How I Did It (2023)

In 2013, after six years of owning a successful boutique C&B lab in Bend, OR, I was feeling dissatisfied with my life and decided to sell my business and move with my wife and four kids to Costa Rica. A year later, I was missing the dental industry and decided to move back to the U.S., this time...

Back in eighth grade, I was hit in the mouth with a baseball bat and needed extensive dental work; luckily my dad was a dentist and after my teeth were restored, he made me a custom mouthguard in his in-house lab to protect my teeth. I was fascinated by the process and throughout high school, I made...

About 20 years ago, I was invited to a wild game feed—a potluck dinner featuring deer, boar, elk, etc.—that turned into a career-changing meal. Almost all of the attendees were dentists and I had a discussion with Dr. Stephen Johnston who mentioned he liked the concept of working side by...

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...

I had a loyal and favorite dentist-client who had taken a chance on me when I first opened my lab in 2018. As my lab grew, he remained one of my top accounts and represented about 15% of my workload around the same time he decided to sell his practice a few years later.

The first month I received cases...

When I came to the U.S. from Colombia in 2000, I had a degree in dental technology but had never worked in a lab. I spoke limited English and was eager to start a new life here.

While working at a coffee shop, I knocked on laboratory doors and finally Eric Morello, Owner of Accu Dent Laboratory in West...

In 2011, our laboratory began offering surgical guide services. As this segment of our business grew, we became well-known for our expertise and, since we used Straumann’s CoDiagnostiX software, we established a great relationship with many representatives at Straumann. When other labs purchased...

Four days after I graduated from high school in 1996, I enlisted in the Marine Corps. I served active duty for four years, then joined the reserves where I was deployed twice to Iraq and involved in active combat. When I left the reserves in 2007, I was suffering from PTSD and had a very difficult time...

I spent much of my career working in dental office labs—alongside Olivier Tric, MDT, at the beginning of my career, then Dr. Ed McLaren at UCLA and finally setting up my own lab in my father’s Cherry Hill, NJ, dental office. As we grew, space got tight so I moved the lab into a 1,000-square-foot...

When I first moved into my new lab in 2019, I was ecstatic. The 3,200-square-foot space was twice as big as my last and we increased our staff from 11 to 16. I thought everything was rosy and had high hopes to keep growing the business. What I didn’t expect was the culture shift that occurred.

I...

In the early years of running our lab, my partner, Drew Van Aarde and I were so focused on product quality and making sure every case was perfect that we were creating a lot of conflict and stress within our company. In short, there was a lot of product leadership, but not much people leadership.

Around...

When I started looking for a new location for Cosmetic Creations, the Boynton Beach Mall was not on my radar. I visited many locations and industrial parks over a six-month period but every place was the same: small and stuffy and looked exactly like our existing 1,000-square-foot lab. We wanted something...

‘I don’t know anything about coding.’ That was my response the first time Dr. Wendy Clark, a prosthodontist at the University of North Carolina dental school, asked me to write CAD software that would help her students learn how to virtually wax up a crown. Since the school would require...

After 35 years in the industry, I had finally achieved my goal of becoming a laboratory owner. My son, Eric Rounds, also a technician, and I opened our own C&B lab, CAD Crafted Dental Studio, in Palm Desert, CA. There was just one problem: we opened on February 1, 2020, just as COVID-19 cases were...

My love of dental technology began when I was 14 and living in my home country of El Salvador. While helping my mom with her food cart, I delivered to a local dentist’s office who had an in-office lab. I was fascinated by the technicians making teeth and asked if I could learn more; before long,...

In 2008, I was the owner of a successful C&B laboratory: I had four employees, a good roster of accounts and I had just purchased my first CAD/CAM system. We were producing 15-20 zirconia crowns per day, plus gold, porcelain and e.max crowns and business was booming. Towards the end of 2009, however,...