How Michael Roub acquired
37 Western Dental locations in 10 months

What did the acquisition landscape look like before Roub arrived?

Western Dental had operated for roughly a century as a large, established dental services organization, but it had never once acquired another practice. There was no M&A history at all: no deal team, no target pipeline, no playbook for sourcing, negotiating, or closing a transaction. Growth up to that point had come entirely through the company’s own operations, not through consolidation.

That absence of a track record mattered because acquiring dental practices is a relationship-driven business: owners who have run their own practice for years, sometimes decades, are rarely inclined to sell to a company with no history of doing deals well. Without a credible acquisition function in place, Western Dental had no way to compete for the kind of opportunities that would let it grow by expanding its footprint rather than just its existing locations, and no infrastructure ready to move quickly when a compelling target did surface, as would prove decisive with the fourteen-location group later acquired out of receivership.

How did the work unfold?