How to Use Consulting to Grow Your Dental Laboratory

When this dental lab owner first contacted me in late 2024, he was frustrated.

He had already worked with a few marketing and consulting firms, but the results were, in his words, “mediocre at best.” He was spending most of his days putting out fires, solving problems, managing production issues, and trying to generate growth through a few sales and marketing firms.

Diagnosing the Real Issue

From our first few calls, it became clear the business had outgrown its systems. The owner was still operating in the same way that had worked when the lab was smaller, but those methods couldn’t sustain the next stage of growth. Like most of my clients, we weren’t even in the same state, and for many not even the same country, and to this day, we’ve still never met in person. Every aspect of this transformation happened remotely, over video calls.

Like most of my clients, we weren’t even in the same state, and for many not even the same country, and to this day, we’ve still never met in person.

That fact alone helps dispel a common myth: great results does not always require being in the same room. What matters is building an environment with expertise, with the kind of talent that can execute on strategy.

Building the Foundation for Growth

We started by identifying and ranking every initiative needed to stabilize operations and enable scale. We built a plan that included:

• Upgrading the lab software and product configurations

• Tightening operational processes and workflows

• Designing training systems to support growth without adding chaos

• Identifying and filling talent and training gaps

The goal was to create an infrastructure that could easily more than double in size while reducing the owner’s daily workload.

Designing a Client Acquisition System

With the internal systems fixed, we turned our focus to revenue generation.

We designed a repeatable client acquisition system to attract and convert new dentists at a predictable and significantly lower cost per client. We analyzed the existing local territory, identified new areas with growth potential, and integrated a CRM that was tied into the selling system. This allowed us to measure every stage of the customer journey and all related sales and marketing activities from lead generation through onboarding and retention.

Over the next few months, we built a rhythm of testing, refinement, and iteration. Messaging was tuned to resonate with the right types of dentists for this labs value proposition, and marketing channels and frequency, were evaluated against performance and cost. Within months, the lab was acquiring new clients at less than half of its previous cost.

Results That Redefined What’s Possible

By mid 2025, we were able to achieve:

• Month-over-month revenue growth

• Customer acquisition cost reduced by over 50%

• Consistent daily inflow of new prospects

• Owner’s working hours reallocated from daily firefighting to weekly strategy sessions

Creating Great Results for My Clients

I take a lot of pride in building systems that create scalable growth, eliminate chaos, and transform dental labs into businesses that run on great sales and operational processes. These types of changes not only transform the dental lab I am working with, but the lives of the owners, managers, every employee and the clients they work with.