Transforming Your Career: Simon Beylin’s Path from Dentistry to Wealth

Dylan Silver (00:00.674)
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. I’m your host Dylan Silver and today on the show I have Simon Beylin in New Hampshire. Simon is an endodontist and real estate entrepreneur and we’re very happy to have him on the show today. Simon, welcome to the show.

Simon Beylin (00:16.063)
and thank you so much for having me here. appreciate it.

Dylan Silver (00:18.4)
Absolutely. Starting off at the top, how did you get into the real estate space?

Simon Beylin (00:24.089)
I grew up around real estate. My father was in construction for multi-family and apartments and single-family subdivisions. Then I transitioned. I went to school, became a dentist, and then specialized in endodontics, which is root canals, and then went full circle back to real estate.

Dylan Silver (00:44.088)
So, thinking about dentistry, I have a friend who’s a dentist in San Antonio, Texas. Wonderful person. I’ve told them multiple times that they should run for office because they’re one of the best people that I know and helping people, But I’ve since learned that there’s lots of different specialties within dentistry, including dental surgery. And so how did you decide, I’m gonna carve out this niche for myself within the dentistry space?

Simon Beylin (01:12.129)
So it actually kind of happened by accident. My wife and I were building our offices and I grew up in Southern California and my father’s construction company was in California.

And construction is just very different on the West Coast versus East Coast. So we got into building our first office and it ended up being a nightmare. We started construction on the second office and also just ended up going down the same path with the new contractor. And I just said, you know what, enough’s enough. Got my contractor’s license and started building dental offices. So initially we just thought that we would do it for ourselves and the architects we were working with started referring other dentists and physicians and kind of grew that. I had just…

subs I was working with and I was practicing dentistry and then just went from that into multifamily. That’s kind of where I I wanted to go and made the transition.

Dylan Silver (02:01.208)
So at this point, when you’re initially building out your own practice, you’re seeing ways that this can be done better, and you’re also seeing that not everyone has the background that you have, so you have a unique opportunity to help other people in the field. Was it then organic, almost a word of mouth type of spread, or how did you start building practices for other people?

Simon Beylin (02:22.529)
So just you build a little bit of a reputation with the dental architects.

Like dentists are very specialized, so are architects. If you’re working with an architect that does a lot of medical and dental space, they’re looking for good contractors. And for us, it was very easy because we speak the same language. Building a dental office is very different than building multifamily. Knowing the ergonomics, the day-to-day of what one of my colleagues goes through, I was able to speak their language. And anytime I bid against any other contractors, if I was there, if I was doing sales, it was easy to the deal.

Dylan Silver (02:56.248)
And so I’m imagining that it’s kind of hard to, or maybe I’m off. Is it difficult to be a full-time contractor and a full-time dentist? How does one do this?

Simon Beylin (03:06.593)
So that wasn’t the intent. I kind of, I had a group of people that I had managing my construction company for me. All I was really involved in was the sales. And then I had just an injury that I wasn’t able to practice dentistry anymore. So as soon as I was injured, like I wasn’t going to sit and crawl up into a ball, just switch paths and said, you know what? I have this construction company. Let’s just take it to the next level and expand into ground up development.

Dylan Silver (03:35.054)
Was it a hand injury? Was it an eye injury?

Simon Beylin (03:37.665)
So it was actually a vaccine injury, unfortunately, with the COVID vaccine and caused arthritis. So it’s a known result now, people that were borderline with psoriatic arthritis and you can’t have arthritis when you’re trying to drill in somebody’s mouth. So yeah, it makes it a little bit difficult to practice dentistry.

Dylan Silver (03:40.448)
my gosh.

Dylan Silver (03:59.544)
You know, now that I’m thinking about it, it’s probably, mean, for sure you need to have steady hands in lots of fields of medicine, but being a dentist, I think, is one of the ones where it’s a non-negotiable. It’s not like, you know, family care or so on and so forth. And so, when that happened to you, what was the state of the dental office business? Had that already taken off at that point, and it was like, okay, I have this already here? Or was it,

Simon Beylin (04:11.2)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (04:29.218)
this has been going for me, now I have this opportunity to dive in because I can’t practice dentistry any longer.

