Jillian Swafford, 35

“I’m not a shy or nervous lady by any means,” laughs Jillian Swafford. In fact, two-and-a-half years ago, she attended her first Dentsply Sirona inLab Summit and walked right up to Norbert Ulmer, the company’s Director of Marketing at the time, and asked if she could sit at his lunch table. There, she told him her tale of taking a leap of faith, leaving her job as a manager of a dental practice and starting a lab—two-person Oaks Dental Designs in Pikeville, TN—all by herself, without any lab experience but with a supportive husband, invaluable lab mentors “and a lot of prayers,” she notes.

“I also mentioned to him that, in one year, I wanted to be sharing my story at one of these events,” Swafford says, who is now an experienced CAD/CAM technician. Her prediction was correct and, since then, she has become a frequent lecturer for Dentsply Sirona, sharing her start-up story and business acumen in order to motivate other...