentistry Now Show: The Voice of the DSO Industry!

Dr. Chris Salierno, Chief Dental Officer of Tend, joins the show to discuss the unique dental care model that Tend is bringing to a hip town near you.

Key discussion points include:

• The concept of hospitality in dentistry

• The importance of technology and strategic partnerships

• Growth plans & innovations on the horizon for Tend

• Much more

Thank you to Ivoclar for sponsoring this podcast with their partner, Tend. To learn more about Ivoclar visit – https://www.ivoclar.com/en_us

You can also email Sean Finn to learn more about Ivoclar’s product solutions at sean.finn@ivoclar.com

To learn more about Tend visit – https://www.hellotend.com/

Follow Tend on Instagram here – https://www.instagram.com/hello_tend/

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Tend DSO podcast transcript:

Welcome to the Group Dentistry Now Show, the voice of the DSO industry. Join us as we talk with industry leaders about their challenges, successes, and the future of group dentistry. With over 200 episodes and listeners in over 100 countries, we’re proud to be ranked the number one DSO podcast. For the latest DSO news, analysis and events, and to subscribe to our DSO Weekly e-newsletter, visit GroupDentistryNow.com. We hope you enjoyed today’s show.

Bill Neumann: In 2025, Ivoclar is celebrating 20 years of success with IPS e.max. Since its launch, IPS e.max has dramatically shaped the dental industry, especially in the field of all ceramics. Thanks to Ivoclar’s close and trusted collaboration with customers, partners like you, they have consistently refined and expanded the IPS e.max product family, continually introducing innovative solutions that exceed expectations. Ivoclar’s commitment to quality, aesthetics, cost efficiency, and clinical reliability is evident in every product they create. The IPS e.max portfolio offers remarkable versatility, covering all fixed prosthetic applications, Lithium disilicate is renowned for its natural aesthetics and exceptional clinical reliability, boasting survival rates above 97%. To date, over 230 million restorations have been crafted with IPS EMAX family of materials, reinforcing its status as the top choice for dental professionals worldwide. Throughout this year, Ivaclar will be celebrating this incredible milestone with you and sharing the exciting next steps for IPS eMAX. Thank you for being part of this journey. And if you’re interested in learning more, you can scan the QR code that you see on the screen or visit ivaclar.com. We also thank Ivaclar for sponsoring this podcast. Next up is the Chief Dental Officer of TEND, Dr. Chris Salerno. Welcome, everyone, to the Group Dentistry Now Show. I’m Bill Neumann. And as always, we appreciate you tuning in. Always have great guests. First off, I’d love to thank Ivoclar for sponsoring this podcast. We have with us today Dr. Chris Salerno. He is the chief dental officer of TEND. And first off, Chris, thanks for being here. Great to see you.

Dr. Chris Salierno: Good to see you, Bill. Thanks for having me on.

Bill Neumann: So I had the opportunity to learn from Dr. Salerno. Gosh, you’re probably not going to remember this, but it was probably back around 2017, 2018. You spoke at a Plan Mecca event in Richardson, Texas.

undefined: Yes.

Bill Neumann: And the first time I had, you know, You’re doing a lot with dental economics. I knew of you through dental economics and then you spoke there and learned quite a bit. It was a lot of fun and I’m really happy to have you on the podcast today.

Dr. Chris Salierno: Thank you. Yeah, gosh, I do remember that event. That was fun. I got to talk about some of my favorite topics, just building a business model for the modern dental practice, not trying to be everything to everyone, but be something really special to target demographics and combine that with some, you know, riding the wave of the industrial revolution and what technologies to invest in. And to get to talk to a group of, you know, leading key opinion leaders like yourself is just really great fun.

Bill Neumann: Yeah, it was pretty cool. There were a lot of emerging groups in the audience. And at the time, you weren’t part of a group. You were still in private practice, I think. Does that make sense?

Dr. Chris Salierno: Yeah.

Bill Neumann: Well, now fast forward to today and chief dental officer of 10. So maybe a little bit about your background first, and then I’d love to learn more about 10 because you’re Your studios, the model, it’s quite unique, a lot different, I think, than what most people think of when they think of DSO. If you have more than three locations, it gets thrown into the DSO bucket. And what is the famous saying? When you’ve seen one DSO, you’ve seen one DSO. So a lot to learn about your model and 10, but let’s find out a little bit more about you.

