The accidental dental strategist

By Andy Sloan

1 May 2026 · 3 min read

I am not a dentist. I have never been a dentist. I have never wanted to be a dentist.

I arrived from banking, via accountancy, via hospitality. The path was not planned. The first dental role came because someone I respected said there was an interesting problem to solve. That was fifteen years ago. I am still here.

The way I arrived has turned out to matter as much as how long I stayed.

What the outside sees

Every sector accumulates orthodoxy. The longer a market has been structured in a particular way, the more its participants mistake convention for logic. Dentistry is more susceptible than most, having spent decades insulated from the commercial pressures that forced other healthcare markets to interrogate themselves.

When consolidation accelerated and private equity arrived at scale, assumptions that had never been stress-tested suddenly were. I was useful in those rooms not because I understood dentistry better than career insiders, but because I was not anchored to how things had always been done.

Two examples make the point. When a founding principal told me associates would never accept a different pay model, I did not have fifteen years of dental culture telling me to believe it. The conversation went somewhere different, and the model changed. When a group finance director explained why acquisition integration had to take eighteen months, I had seen the same process completed in six in another sector, and I asked the obvious question. The answer, when it came, did not justify the timetable.

The questions that feel naive from outside are often the ones nobody inside is asking, not because insiders lack capability, but because proximity makes certain assumptions invisible.

What fifteen years builds

The outsider perspective is only valuable when paired with genuine knowledge. Naivety without substance is noise.

Over the course of more than 120 acquisitions, two private equity transactions, and years spent working across European dental markets in distribution and business solutions, I developed a view of how dental businesses are actually built, not how they are described in an Information Memorandum, but how they function, fail, and scale in practice. I have been on deal teams and I have been in the post-completion meetings when the deal thesis met reality. I have run governance and compliance functions in regulated dental environments and sat on the boards that had to make hard decisions when the frameworks were tested. I guided the platform development of what became the most recognised middle office support solution in UK dentistry, which means I understand the technology businesses that serve the sector as well as the clinical and group businesses they depend on.

That breadth is the point. The sector has dealmakers who understand transactions. It has operators who understand practice management. It has technologists who understand software. The genuinely useful territory is the person who has worked across all of it and can read the whole system at once.

Why this column exists

The CMA is examining consolidation. AI is arriving faster than most boards are equipped to evaluate it. The workforce challenges are structural, not cyclical, and will reshape the economics of group dentistry more profoundly than current forecasts assume. Capital is more selective than it was three years ago, and groups that secured investment on thin governance are starting to feel the weight of that.

The decisions that will define which dental businesses survive and scale through this period are being made right now, mostly without sufficient independent scrutiny.

The Accidental Dental Strategist is a monthly column on sloanstrategic.com covering the strategic, commercial, and governance questions the sector needs to be asking. It will be direct. It will sometimes be uncomfortable. It will not tell you how to treat patients.

I have spent fifteen years asking the questions that felt obvious from outside and turned out to matter. I intend to keep asking them.

Next read: The three prices of a dental business →