Apex Dental Partners and Your Practice: What Owners Should Know in 2026

The email is three sentences long and unfailingly polite. Someone would like to introduce themselves.

No pitch, no number, just a name and a calendar link.

You do not answer it. You sit on it for eleven days, and then at some point on a Sunday you type the name into your phone while the coffee goes cold.

What comes back is a run of press releases about practices in Colorado. Which is not, on the face of it, about you at all.

But it is. Buyers do not affiliate at random, and the pattern in those releases tells you more about what your practice is worth to this particular organization than any brochure will.

Here is how to read it.

Key takeaways

• Apex Dental Partners buys existing practices. It does not primarily build new ones. Six practices joined across Colorado and Texas in April 2026, and five more Colorado practices followed in May.
• The footprint is eight states, not one. Apex is headquartered in Dallas and has 65 supported practices nationwide, with Colorado at 12 locations after the May announcement.
• Density is the strategy, and density is priced. Buyers deepening a market they already run capture cost savings that a scattered distant addition never delivers.
• Density cuts both ways for a seller. A buyer already thick in your market may pay more to close a gap, or less because they already have what you were selling.
• You cannot tell which from the outside. That asymmetry, not the buyer’s reputation, is the reason a single unopposed offer is impossible to evaluate.

Does Apex Dental Partners buy dental practices? Yes. Apex affiliates existing independent practices rather than building new ones.

As of May 2026 it supported 65 practices across eight states from a Dallas headquarters, having added six in April and five more in May.

Who Apex Dental Partners actually is

Founded in 2014. Dallas headquarters.

The founding group includes Matt Hale, David Lohmann and Dr. Layla Lohmann, and the current chief executive is David Lohmann, with Hale as president and chief operating officer.

A definition first, because the label does real work here. A DSO is a dental support organization: the management company owns the non-clinical side of a practice and handles everything outside the operatory, while a licensed dentist keeps ownership of the clinical entity.

That split is not branding. Most states restrict who may own or control a dental practice under the corporate practice of dentistry doctrine, and the DSO structure exists to operate inside those rules.

Apex closed its tenth calendar year with more than 50 supported practices across eight states. By May 2026 that number was 65.

The public trail of the footprint is worth following in order. Its investor’s own portfolio description, written when the partnership began, put the locations in Texas, Oklahoma and Colorado, with plans to enter two or three new markets.

Colorado is where the recent activity concentrates. Apex announced its third and fourth Colorado affiliates when the whole network stood at 37 locations.

In May 2026 it added five Colorado practices at once, taking that state to 12.

That is not a company scattering pins on a map. It is a company filling in the states it already occupies.

On ownership, be careful, because most write-ups get this wrong.

Apex describes itself as doctor-led. It operates a Doctor Partnership Path whose top rung is an Equity Partner designation, carrying a profit share tied to the individual practice.

A new cohort of those partners was announced in May 2026.

There is also an institutional investor. Endeavour Capital states on its own portfolio page that in 2020 it partnered with the founders to provide partial shareholder liquidity and to recapitalize the company’s balance sheet.

What I have not found is a primary disclosure setting out the full current ownership split between founders, doctor equity partners and institutional capital. So I will not assert one.

Ask them directly instead — the question is in the list further down.

Does Apex buy existing practices, or build new ones?

Buys. Clearly, currently, and on a documented cadence.

That sentence is worth writing plainly because several of the largest names a dentist would Google do the opposite. Of the three biggest DSOs in the country, only Heartland Dental is substantially acquisition-led.

Aspen Dental and PDS Health grow mainly by opening new offices.

An owner assuming the biggest brands are all bidding for existing practices is working from a wrong map. It is the error I correct most often on a first phone call.

Apex sits firmly in the affiliating group. Group Dentistry Now’s April 2026 deal roundup records six practices joining across Colorado and Texas.

The May announcement added five more.

Its own site is built for sellers, not just patients. There is a partnership page with two buttons: start a conversation, and request an appraisal.

Compare that with a company whose only dentist-facing page is a job board.

The model is described as non-branded. Practices keep their own identity, and the stated arrangement leaves the doctor leading locally while central functions handle the administrative load.

What in-market density actually buys a buyer

This is the part that changes how you read those Colorado press releases.

