Love as a Business Model
Staff turnover is one of the most persistent and expensive challenges in the dental industry. You can offer competitive pay, decent hours, and a clean operatory, but if the internal culture isn’t right, people leave. And when people leave, patients notice. The experience becomes inconsistent. Trust erodes. New patient acquisition becomes a treadmill rather than a growth strategy.
Dr. Michael Rhees, owner-partner at Comfort Dental West Springs in Colorado Springs, has a straightforward answer to the culture question. It isn’t perks or ping-pong tables. “It comes down to love,” he says. “Our staff is oriented towards loving each other and loving the patient.”
That might sound like a soft answer to a hard business problem. In practice, it turns out to be one of the most durable frameworks a practice can build on.
What “Oriented Toward Love” Looks Like Operationally
Dr. Rhees describes a team that approaches every interaction, including the difficult ones, from a place of service rather than ego. When a patient comes in grumpy or anxious, the instinct isn’t to get defensive. It’s to recognize that the person is in pain and needs help. “People that take themselves and their egos out of the situation,” he explains, “they just say, ‘Look, this is someone that’s in pain and I want to help ’em out.'”
This orientation extends into small moments that add up over the course of a patient relationship. If someone calls the office and needs help finding the nearest pharmacy, someone looks it up. If a patient doesn’t have insurance and can’t afford an emergency extraction, the office has a standing policy: they do it anyway. These aren’t grand gestures. They’re the product of a team that has genuinely internalized a service-first mindset.
High Emotional Intelligence as a Hiring and Retention Strategy
Dr. Rhees is intentional about who joins his team. He looks for people who are oriented toward giving, not those who operate from scarcity or who treat patient frustration as a personal affront. The result is a staff with, as he describes it, “very high emotional intelligence” that is both more resilient and more consistent in patient interactions.
This matters for retention on both sides of the chair. Staff members who feel genuinely supported by the people around them, and who find meaning in the work they’re doing, stay. And patients who feel genuinely cared for, rather than processed, return. They refer friends and family. They become the kind of long-term relationships that stabilize a practice’s revenue and reputation.
The Comfort Dental Model as an Enabler of Culture
One thing Dr. Rhees credits for making this culture sustainable is the structure of the Comfort Dental model itself. Because the practice maintains a high volume of patients through accessible, affordable pricing, there is room to extend care in ways that pure margin-focused practices cannot. There is no ethical tension between doing the right thing for a patient and keeping the lights on.
“When you are getting a surplus of patients,” as podcast host Shawn Zajas put it during their conversation, “there are days when you can give and extend above and beyond, simply because you know the work needs to be done and you’re going to do the right thing.” Dr. Rhees echoed this, noting that the model creates the freedom to treat the work as something close to ministry, not just a business transaction.
Why This Model Is Worth Studying
For dental industry leaders, DSO executives, and owner-partners thinking about scalable culture, the West Springs practice offers a case study in what it looks like when values are genuinely embedded rather than laminated on a wall. It isn’t about training scripts or customer service programs. It’s about hiring for emotional orientation, reinforcing a team identity built around service, and creating structural conditions that allow generosity to flourish.
The result is a practice where patients describe the dentist as “nice,” where staff turnover is low, and where the work, in Dr. Rhees’ own words, builds a real “one-on-one relationship” that keeps people coming back.
Culture Is a Competitive Advantage
If your practice is struggling with retention, inconsistent patient experience, or a team that feels transactional rather than invested, the fix probably isn’t a new bonus structure. It might start with a harder, more fundamental question: what is your team oriented toward? At Comfort Dental West Springs, the answer is love. And it’s working.
Learn More About the Comfort Dental Partnership Model
Interested in how Comfort Dental supports its owner-partners in building thriving, culture-driven practices? Explore partnership opportunities and learn what makes the Comfort Dental model different at comfortdental.com.