A second dental roll-up built on practice autonomy, not a rigid playbook, and an AI stack built in-house instead of bought.
“There's no sense in adding marketing spend to a leaky bucket.”— Lane Theriault
Lane Theriault isn't a dentist, he's an investment banker who spent his early career in M&A at Citigroup before co-founding 123Dentist, one of Canada's largest dental groups, in 2017. When a private equity transaction gave him a clean exit in 2019, he moved to the US to build a second DSO rather than compete with his old company, launching Independence Dental Services with eight practices at the end of 2020. Five years on, Independence has grown to around eighty practices, using a model built on preserving each practice's autonomy rather than forcing one playbook onto everyone.
Much of the conversation digs into what that autonomy actually means in practice, from recruiting, Independence's biggest and hardest support function, to marketing, where Lane argues spend is wasted until a practice fixes its 'leaky bucket,' his own term for a business that can't convert or retain the patients it's already attracting.
The back half of the episode turns to how Independence uses AI, not by buying a stack of point solutions, but by building a searchable knowledge base from its own emails, calls and documents, then layering narrow, low-risk automations on top, all the way up to an in-house AI voice receptionist that Lane insists has to openly identify itself as AI to actually work.
Coherent gives private clinics one patient relationship engine, recovering revenue lost at enquiry, recall and billing.