Adding a practice twenty minutes from four you already run is a different transaction from adding one in a state where you have nothing. The headline price can look identical.

The economics underneath it are not.

Six things get cheaper when offices cluster.

Staffing. A hygienist calls in sick. In a dense market she gets covered from the office down the road.

In an isolated one that chair sits empty, and the day’s production is gone.

Recruiting. You hire once for a metro rather than repeatedly for a single site. Given that two in five dentists report being short on hygienists, this is not a rounding error.

One payer environment. Same plans, same fee schedules, same credentialing team who already know which carrier is slow. A new state means learning all of it again.

One regulatory environment. One state dental practice act, one board, one set of ownership rules, one annual filing. More on the Texas version of that in a moment, because you can use it.

Referrals. Specialty cases stay inside the group when there is somewhere close to send them. Isolated offices refer their endo and their surgery straight out the door.

That revenue never comes back.

Marketing. This is the big one. A radio buy or a geo-targeted digital campaign covering a metro costs roughly the same whether it feeds four offices or twelve.

The twelfth office in Denver is cheaper to fill than the first office in a state where nobody has heard of you.

None of this is a theory I invented. Becker’s Dental Review reported the sector shifting deliberately toward regional density and away from a scattered national footprint.

Operating depth over raw location count.

So when an acquirer’s recent announcements cluster in one state, that is a live signal about where the incremental dollar is worth most to them.

The part that cuts against you

Now the honest half, which nobody writing about buyers seems to include.

Density is not automatically good news for the seller. It runs in two directions, and you are on the receiving end of whichever one applies.

Direction one. The buyer has a hole in a metro they are trying to own. Your practice fills it.

Your patients, your staff and your location are worth more to them than to anyone else, and the offer can reflect that.

Direction two. The buyer already has four offices within fifteen minutes of you. They already have the coverage, the referral base, the recruiting pipeline and the marketing reach in that ZIP code.

In direction two, a meaningful part of what you were planning to sell is something they already own. Adding you may be pleasant rather than necessary, and appetite is lower.

Same organization. Same market.

Opposite answers, driven entirely by an internal density map you will never be shown.

Let me be exact, because this is easy to hear as criticism. It is not.

Every acquirer everywhere values a target against what it already holds. That is ordinary.

It is also rational.

The problem is purely informational. You are being asked to evaluate a number without access to the one piece of data that determines it.

There is exactly one way around that, and it is not clever negotiating. It is finding out what other qualified organizations say about the same practice in the same month.

The arithmetic, walked through

Abstractions decide nothing. Numbers do.

Take a practice collecting $3.4 million. Two associates.

Overhead running at 61 percent, which is respectable but not extraordinary.

Now do the bridge most dentists never do.

Collections are the money actually collected, not what was produced or billed. Start there: $3.4 million.

Subtract true operating overhead at 61 percent. That leaves roughly $1.33 million.

Then subtract what it would cost to hire an associate at market rate to do the owner’s own production. Call it $360,000.

What remains is about $970,000 of adjusted EBITDA — the operating profit left after paying a market-rate dentist to do the work the owner currently does personally.

That figure, and not collections, is what a buyer values.

Which is why a “percentage of collections” number quoted at a study club is not comparable to anything. A 120-percent-of-collections figure and an EBITDA multiple are different units.

Converting between them takes the bridge above. Nothing less.

For illustration only, and attached to no named organization: value that $970,000 at 8x and the headline is $7.76 million.

Split it 70/30. Cash at close, $5.43 million. Rollover equity — keeping a slice of ownership in the buyer’s company rather than taking all cash — $2.33 million on paper.

Then ask the question that separates a good outcome from a mediocre one. What is the paper worth?

If the organization grows and a later liquidity event prices higher than when you joined, that $2.33 million can be worth considerably more. Dentists who affiliated early with groups that then grew well have done very nicely from precisely this.

If it prices flat, you get your own money back years later, having carried risk and lost the use of the cash meanwhile.

If liquidation preferences rank ahead of you, common equity can return a fraction of its stated figure. That is not a forecast about anybody.

It is arithmetic about how a preference stack pays out.

Nobody can tell you in advance which one you are in. Anyone who claims certainty is guessing, and I would want to know how they are compensated before I believed them.