Dr. Chris Salierno: Yes, I graduated dental school 20 years ago and did a GPR, did the associate dentist thing. I went to Stony Brook and I’m a Long Islander, so bounced around Long Island. It’s an interesting place to practice dentistry. There’s a lot of dentists in a very small little like cul-de-sac of an island. And it’s an interesting place. It’s always been a bit different environment. It’s suburban, but it behaves a little bit more like an urban environment because of the density of population and the density of dentists. So interesting place to be an associate, plenty of opportunities. Couldn’t find the right one for me to own a practice. So I eventually opened a practice with my business partner. We started a practice in 2010, Total De Novo Startup. And that was exciting. Learned a lot about what to do, what not to do when building a practice. And around that time, I really started to be able to see some return on investments I was making in non-clinical work. I loved writing. I had a blog called The Curious Dentist. I loved doing some consulting work with companies, started to become a KOL. My real passion was speaking, and I was doing some lecturing on, at the time, implant complications. That was a nice niche for me to get into, but started to transition more into practice management, which is a real passion. for me. And in 2014, became chief editor of dental economics, did that for a long time, did that for seven years. And in 2020, I started to have conversations with the leadership at Tend. They were looking for their first chief dental officer. They’ve been in operations about a year. And in 2021, sold my practice to my partner, gave up the editor for Dental Economics, gave that to my friend, Pam Raglino-Muniz, who’s doing a terrific job and really turned down a lot of the fun other things I was doing to just be totally dedicated at 10. It’s been four years, almost four years to the date that I’ve been with 10 now.

Bill Neumann: So let’s talk a little bit about Tend. Dental done differently is the tagline. So maybe you can explain a little bit about what that means and why it resonates with your patients and team members as well. So, and then also I’d love to kind of, when you started, so almost four years ago, which that’s, I always think of Tend as a newer DS, a newer group. And four years, that’s like an eternity in this industry. So what was the, what did the organization look like when you started? And then let’s talk a little bit about this Dental Done Differently. What does that mean?

Dr. Chris Salierno: Yeah, so when I joined, we had five locations. We call them studios. You may hear me drift into that lingo. Five locations, all in New York City. And they’re all de novo. So Tend is dental done differently in a few ways. From a DSO perspective, they’re all de novo. They’re in dense urban core. New York, we’ve since expanded to DC, Northern Virginia, Boston, Atlanta, Nashville. So dense urban core de novo, that right there is a bit different from most group practice DSO plays, right? These are really difficult competitive markets. And if you’re going to survive in those markets, you really need to have a differentiated offering. What attracted me to 10 and the opportunity, one of the things that attracted me was they were doing what I was looking to do in my own private practice, but they were just able to execute it so much more perfectly. And it’s this, to appeal to a specific target demographic and give them a unique value proposition. It’s stuff you heard me talk about when you saw me in Richardson, Texas, you know, so many years ago. Stop trying to be everything to everybody. Be something really unique to a target few. The target few that we were targeting at 10 is that young urban professional. So you live in Williamsburg and you work on Wall Street. You’re 27 years old, right? Climbing the corporate ladder. What does that person want out of their dental visit? That’s unique compared to what other demographics might want. When you start answering those questions, you start to put together a value chain. You start to put together a business plan that meets those specific needs and really gives a customized experience. I was targeting busy business people when I had my practice in Melville, Long Island. And we were doing a lot of the same things, right? Like you need to have flexible hours of operation. You need to have a convenient booking. You go down the list of the things that would appeal to that group. And I just saw what Ten was doing and they were executing it so well for that young urban profession. The other key ingredient here too is hospitality. Every dental practice on the planet, including my own in Melville, Long Island, every practice says, you know, we put patients first. Everyone has that on their website somewhere. Hopefully every practice tries to be nice to patients and gives them a really nice experience. But Tenn was heavily invested, still is, in true meaning of the word hospitality. you know, our mission statement is that we innovate in health care and hospitality, so that our patients look forward to the dentist. That’s a bold statement, to get patients to look forward to the dentist, right. And so that’s really that, how we answer that question of how we’re dental done differently. Very select on our target demographic and urban core. and delivering them an exceptional hospitality forward experience. Something that you could compare to a high-end restaurant or an incredible boutique hotel.

