From Dental to Tires: Why We Pivoted (and What’s Actually Working)

We pivoted our self-funded ETA thesis from dental to tires and auto service for one core reason: control. Dental is a great industry, but first-time owners get pinched by clinician scarcity, payer friction, and DSO bidding. Clean deals were getting priced like platforms, diligence dragged around credentialing and HIPAA, and collections rode EOBs and write-offs. We wanted the same fragmentation and recurring need, with levers we could pull on day one. Auto service gave us that. Pricing is still local. Cash conversion is faster. Labor is scarce but trainable, with incentives and process driving throughput. The operating stack responds immediately to execution: bay utilization, quote-to-approval speed, ARO, parts margin, technician efficiency, comeback rate, and on-time for fleets. A focused procurement program with tight SKUs and rebates has done more for our P&L than any single marketing idea, and a real dispatcher and service writer lifted revenue faster than more ad spend. The biggest upside has been fleet. Municipal, utility, USPS, and delivery buyers are purchasing uptime and clean SLAs, not branding. Preventive-maintenance calendars function like a membership plan. Publish response times, stick to price transparency, hit turn-time targets, and the work becomes recurring and schedulable. We kept our ETA muscle from dental: clustering for density, a 13-week cash cadence, central phones, and a simple scorecard that the team actually sees daily. If you’re running a fleet-heavy play or have exited a clustered MSO in this space, I’d love to compare dashboards and what multiples really cleared for footprints with documented SLAs. Happy to trade our procurement terms matrix, KPI spine, and day-1/30/60 integration checklist. DM me.