Founded by a collaborative network of 18 orthodontists, EPIC4 Specialty Partners aims to preserve practice legacies, ease administrative burdens, and provide a debt-free pathway to ownership for associates.
By Alison Werner
Five years ago, Sami Webb, DDS, MS, would have flatly rejected the idea of folding her private practice into a corporate model. Like many independent orthodontists, she worried that signing on with a larger organization meant surrendering clinical control and watering down the profession.
Then the math changed. Webb, who has been practicing since 2004, had grown a satellite office open one day a week into a six-location practice across Nebraska and Wyoming—too big, and too expensive, for a recent graduate to buy outright. Faced with a narrowing set of exit options for when she was ready and determined to avoid a revolving door of associates, she started looking at the corporate landscape she had long resisted.
None of the existing models lined up with her priorities—associate mentorship and clinical autonomy chief among them—so Webb and a group of like-minded peers built their own. The founders had met as members of the Schulman Study Group, a collaborative network of leading orthodontic practices, and had spent roughly two decades trading best practices and supporting one another. In a single day, 18 of them merged 52 locations across 13 states to launch EPIC4 Specialty Partners—a primarily orthodontic group that also includes pediatric dentistry.
The organization now operates 61 locations in 16 states—and was recently named an inaugural American Association of Orthodontists Gold Star Partner, a designation recognizing that at least 95% of its affiliated orthodontists are AAO members in good standing. In a crowded market of dental support organizations (DSOs), EPIC4’s founders call themselves something different: a doctor-led specialty partnership organization, or SPO—a label they coined. Notably, the company has no private equity or family-office backing. The 18 founders capitalized the business themselves, with outside consultants serving only as advisors, and took the additional step of cross-owning one another’s practices—meaning Webb holds equity in her co-founders’ offices and vice versa, binding the group together as genuine co-owners rather than shareholders in a holding company.
Preserving Legacy and Solving the Associate Dilemma
One problem drove the launch as much as any other: the next generation of orthodontists can no longer afford to buy in. New graduates carry six-figure student loan debt, and the traditional path of purchasing into a large, successful private practice is increasingly out of reach.
EPIC4 built its answer into the company from day one. At inception, the founders set aside 10% of the company’s equity for associate doctors. The model played out last year in the practice of EPIC4 founding doctor Michaela McCormick, DMD. The practice, which has offices in Pennsylvania and Maryland was at capacity and ready for help. McCormick hired an associate who stepped in, trained under her, and was gifted ownership—not in McCormick Orthodontics itself, but in EPIC4—without taking on any debt.
“We like to call [associates] partner doctors, because we do want them to come in as partners, and we do gift them equity in the company,” says Webb, who serves as EPIC4 CEO. “A lot of these newer grads come out with a ton of debt, and they can’t buy the practice. We really think about our profession and the next generation of orthodontists. How do we give them a forever home? How do we provide that mentorship?”
Sam Jenio, EPIC4’s director of procurement and business development, calls the debt-free route to ownership a recruiting and retention tool—a way to lock in the next generation of doctors at a moment when student loan debt has made the traditional buy-in math impossible.
The Specialty Partnership Organization Model
The market is thick with DSOs and orthodontic support organizations (OSOs). EPIC4 has staked out a different label on purpose. The “P,” the founders say, stands for partnership—a posture of coming alongside doctors rather than running them.
Clinical autonomy is non-negotiable. EPIC4 does not dictate treatment plans or clinical decisions, Webb says, and the company screens hard on the front end, targeting practices that already produce strong clinical outcomes and a healthy internal culture. That restraint extends to operations as well. Unlike many DSOs, EPIC4 does not deploy regional directors of operations to review schedules week to week or send operations managers into practices to push staff toward weekly numbers. The company’s pitch is that partner doctors who already run strong businesses do not need that kind of oversight—they need infrastructure.
“Instead of taking the easy way out and perhaps joining one of the groups that was calling on Dr Webb on a regular basis to partner and sell into, [she and the founding partners] decided to do the very hard thing, which is to start a business together,” Jenio says of the founders.
The doctor-led pitch is reflected in who sits at the table. With women now making up more than half of dental school enrollment, EPIC4’s founding group is 41% female, a demographic the company says shapes how it thinks about work-life balance in a changing profession.
Relieving the Administrative Burden
For many orthodontists, the business of running a practice has eclipsed the clinical work. HR, payroll, real estate leases, procurement—the administrative load is a leading driver of burnout, and Webb says it’s starting to shape career choices on both ends of a career. She got tired, she says, of spending her nights on the back-office grind instead of thinking about patients. Her daughter reached the same conclusion from the other direction: after watching her mother juggle clinician and business owner, she opted for medicine instead. “Mom, I want to go to work and see patients and go home. I’m not doing this,” Webb recalls her saying.
EPIC4 absorbs much of that, says Jenio. A central back office handles the operational work partner doctors used to do at night and on non-clinic days: a finance team runs payroll and bill pay, a centralized procurement system lets practices order supplies in a few clicks, and a dedicated HR team manages benefits and staffing.
One byproduct: partner practices can offer health insurance and other benefits to staff for the first time—a meaningful edge in a tight labor market. Webb says doctors initially worried staff would balk at the corporate parent and walk out the door. That has not happened. Across the practices that have joined EPIC4, she says, not a single employee has left, and the benefits package has become both a hiring tool and a retention one.
Marketing is another area EPIC4 takes off doctors’ plates. EPIC4 runs a dedicated marketing function that tailors campaigns by market, from traditional advertising in rural communities to targeted social strategies in urban offices.
A Strategic Approach to Partnership and Growth
EPIC4’s deal pipeline is deliberately narrow. The company is not in the business of engineering quick exits.
“We don’t do retirement events,” Jenio says. “If a doctor wants to be a partner for less than five years, we say, ‘No thank you.’ It’s not a good fit for us.”
The company targets healthy, culturally aligned practices in the neighborhood of $2 million in annual revenue, looking for doctors who want to keep growing with institutional support behind them. That strategy was on display in March, when EPIC4 added Bowers Orthodontic Specialists in Illinois—an established, community-rooted practice.
Compensation is structured to keep partners pushing after the deal closes. Rather than a flat day rate or salary, EPIC4 pays a percentage of collections.
“You don’t want to close a partnership on a Friday … and then show up on Monday and be paid a day rate. The motivation is not there,” Jenio says. “We pay a percentage of collections that is significant enough that the doctor can feel that their way of life is not impacted. It creates the mindset that the more you grow the top line, the more money you make.”
The full deal structure layers three components: cash at close, a delayed “earn-out” payment, and equity in the company. The earn-out, Jenio says, is not tied to aggressive growth targets or profit hurdles. “Just be you,” is how he frames it—keep running the practice the way you already do, and the additional cash follows.
Building a Collaborative Culture
The financial and operational case is only part of the pitch. The peer network is the rest. EPIC4 doctors regularly trade clinical advice, work through complex cases together, and lean on each other through personal setbacks—illnesses, the loss of spouses. Office managers and treatment coordinators run their own cross-practice calls, too, swapping ideas and problem-solving in a way most independent practices can’t.
For Webb and the leadership team, the goal is durable growth, not a land grab. By holding the line on cultural fit, clinical quality, and genuine partnership, EPIC4 is betting it can build a model that works for today’s practice owners and the associates lined up to succeed them. OP
Alison Werner is chief editor of Orthodontic Products.
Photo: ID 220039959 © Andrey Popov | Dreamstime.com