What you can establish is where the equity sits, what ranks above it, and when a liquidity event is realistically expected. Then price the whole package against a straight cash alternative from somebody else who wants your practice.

Notice what else the arithmetic exposes. That 70/30 split is not a law of nature.

Owners read it as fixed policy. Very often it is an opening position.

Owners who wanted more cash have received more cash — when somebody else was bidding.

The public record you can check before you reply

Here is something free that almost nobody uses. It takes ten minutes.

Texas requires dental support organizations to register annually with the Secretary of State. Registrations expire on 31 December and must be renewed by 31 January.

The filing fee is $150.

The filing is not a formality. It asks for the name and business address of each Texas dentist the organization has contracted with, and for every person owning 10 percent or more of the organization.

Read that again if you are a Texas owner. Before you take a meeting, you can look up how many dentists a prospective buyer is actually contracted with in your state, and who owns a tenth or more of it.

That is a primary source. It costs nothing.

And it settles two of the questions this article opened with, without you having to ask anything awkward in a meeting.

The Texas State Board of Dental Examiners receives that information as well and monitors these arrangements for transparency, though it does not regulate the organizations directly.

Most states do not have a registry this useful. Where yours does not, the fallback is the sponsor’s own portfolio page and the company’s own newsroom — the same two sources I used above, and the only two I would trust on ownership.

What kind of practice Apex looks for

Apex publishes no revenue threshold, patient-count minimum or explicit geographic screen. Nearly no acquirer does, and those that publish one tend to move it anyway.

The footprint tells you more than a stated criterion would. Texas, Oklahoma and Colorado formed the original core, and the recent announcements concentrate in Colorado.

The practice types named across its affiliations are general and pediatric dentistry.

Its stated preference is cultural as much as financial. The language is about practices with strong local leadership, established patient relationships and a culture worth carrying forward, supported rather than replaced.

Read past the warmth and a real screen sits underneath it. A practice whose patients come for the practice survives a founder’s departure.

One whose patients come only for you is harder to underwrite. Every buyer prices that gap.

A strong hygiene department reads well for the same reason. Hygiene percentage — hygiene production as a share of collections — gets treated as a proxy for recurring, transferable patient revenue.

What an offer typically contains

Apex does not publish a price sheet, and neither does anyone else in this market. What any acquirer pays turns on the practice, the market, their current appetite, their capital position, and above all on who else is at the table.

Any source quoting you a specific multiple for a named buyer is generalizing from a handful of deals it half-remembers, usually second-hand.

What does hold broadly across the private-equity-backed pool, rather than for any single organization:

Cash at close is generally a portion of the headline figure rather than all of it. Rollover equity commonly makes up part of the balance.

An earnout may account for the rest — part of the price paid later, and only if the practice hits agreed targets after closing.

There is almost always a post-closing employment agreement. Its term, its compensation formula and its restrictive covenants are negotiated terms, not paperwork.

Two offers with identical headline numbers can therefore be worth very different amounts. I have watched an owner take the larger headline and end up with less money in hand.

On the ranges you will find online, one warning. Page-one search results routinely publish general-dentistry figures in the low single digits that are either small-practice numbers or revenue multiples mislabeled as EBITDA multiples.

Directionally, and hedged deliberately: solo practices tend to clear in the mid-single digits, larger group practices higher, and genuine regional platforms higher again. A single unopposed offer usually lands beneath the range its practice could support.

What changes after the sale

Start with what typically does not change, since with a non-branded acquirer it is more than owners expect.

The sign usually stays. Apex’s model is explicitly non-branded, and its announcements describe carrying forward what the affiliating doctors built rather than converting them to a national banner.

Clinical autonomy is its stated position too. Affiliated dentists quoted in its materials describe practicing the way they always did.

Treat every such statement, from every acquirer, as the opening of a conversation rather than its conclusion. The pitch deck is not where you verify it.

The phone call is. Speak to two dentists who affiliated at least two years ago.

Long enough for integration to have happened, and for any honeymoon to have ended.

What genuinely changes is the back office. Payroll, benefits, insurance contracting, purchasing, marketing, compliance and IT move to a central function.

For plenty of owners that is the entire point.

