From Building a Practice
to Helping Others Build Theirs

The first time I sat still after selling everything, it scared me.

It was 2021. We had just closed the deal on Afinia Dental Group — fifteen years of building a practice, then another, then a network that became the largest dental group in the Cincinnati area. For most of those years I had been a dentist running between operatories, then a CEO running between locations, then a husband running between airports. Now there was nothing to run to. I sat on a yoga mat in a quiet room and realized I had no idea what to do with my hands.

That moment is the reason this page exists.

I grew up in Hutchinson, Kansas, and like a lot of kids who become entrepreneurs, I was probably wired for it before I had the language for it. By my mid-twenties I was on what looked like the right track — a corporate role I was being fast-tracked through, the kind of trajectory you are supposed to want. At 27 I walked away. The freedom I was looking for was not going to be handed to me by a company. I was going to have to build it myself.

I chose dentistry on purpose. I had watched a healthcare model drift away from its origin — the simple relationship between a healer and the person sitting across from them. Magnificent technology. Brilliant science. And somewhere along the way, treatment choices got married to patient finances, and we started fixing problems in bodies before we got around to meeting the human residing inside them. I wanted to do it differently. I graduated from the University of Louisville School of Dentistry in 2005 and opened my first practice the same year.

Then life curved.

Our son Noah was born in Colorado with Down syndrome. The altitude made it hard for him to breathe, and "where we live" went from a lifestyle choice to a medical decision overnight. We moved the family to Ohio. I rebuilt.

Ohio is where Afinia happened. One practice became two. Two became eight. We hired clinicians who actually wanted to be there, built systems that gave them room to do good work, and treated the business side of dentistry like a craft instead of an afterthought. Around the core practices we built related companies — the support businesses every dental group eventually needs but few do well. It grew into the Afinia Dental Group: eight locations, seventy team members at peak, and the largest dental group in the Cincinnati area. Along the way I earned my Fellowship in the Academy of General Dentistry, and the credential I am proudest of: a team that ran the place better than I could have on my best day.

If you have ever built something that grew faster than you did, you know the shape of those years. There is the public version — locations, headcount, awards — and the private version, which is mostly a sleep deficit, a marriage you have to actively protect, and a constant low-grade question of whether the thing you have built is the thing you actually wanted to build.

By 2021, the answer to that question had quietly changed.

The private equity calls had been coming for a while. Plenty of operators in our position were getting offers; the dental industry was consolidating fast. My wife and I had been talking about a reset for longer than I care to admit. We were not burned out, exactly — we were full. Full of obligations, full of meetings, full of other people's emergencies. We wanted meaning, peace, and order, in roughly that proportion, and we could not see how to get there from inside the schedule we were keeping. So when the right offer came, we sold. All of it.

What surprised me was not the deal or the number. What surprised me was the silence on the other side of it. I thought I had wanted it; I just did not know how loud my own life had been until it stopped.

The next three years were the most useful of my career, and I was not working.

We traveled. I sat in rooms with teachers I had been too busy to listen to. I learned to breathe again, the literal kind. I read the things you put off reading when you are running a company. I let myself be bored for the first time since I was a teenager, and I noticed what came up in the boredom. I came out of it with one sentence I keep returning to: there is no personal life separate from the professional one. They have to exist together. Most of the chaos I had spent fifteen years trying to manage in my businesses was not really in the businesses. It was in me. The cortisol, the reactivity, the three-dimensional stress of programmed thoughts running the show — that was the operating system underneath every decision I made. I needed to reinnovate the operating system. Not the company's. Mine.

"There is no personal life separate from the professional one. They have to exist together."

— Andrew Killgore