Practice Owner Foundations
Deciding on a startup, equipping it, filling it, staffing it, and running it as a business rather than a clinic that happens to take money.
Why this one
Dental school teaches dentistry. This is everything else: whether a startup fits you, what it costs to equip, how to hire and keep people, how to market without waste, and how to recover value from equipment when things change.
Who it is for
Associates considering ownership, new owners, and anyone running the business side
What you will be able to do
The exam is written against this list. Nothing on it is decorative.
- Judge honestly whether a startup or an acquisition fits your situation
- Build an equipment budget and a new versus used strategy by category
- Define a role, hire for it, and keep the person you hired
- Spend a marketing budget where it can be measured
- Recover value from equipment at the end of its life with you
- Decide which plans to join, negotiate or leave, using your own procedure mix
- Find the supply spend that is waste rather than cost of doing business
The curriculum
7 courses, 38 lessons. Take them in any order. Every lesson you finish anywhere on the site counts here automatically.
Practice Startup 101
From deciding whether a startup fits you through demographics, financing, buildout, systems, and the first hundred days.
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Buying Equipment for a New Practice
Budget, new versus used strategy, sourcing, inspection, negotiation, and opening day.
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Hiring and Keeping a Dental Team
Defining the role, writing a posting that works, screening and interviewing, onboarding the first ninety days, retention, and what to do when it is not working.
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Dental Marketing Fundamentals
Who your practice is for, the Google basics, website conversion, reviews, paid ads without waste, and measuring what works.
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Reselling Equipment: A Practice Owner's Guide
What sells, how to price it, how to list it, how to get paid safely, and how removal day works.
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Insurance Credentialing and Fee Schedules
Getting credentialed and staying that way: what a contract actually decides, the application and CAQH, reading a fee schedule, negotiating or dropping a plan, and keeping providers current.
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Dental Inventory and Supply Management
Where the supply budget actually goes: par levels and ordering, vendors and what a price really is, receiving and expiry, and the cost per procedure that tells you where the waste is.
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The final exam
This is what separates the certification from a stack of completion records.
Locked until the coursework is done
All 38 lessons have to be recorded complete before the exam will open. There is no skip.
Drawn from 152 questions
Your paper is 30 questions pulled at random from the entire pool, across all 7 courses. The answer order is shuffled too.
Timed, 40 minutes
Long enough to think, short enough that you cannot look everything up as you go.
80% to pass, fresh paper on a retake
Retakes are unlimited and free, and each one draws a new set of questions from the pool. After a failed attempt you get every missed question back with the answer and an explanation, so a retake is a second read rather than a second guess.
Checking your progress in this browser.
What the certificate is, and what it is not
It is a record that you worked through 38 lessons and then passed a 30-question comprehensive exam at 80% or better, with a reference code that stops matching if the name, program, date or score is changed after it is issued. It is reasonable to put on a resume, in a personnel file, or in front of an employer who asks what you actually know about the business side of a dental office.
It is not continuing education credit, a licence, or a state credential. ChairsideSource is not accredited by any dental board or professional body and holds no CE provider status, so this carries no CE hours. There is no proctor and there are no accounts, which means the certificate records that the exam was passed in this browser, not who was sitting at it. Anyone reading it can check the code at the verification page, and that page says the same thing.
Being straight about that is the point. A certificate that claims more than it can back would be worth less than one that claims exactly what it is.
This guide is educational content and does not constitute legal, financial, tax, or clinical advice. Laws and regulations vary by state and change over time. Consult your own dental-specific attorney, CPA, and state dental board before acting.