News and Updates

If your benches have been quiet this year, the data says it is not just you. What has been driving the 2026 slowdown, and how to get intake ready for the year-end benefits rush without hiring for it.

When a doctor asks for better support, they are describing a number almost no lab measures: the hours between a case arriving and the first moment somebody looks at it. Here is how to measure it and cut it to the same day.

A scan leaves the practice in minutes and the case still reaches production the next day. Nine portals, a booking cutoff, and one person holding it together. What multi-portal intake actually costs a dental lab.

Benchmarking data from 2,000+ labs reveals a widening divide in dental lab profitability — and it has nothing to do with talent, geography, or case volume. It comes down to one number.

Four compounding crises in five years have reshaped the dental lab industry. The labs that are still growing through all of it share one pattern: leverage over labor. Here's what that looks like in practice — and what the data says about where the industry is headed.

The ACA's 50-employee threshold is more than an HR issue — it's a financial inflection point that shapes your lab's cost structure and growth ceiling for years to come. Here's what the data says about how the fastest-scaling labs are navigating it.

Every dental lab has a person it cannot afford to lose. This post breaks down why that is a systems problem, not a staffing one, the three moments when it becomes impossible to ignore, and what the labs that have solved it built instead. The full framework is in the whitepaper.

When a dentist calls about a competitor's lower price, most labs hear a pricing problem. The data says otherwise. This post breaks down what ADA survey research actually shows about why dentists switch, why matching the price is the wrong move, and what the labs that haven't lowered their prices in years have built instead, including a 7-day action list from the full whitepaper.

The staffing crisis isn't going away — but the labs winning right now aren't waiting for the right hire. They're unlocking capacity that's already on their team. This post breaks down the real cost of manual intake, the five high-value roles hiding behind your front desk's download queue, and what changes when your best people stop doing data entry. Plus: the 90-day roadmap any lab owner can follow starting this week.

Staffing isn’t just “hard right now”—it’s structural: 300 graduates vs 7,700 annual openings, a 75% collapse in training programs, and 49% nearing retirement. Here’s how labs grow anyway.

The industry is splitting into two winners—industrial-scale commodity labs and high-margin niche boutiques—while the mid-size generalist lab is being squeezed from both ends. This post explains the three forces driving the split (labor crisis, digital disruption, PE consolidation) and the two viable strategies: scale with efficiency or specialize with leverage—both powered by automation.

This report argues the next 5–7 years will be a Golden Age for prepared labs: supply is shrinking, demand is growing toward ~$10B, and 73M seniors will drive higher-value implants/full-arch work. The constraint isn’t demand—it’s capacity—so labs that automate capture outsized share while others get consolidated.