Fresh out of dental school, two Jonesboro dentists bought their first practice together in 2015, launching a business partnership that has blossomed into one of Arkansas’ largest private companies.
Dr. Hunter Smith and Dr. Will Little are the founders of GPS Dental of Jonesboro, a dental support organization that offers a variety of management services for dentists across the country. It touts partnerships in 108 dental practices with about 250 dentists across 28 states, said Smith.
GPS Dental also reported more than $300 million in revenue in 2023, which would have placed it No. 43 on Arkansas Business’ list of largest private companies and made it the youngest company on the list.
And it’s planning for even more growth next year. “We’re looking to bring in new investors,” said Smith, who is co-CEO with Little. “We’re going to have a lot of new business models that we’re going to explore and try to implement around our philosophy of being … a great partner, and not necessarily a clinical guidance type organization.”
Smith declined to say what new business models are being considered.
After GPS Dental partners with a dental group’s practice, the dentists in the practice will continue treating patients while GPS handles the nonclinical services. (Smith declined to say what percentage of the dental practice that GPS acquires.)
“If it’s not done on a patient, then GPS should be able to support that,” Smith said. “So that would include billing, accounting, finance, HR, payroll, IT, marketing — daily operations type things.”
GPS won’t rename the dental practice or tell dentists what type of procedures to do.
Dental support organizations have been growing in recent years. In 2015, 7.4% of dentists across the country were affiliated with a dental support organization, according to the American Dental Association Health Policy Institute. Last year, that percentage was 13.8%.
The institute’s study found younger dentists are joining DSOs at the highest rates. In 2023, 26% of dentists who had been out of dental school for less than 10 years were affiliated with group practices with at least 10 locations. In 2022, the percentage was 24.2%.
“More dentists are considering DSOs as an avenue for furthering their business,” Smith said. “I think there’s just way more advantages now to joining a group like GPS than there was even 10 years ago.”
Business ‘Snowballs’
Little and Smith grew up in Craighead County. They didn’t know each other until they met at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro. They both attended dental school at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center College of Dentistry.
After graduating, they returned to Jonesboro and Smith bought his first dental practice in 2014 while Little started his own practice.
Little and Smith bought a dental practice together in October 2015, and GPS Dental was formed. Soon, business started to “snowball,” Smith said.
They bought three or four practices in the Jonesboro area and continued to work as dentists.
But some of the dentists they worked with wanted to become owners of dental practices. “So we sold partnerships or acquired a practice alongside those folks and then pretty quickly developed a support team to support us and the partners,” Smith said.
As dentists and owners, Smith and Little developed GPS to provide the services they would want from a dental support organization. The move seemed to work.
In 2019, other dentist practice owners began seeking GPS to work with them, Smith said.
By having GPS handle a dental practice’s nonclinical duties, the practice owners could focus on growing their practices, such as expanding into new locations, according to GPS’s website.
GPS grew even bigger when it began working with the private equity firm Main Post Partners of San Francisco. Smith declined to say how much Main Post Partners invested in GPS, but at the time, GPS had about 25 practices.
GPS also has raised money internally to invest in dental practices. Between July 2023 and April 17, GPS Dental — through its network of doctors and vendors — raised $10.95 million in equity through unique LLCs, according to filings with the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission.
Dentists Affiliated With a Dental Support Organization
GPS Dental also has relationships with private creditors that provide it with the money to partner with the dental practices.
GPS almost exclusively partners with practices that have at least two dentists, but usually more than that.
Some of the biggest challenges GPS has faced in the last year and a half “have been the greater macroeconomy and interest rates,” Smith said. “And being able to source good debt partners to continue to fund our growth and fund new partnerships.”
But fast growth of GPS hasn’t been a problem, Smith said. “Although the growth has been rapid, I think it’s been at the right pace and trajectory based on our operational capabilities,” Smith said.
And while finding the right employees has been a challenge for most companies after COVID, “I thought we did a good job navigating that,” Smith said. “I’ve always felt that we were in a position to support our practices.”
Employees in the dental practices now total more than 1,700, and GPS’s administrative team has between 75 and 100 people.
Focus on GPS Dental
Both Little and Smith have stopped practicing dentistry to run GPS Dental.
Smith said that being a dentist was never one of his passions. But it showed him how “hard the profession could be, and how emotionally and mentally taxing it is,” he said.
Smith said he became a dentist because he wanted a career in health care and it offered a lot of flexibility.
“There’s a lot of different avenues you can go within dentistry, whether it’s a business owner or full-time clinician or even teaching or something like coaching, consulting.”
Smith expects GPS’s growth to continue.
“As long as we’re sticking to our philosophy of doctor/clinician-partner first mentality, and how we can fill in and be supportive around that, then the sky’s really the limit there in ’25,” he said.
Sign up for Daily E-news