Bill Neumann: Pretty interesting. I have not heard hospitality used in dentistry. You hear retail experience sometimes, not a lot, but hospitality, that is new and it really makes quite a bit of sense, even more so, I think, than retail. I mean, is this something that Tend coined? Was this something that you coined? I mean, where does that come from? Because it really resonates with me and I have not heard it before. for.

Dr. Chris Salierno: Yeah, I’m sure there’s other dental practices that will use that term hospitality on their website or in their, you know, mission, vision and values. And but, you know, we’re very clear on how what we mean to mean. It’s not just that we’re giving pleasant experiences. We’re creating raving fans. We use terms like surprise and delight. That’s something that you can you can find that we use. Like, how do we really blow apart someone’s expectations, not just deliver the basic experience like, oh, that was a nice experience. It was fine. How do we get those wow moments at every encounter? That’s not easy to do in dentistry for all the reasons we’re well aware of. Right. But many patients don’t look forward to going to the dentist. So how do we think about every every step along their their their patient journey from when they first learn about the brand to when they call or go online to book an appointment. So that when they first walk into the practice, every step of those points, we try to be really thoughtful and remove any moments that might be frustrating for that target demographic and instead inject a moment of surprise and delight. So I’ll give one example. You’re a 27 year old, you know, working, you know, first big job in the big city and you want to book a dental appointment. Many of these folks don’t want to pick up a phone and call someone to book an appointment. So online scheduling, which many practices have, that’s like a must have for us. We’ve also spent a lot, invested a lot in an app, which a significant number of our patients use, and they’re able to just book and move appointments just on an app on their phone. And that just takes that convenience a step further. That’s providing just a little bit of value in that value chain, in that patient journey. All of those little bits of value really start to add up to a differentiated experience.

Bill Neumann: Yeah, it’s interesting. I was looking at your website earlier and found your app. And I mean, there’s quite a few reviews. I mean, thousands of reviews of the app. So there’s, that means there’s quite a few people that have downloaded it. And even something simple like the website design is very, just appealing. These aren’t things that should be overlooked. I mean, a lot of people take it for granted. We need to have a good website. Yeah, okay. Well, no, you need to have a great website. And it’s just easy to navigate. But the app is something that I, again, another thing that I have not seen. I’m sure maybe there are some other groups that have it. I haven’t seen it. So kudos to Ten for doing things that I think are just, out of the norm, but for dentistry, but not necessarily for hospitable experience, right? So, great. Let’s talk about the studios. Even the studios themselves, the practices, like that studio, is a lot different than what most of us would think of when we think of a traditional dental office. Can you talk a little bit about what a studio looks like and

Dr. Chris Salierno: Yeah, so because we are de novo only, we have an opportunity to really customize the look and feel and make that consistent. So we have also a density of practices in Manhattan and in Brooklyn and in DC. So it’s not terribly uncommon that a patient might go to one of our locations. Maybe it’s more convenient to where they live. but also see us in another location that’s closer to where they work. And we make it super convenient for them to do that. It’s really no big deal. If you can book your one hygiene appointment here, and then you want to book your next one closer to work, that’s more convenient for you. No problem. We’re all on the cloud with our practice management software. let’s do that. We want to balance that with cognitive care, but the convenience of hopping between locations is present for them. So because of that, because it’s part of the value we offer, it’s really important that we have a consistency to the look and the feel of practice. So we do what’s called like a kit of parts. We have you know, what we call our welcome bars, our reception area, you know, the different elements of our practices, soothing colors, you know, fun, playful, you know, moments to celebrate, you know, someone’s oral health. One of the cute things we do that’s a huge hit, which is really interesting, is called a brushery. We make sure all of our studios have a brushery. What is this? A pressure is when a patient comes in and they’re about to have a cleaning visit or maybe it’s a filling visit. And they had breakfast, but they didn’t brush their teeth before. And they feel embarrassed going in to see their dentist, their hygienist. And they’ve got, you know, food around their teeth, even though they’re about to have their teeth clean. They don’t feel clean. And so traditionally, and what I did in my own practice was they’d say, is there somewhere I can brush, you know, freshen up? And we’d have to, you know, go find an extra toothbrush. Maybe it was their take home goodie bag. And we give it to them at the top of the visit instead of at the end. And they go into a bathroom and they brush. And it’s kind of this, you know, awkward moment. What we do at Tend is they get their brush bag, as we call it, at the top of the visit every time, no matter what. Yeah, hey, would you like to have a brush bag? Would you like to use the brushery to freshen up? They walk into the brushery. There’s pictures of it online. It’s a fun oral health moment. It’s branded for Tend, of course, but they get to go to a sink, just kind of freshen up, put themselves in a good mood before they go back and then have their dental appointment. There’s usually a sign, a neon sign that says, brush buff, and it’s behind them, but it’s reversed. So when they look in the mirror, it comes out the right way. And so you can imagine with our target demographic, they’re taking selfies and having a fun moment with this. It’s really a fun moment of surprise and delight on their first visit, but something they enjoy using at subsequent visits. We’re thoughtful about the design, the layout of our practices, our studios in elements like that. So there’s this kit of parts that is going to be a familiar experience in each one of our locations. We’ve had patients who work in New York and have business in Boston, and they end up having an emergency. We can see them in one of our Boston locations, and it’s going to look and feel the same, a really branded experience. And our patients really appreciate that.

