We caught up with Dr. Karen Parvin, Navy veteran and owner of Coastal Smile Design in Chesapeake, VA. Before moving to a fee-for-service model, she was working six days a week — and still losing money.
With Amplify360, everything changed. We asked her to walk us through her experience.
6 Days a Week Wasn't Working
Dr. Karen Parvin's story starts in a place a lot of practice owners will recognize immediately: doing everything right and still not seeing it pay off.
"I was working like crazy — two nights a week until 8:00 p.m., four and a half days that always turned into five, plus admin on Saturdays. I was exhausted, and despite all that effort, I wasn't making the money I should have been."
At the time, she was participating in nearly every PPO network available to her. And why not? Most dentists are taught that this is the standard playbook for keeping the schedule full. But the schedule was full. The numbers still weren't working.
The Math of Walking Away
Dropping out of the system you built your whole business model around is scary, and that fear is rational. There's no way to know in advance how many of those patients will actually follow you.
Dr. Parvin had that same fear. With Amplify360's support, she made the call anyway — and what she found on the other side of it reshaped how she thought about the risk entirely.
With our guidance, Dr. Parvin started by leaving the plan that was paying the least, but that didn't mean it was an easy decision. "I dropped my lowest-paying network first. But that plan represented about 40% of my practice," she shared. "I thought everyone would leave."
Forty percent is not a small number. For most practice owners, it's the kind of number that keeps a decision on the shelf for years. But Dr. Parvin recognized that the value behind those patients was not all it seemed. She describes the moment the math actually clicked for her.
"I realized I'd be better off handing each of those patients a fifty-dollar bill and telling them to go somewhere else. It sounds insane, but once I saw it that way, it made perfect sense. It was a win-win."
Making Moves
Even though she was prepared to face the reality of her decisions, after escaping the low-paying PPO, Dr. Parvin didn't end up losing all 40%. "Only about 20% actually did leave," she estimates. And they didn't all stay gone. "A lot of those came back once they realized they weren't as happy elsewhere."
For Dr. Parvin and the Coastal Smile Design team, the impacts of those returns weren't just financial. Leaving the network became the foundation for a better kind of practice — one built on value instead of volume, with a business finally profitable enough to support a balanced life outside of it.
"That gave me the confidence to drop the next plan, then the next, until we became fully fee-for-service."
Better Practice, Better Patients
For Dr. Parvin, leaving insurance networks also changed who was sitting in the chair.
When the patients who comprise your practice choose you for the care rather than the copay, it makes a palpable difference in your day to day. The relationship dynamic is based on patients opting in to what you have to offer, layering in an element of automatic trust on top of your recommendations. In other words: more yeses to treatment.
"I noticed a big difference in the quality of patients that came in," she shares. "Now I get more patients who are genuinely interested in dental treatment — not just the least expensive dentist to get a free cleaning. New patients actually came and kept their appointments, unlike before."
Why Training is a Secret Weapon
Ultimately, going fee-for-service gave Dr. Parvin the freedom to run a more profitable practice that didn't require so much of her time. More than this, though, she knew it wasn't only her time at stake. Dropping a network isn't just an administrative decision. It changes what happens every time the phone rings.
This is one of the main offerings that sets Amplify360 apart. In addition to building marketing and profitability strategies for dentists, we also train your entire team to support every change we implement.
"You did a great job working with me and my team to coach us on how to handle calls the right way," recalls Dr. Parvin, recognizing that her team was a key component to her success. "If the phone rings and we're not doing the right thing with it, it's kind of useless."
Beyond the Bottom Line
Ask any dentist why they got into fee-for-service, and the answer is rarely just about the collections number. For Dr. Parvin, it was about getting her life back. "My number one priority is my family — my kids and my husband," she shares. "I like to travel, hike, kayak, and rock climb."
Chained to the grind of insurance claims and price-shopping patients, the only road to profitability is doing more. More appointments, more time in the chair, more low-value cases to eke out what little profit you can collect, more time in the office. On Saturdays. When the only strategy that works is to do more of what you're already doing, that grind slowly creeps into the rest of your life. But as Dr. Parvin discovered, it doesn't have to be that way.
"As I was able to leave PPOs, I focused more on the dentistry I love to do, and I became more productive in less time. That's allowed me to take more time off and gain more financial freedom."
Advice for Practice Owners Considering Going Fee-For-Service
Amplify360 has helped hundreds of practice owners who want to go fee-for-service make their dream a reality — while also uplifting their marketing, training their teams, and teaching them how to invest in the systems that will support their practice goals. But don't just take it from us.
In her own words, here's what Dr. Karen Parvin has to say about working with Amplify360.
"I highly recommend this team. They're reliable, and having worked with other companies before, I can say the quality of patients I've seen through your marketing has been vastly better."
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