Welcome to This Way Forward, the podcast where C-suite leaders unpack the bold strategic bets that changed everything.
In this episode, Charlie Newark-French sits down with Alex Weiss, CFO of The Aspen Group, the parent company of Aspen Dental and other retail healthcare brands. Together, they explore the pivotal decision that turned Aspen from a single office into one of the largest dental networks in the United States.
The bold strategic bet
In the late 1990s, dentistry in the U.S. was almost entirely fragmented—thousands of independent offices with dentists juggling patient care and back-office operations. Aspen made a different bet: build the first coast-to-coast, nationally branded dental support network. By taking on the administrative burdens—real estate, marketing, insurance, billing, procurement—Aspen freed dentists to focus on patients and scale their practices.
It wasn’t obvious. Dentists had to legally own their practices, making franchising impossible. Skeptics doubted doctors would give up control. But Aspen proved the model, grew to hundreds of locations, and later made another bold pivot—cannibalizing its core denture business to double down on dental implants. That shift now drives nearly a billion dollars in revenue across Aspen and ClearChoice implant centers.
In this episode:
Why Aspen bet on a national dental support model when no one else would
How back-office scale unlocked growth for independent dentists
The bold move from Syracuse to Chicago—and how it unlocked talent for the next phase
Why Aspen cannibalized its own denture business to embrace implants
How lessons from dental are shaping Aspen’s expansion into vet care and medical aesthetics
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