Here's a question worth sitting with: how many decisions did your leadership team make last month based on data that was already a week old? Most DSO operators have a number in their heads. It's probably wrong and almost certainly too low.

That gap between what organizations think they know about their business and what's actually happening across their locations is exactly what surfaced at the DEO Operations Intensive in Dallas. Over three hours, the session broke down what a true tech-enabled dental organization looks like, from patient intake to revenue cycle management to executive decision-making. The session led by Coach Michael Irving alongside Jim Zlotnick (Senior Director of Operations, Espire Dental

The premise was simple and a little uncomfortable for a room full of operators who had invested heavily in technology. Growth doesn't come from more data. It comes from better decisions, and better decisions only happen when leaders have complete, real-time visibility across the entire business.

The problem is that most multi-location dental organizations are nowhere near that. They're running on a setup that looks functional on the surface but creates serious problems underneath:

Payroll and finance living in spreadsheets

Everything technically "works." But the cost of keeping it all separate is higher than most groups realize. The session had a name for it: 

Data debt builds quietly. Information spreads across platforms, teams start manually consolidating reports, and by the time a number reaches a decision-maker, it's already outdated. Leaders stop getting answers but get versions of answers and they spend more time reconciling data than acting on it.

Two live audience polls shifted the tone of the room.

The first question: how long does it take your team to pull a unified report across marketing, payroll, and revenue cycle management?

The second: are you spending money on a custom data warehouse just to see your numbers?

 said yes, and described it as expensive and difficult

The rest were still manually stitching together disconnected systems

Together, those two polls revealed something that created one of the strongest conversations of the session. Leadership teams across the room were spending days pulling reports, money building custom infrastructure, and hours debating which number was correct, instead of actually improving the business.

That's not a reporting problem. It's a decision-making bottleneck.

One issue surfaced directly from the audience: trust in the numbers.

Operators openly described what happens when reports from different systems conflict. When teams are working from different versions of the data and leadership spends more time validating numbers than acting on them, the result is hesitation. And hesitation, in a multi-location dental organization, quietly kills growth.

When leadership questions the data, decision-making stalls across the entire organization. Not just at the top, but at every level where someone is waiting for a green light that never comes because nobody can agree on what the numbers actually say.

The conversation that followed shifted from reporting to something more important: the difference between static, delayed data and actionable, immediate data. Most dental organizations don't lack reports. What they lack is real-time operational visibility, unified business intelligence, and insights that leadership can act on the same day they receive them. 

The takeaway was direct: data only creates value when it changes behavior fast enough to impact the outcome.

Jim Zlotnick: Analytics as a Growth Center, Not a Cost Center

Jim Zlotnick, COO at eSpire Dental, reframed the entire conversation with a single mindset shift.

Enterprise analytics should not be viewed as a reporting expense. It should be viewed as a growth center. Before centralizing analytics, Jim was personally spending five to six hours every week just pulling reports together. That time is now redirected toward actually changing the numbers. Toward understanding which treatment coordinator and doctor combinations perform best together, tracking completed treatment versus accepted treatment trends, identifying what high performers are doing differently, and replicating those workflows across the company.

His point was precise: enterprise analytics isn't about having more data. It's about having all the data in one place so leadership can see the full story and act on it. You can't evaluate marketing performance without understanding phone conversion. You can't evaluate production without understanding collections. You can't evaluate growth without understanding profitability. When those numbers live in separate systems, leaders are always working from an incomplete picture, and incomplete pictures produce slow, cautious, or outright wrong decisions.

When everything lives in one system, cause and effect become visible. Teams align around the same numbers. Decisions happen faster, with more confidence, and with less time wasted in meetings where everyone has a different spreadsheet.

The irony the session kept circling back to: many dental groups have already invested significant money trying to solve this problem, and still don't have the visibility they need.

Custom data warehouses were supposed to be the answer. In practice, they've created a new set of problems. High setup and maintenance costs, dependence on technical teams to keep them running, and a persistent lag between when data is captured and when insight is actually available. By the time the system explains what happened, it's too late to act on it.

Dental groups are caught between two equally frustrating positions: stuck with fragmented reporting that can't give them a clear picture, or over-invested in infrastructure that was meant to reconnect information that should never have been disconnected in the first place.

That's the trap. It's why so many organizations are now reevaluating their technology stacks, not because they need more reports, but because they need faster clarity and genuine confidence in the data driving executive decisions.

What Real-Time Visibility Actually Changes

The organizations pulling ahead right now are not necessarily producing more dentistry. They're making decisions faster because they have real-time operational visibility across the business. That means leadership can quickly identify declining treatment completion rates, underperforming locations, staffing inefficiencies, marketing channels that aren't converting, and revenue cycle slowdowns impacting cash flow, and act on those insights immediately, while there's still time to change the outcome.

That's where same-store growth actually accelerates. Growth stops depending on instinct or delayed reporting and becomes a repeatable operational system driven by real-time business intelligence. Leaders stop reacting to problems weeks after they develop and start making proactive adjustments while the window to act is still open.

In practical terms, Executive Mastery means being able to answer the questions that matter most, and answer them in minutes:

Which locations are underperforming, and why?

Is marketing driving profitable growth, or just activity?

Not next week. Not after three days of spreadsheet work. Today, in the time it takes to have a board-level conversation. This is what OS Dental was built to deliver. A single platform where PMS data, financial performance, payroll, marketing, and phone metrics converge, so that the questions that used to take a week to answer take fifteen minutes instead.

The session closed with something simple that landed harder than any statistic in the room. You cannot scale what you cannot see and you cannot act on what you see if it's delayed, incomplete, or inconsistent.

The dental groups winning right now are not necessarily collecting more data than everyone else, they are operationalizing it faster. Actionable visibility improves accountability, accelerates decisions, drives same-store growth, and creates a competitive advantage that compounds over time.

For most dental groups, the infrastructure to scale is already in place. The marketing is running, the locations are open, the demand is there. What's missing is the visibility to capture the full value of what's already been built.