What happened
at Ssun Health.

Where it started

When I was a little boy, my dad made wine in our basement. My two brothers and I helped pick the grapes, crush them in a press, add the sugar and yeast, and mix the vat. When the wine was ready for bottling, I was put in charge of the labels. Dad wanted them to read Nuss Winery. Nobody had told me the letters in a stamp had to be set backward, so every label came out SSUN ENIW. Dad was pretty upset at first, but he did not throw them away. Then an idea popped into his head: he would call his home winery 3 Ssuns Wine. After all, there were three of us helping our dad with his hobby. I have carried that story most of my life. Something I got backward did not have to be discarded. We found meaning in it and made it ours.

By the time I started a dental company of my own, I had spent two decades in the industry and had sat down with more than 4,000 practices. I had watched a lot of doctors sell to dental groups on promises that did not hold up for them or for their teams. I had also seen the other side. At one of the largest groups in the country, I helped associate doctors buy about $15 million of ownership in the practices where they worked, and I saw what real ownership did for them. I wanted to build a company around that second experience, and I named it Ssun Health.

The idea was that doctors and their teams should “be, do, and have” more with Ssun than they could on their own or anywhere else. A doctor who joined us stayed an owner. We called the economics “the five bites of the apple.” Those five bites were cash at closing, deferred compensation, a share of the profits, growing equity that qualified associates could buy into, and a stake in a future recapitalization. Each practice kept its own culture. A central team carried the administrative weight so the doctors could practice and their people could grow, in the practice and in their lives. In 2020, Group Dentistry Now recognized Ssun Health as the top emerging group practice in America.

We documented who we wanted to be. Vision, mission, and values were central to everything we did with our teams. Our mission was to save a smile on a good day and a life on a great day. Two of our values were Tenacious Joy and Outrageously Brave, and our vision was to touch a million smiles by 2030. Reading those words now, they sound like what they were: plans that had not yet been tested. I believed every one of them. Ssun Health did not turn out the way I intended, but that doesn't mean what we built had no meaning or value.

If you searched my name on Google, you likely stumbled on news coverage from 2025 about the collapse of my company in 2023. What you did not find was the well-documented establishment of the company, its growth, the team we built, or an account of what actually happened from the person who was running the company. Here is that account, with the paperwork behind it. Where this page states a disputed fact, I have tried to tie it to a document rather than ask the reader to take my word for it.

I was the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Ssun Health, a management company that supported dental practices in Colorado and New Mexico. We ran the administration, the billing, the human resources, the technology and the accounting. At our largest, we were doing between $1.2 million and $1.5 million a month, so call it an $18 million organization.

In 2022, one practice grew collections 17 percent over the prior year, and two others grew collections by 32 percent and 26 percent. The practices that declined were the ones that lost providers, because when a doctor leaves, the production leaves with them.

I owned no part of any dental practice. Not one unit.

That is not my description of the ownership structure of Ssun Health or the clinical entities it supported. That is what the assignment of units documentation says, what the equity waterfall and organizational chart prepared by outside counsel says, and what the management services agreement says in its opening lines. Licensed dentists owned the practices from the first day to the last. I owned a majority stake in the management company that served them. The dentist who owned the majority position of every practice also owned a part of the management company too.

What actually happened

The capital

We ran the company as though someone stood behind us with an open checkbook, and no checkbook like that existed. Practices joined the group on bank debt that I personally guaranteed, with no additional operating cushion behind that acquisition debt. Because the bank did not lend enough operating capital to support the business, we went to outside creditors for working capital in the form of a very small line of credit relative to our needs.

The group paid at the high end of the market for practices to be competitive with other major dental service organization (DSO) aggregators, layered management on top, and counted on an exit in three to five years to settle the difference. That was the play most of the industry ran in those years. Several of the largest names in the industry have since restructured, recapitalized, or sold off practices to survive the same math. In one recent year alone, three of the biggest groups in the country restructured billions in debt, lenders took outright ownership of one of them, and most groups surveyed said they expect to recapitalize within three years.

The play works when there is capital behind the group and the most vital systems, starting with revenue cycle management, are dialed in tight. There was no capital partner or private equity behind ours, and the systems were not tight enough.

