The business half of a dental family
I'm Forest Ratchford. I'm not a dentist — I'm the business side of a dental partnership. I hold an MBA from Temple University and went on to pursue a PhD in economics, and I've spent twenty years in business management and consulting, the last fifteen-plus of them inside the dental industry.
Before dentistry, my consulting work lived in academic medicine: I helped MDs attached to universities and university hospitals launch venture-funded companies — taking deep clinical expertise and building real businesses around it. That work taught me the pattern that defines everything I do now: brilliant clinicians are rarely taught the business that carries their craft.
Then dentistry became personal. My wife, Dr. Sorina Ratchford, DDS, is a Loma Linda University graduate who has practiced dentistry for almost twenty years. Together we own and operate multiple dental offices on California's Central Coast — she leads the clinical side, and I run the business.
Our first office taught me more than any degree has: how to read a seller's P&L with appropriate skepticism, what a lease can quietly cost you, why the team you inherit matters more than the equipment you inherit, and how quickly the numbers stop being abstract when your name is on the loan. The transition from associate to practice owner is dramatic — overnight, a clinician becomes a chief executive — and almost nothing in dental training prepares you for it.
The offices that followed taught the other half: a practice you don't personally hold together every day requires real systems — block scheduling that protects production, KPIs reviewed monthly, a hiring process instead of hiring luck, and a team culture strong enough to survive growth. We run our practices on the same operational discipline I now teach.
Doctors Inc. exists because I kept having the same conversation with associates and new owners: smart, capable dentists making expensive decisions alone, with advice only from people who had something to sell them — a broker's commission, a lender's loan, a supplier's contract.
I'd rather you skip the expensive lessons. My only incentive is that ownership goes well for you.