If you run a dental lab, you’re feeling it:
higher costs, tight margins, and growing pressure from clinics and DSOs.
This isn’t your imagination — it’s a real pattern happening across medium to multi-site labs.
We call it The Margin Squeeze Multiplier, because it’s not caused by one thing. It’s caused by five forces working together.
This article breaks down:
Get the full set of 2025 dental lab benchmarks — including remake ranges, turnaround expectations, workflow risk indicators, and a performance checklist here.
Here are the five main reasons dental labs lose profit today:
Zirconia, discs, pucks, consumables — everything is more expensive.
Skilled techs are harder to find and more expensive to keep.
Bigger groups negotiate harder. Smaller clinics expect more “white glove” service for less.
Every remake you absorb doubles your labor + material cost for that case.
Cases coming from:
…creates search time, delays, missing info, and errors.
These five factors multiply each other — and that’s when margin collapses.
Every medium–multi-site lab experiences the same seasonal spike in stress:
When your team is already stretched thin, every small bottleneck becomes a crisis.
This is when the margin squeeze is most visible.
When margins shrink, labs often blame:
But these are external pressures you cannot control.
The labs that grow profitably focus on what they can control:
Reducing internal chaos.
Internal chaos is the multiplier. It’s what turns a small problem into a major profit leak.
Internal chaos amplifies every cost.
Here’s how:
A bad scan wastes your senior tech’s time — the most expensive time you have.
Missing Rxs and shade notes slow down production dramatically.
A lot of the day is spent downloading files, re-typing Rxs, or tracking down missing information. These repetitive tasks pull technicians away from the high-skill work that keeps cases moving and impacts overall efficiency.
You can’t manage what you can’t see.
And chaos makes everything invisible.
Every delay compounds.
Every delay costs money.
Every delay damages trust.
Chaos is the real margin killer — not materials or salaries.
Modern labs aren’t beating margin squeeze through discounts or overtime.
They’re doing it through workflow standardization and automation.
Here’s what they focus on:
Stop bad scans before they enter your workflow.
This reduces:
All cases and communication go through one channel.
This eliminates:
Top labs automate:
This frees up technicians for actual production, not admin tasks.
No more relying on hero technicians.
No more “only this person knows how to handle that dentist.”
Predictable workflows = predictable margin.
Modern labs track:
This lets them make smarter decisions about pricing and service level.
If you only read one thing, read this:
You can't control zirconia prices.
You can't control the labor market.
You CAN control internal chaos — and that’s where all your margin lives.
When you eliminate chaos:
This is how the most profitable labs protect themselves — especially during the holiday and sick-day season.
Paolo Kalaw is the founder of EviSmart – Where Dental Work Flows.
A lifelong dental lab veteran, Paolo has owned and operated dozens of labs worldwide. He’s lived the “10 Anxieties” of lab ownership firsthand — from production bottlenecks to remake nightmares.
He created EviSmart to solve the problem no one else could: to give lab owners the operating system for the modern, product-led lab.
EviSmart empowers labs to:
Paolo and the EviSmart team believe there’s a better way to run a dental lab — one that’s profitable, scalable, and stress-free.