Bill Neumann: So what’s the name of that room again? You said the Brush?

Dr. Chris Salierno: The Brushery.

Bill Neumann: Brushery, I like that. Brushery, yeah. That’s really the start, I guess, of the patient journey, right, is in the Brushery. Well, maybe it’s the website and being able to book online and find things easily. How do you find, how do the patients tend to find out about TEND? Is it through marketing? Is it the location, they’re walking by it on the way to work? How do you seem to, how do patients seem to find Tent?

Dr. Chris Salierno: Yeah, all of the above. So we have prominent locations. We’re not necessarily on Main and Main, but we’ve got a wonderful team that finds not only, of course, the market and then the neighborhood, but the exact cross streets. We’re usually going into really fun retail blocks. Common neighbors for us are like Warby Parker or Just Salads or these kinds of really popular Trinity places. So we’re in these kind of fun, fun neighborhoods. That’s a big part of it. We’re looking at up and coming neighborhoods where our target demographic lives, plays and works. So yeah, they’re walking by, they’re seeing the signage, it really pops, the color palettes we use and all of that. So that’s a big part of it. But we’ve got a fun online presence. Our team, our VP of marketing, Kayla Shoup, is tremendous. We’ve got a really thoughtful online presence. It’s fun. It’s playful. It starts to communicate the culture and the vibe of what it’s like to go to attend and have an experience. Now, we’ve got to deliver on that, that vibe that we’re promising when they do come into the practice and things like the brochure keep that going. But yeah, we’re really just on meta. Instagram in particular has been a very strong marketing channel for us. We’ve partnered with influencers in the past and have had some success with that. And that’s really where we live. It’s having a really thoughtful, you know, marketing presence. It’s not just about come in for a free whitening or, you know, come in for this or that. We do communicate those value opportunities. but it’s more just about the experience of coming to a 10. I think that’s, if you, you know, please go to, you know, Instagram and check out, you know, check out the 10 profile. I think you’ll get a sense pretty quickly of the kinds of messages that we communicate. And it’s this positivity, positive culture, great team that’s gonna care for you, some playfulness, that really resonates with our target number.

Bill Neumann: I’ll make sure we drop that Instagram handle in the show notes too, so people can jump over there and check it out. So your typical patient journey, I know you do have a focus on aesthetics, even though it’s not just coming in for whitening. I mean, it’s really your full service. So you’re doing a little bit of everything there. Do a lot of people come in for the cleanings, they come in for whitening, they come in, you do clear liners as well. What do you tend to see with that patient journey? What’s that typical patient looking for?

