From Consultant to Founder: How Torch Dental Turned Industry Observations Into $5B in Transaction Volume

From Consultant to Founder: How Torch Dental Turned Industry Observations Into $5B in Transaction Volume

Consultants see problems everywhere. Most write reports about them. A few build companies around them.

Khaled Boukadoum, Founder of Torch Dental, spent years in consulting watching dental practices struggle with the same operational nightmare: 30-40% of their staff doing nothing but administrative work, despite having software that supposedly solved these problems. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, he shared how that front-row seat to industry dysfunction became the foundation for a platform now processing $5 billion in patient transactions.

This is the story of how consulting experience translates into founder advantage—and the specific patterns that separate observers from builders.

The Consultant’s Advantage: Seeing Patterns Others Miss

Most founders enter markets as outsiders, spending months or years learning what insiders already know. Consultants enter with a different advantage: they’ve already seen the operational reality dozens or hundreds of times.

Before starting Torch Dental, Khaled worked closely with dental practices, getting an intimate view of how they actually operated behind the scenes. Not the sanitized version presented in marketing materials or board meetings—the messy, grinding reality of daily operations.

What he witnessed was striking. Practices had sophisticated practice management systems. They had invested in technology. They had implemented “best practices.” And yet they were drowning in administrative work.

“What we realized is that the biggest problem in the space is actually what happens after the clinical visit,” Khaled explains. “So the patient gets the treatment done, and then we need to figure out how much the patient owees, how much the insurance owes, and then how do we actually coordinate the collection of that money.”

This wasn’t a new problem. Every practice faced it. Every consultant saw it. The difference was that Khaled saw it not as an operational challenge to optimize, but as a structural problem that required new infrastructure.

From Observation to Architecture

The leap from consultant to founder isn’t just about identifying problems—it’s about developing conviction that you can architect a better solution than what exists today.

For Khaled, that conviction came from understanding why existing solutions failed. Practice management systems like Dentrix and Open Dental were built as systems of record, not operational automation platforms. They helped practices track what happened manually, but they didn’t eliminate the manual work.

“The practice management systems are really systems of record. They’re systems that track your clinical information, your operational workflows, your schedule, things like that,” Khaled notes. This observation was crucial. The incumbents weren’t poorly executed—they were solving a different problem entirely.

This distinction matters for founders. Many startups fail because they try to build “better” versions of existing solutions without understanding why those solutions are structured the way they are. Khaled succeeded because he understood the incumbents’ architectural decisions weren’t wrong for their original purpose—they were just inadequate for the problem he wanted to solve.

His insight was that dental practices didn’t need a better system of record. They needed operational infrastructure that eliminated work entirely.

The Technical Bet: Automation as Core Architecture

Consulting provides market insight. Building successful companies requires making technical bets about how to solve problems differently.

Khaled’s technical bet was straightforward but ambitious: AI-powered automation could eliminate entire categories of administrative work, not just make them marginally more efficient.

“Our bread and butter at Torch is really using AI to take all these manual workflows and automate them,” Khaled shares. This wasn’t a feature—it was the foundational architecture decision that differentiated Torch from incumbents.

Insurance verification that took staff 5-10 minutes per patient? Automated in seconds. Payment posting that required reading explanation of benefits documents and manually reconciling accounts? Handled automatically. Collections strategies that required constant human judgment? Optimized through pattern recognition across thousands of transactions.

The consultant-turned-founder advantage shows up here. Khaled didn’t need to discover that these workflows consumed massive staff time—he’d watched it firsthand for years. His founder contribution was betting that modern AI capabilities could eliminate this work entirely, and building the product architecture to prove it.

The Strategic Positioning Insight

Here’s where consulting experience becomes founder advantage: understanding not just what to build, but how to position it in the market.

Many founders would have looked at the dental software market and concluded they needed to build a practice management system replacement. After all, if the existing systems don’t solve the problem adequately, build a better one.

