Since someone asked why I wasn't considering fully buying the office outright and practicing their myself to reduce the 'overhead' cost of an associate (thus making the breakeven/profitiability numbers a bit more palatable). It's mainly because I have a solid situation going right now, and even with my estimates (which again I may have incorrectly assumed), I am unsure if the practice would capture sufficient gross to make me the same, let alone meaningfully more than I currently make. Happy to hear more/differing thoughts on this topic from others as well.

Honestly, if the prior owner's payment model was more typical, then whether an associate-run or solo-owned practice, I would have much more comfort imagining a smoother transfer of patients (thus a rapid ramp up to breakeven/profitability), but with a relatively 'drastic' change in patients' payment expectations (i.e., from nothing OOP historically to full co-pay+dedutible now), I suspect that I'd/we'd basically be starting 'from scratch', in which case, my estimates of the overhead/OpEx + start up costs would put the office in the red at a high loss over however long it'd take to hit sufficient gross revenue to make an income myself (as the owner) or as investors and then slowly pay myself/ourselves back for all that above initial 'loss'. Sure, there is always the potential upside that some percentage of the legacy patients return, but I'm currently assuming we would need to start ground up to build a new patient pool/base. The practice is in a dentist-saturated major city in a lower- to lower-middle-class subregion (so mainly PPO/HMO/Medicare patients, I'm thinking FFS might be a tough sell here), so that also brings dynamic of is it too competitive to succeed in vs. there may be 'enough patients to go around'.

Further, the dental family member that the office has been passed on as claimed interest in restarting the practice for now (with additional investors), and then selling it down the road.
Although if sufficiently persuaded, they may be willing to sell it to me.

All that said, I am open to at least evaluating the full ownership idea, but first it would be really helpful to understand if my OpEx, Associate comp, Gross Rev, etc. assumptions are accurate to determine whether there's a good case for me to have conviction in this practice being fully associate-run as an investor, let alone as a full owner (even if I were to consider that).