What Pet Care Taught a Dental CEO

Dave Gaspar's route to leading SmilePartners began in veterinary medicine. As a field director for Banfield Pet Hospital in Arizona, he learned to support clinicians in a care setting where patients cannot explain what hurts and where families face deeply emotional decisions. He later spent more than a decade with Pacific Dental Services before joining SmilePartners, first as COO and, for the past two years, as CEO. The group has grown through majority acquisitions to 130 offices across seven states and is now adding de novo practices to diversify its growth.

Across veterinary and dental care, Dave sees the same four fundamentals behind a successful clinic: enough providers, genuine access to care, a steady flow of patients, and the ability to deliver and collect for the treatment clinicians diagnose. The framework is simple, but executing it is not, because every part depends on people. The conversation explores where the two sectors diverge, from dental insurance's 30-to-90-day payment cycle to the different ways teams uncover pain, build trust and help people act before a preventable condition becomes an emergency.

At 130 offices, Dave can no longer solve every operational problem himself. His role is to build an organization that reduces friction across clinician recruitment, patient access, care delivery and payment, while developing leaders through repetition, role-play and time spent shoulder to shoulder in clinics. That same principle governs technology: judge any automation by its effect on patients, clinicians, teams and the business, communicate the reason for the change, and remember that the people closest to the work must live with its consequences.