Simon Beylin (04:35.745)
So luckily, at the time that I was injured, we had two very well established offices and we had several associates working for us. So I was able to just cut down my clinical time and focus my clinical time elsewhere. I actually enjoyed doing dentistry.

root canal specialist that’s the person you see when you’re in pain. So it’s kind of instant gratification. Somebody comes in with pain and they leave without pain. So it’s great. Financially, it was very rewarding. But if I couldn’t do that with my hands, just went to the next thing. And like I said, I had the construction company going. So dove feed in with our head first, I guess, straight into development.

Dylan Silver (04:56.067)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (05:00.376)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (05:17.26)
Okay, wow. I’d like to ask a few questions about what it’s like transitioning out of one field which you’ve devoted your life to and however many years of education. I actually spoke, it wasn’t an injury, but I spoke with an attorney who, of course, went through all the education, becomes an attorney, is working in an attorney’s office, and realized within the first year, sitting across from one of his superiors who was 20 years his superior,

that he just didn’t feel like this was a lifestyle that suited his well-being. And he had heard about real estate and he decided to go into real estate. I told him, I was like, man, I don’t have the courage that you had because if I was perfectly healthy and then got into my career and said, hey, this isn’t for me, I wouldn’t have had the courage to be like, let me go transition, because I’m already so dedicated in, but he knew it. In your hand though, even though it was essentially forced out of it, it still had to be

Simon Beylin (05:48.139)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (06:13.67)
super, I would say, challenging to navigate that. What was kind of the emotions and everything that was going involved in realizing I can’t practice the industry any longer, but I have this business that’s doing well, I’m gonna transition into that.

Simon Beylin (06:28.929)
Well, as you mentioned, mean, by the time you go through undergrad and dental school and then residency, you’re looking at 12, 13 years to get to that position and several hundred thousands. I mean, if you’re going to a private school, which is what I did, you’re at over $900,000 in student loans. So whether you practice or not, you got to figure out a way to make your payments and live the lifestyle you lived before or better.

And that was my intention. I don’t want to have any slump in my lifestyle. I produced a lot. did a lot with my hands. So I’ve got to have something that you enjoy. And I already had the second business. So why not just go venture that way while also keeping the dental office? So they’re still very profitable. My wife and I still run them. But my involvement is very minimal at this point. It’s just on management side.

Dylan Silver (07:17.39)
This is in New Hampshire, that you have the dental office.

Simon Beylin (07:19.769)
We live in New Hampshire, but the offices are in Massachusetts and we build in Mass, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Maine.

Dylan Silver (07:27.566)
Okay. This is an investor-specific question, and I’m actually not certain if it varies by state, but I’ve spoken with some folks in the healthcare space who told me that depending on which state that you’re in, you have to be a licensed practitioner of some kind in order to operate, for instance, a dental practice or a doctor’s office. In those states that you mentioned, do people who own and operate

For instance, a dental practice have to be dentists themselves or can the investors be anybody?

Simon Beylin (08:00.577)
So Massachusetts is one of those states where you have to have license to own the dental office So it needs to be a professional corporation And non dentists cannot own more than 25 % of the corporation So if there are investors like you’re getting into a lot of that private equity coming into the healthcare space So they they form DSOs or DPOs for dental service organizations or dental partnership organizations

Dylan Silver (08:17.144)
Yeah.

Simon Beylin (08:25.247)
The partnership ones, they always partner with dentists that remain in the practice and dental service organizations, they just structure the businesses in a different way where they have clinical boots on the ground, which has to be a clinician. And then they own one level above in terms of their corporate structure.

Dylan Silver (08:43.214)
So to clarify that for myself and our audience, based out of my own ignorance on this, so if private equity is coming in, I’m imagining, are they finding a way to have it structured so that they have a dentist within their group, in a sense, or is it because it’s private equity, they’re owning 25 % and individual dentists have to own the rest of the 75%. So in effect, private equity really isn’t swallowing up all the dental industry in New England.

Simon Beylin (09:12.369)
They’re trying, they’re definitely trying. But typically when they come in, if it’s a dental service organization, they’re buying at least 51%. They want to be in full control. But you’ll owe them a certain amount of years if you’re selling off to a private equity, so that you personally have to stay on. And if you stay on beyond that, if it’s one of the better private equity firms and you do stay on afterwards, when you intend to leave, you just give them notice and they’ll hire somebody else that’s going to manage that office clinically.

Dylan Silver (09:14.286)
you

Simon Beylin (09:41.473)
The dental partnership organizations, there’s always 25 % minimum that the owning dentist that sold the practice typically keeps indefinitely. And it’s their responsibility to then sell that to another dentist when they want to exit.

