What happened
at Ssun Health.

If you searched my name, 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 employment of key team members, 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 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 size we were doing between $1.5 million and $1.9 million a month, so call it a $20 million organization.

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

That is not my description of the structure. That is what the assignment of units says, what the 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 the management company that served them. The dentist who owned the practices owned a part of the management company too.

What actually happened

We ran the company as though a financial backer with unlimited reserves stood behind us. Nobody did. Practices joined the group on bank debt that I personally guaranteed, with no operating cushion behind that debt, because the bank did not lend operating capital adequately sized to support the operations of the business. 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 behind ours, and the systems were not tight.

What got lost underneath all of that was Revenue Cycle Management (RCM), meaning 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 is a system, every system needs an owner, and we did not have the right resources in place to run them right. A national accounting firm reviewed our books and then audited them as a function of our own internal checks and balances, and the thing an accounting firm cannot solve in an audit is a broken revenue cycle system. The firm examined what we recorded, and the problem was what we never captured.

None of that was hidden and none of that was intentional. Revenue Cycle Management was a blind spot the size of the company, and putting the right resources against that blind spot was mine to do.

Many of the people who could have caught the problem did not stay. Fewer than one in five of the staff who came with the practices that joined our group were still there twelve months later, and the people who replaced them were learning the job as they went. Doctor compensation was calculated on collection estimates rather than reconciled statements, which meant the numbers could not be verified in either direction. The company did not have, at any level including mine, the depth in those systems that a group our size needed.

In 2022 we moved all the practices onto one management software platform. We prepared for the conversion with online videos and homework assignments from the software vendor, and we had no way to certify true comprehension. There was no way to validate that anyone understood the new software, let alone our own revenue cycle systems that sat on top of the software. Key people were away when the conversion ran, and nobody was watching the two things that mattered most. The schedules and the accounts receivable did not migrate in the data conversion from the legacy software to the new platform. Nothing transferred, and we had to start over. The clinical records were intact. Patients who called to be seen were seen, and their history was rebuilt by hand from the records of their last appointment. Patients who did not call, the no-shows and the cancellations, could not 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. 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 see who owed it.

COVID hit the business early in its establishment, since we had started the company 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.

By early 2023 there was no cushion left. I went to our bank for expanded credit and the bank said no. Then the bank told us the credit we already had could not continue. We never missed a payment on our bank loans. We did not meet a covenant test, and that gave the bank the right to act. On April 6, 2023, the bank declared a default and placed a hold on every dollar we had on deposit. We were already tight, but we were not out of money. We simply could not reach any of the money we had.

April 7 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. I insisted on that, because under no circumstances was a bank decision going to cost my employees their pay. The support team worked the entire day from what we could calculate by hand and got everyone paid with the data we had.

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

I hired too fast and I bought too fast. I should have hired people who knew what I did not 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 who were owed, and I am not going to dress the number up. Against $20 million a year, $600,000 is about two weeks of revenue.

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, which is exactly what bankruptcy protection is for.

My compensation was set by our board, which was with me from the inception of the company. 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 them 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. 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 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 state order carried my name because I was still the company's owner on paper, even though the receiver, not I, controlled the company when those final paychecks came due. That is not skirting the responsibility. I was not there. The retirement plan was administered by the receiver and made whole. Care continued at every practice that had a dentist. Two closed because their dentists left and could not be replaced.

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 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 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 did not 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, the kind people see on television. I was at a conference, walking between meetings across a hotel, when a reporter stepped out from behind a bush with three cameras and followed me through the building. I was on the clock, headed to another meeting. I did respond. 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, 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 what I would have said if anyone had asked for a conversation.

I wrote a book about the journey of an entrepreneur, and about how quickly things can unravel when the right guardrails are not in place. I wrote the book because when the failure happened to me I could not find an honest account of one like mine anywhere. The documents behind this account are listed below.