The revenue cycle

Revenue Cycle Management (RCM) is not just insurance claims management. RCM is everything that happens between a patient accepting treatment and the money landing in the bank. RCM starts with the payer contracts and what each one actually pays. RCM includes how a patient's share is estimated at the chair, collected at the desk, and followed up when the desk misses. RCM includes how cash, checks and incoming mail move from the front desk to a deposit, and how the books get reconciled to the bank and to the accounting firm.

Every one of those things is a system. Every system needs an owner. Unfortunately, we didn't have the right resources in place to run them to their full potential. A national accounting firm reviewed our books and then audited them as part of our own internal checks and balances. But an audit could not repair a broken revenue cycle system. The firm examined what we recorded, but it could not address what was never captured.

Poor execution of RCM wasn't in the playbook for Ssun or the practices it supported. Yet Revenue Cycle Management became a blind spot bigger than anyone could have imagined, and putting the right resources against that blind spot was mine to do.

The people

Many of the people who could have caught the problem were no longer there by the time we realized what was happening. In my experience working with dental groups and acquisitions, fewer than one in five of the staff who come with an acquired practice are still there twelve months later. We found that to be true in our group as well. Their replacements were learning the job as they went.

To further turn the cash flows upside down, doctor compensation was calculated on net production estimates rather than received and reconciled collections, which meant the providers were paid before any money was received for the work they had done. The company did not have, at any level including mine, the depth in those systems that a group our size needed.

The conversion

In 2022 we moved all the practices onto one management software platform, hoping it would help us with better reporting. We prepared the teams at each office for the conversion with online videos and homework assignments from the software vendor. But we had no way to validate that anyone truly understood the new software, let alone our own revenue cycle systems that sat on top of it.

Key people from the leadership team were away when the conversion ran, and nobody was watching the two things that mattered most: accounts receivable and the forward-looking schedule. Neither migrated from the legacy software to the new platform. We had to start over from scratch with every patient visit.

The clinical records were intact, but when a patient called to verify an appointment, we couldn't confirm the date or time. Their history had to be rebuilt by hand from the records of their last appointment. Patients who didn't call to confirm or cancel, and all the no-shows, couldn't be identified to reschedule because the schedule that held them was gone. A substantial portion of the receivables could no longer be reliably identified and collected either. Between lost production and lost receivables, that conversion cost about $1.5 million.

Money we had already earned never arrived because we could no longer reliably identify who owed it, particularly the patient portions.

COVID and growth

COVID hit the business early in its establishment, about four months after the first practice joined in November 2019, and we never fully recovered. Our answer was to keep adding practices, on the theory that more revenue would cover the hole. More practices made the hole bigger.

The bank

By early 2023, there was no cushion for operational variance or the lagging collections problem that had grown out of control. I went to our bank for expanded credit, but the bank wasn't interested in extending a line to us. At nearly the same time, the bank told us the credit we already had could not continue and that we needed to find a new bank to work with.

We never missed a payment on our bank loans.

We did, however, fail a covenant test, and that gave the bank the right to act. On April 6, 2023, the bank declared a default, called our notes, and placed a hold on every dollar in every account we had on deposit. We were already tight, but we were not out of money. We simply could not access any of the money we had.

Payroll day

April 7, 2023, was Good Friday and a payday. The receiver was appointed that afternoon. That morning, with the accounts frozen, we moved payroll from direct deposit to manual checks with permission from the bank. Without payroll processing, our people would go into a holiday weekend without pay. That risked losing the team and eroding the remaining value the receiver would need to recover from the company's assets.

I insisted on the team being paid using every means necessary, because under no circumstances was a bank decision going to cost my employees their income. The support team worked the entire day from what we could calculate by hand and got everyone paid with the data we had. It meant people had to come to the office for their checks, but everyone got a check.

What was mine

The account hold and receivership sharply changed what the company could pay and who controlled those decisions from that point forward.

Ssun was a good company with real problems, and eventually the problems won.

We hired too fast without fully verifying people's skills, and we added practices too fast before we had the infrastructure to support them. I should have hired people who knew what I didn't know, and I should have been far more conservative about what we took on. All of that is mine.