Dylan Silver (09:41.858)
Wow.

Dylan Silver (09:57.388)
I’ve seen in the, I remember going to the dentist as a kid. I really probably need to go get my teeth checked now recently. You’ve reminded me. I gotta get a cleaning. But when I would go as a kid, I remember always going to what seemed like dental practices that were owned by dentists. But now as I’m thinking about it, more and more I’m seeing what appears to be corporate owned in some capacity. Is that a trend in general in dentistry?

Simon Beylin (10:04.233)
Ha

Simon Beylin (10:25.385)
It is in medicine and in dentistry. I think in medicine, they’re close to 80 % is now corporate owned. in, I’m sorry, in medicine, in dentistry, I think they’re getting close to 50%.

Dylan Silver (10:38.102)
As a dentist yourself, what do you make of this? it good for individual dentists? Is it difficult because people are beholden to private equity groups and corporate interests? Or is it almost like, the wave is here and we have to adapt?

Simon Beylin (10:54.117)
It depends. A lot of private equity firms want to come in and they want to take care of the business side and have nothing to do with the clinical aspect. And if they’re leaving clinical autonomy to the providers, that could be great because you have a lot of dentists that have no business running a business and they don’t want that. So they do very well clinically, but they don’t want the headaches of running a practice. But there are a lot of these dental service organizations where it’s definitely profits over patients.

And those are the ones that are getting in there and placing managers that are telling clinicians that have gone to eight to 10 years of school what type of treatment to provide to patients. And those are the absolute worst that can happen to dent dentistry or medicine. And of course, it’s a lot of a lot of it comes from insurance companies as well. They’re they’re they’re

Dylan Silver (11:38.606)
So when that’s…

Dylan Silver (11:44.654)
When that’s happening, is that some type of directive, meaning like they’re installing a dentist or they’re installing a person to oversee the business within the practice itself? Or is it, from an investment standpoint, the operator’s getting on phone calls and so on and so forth and saying, these line items have to be reduced?

Simon Beylin (12:05.973)
They’ll put in managers that are not clinicians and they’ll just learn what procedures are profitable and push those procedures. If you ever look up some, I don’t want to name names, I don’t want to get you or me in trouble, but if you look up some of the large corporate ones and see the lawsuits against them, you’ll definitely see that they’re putting profits above patients.

Dylan Silver (12:14.734)
Hmm.

Dylan Silver (12:28.056)
So then in New England, where dental offices are still required to have a dentist in the ownership group, what kind of, I don’t want to say education, because that’s probably not often talked about, although it may be, when you have a young dentist or an aspiring dentist who’s going through school, how much of this is spoken about, kind of the business acumen that’s required to be a dentist and to navigate these waters?

Simon Beylin (12:56.417)
You know, it’s interesting, when we were in dental school, was almost like that was taboo to speak about the business of dentistry, but at the end of the day, it is a business. Even if you’re an excellent clinician and you want to do the absolute best that you can for your patients, if you don’t understand the business aspect, you can’t treat anybody if your doors are closed. So I think now they’re moving more towards…

having some sort of business school during dental school. But I graduated in 2010 and it was taboo to speak about the business of dentistry. But I graduated residency in 2016. I practiced as a dentist for a few years before I went back to residency. And by the time I got back to residency, we even had opportunity to be involved in business school as part of one of your electives. So I took a full business course while I was in my residency.

Dylan Silver (13:48.536)
So I can imagine that there’s a lot of people in the medical field in general, but especially in settings as close quartered and intimate as a dentist office, right? From what I’ve seen, they’re typically smaller offices. It’s not like dentists are operating out of hospitals, although they could. It’s just not to my knowledge. And so you’re facing new people. You’re very community facing. People are coming in regularly for cleanings and so on and so forth.

for recent graduates to then be kind thrust into this space where they’re expected to kind of learn on the fly, I can imagine some people are kind of shocked by this. Is there that element at all to it of that kind of, wow, I now have to be a business professional and I don’t really have this training?

Simon Beylin (14:37.249)
Well, it’s interesting. I graduated 2010, my wife graduated 2011, and all of us when we were in school back then thought, okay, we want to get out and be practice owners as soon as possible. That’s just, you knew that’s kind of the way that you were going to go. Now the graduates seem like they don’t want to own practices. So they’re perfectly fine going into a practice that’s owned by dentists and being an associate for their entire career.