Your team feels that change before you do. New benefits, new payroll system, new reporting lines for some roles.

Better to know the detail before you tell them, not after.

Your own role shifts as well. Apex’s stated arrangement combines production-based income with a profit share reflecting practice performance, and a route toward broader equity participation.

Compensation structured that way is a genuine feature for a dentist who wants a decade of upside. It is a complication for one who wants to be finished in eighteen months.

Neither is wrong. They are simply different deals, and you should know which one you are signing.

Questions worth asking Apex specifically

Generic questions get generic answers. These are the ones I would put in front of this particular organization.

“How many supported practices do you have within thirty minutes of mine today?” This is the density question asked directly. The answer tells you which direction you are in, and it is a perfectly reasonable thing to ask.

“Which states are you actively affiliating in this year, and where does my market sit in that order?” A company filling in Colorado has a stated priority list. Ask where you fall on it.

“Can I speak with two doctors who affiliated with you at least two years ago?” Ask for two, and ask by name rather than accepting whoever is offered. A confident organization sets that call up within a week.

“Who owns the company today, in what proportions, and what does an Equity Partner actually hold?” Doctor equity in your own practice entity behaves nothing like equity in the parent. Get the distinction in writing.

“Does my practice name stay, and is that in the agreement or just the intention?” A non-branded model makes it far more likely. Have it written down regardless.

“Which clinical decisions remain mine, listed individually?” Materials, labs, hygiene protocols, scheduling templates, case acceptance targets. Name each one rather than accepting a general assurance.

“Who supports me day to day, and how many practices do they cover?” That answer describes your future Monday mornings more accurately than any org chart.

“What is the earnout measured on, and who controls the inputs?” An earnout measured on a number the buyer controls is not really an earnout.

Ask all of these of every acquirer, not just this one. The answers only become comparable when the questions are identical.

How to know whether the offer is competitive

Here is what actually determines your outcome, and it is not whose name is on the letterhead.

An acquirer who approaches you directly is competing with nobody. Their opening number reflects that.

It would be odd if it did not.

The same organization, bidding alongside three others who also want your practice, behaves differently. Not because the first number was dishonest.

Because the information changed.

The pool is deep enough for that to be real rather than theoretical. Becker’s Dental Review tracked more than 200 DSO affiliations in 2025, and reported 69 percent of DSOs expecting increased acquisition activity in 2026.

The ADSO alone counts more than 80 member companies.

Roughly 30 to 35 organizations acquire independent general practices at meaningful scale in the United States. Most owners can name four.

And the density argument runs in your favor here too. Regional platforms frequently outbid national ones inside their own footprint, because filling a gap in a market they already operate delivers savings a distant addition never will.

The only way to find the acquirer who is short a location in your exact ZIP code is to let more than one look.

Creating that competition is what the Elite Selling System exists to do. We hand-select and vet every buyer permitted to bid on your practice, the way a doorman with a velvet rope admits only the right people.

Then we run a private competitive window inside that group. The aim is not to squeeze anybody.

It is that a number means nothing until a second serious buyer has told you what they think your practice is worth.

What to do next

If an Apex approach is sitting in your inbox, the first job is not to judge it against your expectations. It is to make it comparable to anything at all.

Get your adjusted EBITDA documented properly, with the owner-production adjustment done honestly rather than hopefully. Separate cash at close from equity from earnout.

Read the employment agreement with the same attention you give the price.

If you are in Texas, spend ten minutes on the Secretary of State registry first. It is free and it is primary.

Then find out what the practice attracts when several qualified organizations are competing for it rather than one.

Apex may well be the right home. A doctor-led group that keeps local names, has affiliated steadily for over a decade and is visibly deepening the states it occupies is a serious buyer.

Plenty of dentists want exactly that shape of deal.

The point is to choose it on the numbers rather than on the tone of the email.

We will give you that assessment free and in confidence, including the answer that you should wait eighteen months and fix two things first when that is the honest one. It starts with a free, confidential practice value estimate.

Our fee varies depending on the value of the practice and is entirely success-based. If we do not get you a result, we do not get paid.

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Frequently asked questions

Does Apex Dental Partners buy dental practices?

Yes. Apex affiliates existing independent practices rather than growing chiefly through new offices.