What it cost

Roughly $600,000 in vendor balances went unpaid from before the receiver arrived. That is real money to the people and companies that were owed, and I am not going to dress the number up. For perspective, against $18 million a year in revenue, $600,000 is about eight and a half working days of revenue. That is not to minimize the damage at all.

The consequences to me were also substantial. I signed personal guarantees on the acquisition debt. When the guarantees came due, I sold my house and used the proceeds to pay off one of the many creditors. I lost effectively everything I had. Then I filed for bankruptcy protection from the remaining creditors, which is exactly what bankruptcy protection is for.

My compensation was set by our board, which had been in place from the inception of the company and to which I reported. There were months, particularly through COVID, when the company could not pay me what that agreement said I was owed. My pay was a base salary plus an increase for each practice that joined the group, so the extra I earned worked like a bonus.

Rather than take the increases on schedule, I deferred them, expecting to collect the unpaid income from the proceeds of a sale of the management company. In November 2021, I signed a written agreement that put my unpaid income behind every other creditor. The sale never came, and I never recovered any of the deferred income. Company spending ran through a written expense policy, with itemized receipts on every report and board approval above a set threshold.

The wage matters of which I am aware were ultimately resolved and paid. No wages were ever intentionally withheld. Every wage-related matter arose after the receiver was appointed, when I was no longer there to navigate anything inside the company. The receiver controlled the company when those final paychecks came due. That is not skirting the responsibility. I wasn't there.

The retirement plan was administered by the receiver and made whole. Care continued at every practice that had a dentist. Two of twelve practices closed because their dentists left and could not be replaced fast enough.

When the company ended, the practices the receiver could control were sold. Others returned to the dentists who owned them. Those dentists had previously been paid when Professional Dental Care PLLC acquired a majority stake in their practices, with acquisition debt that I personally guaranteed. I have never received a dollar from any of those later transfers.

Where that leaves me

I did not come out of Ssun believing revenue cycle management explains every problem in a dental practice. I came out of it understanding that RCM is one of the many operating systems a practice cannot afford to treat casually. Profitability depends on converting completed work into collected cash. Staff stability depends in part on having systems people can actually learn, execute and hand off. Patient trust is damaged when estimates are wrong, claims fail and surprise balances appear months after treatment. At Ssun, I didn't understand those systems deeply enough, and I did not put enough people around me who did.

I was the CEO. That was mine to solve.

I understand those systems far better now, and they are a substantial part of the work I do today.

Failure did not make me an expert overnight. It made me unwilling to remain ignorant. I have spent the years since working inside practice economics, revenue cycle performance, transactions and operating systems because I know what it costs when those systems are treated as administrative detail instead of infrastructure. I learned far more from losing the company than I ever learned while things were going well.

The television footage of me came from an ambush-style interview: a reporter showed up without warning and began asking questions with cameras already rolling. I was at a conference, walking between meetings across a convention center, when a reporter stepped out from behind a bush at an outdoor lunch area with three cameras and followed me across the lawn and through the building. I was on the clock, headed to another meeting.

I did respond to his initial questions. I told him it was nice to meet him, that my attorney had instructed me to direct any questions to him, and that I would be happy to send that contact information by email. I also told him that the doctors who had a relationship with my management company got their practices back for free, without having to spend a nickel to take back their equity, and that patient care was not disrupted anywhere there was a doctor. That part did not make the broadcast.

My bankruptcy was open at the time, and my lawyer had told me not to discuss the case. On camera, following that advice looks like dodging. This page is the conversation I could not have then, while my bankruptcy was still open, and have not been asked for since it was discharged.

My dad taught me something with that first homemade wine label without either of us knowing it. The labels came out backward. He kept them and gave the winery a name that meant something to our family. Ssun Health did not become the company I intended. I cannot change how the company ended, but I can carry the lessons into what I build next.

I wrote a book drawn from my experiences as an entrepreneur and about how quickly things can unravel when the right guardrails are not in place. When the company began to unravel, I couldn't find an honest account of an experience like mine that could help me understand what lay ahead. I wrote the book so someone else would not have to charge that hill alone. The documents behind this account are listed below.