Today we’d like to introduce you to Ben Topaz.
Ben, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
After finishing a 3-year military service in the Israeli military, I came to the states to visit my family. I went to play a soccer game at a local community center, and met a person who owned and operated a dental lab. He invited me to see his facility. I was impressed, and decided to learn the industry from the ground up over a seven-year period. In 2006 I relocated to Chicago, and opened my own lab in my home basement. I was a one man show doing sales, production, accounting, pick-up and delivery, and customer service. Fast forward to 2017 and a lot of hard work, I am now operating a full service lab, in a 3,000 square foot building and 10 committed and experienced employees.
Has it been a smooth road?
The biggest hurdle for me was starting my business. I was able to secure a start-up loan, but had to quickly get out there and cultivate new dental clients. While spending a great deal of time in business development, I also had to balance new operational expenses, including the need for new equipment and materials, with a limited amount of revenue. Similar to other new business entrepreneurs, patience and perseverance were my most important success attributes. Over the past few years, the next challenge was the rapid technology changes that were occurring within the Dental industry. As equipment became more and more sophisticated and expensive, it was critical to make the choice of what to buy and when to make the purchase. We made some costly mistakes, but have overcome them with quick adjustments. We’ve had to become experts in not only the art of dental lab fabrication, but also technical experts capable of understanding which new digital products are simply short-term trends and which solutions would have a meaningful impact for both our lab as well as our dental practice partners.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
We’re a full-service dental lab serving dental practices across the country, with the largest percentage of our clients based throughout the Chicagoland area. We support our clients in 4 critical fabrication categories: Implants, Removeables, Crowns & Bridges, and Orthodontics. Our dental partners like that we developed our lab with the flexibility to support their practice(s) from both a traditional milling or digital production process – frequently it’s a combination of both. Golden Ceramic was an early adopter of digital equipment and solutions, which puts us in a unique position to consult our dental clients on solutions that will have a valuable long-term impact on their practice vs. equipment that tends to be glitchy or trendy. This evolution has allowed us to shift to more of a partnership with our clients vs. a disposable outside resource. In the end, it’s about staying true to our core values -a hyper focus on consistency and quality production, continued adoption of meaningful digital solutions, and a willingness to be available at the drop of a dime when unexpected patient emergencies arise. This has been our success formula from the beginning, and it’s the foundation of our continued growth – it’s also what gives me the greatest pride in our organization.
Is our city a good place to do what you do?
Chicago is one of the most highly competitive markets in the country. This challenge has a direct impact on pricing and margins if you want to be competitively relevant – typically an expectation from the majority of dental practices. This becomes even more of a challenge respective to maintaining a lab with equipment and materials which basically have the same pricing across the US. From a start-up perspective, my guidance would be to have a high understanding of how many new clients you would need to acquire to have a revenue viable business before fully staffing – in the interim of achieving that goal, look to keep your overhead as low as possible which may require long hours, where you as the owner must where several hats. Chicago can help young dental lab companies, or other businesses in an equally competitive situation, by providing tax incentive relief in the early years to help with cash-flow, reduce risk, and encourage entrepreneurial growth.
Contact Info:
- Address: 4 Piper Lane
Suite J
Prospect Heights, IL 60070 - Website: www.goldenceramicdentallab.com
- Phone: 224-676-1303
- Email: info@gcdl.net
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GoldenCeramicDentalLab/
- Other: https://www.linkedin.com/company-beta/6650708/
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