Six practices joined across Colorado and Texas in April 2026, and five more Colorado practices were announced in May, taking the network to 65 across eight states.

Where does Apex Dental Partners operate?

It is headquartered in Dallas and supported 65 practices in eight states as of May 2026. Its original core was Texas, Oklahoma and Colorado.

Colorado stood at 12 locations after the May announcement.

Who owns Apex Dental Partners?

Apex describes itself as doctor-led and runs an Equity Partner track for affiliated dentists. Endeavour Capital states on its own portfolio page that it partnered with the founders in 2020, providing partial shareholder liquidity and recapitalizing the balance sheet.

No fuller breakdown is disclosed.

Why does a buyer’s density in my market affect my price?

Clustered offices share staffing, recruiting, payer contracting, referrals and marketing spend. A buyer filling a gap in a market it already runs captures savings a distant addition never delivers.

But one already thick in your area may need you less.

Will my practice keep its name if I affiliate with Apex?

Apex operates a non-branded model, which makes it considerably more likely than at a single-banner acquirer. Get the specific commitment written into the agreement rather than relying on the general pattern.

How can I check who really owns a DSO in Texas?

Texas requires dental support organizations to register annually with the Secretary of State. The filing lists every person owning 10 percent or more, plus the name and business address of each Texas dentist under contract.

What does Apex Dental Partners pay for a practice?

There is no published price sheet, and any specific multiple attached to a named organization is generalized from limited data. What any acquirer pays depends on the practice, the market, their appetite and who else is bidding.

Should I accept a direct offer from Apex?

Not before other qualified buyers have looked. A single unopposed offer tells you what one organization will pay when nobody is competing.

It tells you nothing about what your practice is worth.

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Sources

Apex Dental Partners scale, ownership and activity

1. Apex Dental Partners. “Private Practice Reimagined.” apexdp.com
2. Apex Dental Partners. “Partnership.” apexdp.com
3. Apex Dental Partners. “Apex Dental Partners Cements 10 Years of Partnership Excellence with 50+ Practices.” apexdp.com
4. Apex Dental Partners. “Apex Dental Partners Celebrates their Third and Fourth Colorado Affiliates.” apexdp.com
5. Apex Dental Partners. “Apex Dental Partners Expands Colorado Presence with Five New Affiliations, Reaching 65 Practices Nationwide,” 22 May 2026. prnewswire.com
6. Apex Dental Partners. “Apex Dental Partners Welcomes New Equity Partners, Reinforcing Doctor-Led Ownership Model,” 15 May 2026. prnewswire.com
7. Endeavour Capital. “Apex Dental Partners” portfolio page. endeavour.com
8. Becker’s Dental Review. “Apex Dental Partners hits 65 practices.” beckersdental.com
9. Group Dentistry Now. “DSO Deal Roundup – April 2026.” groupdentistrynow.com

Buyer pool, deal activity and market structure

10. Association of Dental Support Organizations. “About ADSO.” theadso.org
11. Becker’s Dental Review. “200+ DSO affiliations in 2025: State-by-state breakdown.” beckersdental.com
12. Becker’s Dental Review. “69% of DSOs plan to boost acquisitions in 2026: Report.” beckersdental.com
13. Becker’s Dental Review. “The big trends driving DSO growth in 2026.” beckersdental.com
14. Becker’s Dental Review. “What the 3 largest DSOs have been up to.” beckersdental.com

Deal structure, process and regulation

15. Texas Secretary of State. “Form 3801 & Form 3802 — Dental Support Organization Registration.” sos.state.tx.us
16. Texas State Board of Dental Examiners. tsbde.texas.gov
17. Mandelbaum Barrett PC. “The Four-Phase DSO Transaction Process.” mblawfirm.com
18. Cranfill Sumner LLP. “Selling Your Dental Practice to a DSO.” cshlaw.com
19. US House Committee on Oversight. “Survey of State Laws Governing the Corporate Practice of Dentistry.” oversight.house.gov

Ownership trends and practice economics

20. ADA Health Policy Institute. “Practice Ownership Trends in Dentistry: A New Look at Old Data.” ada.org
21. ADA Health Policy Institute. “Dentist Workforce.” ada.org