Most consulting engagements ask you to commit before you can verify the value. Lakebeam is structured the opposite way: each stage stands on its own. The Audit is a deliverable you keep. The Build is a fixed scope. The ongoing partnership is monthly. You never have to commit further than what you can see working today.
One to two weeks. The diagnostic that comes before any larger engagement.
A focused walk-through of every system that touches a customer in your practice — from first call to follow-up. I sit with you and your front-desk team, map how patients move through the business, identify where they fall through the cracks, and quantify what each gap costs.
A short findings document — usually two or three pages — with three to five plain-language observations, a prioritized list of fixes, and a rough payback estimate for each. Whatever you decide afterward, the document is yours to keep. No lock-in.
Flat fee, tailored to the size of your practice and discussed at the start. If you proceed to a Build engagement within thirty days, the audit fee credits against it.
Several weeks. The hands-on work of fixing the highest-value gaps from the audit.
Implementation of the prioritized fixes — typically some combination of patient recall workflow, follow-up automation, treatment-plan tracking, review-velocity systems, reporting dashboards, and staff training. We work in your existing tools wherever possible (Dentrix, Open Dental, Eaglesoft, Weave, Solutionreach, NexHealth, etc.) so you keep ownership of the systems we build together.
Operating customer-facing systems. A trained team using them. Documentation your front desk can reference six months from now when the person who learned the workflow goes on vacation. The systems run when I’m not there.
Sold as fixed-scope bundles so you know what you’re paying for before we start. Three sizes, tailored to the depth of work. Billed across milestones tied to deliverables, so you never write a large check up front.
Monthly. Optional. The reason most practices keep working with me long-term.
An embedded monthly partnership that keeps the customer systems tuned as your practice grows, your staff changes, and new operational opportunities surface. Includes a monthly working session with you, ongoing system monitoring, continuous improvement projects, and direct access between meetings.
Predictable, measurable improvement month over month. The customer side of your practice as something that quietly compounds, not something that decays the moment your attention goes elsewhere.
Tiered by depth of involvement — light-touch monthly maintenance, regular optimization, or deeper multi-system ownership. Month-to-month. No long contracts. Annual prepay receives a discount, but is never required.
I’m not a dentist and I’m not going to pretend to be. What I do know is operations. I’ve spent ten-plus years building the systems that keep customers coming back at scale — in software companies where retention is everything. Most independent dental practices have the same underlying patterns: recall lists nobody chases, treatment plans nobody follows up on, software you pay for that’s only being used for a fraction of what it can actually do. Those aren’t dentistry problems. They’re operations problems. That’s what I do.
Independent dental practices are my primary launch focus, and you’d be in the first cohort. The reason I’m focused here is that the operational patterns I built and scaled in software companies translate almost directly to what a practice like yours needs. I’d rather be honest about that than pretend to a track record I don’t have. The flip side is that you get real attention, not the backseat treatment a generalist consultant might offer.
Most dental practice consultants come from inside the dental world — former practice managers, retired dentists, dental-school graduates. They know dentistry deeply, and that’s their strength. My background is the opposite: I built operations at software companies where customer retention was the entire business model. I bring a different lens to the same problem — the operational discipline that makes a SaaS company grow, applied to your patient lifecycle.
Then you keep the document and we part ways. No commitment. The audit deliverable is yours — you own it, you can implement it yourself, you can take it to another consultant. I’d rather have you walk away with something useful than feel pressured into work that isn’t right for you.
The audit is one to two weeks. The build, if you choose to do it, is typically four to eight weeks depending on scope. The systems we put in place keep running after that — it’s not a six-month project. The optional monthly partnership is for keeping things tuned over time and adding new improvements.
The work takes effort on your side too. I can build the systems and train your team, but if your front desk doesn’t actually use the new recall workflow, nothing changes. The practices that get the most out of this are the ones where the owner is genuinely committed to making the operational changes — not just hiring someone to fix it from the outside.
Twenty minutes, no pitch. I’ll listen to how your practice runs today, and you’ll get an honest read on whether the Audit is worth a closer look.
matt@lakebeam.com