THE CLIENT: A Growing Multi-Site Dental Group in Western Canada
Our client is an established, independently owned dental group operating a multi-site network of family dental and orthodontic practices across Western Canada. Built patiently over more than a decade, the organization has earned a strong reputation for clinical quality and for putting its practice teams at the centre of the business.
What began as a single practice has grown into a network approaching 50 clinics, supported by more than 600 team members and over 150 associate dentists. Growth has come through a combination of organic expansion and steady acquisition, with each new practice integrated into a shared operating model rather than left to run on its own. Very few independent dental groups in Canada have reached this size, and fewer still have done it while holding on to the culture they started with.
The network extends from major urban centres to smaller coastal and interior communities, several of which are a considerable distance from the nearest city. Every clinic is supported by a central services team spanning operations, finance, people and culture, marketing, patient experience, facilities, and a growing contact centre.
By mid-2025, the group was in an enviable position. Growth was steady, acquisition activity was active, and the leadership team had a clear view of where the business was heading. What they wanted was a talent partner who could build the leadership and central services bench at the same pace the network was expanding. They engaged ML6 Search + Talent Advisory.
THE CHALLENGE: Building a Leadership Bench at the Speed of Growth
Few things test an organization like success. Supporting a network of this size calls for real depth in regional leadership, finance, and people functions, and the leadership team recognized early that the next phase of growth would require more of it. Rather than wait for the pressure to show, they moved ahead of it.
The roles they needed, however, sit among the most competitive in Canadian healthcare.
Five factors made these searches genuinely difficult:
- Scarce multi-site operating leadership. The group had a strong culture of promoting from within, and many of its best operators had come up through the clinics. Leadership wanted to complement that internal talent with regional leaders who brought formal multi-site P&L experience from outside the business. In Canadian dentistry, that profile is rare and almost always already employed.
- Specialist finance capability. The group needed a controller with genuine multi-unit consolidation experience and sector fluency, along with the analytical horsepower to translate a rich set of operational data into decisions. Candidates who combine both are uncommon, and they are rarely found through advertising.
- Clinical roles in communities with limited local supply. Associate dentist and hygienist openings sat in smaller interior and island communities where the resident candidate pool is naturally thin. Filling those roles is less a sourcing exercise than a relocation conversation, and relocation decisions are made by families rather than by candidates alone.
- A need for true passive-market reach. The internal team had already had real success hiring through their own networks and advertising. What they wanted next was access to the candidates who were not applying anywhere: experienced operators who were performing well, well compensated, and not in the market.
- A more senior hiring profile. As the roles grew more senior, the leadership team wanted current market intelligence on compensation, incentive structure, and interview design so that offers would land the first time.
The leadership team knew exactly what the business needed. What they were looking for was a partner with the market reach and sector fluency to deliver it quickly.
THE SOLUTION: A Blended Engagement Model, Built Around the Work
ML6’s Healthcare Division led the engagement, drawing on direct operating experience inside multi-site dental and healthcare environments rather than search experience adjacent to them. Members of the ML6 team have built talent functions inside dental support organizations from the inside, and that perspective shaped the approach from the first conversation.
We matched the commercial model to the shape of each role. Rather than pushing a single engagement structure, ML6 proposed a blended arrangement: a partially retained search for the two most critical regional operations leadership roles, with the remaining central services roles run on a standard contingency basis. The roles carrying the most weight received the most committed search effort, and the client’s investment was matched to the stakes.
We went directly to the passive market. The operational and finance leaders placed in this engagement were not applicants. They were employed, performing, and not looking. Reaching them took a direct approach, sector credibility, and a compelling case for change, the same discipline ML6 applies across every division.
We widened the profile where the market supported it. Working closely with the leadership team, ML6 introduced multi-site leaders from adjacent field-based sectors, including healthcare and multi-unit retail, where P&L accountability, labour management, and field leadership translate directly. The leadership team was open to the idea from the outset, and several of those hires are now among the strongest performers in the network.
We supported the work that sits around the search. Over the course of the partnership, ML6 has also helped the client with:
- Compensation benchmarking, validating salary bands against live market data and helping formalize a performance bonus structure in the 10 to 15 percent range.
- Interview design, including positioning psychometric profiling as a post-interview conversation tool that deepens the discussion, rather than as a screening gate.
- Organizational design, helping map the central services structure and shape emerging roles, including a central operations leadership layer, before searches were triggered.
- Employer brand collateral, developing clinic and community profiles used to bring remote and rural opportunities to life for relocating clinicians.
We stayed in cadence. Weekly touchpoints, honest status on every search, and a clear position on every candidate we presented. The relationship was built search by search, and it has held.
We embedded as the partnership grew. As clinical hiring volume increased, the engagement expanded again, this time into a dedicated RPO arrangement. An ML6 recruiter now works inside the client’s process on associate dentist and clinical hiring, posting to dental school boards across Canada and the United States, building a longitudinal pipeline of internationally trained clinicians tracked to their accreditation dates, and reporting into the client’s weekly leadership rhythm.
THE OUTCOME: 9 Placements, Three Engagement Models, One Partner
ML6 has completed nine placements for this client to date, and the partnership is ongoing.
