Uncommon Solutions

Washington Doctor Builds His Own Fully Integrated Vertical Software

Tired of being marketed 15 different software solutions to solve the problems of being a ‘maker-manager’, Dr. McClendon has spent years creating his own software system, a top- to-bottom solution for independent solo practitioners trying to manage practice administrative tasks while also being the main performer of his business.

Dr. Grant McClendon is a busy man. Not only does he own and operate his solo dental practice with two locations in Washington State, but he also conducts research, has co-authored published articles in peer-reviewed journals, and participates in many professional associations. He is also the pastor of his local church congregation. And for the last several years, beginning before the COVID pandemic, he has been iterating, testing, improving, and rolling out his own dental software solution.

Originally from Colorado, Dr. McClendon earned an Economics degree with a minor in Management from Brigham Young University. His career began in healthcare administration as a facility manager in Palm Springs, a place where summer temperatures can reach 120 degrees. He was tasked with keeping hospital equipment fully operational, including the large power plant that supplied emergency power, and maintaining the buildings at 75 degrees for patients and machines. He credits this position as the place where he first gained an appreciation for preventive maintenance schedules and the software that helps maintain equipment.

 

He went to dental school with the plan to focus on oral surgery, obtaining a Doctoral Degree in Dental Medicine from Western University of Health Sciences and completing a one-year postgraduate internship in Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery. He practiced in El Paso, Texas, for 3 years, exclusively performing oral surgery and wisdom teeth extractions, until moving to Bellingham, Washington, in 2002. He has considered the Pacific Northwest his home ever since.

After years of owning and operating his practice, Dr. McClendon noticed a few issues.

To him, one of the core problems as an independent solo practitioner of a dental office without any outside administrative support was that all the managerial duties and tasks fell to the doctor: equipment needs to be maintained, the expiration date on the emergency drugs needs to be checked, and the building lease needs to stay current, to name a few examples.

“As I am going through the day-to-day grind of trying to own and operate a dental practice and simultaneously be the operator and the person that actually performs treatment to help keep the office afloat,” he explains, “it presents certain challenges in keeping on top of all the many tasks and responsibilities”

 

 

He describes it as the ‘maker-manager’ problem, a term he attributes to Paul Graham, Co-Founder of technology startup accelerator Y Combinator, LLC, who introduced the concept in a 2009 essay. In applying this concept to dentistry, a lot of things need to happen that have nothing to do with the ability to prep a filling or to do a nice crown. The business side of the practice is the maker-manager problem for every solo dentist. In Dr. McClendon’s view, that’s one of the reasons many dentists elect to outsource, and, in many cases, he says, they end up selling all or a portion of their practice.

“There’s a lot of other dental software products out there, and many of them focus on analytics,” notes Dr. McClendon. “Most of them will integrate with your practice management software, your electronic health record, and then they will take your data, process it and regurgitate it back to you in some sort of a dashboard.”

 

 

He further explains they may be in the vein of marketing, trying to help generate leads, or may be focusing on notifications and appointment reminders. Still, he does not believe he has seen any one significant platform that has focused on operations and enterprise resource planning software.

 

To build his own solution, he began with the core problem, aiming to develop a more inclusive, broader-scope software platform to help with logistics & operations in general for dental practices.

He and his team began building and testing software in ‘stealth mode,’ as he calls it, and continued this process for several years, gradually including elements, while continually testing different tools integrated into the platform. Eventually, they added a main dashboard and incorporated an AI search function.

Dr. McClendon’s software platform, Sigma Adviser, has been fully operational for over a year. Sigma Technologies has grown into a fully operational team of dentists, operators, and engineers working together from multiple states.

 

 

Current client feedback helps to guide new developments, and there are frequent updates to the product in the field.

As AI technology and language learning models continue to advance, he and his team plan to expand the product accordingly.

“As technology does, it continues to move forward and evolve, and it’s our hypothesis that as we’re seeing artificial intelligence eat the world and eat all the other software platforms, it’s going to continue,” observes Dr. McClendon. “We are just trying to skate to where we believe the puck is going.”

 

Everything in One Place

A sampling of some of the features of Sigma Adviser:

• Main dashboard with customizable features on the task management pane
• Tools like Teams, Asana, Dropbox, and Google Drive, all under one umbrella
• AI search engine
• Private and public chat channels with 2-way communication in every operatory
• Customizable preventative maintenance schedules and equipment logs
• Customizable scheduling of routine tasks with automatic notification
• Analytics and reporting, including customizable recurrent email reporting
• Project management functionality (mentorships and study clubs)

 

 

 

For more information about this software, visit SigmaAdviser.com.

For more information about Dr. Grant McClendon’s practice, visit BellinghamBayDental.com.

 

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Written by Dawn Kahl

Published in Catalyst – Q3 2026.

 

 

Category: Practice Consulting

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