It’s interesting to us because you have associates that have been associates for 10 years and they’re perfectly happy. They never want to own an office and it seems to be that that’s the way the trend is going. And with these larger private equity firm practices.

They also get the ability to move around the country. They could practice in Florida on a Monday in California on a Wednesday and be back in New York City practicing on a Friday. And they’ll fly them around and they’ll have corporate living spaces for them and they love it. So it’s like you have five years of just working in different states because a lot of them own offices in multiple different states. And that’s just kind of a new trend for new grads.

Dylan Silver (15:47.478)
Explain that. So how could you be a dentist working in different areas? How does that even make sense from a business standpoint for the business that employs them?

Simon Beylin (15:55.201)
My wife and I looked at her and we were like, how does it make any sense? How’s the continuity of care there? Because you want even in our practice, we currently have seven associates working for us. And if they see one patient, when that patient comes back six months later, we want them to the same patient. But in a lot of these corporate offices, that’s not thought about as much. So they let them move around.

Dylan Silver (16:19.214)
Is this a nude? Is this like a- I haven’t heard of this. Is this like a newer thing like last five years or has this been going on for a decade or more?

Simon Beylin (16:26.077)
So the first time we heard about it was 2019. We’re at a conference, one of these DSO conferences, and that’s one of the larger DSOs were there. They had about three, 400 offices and they were saying what they can offer to new grads that other people can’t is this being able to work in three states in one week and, you know, fly them around. And we thought it was very interesting. Right.

Dylan Silver (16:51.69)
people who like travel it sounds great. Apparently now the dental field is attracting folks who like to travel. In my head I was thinking it’s a very stationary, you go into the same place you have. I grew up in West Caldwell, New Jersey right and so in New Jersey specifically where I grew up you would see the name of the dental practice, was the last name of the person and you would just see them for decades. So you would go back home after school and you’d be like they’re still there.

Simon Beylin (16:58.419)
Yeah.

Simon Beylin (17:12.201)
Yeah. Right.

Yeah, that’s the way it was when I grew up and that’s the way we’ve had our offices, but it’s a new trend.

Dylan Silver (17:23.426)
So pivoting a bit here, Simon, talk about going from being a practicing dentist to then helping other people get their office set up. Are you also at that point when you’re doing that type of work contract to work, are you also involved in any way in coaching these dentists up as far as the business of dentistry or is that totally separate and has never come up?

Simon Beylin (17:48.833)
It comes up all the time when they know their contractors also somebody that’s owned offices and helped others We help them as much as we can with setting up with the insurance companies credentialing setting them up on their practice management software All of their systems IT Computers, that’s just we try we try to help as much as possible We don’t we don’t charge for that It’s just kind of giving them advice of what we’ve gone through just with our years of experience and that let them run

decisions from there. there are courses and my wife and I before we opened our offices we took some of those courses on how to open a dental office but sometimes you try to advise some of these dentists, hey go take this course, it’s actually in Texas, it’s in San Antonio and they won’t go but they’ll ask a million questions while you’re building their office so still we share the knowledge as much as possible.

Dylan Silver (18:41.848)
So what, it’s curious, I actually lived in San Antonio for five years. I call that like my second home at this point. They’re doing lots of really neat things in San Antonio. Funny enough, Simon, I left San Antonio to move up to DFW for the real estate market in September of last year. And like as soon as I left, they’re announcing new Spurs Stadium next to the Alamo Dome, like all this. And I’m like, I just left. But going to that course in San Antonio,

Simon Beylin (19:01.738)
Yeah.

funny.

Dylan Silver (19:10.744)
Without giving away all the game, we only have so much time here, what’s some of the key takeaways that you got from that course?

Simon Beylin (19:17.217)
I mean, the gentleman that ran the course, similar to my situation, he bought a dental office straight out of school and went skiing with his family and just went off mogul the wrong way and fractured a vertebrae in his back. And he had numbness going down both arms so he could not practice anymore. So he was in a position, I think he was like a year and a half out of school. It’s like, again, you have a family, you’re supporting your family. How are you gonna work now? Your arms literally don’t work anymore.

So he pivoted from that to he opened six offices within the next like two years. He’s like, well, if I can’t practice dentistry, I’m just gonna go into the business of dentistry. And then his company was bought out by one of these larger corporations. And then as soon as he was bought out, he was in his late 30s, he’s like, I’m not ready to stop. So then he started a course, it’s called breakaway seminars. And he teaches dentists how just A to Z from choosing location.

to actually designing the office, worry about your supplies and equipment, all the way to marketing the whole nine yards. So for us, we followed all of it. It was geared more towards general dentists, but both of us are specialists and we just took whatever we could, bits and pieces, and followed that and kind of took off.