Khaled took a more sophisticated approach. Rather than competing with entrenched incumbents, he positioned Torch as the complementary layer they’d never prioritize.

“We sit on top of the practice management system and we’re really focused exclusively on everything that happens post clinical treatment,” Khaled explains. This positioning was brilliant for several reasons.

First, it eliminated the need to replace systems that practices had spent years implementing and customizing. Torch integrated with whatever infrastructure already existed, dramatically reducing sales friction.

Second, it allowed Torch to focus exclusively on solving one hard problem exceptionally well, rather than trying to be mediocre at everything.

Third, it positioned Torch as non-threatening to incumbents initially, buying time to establish market position before triggering competitive responses.

This is strategic thinking that comes from deep industry exposure. Khaled understood the competitive dynamics, the switching costs, and the incumbent incentive structures well enough to find the optimal entry point.

The Data Accumulation Strategy

The final piece that separates consultant observers from founder builders is understanding how to create compounding advantages.

Khaled structured Torch so that every transaction processed through the platform makes the product better for every other customer. This wasn’t accidental—it was architectural intent.

“We’ve processed about $5 billion of patient transactions over our life, which is about 15 million unique transactions,” Khaled shares. Each transaction trains the AI models, improving automation accuracy. Better automation attracts more practices. More practices generate more transactions. The flywheel compounds.

This strategic insight—that accumulated data should improve the core product for all users simultaneously—separates infrastructure builders from tool builders. Consultants see problems. Founders build systems where solving those problems creates self-reinforcing advantages.

The Transition Mechanics: What Works Differently

The transition from consultant to founder isn’t just about mindset—it’s about developing different operational capabilities.

As a consultant, success comes from analyzing problems, developing recommendations, and convincing clients to implement them. As a founder, success comes from building products, acquiring customers, and scaling operations.

Khaled’s consulting background gave him credibility with dental practices—he understood their operations intimately and could speak their language. But building Torch required learning product development, hiring engineering teams, raising capital, and executing go-to-market strategies.

The consulting advantage accelerates market understanding and customer development. But it doesn’t eliminate the hard work of building, shipping, and scaling. The founders who succeed are those who recognize consulting as a starting point, not a complete skillset.

The Vision: From Observations to Operating System

Perhaps the most important lesson from Khaled’s journey is how consulting observations informed long-term vision.

“Our ambition is really, again, to be the operating system, to be that piece of connective tissue that connects the insurance companies with the patients and with the practices and sits at the center of all those relationships,” Khaled explains.

This vision didn’t emerge from abstract market analysis. It came from years of watching dental practices struggle with fragmented systems, manual workflows, and disconnected data. Khaled saw firsthand what infrastructure the industry needed—and built it.

The consultant-to-founder path works when deep industry exposure reveals not just problems to solve, but systems to build. When you’ve seen the operational reality across dozens of organizations, you develop intuition about what infrastructure could transform the entire industry.

Lessons for Aspiring Founders

For consultants considering the founder transition, Torch Dental’s story offers a clear framework.

Use consulting to develop deep pattern recognition across multiple companies. The advantage isn’t understanding one company deeply—it’s seeing the same problems replicate across many organizations and understanding the structural causes.

Identify problems where existing solutions are architecturally limited, not just poorly executed. The best opportunities come from understanding why incumbents can’t solve obvious problems, not from thinking you can execute better than them.

Make clear technical bets about how to solve problems differently. Consulting develops problem identification skills. Building companies requires conviction about solutions.

Position strategically based on competitive dynamics and switching costs. Deep industry knowledge should inform not just what you build, but how you bring it to market.

Build for compounding advantages through data, network effects, or operational scale. One-time solutions create consulting engagements. Self-reinforcing systems create venture-scale companies.

“We want to be the back office, effectively, for these practices, so that they can focus on providing great care,” Khaled notes. This vision—using technology to eliminate operational burden entirely—represents the consultant-founder transition at its best. Seeing industry dysfunction clearly, understanding its structural causes deeply, and building infrastructure that transforms it permanently.