How We Grew from a Two-Person Denture Lab to a 24-Employee Full Service Lab

In 2014, my wife Alicia and I moved to Billings, MT, and purchased Montana Dental Lab, a solo denture lab whose owner was retiring. Thanks to my 17 years of lab experience, I was well versed in all specialties so our goal from the get-go was to expand the lab to be full service. There wasn’t a lot of full service competition in Billings and we saw the potential to be a successful one-stop shop.

After about a year, we started the transition by outsourcing zirconia and cast C&B and partial frameworks. As demand for those services grew, we began bringing them in house and hiring technicians to handle the work. Like every lab, finding employees was challenging but, over the next few years, we got lucky and hired some great technicians to head up our digital and ortho departments. By 2021, we had grown to a staff of 11 people, were looking for a bigger space and wanted an area to hold continuing education and training programs for our staff and dentist-clients.

The...