Dylan Silver (20:22.498)
Wow.

Dylan Silver (20:35.404)
grabbing my head over here thinking about that accident that he was involved in. Now I’m really curious with surgeons and with dentists, how common or is it talked about, this type of thing where your job is based on your dexterity with your hands and that that could go away? I can imagine like carpal tunnel, people could get carpal tunnel, which is like common. Is this a thing that people talk about or is it kind of like taboo because no one wants to talk about it?

Simon Beylin (21:03.937)
Oh no, from the day that we walked into dental school, every single dean at the dental school that we were at was on, we have what’s called own occupation disability policy, and they bought it for us while we were in dental school. So if you have a situation like this and you can’t practice your own occupation, which for us is dentistry, that private insurance covers 80 % of your income for the year prior.

up to a certain point, but still almost any dentist and doctor is going to have some sort of policy like that. If they’re smart, I mean, if you’re not, you’re just playing with a loaded gun. Anything happens, you don’t. You don’t think about it, but they absolutely advise us to get those policies while you’re young because they do full check of your health and as long as you’re healthy, you can get covered.

Dylan Silver (21:31.564)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (21:42.008)
Yeah, man, I don’t think most people think about it, but I’m more grateful now for my dentist.

Dylan Silver (21:59.202)
Wow. Man, I’ve done jiu-jitsu in the past and rock climbing and so on and so forth and now I’m thinking, there any, I feel like there was some medical professionals in there, were they risking their livelihood to train on the mats with us? man, we could probably talk about just some of the finer details of setting up these practices and then also building a business in that space. I’ve spoken now, Simon, to a handful of

Simon Beylin (22:08.747)
Yeah.

Simon Beylin (22:13.92)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (22:27.778)
folks in the medical construction space, specifically people who build trauma centers in some major metropolitan areas. Minnesota, I forget the city of Minnesota, and then in Tampa, Florida. And what’s interested me is that most people don’t realize that medical, from the outside looking in, is filled with real estate investors, and it is. And once you start to see it, you start to see how…

really great of a real estate investment it is and why it’s kind of a no-brainer that talk about private equity flowing into these businesses in these practices it completely makes sense we could probably talk about at at nauseam about that and i i i could chew your ear off asking very stupid questions but

Simon Beylin (23:12.033)
I mean, that’s 100 % correct. So these private equity firms are buying dental medical practices.

They know the multiples that they’re willing to pay for the practice and that’s their model is to grow more and more more practices and then recap and sell to a larger group. So they want nothing to do with the real estate because the real estate will actually slow them down. So they’re not getting the same return on real estate as they do on the practices. So when you have these private dentists or doctors that are selling their surgery centers or…

Dylan Silver (23:33.102)
Hmm.

Simon Beylin (23:42.785)
dental practices, whatever they might be, and you have a billing dollar company signing on that lease, the cap rate that that practice, the real estate for that practice is gonna trade out, now starts going way down to worth a heck of a lot more than somebody who owns their own real estate. We own the real estate for our practices, but if I wanted to go and refinance that as somebody who’s not at arm’s length, I’m not gonna get the same cap rate as if one of these private equities owned the practice and I own the real estate.

Dylan Silver (24:11.362)
We are coming up on time here, Simon. Where can folks go to get a hold of you?

Simon Beylin (24:16.11)
So my website is www.beylindevelopment.com

We do teach a mastermind, so a lot of the people that show up to our mastermind are actually dentists and physicians looking to get into real estate. And my niche is ground-up development, so we do lot of just multifamily, a little bit of commercial that might go along with our multifamily, but that’s mainly what we’re doing these days is full ground-up construction. And I’ll be out in Texas and your area in a few weeks. We’re looking at about thousand units in Austin, Temple, and Dallas.

Dylan Silver (24:50.616)
have a San Antonio dentist that I have to talk about reaching out to you with to see if she wants to go to the mastermind. Simon, thank you so much for your time, for coming on the show, for giving us some value. Thank you for coming on the show, Simon.

Simon Beylin (24:55.369)
Yes, there you go.

Simon Beylin (25:02.643)
Of course, thank you for having me. Appreciate it.