Mike Hesketh’s dental practice transformation took Dartmoor Dental from a dated seven-surgery clinic in a listed building to a multi-million-pound hub in Devon.
In 2017, we sold our first dental practice project, The Exeter Dental Centre, to Bupa in a ‘walkaway’ deal.
It was the culmination of a four-year transformation that saw the practice’s value grow tenfold.
Following a family gap year traveling the world with our young family, we found ourselves at a crossroads deciding to test if the principles we used in Exeter still worked in a post-pandemic economy. So we began searching for a new challenge.
That search led us to Lynbridge House Dental Practice in Tavistock in 2022.
On paper, it wasn’t right. An hour from our home, in a town we didn’t know well, and the 250-year-old listed building was in significant disrepair.
The practice was turning over roughly £700,000 with seven aging dental chairs and very few new patients.
However, we saw the kernels of something special: a solid team, over 8,000 registered patients, and a small NHS exempt contract.
It occupied a unique niche – too complex for a corporate acquisition with four existing partners and too large for a typical first-time buyer.
