Fruita Family Dental needed more space, and Lybrook Dental wanted to sell to a dentistry that needed it

Tim Harty, The Business Times

When Dr. Dane Christensen started thinking about expanding his dental practice, Fruita Family Dental, about a year-and-a-half ago, he experienced something reminiscent of the adage: “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”

Things were getting cramped after about nine years at 576 Kokopelli Blvd., Suite B, where Christensen’s office did double duty as the server room for the practice’s computer system. And the breakroom? Well, there was no room for a breakroom, because the practice’s growth required four operatories, taking the vast majority of the 1,216 square feet in the suite.

Understating it severely, Christensen said, “We were a very small office.”

So, he started to think about getting into a larger building, maybe purchasing a piece of property to build an office, and doing it within about two years. He said he told his team as much.

Shortly after Christensen pondered his practice’s future, opportunity literally came to him. Dr. Scott Lybrook, who with his wife, Dr. Carol Lybrook, owned Lybrook Dental Center, across the street from Fruita Family Dental, invited Christensen to lunch. Their conversation centered on a future in which the Lybrooks would sell their dental office and start sauntering toward retirement.

That led to this: Fruita Family Dental as of Jan. 6 is at 551 Kokopelli Blvd., Unit A, after Christensen purchased Lybrook Dental Center and its building on Dec. 29. The 3,372 square feet of space are enough for all of Christensen’s staff and all of the Lybrook Dental Center’s staff, including Scott and Carol Lybrook.

Scott said he plans to work several more years, while Carol is doing dental hygiene full-time until Fruita Family Dental gets another dental hygienist or two. That, Scott said, is “with the hope that she can slow down, scale back to 20 hours a week, or even one day a week or even more. The nice thing is she’s just making herself available for how she’s needed, but she would slow down, maybe even completely, if we found the right person to fill in and see patients.”

Scott Lybrook said the decision to approach Christensen a year-and-a-half ago was a matter of two things: knowing “it was just time to think about slowing down a little bit;” and the good impression he got from Christensen, about 20 years his junior, during brief encounters in recent years.

“I bumped into him personally and professionally at dental meetings and just thought he was a really nice person,” Scott said.

Then came the day he bumped into Christensen and said, “Hey, let’s have lunch.”

And in the back of his mind, Lybrook said he was thinking, “You know, I wonder how his practice is doing. I knew he was … in a really small place. And he’s 20 years younger, and I was just kind of curious if he was thinking about moving into a bigger place. … So, it just, things click together, meeting the right person at the right time. I just feel, actually the best word I can think of is just blessed to kind of bump into the right people at the right time.

“But having the size facility that we have and him having a smaller facility that he has, it just kind of made sense.”

Similarly, Christensen said, “I feel like it was kind of meant to be. … I think we matched each other’s needs and, I guess, wants. And so we decided to, you know, try to get them a retirement plan, get them on the way to enjoying more of their time out of the office, too, and not have to worry about emergency calls, because I can be here.”

Christensen estimated Fruita Family Dental’s active patients at 1,400 before the purchase of Lybrook Dental Center. Scott Lybrook estimated his dental center’s active patients during the past two years was about 1,800 patients.

And the presence of both Lybrooks figures to keep those patients coming to 551 Kokopelli Blvd.

“We try to let everybody know that Dr. Scott will be staying on, he’ll be staying with us for a few more years as Dr. Carol’s retiring,” Christensen said. “That way patients know they can still see Dr. Lybrook and still have the care that they’ve been used to for all these years from the Lybrooks.

“I admire and I appreciate Scott and Carol. It’s great to have them here. … It’s great to have their support and their encouragement.”

The full staff from each practice remained intact and Christensen said his goal is to be open five days per week to see patients instead of four days. Christensen said as a solo dentist he was working five days per week, but the fifth day was “where you kind of catch up on everything else, like maintenance of the office, make sure computers are running fine and keep working with IT and talking to accountants and attorneys and figuring everything else out to run the business.”

Christensen acknowledged the first week at the new location was a challenge, in part because of computer-system changes, merging databases and dealing with delays from technology companies at the national level, and he had to serve as the IT guy.

“It’s technology that’s probably been the biggest headache,” he said.

A month-and-a-half into the transition, Christensen said the larger staff is “getting organized, trying to streamline things,” and he was happy to add, “We’re not practicing like every day is the first day.”

Where did all the extra space go?

Fruita Family Dental went from 1,216 square feet to 3,372 square feet when it moved across the street to 551 Kokopelli Blvd., Unit A. It gained desperately needed space and now has seven operatories instead of four.

But things have a way of filling up fast, as Dr. Dane Christensen, who bought Lybrook Dental Center’s dental practice and building, quickly learned.

“All the storage closets, they’re pretty much full,” he said on Jan. 7, the day after officially merging both offices. “Operatories, yesterday we were using all seven of them with the hygienists we had and then me and Dr. Scott (Lybrook) taking care of patients. … I’d say we’re filling up the rooms.”

They know the feeling

Drs. Scott and Carol Lybrook know what Christensen was going through at his much-smaller previous location, having started Lybrook Dental Center in 1998 and soon outgrowing their original space. Their answer to the dilemma was to build the building at 551 Kokopelli Blvd. in 2006.

“It was just really nice to have a new and fresh and big place,” Scott Lybrook said. “And so from 2006 to now, we continued to grow and always had plenty of space.”

The value of a great office manager

Christensen spoke highly about all of his staff, but he made sure to heap praise on Cara York, his “amazing office manager.”

He said, “I can’t give enough credit to Cara. She’s been with me now for five years, and if she hadn’t come into my life, I don’t know where I’d be, and this transition would not be possible.”