Dr. Chris Salierno: Yeah, so full scope dental practice, right? Hygiene, general dentistry, we’re a standard general dentistry practice in that sense. We do have orthodontists and oral surgeons that will rotate through. We have hub and spoke endodontics as well. So we’re able to really take care of all the patient needs when they come in. Look, our patient demographic, because they’re younger, usually higher socioeconomic background, they have a higher oral health IQ in general. So I would say a lot of our patients, I’m generalizing a bit, but a lot of our patients are in relatively good oral health. We see plenty of tooth decay and gum disease and infection. No question. We see plenty of that. But we get a fair amount of folks who are in really pretty good shape. And so that opens up the door, then, to more comprehensive and preventative services, which is really exciting for our dentists and hygienists, right? To not just be putting out fires, but when there’s a legitimate dental condition like some incisal wear on mandibular incisors, a missing back tooth, an old composite, large composite that doesn’t have decay on it, but we see clear crack lines around it. We know the direction that tooth is going in. We can start a conversation about these opportunities for preventative, comprehensive dentistry, because there isn’t a whole long list of urgent needs tooth decay, gum disease that we see. So we do plenty of urgent dentistry, we do plenty of active disease management, but we’re also able to do some comprehensive conditions. That’s really important as we onboard our dentists and hygienists too though, right? A dentist who has just been focused on on treating urgent dentistry, we’ve got to make sure they have the skillset to be able to diagnose treatment plan and then present opportunities for comprehensive preventative dentistry in a way that’s thoughtful, compassionate. We’re not pushy. We’re not salesy. We don’t do that. Our patient demographic would smell that a mile away, right? But that can be a different skillset for a clinical team is to learn how to talk about that stuff in a way that’s compassionate, thoughtful, and not pushy. So that’s a unique opportunity for our patient demographic.

Bill Neumann: Excellent. Let me make a little shift here. We’ve got a lot of group practices and DSOs in the audience that, you know, it’s a lot of times, see, you’ve, the way TEND goes to the market, the type of patients you have, a lot of that has to do with the companies and the technologies and the solutions that you partner with. That influences, I think, your model influences who you work with. So can you talk a little bit about that, maybe some of the technologies and some of the clinical solutions that you’re currently using? And of course, Ivaclar is sponsoring this, so we’ll talk a little bit about that relationship. But in general, are you using a lot of cutting edge technology? Are your clinicians really driving you as the chief dental officer to find solutions that are cutting edge?

Dr. Chris Salierno: Yeah, we, you know, because again, they’re de novo, we have an opportunity of a clean slate, we’re not acquiring a practice that has a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and hopefully it all kind of works and partners together. It’s really important for us to have a seamless workflow. And these days, that’s often meaning a seamless digital workflow between, you know, the different pieces of hardware and software that our clinical teams are touching. It’s important to have that from on patient experience. It makes a huge difference to our patients when they can get a diagnostic preview or have a case worked up in less time. No patient likes to sit around in a chair or come back from a couple of visits. But you can imagine our target demographic, young urban professionals and dense urban core, they really don’t want to be coming back and forth and they want to minimize their business and they want to be able to get stuff information more instantly. So that diagnostic workflow with our tech stack is really important. We’re also very thoughtful about how, you know, how seamlessly those work together. Here’s an example. When I was in private practice, you know, years ago, we opened up a new treatment room and we needed to get all the stuff, the chair, the whatever. And our x-ray tube manufacturer had stopped producing x-ray tubes, right? So we had to find another manufacturer. So we found another group. We asked, does your, is this x-ray tube going to be able to connect to our imaging software and our sensors correctly? Are there any, oh yeah, no, it integrates perfectly. It integrates perfectly. Okay. Turns out, yeah, it works, but. you had to go through an extra couple of clicks in our software, our image capturing software, every time we wanted to capture an image. So an 18-image FMX now is going to have an extra two clicks for each of those 18 images, which meant more time. What that means is my hygienists and my dental assistants never wanted to use that treatment room to do some dentistry, to do certain dentistry, right? Like our hygiene, never wanted to be in that room because it meant more time, more clicks. It’s amazing the power of what two extra clicks can do to how your team uses that treatment. A lesson I learned early. And so at Tend, we make sure that stuff truly integrates and is seamless. It should just plug and play. It should work seamlessly. So we partnered with, you know, Ivoclar has been an incredible partner in this. It’s really important that not just our tech stack works seamlessly, but our restorative materials and workflows should be. seamless as well. We’ve been using, had been using before I even got there, a number of Ivoclar products. No surprise. This is a company that’s been around, you know, over a hundred years and their products are time tested and KOL approved, right? I’ve been working with Ivoclar in my own private practice for a long time. You know, of course, we were doing EMAX. That’s a material that’s been out over 20 years. It’s a go-to material for high aesthetics and predictability. So we were already using EMAX. But we looked at the rest of the restorative material lineup, and we were using a little bit of this and a little bit of that for composite, for cement, for whatever it was. there was an opportunity to review that and consolidate that. So we have a clinical council that, that tests the pilot of the materials and, and of course put their stamp of approval on it. They were excited to work with Ivoclar. It’s a very well-known brand. So yeah, we made investments and said, okay, VarioLink Aesthetic, that’s going to be our go-to cement. Tetric PowerFill plus, that’s a bulk fill composite, plus the Blue Phase Power Cure. Huge for our business, right? That makes sense for any practice. It certainly makes sense for patients who are like busy, busy on the go. To be able to do quadrant dentistry faster, three second cure of up to four millimeters of incremental composite, that adds up. That makes a huge difference for our dentist workflows and for our patients. One other thing that our dental assistants in particular love was the Adhese Universal Pen. Our dentists and dental assistants love that. Just clickable dispensing of bonding material and not having to go into a dispensing well, that just made a huge improvement in working time and workflow. But also, of course, I’m paying attention to the bottom line now more than ever before. reducing our waste of material, just that well of bonding agent that never ended up getting used, you know, that was eliminated. So that made a tremendous sense to just consolidate our materials, get a consistent workflow. Now we know we’re using Emacs with VariaLink Aesthetic, that all works together perfectly as it was designed to do and just gives us consistency. I’ll tell you too, when you’re in a position like mine, you just want consistent quality. You want to make sure that your clinical team and you’re hiring and training the best clinical team that you can. You’re just you sleep well at night knowing that they’re using the best materials and that is more consistency in their clinical outcomes.

