Meet Our Founder
Most dental practice brokers are former dentists. Clay Churchill came from the other side of the table, and it changes what he is able to do for a client.
Before founding Southeast Dental Transitions, he spent more than a decade deciding which dental practices banks would lend against. That is an unusual background in this industry, and it is the reason he can value a practice from its tax returns, tell you early whether a deal will clear underwriting, and structure financing that supports the practice rather than straining it.
Clay's work in dental transitions began in 2010 at Wells Fargo, where he found a niche he genuinely liked: dentists, at the point in their careers where the numbers start to matter as much as the clinical work. He spent nearly a decade there learning how banks actually assess a practice, and what separates a file that gets approved from one that quietly stalls.
From 2019 to 2022 he refined that at Provide, a lender built specifically around dental financing. Between the two, he has put more than $500 million in dental loans on the books.
After years of financing other people's transactions, the pattern became hard to ignore. Deals were routinely priced on rules of thumb rather than financials, buyers were signing leases nobody had properly read, and the person advising them was almost always paid by the seller.
He founded Southeast Dental Transitions in 2023 to work the way he thought it should be done: value the practice properly, be candid about what the numbers say, and stay with the deal through closing.
Buyer representation is the part of the business Clay is most deliberate about, and the part most brokers do not offer. It requires reading financials well enough to argue with a seller's valuation, which is difficult without a lending background.
For a dentist buying a first practice, having someone in the room whose only obligation is to them changes the entire shape of the transaction. See how it works.
Understanding how little free time a practicing dentist has, Clay makes himself available well outside conventional business hours. Every part of an engagement runs through him rather than a team of associates: the valuation, the lender introductions, the attorney and CPA referrals, the negotiation and the closing coordination.
It keeps the volume of business deliberately modest. It also means the person who answers your first call is the person who sees the deal through.
Clay lives in Jacksonville Beach, Florida with his wife and their three children. He is an avid golfer, a frequent traveler, and a regular at concerts and sporting events, and he is fairly candid that the balance he keeps in his own life is the same balance he encourages clients to think about when deciding whether to buy, sell, or wait another year.
Send over a tax return and we will tell you what the practice is worth and whether a bank will finance it. The first read costs nothing.
