What Comfort Dental Does That Dental School Never Could
There’s a line Dr. Rick Kushner, founder and president of Comfort Dental, delivers at recruiting meetings that tends to stop people in their seats: “Comfort Dental makes weak docs average. They make average docs way above average, and they make above average docs earning seven figures.”
It’s a bold claim. It’s also backed by nearly 50 years of results and a network approaching 500 partner-owners across more than 150 locations. So what, exactly, is the model doing that traditional practice isn’t?
The Reps Problem No One Talks About
Kushner is direct about something dental educators don’t love to hear: most graduates leave school without enough clinical reps. Not because the schools are negligent, but because the economics of graduate training have created a structural problem. Endodontics residents, oral surgery residents, and other specialists need procedures to train on, and those procedures come out of the general dentistry student’s experience.
“Some of you got close to zero of those,” Kushner tells new recruits. “Your dental schools are up against it. This is not a criticism. But you’re in the right place. We’ll give you a whole dental school’s worth of procedures in your first few weeks if you’re willing and able to be mentored.”
That mentorship isn’t incidental to the Comfort Dental model. It’s the spine of it. Early partners worked shoulder-to-shoulder with Kushner himself. As the organization scaled, those partners became the mentors. The throughline has always been the same: clinical volume produces clinical confidence, and clinical confidence produces clinical quality.
Ownership Changes Everything
One reason Comfort Dental doctors tend to perform at a higher level isn’t just training. It’s investment, in the most literal sense. Comfort Dental is a franchise organization, not a DSO. Every practicing dentist is a partner-owner in their location. They bought in. They have skin in the game.
Kushner draws a sharp contrast with the associate model at his recruiting events. He asks associates in the room to calculate what their production would have meant to their income if they had been a partner instead of a percentage employee. The math, he says, almost always tells the same story: “You would have handled your practice buy-in debt, you would have handled your student debt, and there would still be extra dollars in your pocket.”
That ownership mindset changes how a dentist shows up. It changes how they manage patient relationships, how they approach treatment planning, and how invested they are in the long-term success of their practice. DSO associate dentists, by contrast, are often told, as Kushner puts it, “All you have to do is the dentistry. We’ll take care of everything else.” Comfort Dental takes a different view: you do the dentistry and everything else. Different mindset, different outcomes.
The Seven Characteristics of a Successful Comfort Dental Dentist
Kushner worked with an industrial psychology firm to evaluate what actually predicts success in the Comfort Dental model. They landed on seven characteristics: likability, clinical quality, clinical speed, organizational skills, leadership, character, and work ethic. All seven matter. But two rise above the rest by a significant margin: clinical efficiency and work ethic.
“At Comfort Dental, if you have those two things, and you’re not terrible at the other five things, you’ll be successful,” Kushner says. That’s not a knock on the other five. It’s a recognition that volume-based, patient-forward dentistry rewards the dentist who can move efficiently and show up ready to work.
The results speak for themselves. Comfort Dental has roughly ten doctors currently producing at the seven-figure level. The organization’s top earner has held the number one spot for two decades and has an award named after him. These aren’t outliers from an elite demographic. They’re dentists who embraced a model, put in the work, and let the volume do the rest.
What This Means for Dentists Considering a Change
Kushner is frank about the fact that recruiting remains one of Comfort Dental’s biggest challenges. The DSO pipeline tells dental graduates a comfortable story: low risk, no management, steady paycheck. Comfort Dental asks for more, and delivers more in return.
For dentists who feel clinically undertrained, burned out by a slow schedule, or trapped in a model that wasn’t what they imagined, Comfort Dental’s PPOD events, potential partner opportunity discussions, offer a chance to see the model up close without any obligation. Attendees visit offices, meet producing partners, and get real numbers. Not promises. Evidence.
The offer Kushner has been making for five decades is still on the table: come in willing to work, willing to be mentored, and willing to own your practice. The rest, as the track record shows, tends to follow.
Ready to See What the Model Can Do for You?
If you’re a dental professional curious about what partnership with Comfort Dental looks like, reach out to learn more about upcoming PPOD events and what the path to partner ownership could mean for your career.