Bill Neumann: You’ve read my mind, that’s my next question about driving clinical efficiency and consistency. So it sounds like materials are a big part of that, for sure. Any other tips and tricks for people in the audience? I mean, it’s probably one of the biggest challenges out there is, you know, everybody wants consistency. And I think it’s, I don’t know if I can say easier, but you, Since you’re de novo, you can pretty much go in and at least you’re not maybe acquiring other people’s inconsistency or the way they do things. You’re bringing in people, you have a workflow that you can pretty much translate from one location to the other. It looks very, very similar. But any thoughts more on clinical efficiency and consistency across the studios? Do you have something that you do when you open up a new location?

Dr. Chris Salierno: Yeah, so we really invest in training, mentorship and onboarding. Onboarding was a foreign concept to me when I ran my own practice. It’s like you hired someone and you had them observe someone else. And all right, that’s it. You’re off and running. And I think one of the things that group practices DS tend to do better on average is having really structured mentorship and onboarding. They’re very thoughtful about it compared to say a solo private practice like I have. So look, we invest heavily in onboarding. We spend time with the dentists. They may have years of experience, but to be able to see, shadow, observe workflows, get familiar with materials, having check-ins, that’s really important. I think sometimes what some groups, and by the way, solo private practice as well, in an effort to drive consistency and have great outcomes, they can tend to remove some clinical autonomy. And that’s a really challenging thing to balance. Um, you know, our, our general clinical philosophy is that we, we absolutely want our dentist to have full clinical autonomy. And as long as they’re doing great dentistry that follows the standards of care, as long as they’re pushing themselves to, to continuously incrementally improve just a little bit better every day, then, then we’re satisfied and we don’t need to micromanage them. But it’s having that ability to check in on a regular basis, you know, chart audits, go through the normal process that many practices and mentors do. You have to actually follow up on that and make sure we’re doing that consistently. I’ll also say for consistency, we have a clinical counsel. I mentioned them before. We actually just met last night and we meet quarterly and we review some new materials, you know, lab partnerships, those kinds of things. That’s really important to respect clinical autonomy. You know, if if I had just said to to to the 10 dentists, hey, we’re using this new material, have at it. I like to think they trust me and if it’s a brand like Ivoclar, they’re gonna be really excited by that because they certainly know and respect that brand. But there’s power in vetting those decisions through a clinical counsel. So you have other doctors that can step up and say, hey, I use this and it’s awesome, here’s why. So you get some more buy-in from, the team that you’re leading before you roll out these decisions that are ultimately to drive efficiency and consistency.