The first three offers were accepted within approximately five weeks of the engagement being signed: two regional operations leaders and a contact centre manager, all sourced through direct approach rather than advertising.
Placements have spanned the full central services organization:
- Operations leadership. Regional Operations Manager (Lower Mainland), Regional Operations Manager, and Regional Manager, Operations. Three leaders who brought external multi-site experience into a growing regional structure.
- Controller and Senior Financial Analyst, adding multi-unit consolidation strength and the modelling capability to turn operational data into insight.
- People and culture. People & Culture Partner and People Analytics Analyst, giving the HR function both additional partnering capacity and a dedicated analytics capability.
- Patient experience. Director, Patient Experience, one of the newly defined director-level roles created as the organization formalized its leadership structure.
- Contact centre. Call Centre Manager, hired with a mandate to build and shape the function.
Just as telling as the placement count is the shape of the relationship. What began as a single contingency conversation in June 2025 became a partially retained leadership search, then a multi-year advisory relationship spanning organizational design and compensation strategy, and then an embedded RPO engagement supporting clinical hiring. Three commercial models, one partner.
Today the client’s leadership team brings ML6 into the conversation before the role exists, while the org chart is still being drawn. That is the clearest signal of all.
AT A GLANCE
Location | Western Canada, spanning urban centres, coastal communities, and remote interior regions |
Industry | Healthcare. Multi-site dental group, family dentistry and orthodontics |
Client Scale | Network approaching 50 clinics, 600+ team members, 150+ associate dentists |
Placements | 9 (and growing) |
Roles | Regional Operations Manager (x3), Controller, Senior Financial Analyst, Director of Patient Experience, People & Culture Partner, People Analytics Analyst, Call Centre Manager |
Functions Served | Operations, Finance, HR & People Analytics, Patient Experience, Contact Centre, Clinical (RPO) |
Level | Manager to Director |
Engagement Models | Contingency, Partially Retained, RPO |
Speed | First three offers accepted within approximately five weeks of engagement |
Division | ML6 Healthcare |
WHY THIS MATTERS
Dental Is Consolidating Faster Than It Is Building Leaders
This engagement is not an outlier. It reflects a structural gap opening across Canadian dentistry: clinic counts are growing far faster than the leadership infrastructure required to run them.
Consolidation is accelerating. The Canadian dental support organization market is projected to reach USD 3.92 billion by 2035, growing at a compound annual rate of just over 11 percent, driven by practice consolidation, rising administrative complexity, and expanding investment in multi-location networks. Sector reporting indicates that 69 percent of dental support organizations planned to increase acquisition activity in 2026. Every acquisition adds a clinic. Very few of them add a regional leader.
Demand is surging at the same time. More than 6.3 million Canadians were enrolled in the Canadian Dental Care Plan as of July 2026, with the program open to all age brackets for the first time. That is a material expansion of the patient population moving through Canadian operatories, arriving in a system that was already working hard to keep pace.
The Clinical Shortage Is Real, and Rural Canada Feels It First
Canada’s federal occupational projections classify both dentists and dental hygienists as shortage occupations. For hygienists, the analysis of job vacancies, employment growth, and unemployment rate indicates that labour demand substantially exceeded supply, with the unemployment rate remaining far below the national average and more than half of vacancies still unfilled after 90 days. For dentists, the same analysis found demand well ahead of supply, with the introduction and expansion of the Canada Dental Care Plan driving further increases in demand for services.
The pressure is not evenly distributed. Urban clinics compete on wages. Rural and remote clinics compete on life. A hygienist or associate considering a move to a smaller community is not only evaluating an hourly rate. They are evaluating housing, schools, a spouse’s career, and whether they will feel welcome. Recruiting for those roles is a relocation conversation, and it works best when it is treated as one.
Operating Leadership Is the Quietest Bottleneck in the Sector
The hardest role to fill in a growing dental group is often not clinical. It is the regional operator: someone who can support a practice manager against a P&L, keep a schedule full, manage labour percentage, address an associate’s concerns early, and do all of it across six to eight sites at once.
Many groups build this role by promoting their strongest office manager, and with the right development, that can work extremely well. Clinic excellence and multi-site business leadership are different skill sets, and the bridge between them is business acumen: reading financial statements, diagnosing variance, and coaching others to do the same. Groups that invest in that bridge, or that bring in external multi-site experience alongside their internal talent, tend to scale far more comfortably.
The most effective approach is usually a wider net. Multi-unit leaders from healthcare, retail, hospitality, and other field-based operating environments bring exactly the P&L discipline and people leadership that dental groups need, and they tend to learn the clinical context faster than a clinical operator learns finance.
Passive Sourcing Is Not a Premium Service. It Is the Only Service.
Roughly 70 percent of the global workforce are passive candidates who are not actively job searching. In senior operating and finance roles inside a specialized sector, that proportion is higher still. A multi-unit dental controller is employed, well compensated, and invisible to advertising.
This is why the return on a recruitment partnership depends so heavily on reach. An agency that screens inbound applications is duplicating work an internal team already does well. The real value of a search partner shows up in the candidates a business would never have seen on its own.
The organizations that win talent in this market tend to do one of two things. They build a specialist internal talent function with genuine headhunting capability, or they partner with a firm that already has one.