Bill Neumann: couple questions left as we kind of round out this podcast here. For, again, DSOs, emerging groups in the audience, we do have a lot of solo practitioners, too, that listen to the podcast and are, you know, interested in learning from some of the, some of the groups out there and really understanding kind of what everybody’s doing. You know, it’s like, even though they’re some of the maybe solos don’t like DSOs, right, there’s still a little bit of that going on. Maybe not as much as there once was. I think a lot are like, hey, you know, this model makes sense. I’d like to learn. Maybe I don’t want to be a DSO. Maybe I want to be a private group practice. I’m a bunch of doctors owning seven or eight locations. That’s pretty good too. But they want to learn from best practices from groups. partnerships like Ivaclar and some others, do you have any tips on, you know, how you really look for partners that, that are aligned with, with what Ten’s doing? And then, I think, It’s not just about the product, and I’m saying this and you may say it’s something different. It’s not just about the products and the solutions, but I think it’s also a lot about, you talked about onboarding. So when you bring in a new product, it’s not just about Dr. Salerno learning the new product, it’s about 18 doctors or 25 doctors learning how to use a new product. So I think the education is really a challenge too. Any tips on evaluating potential partnerships?

Dr. Chris Salierno: Yeah. So I categorize the vendors that you work with as more transactional relationships. I buy the thing from you. Thank you. and strategic partnerships. You use that word partnership, and I agree with you. There’s an opportunity for really any vendor that you work with to become a strategic partnership. And what that means is, yes, we’re still paying for a service. We’re paying for materials, for inventory. But we partner together. We both benefit from a larger relationship. You can absolutely take advantage of this in a private practice. I did. I very much valued the the field sales representatives that would come to my practice. Some of them were very much transactional. Great, I needed the material. That was it. I really valued the strategic partnerships. I remember a since retired guy, John Glasser, who worked for NIOS, an implant company. I loved when he visited. That was a strategic partnership. He wasn’t just there to sell me some stuff. He was like, Hey, what’s, let’s talk about like, what’s going on. How’s your practice doing? And here’s what I’m seeing. Cause he’s going to all these other practices in my area. And he’s, he’s sharing some insights. Yeah. Look, it’s a little busy right now, or it’s a little slow right now. That was value that I got from, from that strategic partnership. I had a very similar relationship with Ivoclar over the years. They just have so many resources that are available online. I hope Dennis realized how much material Ivoclar shares for free on YouTube and on their website. Tremendous material to help make sure that you’re using their products and just treating your patients better and getting better clinical outcomes. That’s a strategic partnership. When you’re helping me grow, helping my professional development, my clinical development. So those are the things we look for. It made so much sense to consolidate a lot of our product lines with Ivoclar because not only were we getting clinical consistency, but I mean, that’s just a company that understands strategic partnerships. So, you know, we sit down and have conversations about, you know, continuing education opportunities and tapping into their brilliant group of key opinion leaders. You know, the sky’s the limit on the things that we can accomplish together.

Bill Neumann: So final question for you, Dr. Salerno. What’s the rest of 2025 look like for Tend?

Dr. Chris Salierno: Yeah, so we’ve opened three practices this year. Again, they’re all de novo in urban landscapes, so construction in an urban landscape is always exciting. We are going to open two more for sure, and excited to continue to densify our existing markets. We’ve got one more coming in Brooklyn and one more coming in Boston before the end of the year. We just opened Fenway, which is a really fun one. You look outside the front window and at the ballpark, which is pretty cool. And we just opened in Pentagon City. So just more de novo growth and really excited to just continue to invest in technology. We’re piloting a lot of innovative technology. I wanted to be getting into 3D printing in a big way. We see tremendous potential there. And I’m just excited to see where our dentists push us. That’s the juice for me is when I go and visit our studios, we’ve got really sharp, bright people that we’ve attracted to attend. They’re thriving and I love their energy and they’re like, can we start doing this? And we thought, my gosh, there’s an opportunity to do that. And it’s exciting to pursue that with them and just improve clinical outcomes for our patients, but also see them grow and flourish in their earlier parts of their dental career.

Bill Neumann: Excellent. Well, thanks so much, Dr. Chris Salerno, Chief Dental Officer of TEND. It was a great conversation. If people want to learn more about TEND, you can go to hellotend.com. That’s the website. We’ll drop the handle for Instagram in there, and you can check out what’s going on on Instagram. Thank you, Ivaclar, for sponsoring this, ivaclar.com. You can actually email if you’re part of it, if you have a DSO or you’re part of an emerging group, you can reach out to Sean Finn. It’s s-e-a-n.f-i-n-n at ivaclar.com. I’ll drop that email address in there in the show notes. Thanks, Chris. Really, really appreciate it. Great conversation. And thank you, everybody, for watching us today. Until next time, this is the Group Dentistry Now Show.