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Show Notes

In this episode, Howard Farran sits down with Jim Glidewell — the man he calls his idol, mentor, and the GOAT of crown and bridge — for a conversation nearly 1,800 episodes in the making. Jim traces his improbable path from a one-room Kentucky schoolhouse with a coal stove and no electricity, to returning from Vietnam, selling insurance at 21, and stumbling into dental technology after visiting a friend at his lab bench. He explains the philosophy that shaped everything since: like Henry Ford, Sam Walton, and Southwest Airlines, the winner isn’t whoever charges the most, it’s whoever delivers the most value for the dollar — and why he’s always built for the working man rather than the “Neiman Marcus of dentistry.” From there the conversation covers an enormous amount of ground on technology and the trade, including AI trained on 45 million archived crown designs that can match a crown shape in 8 to 10 seconds, the “Lego partial” that prints frame, teeth, and tissue simultaneously for a four-hour turnaround, and the surprisingly brutal engineering behind diamond-coated burs for milling sintered zirconia. Jim predicts chairside-printed dentures within three to five years and the decline of metal partials, reflects on how introducing zirconia in 2007 ended the gold and PFM markets overnight, and notes an industry that has consolidated from 17,000 labs down to just over 4,000.

The back half turns candid and personal. Jim weighs in on open versus closed systems, why scanner prices are collapsing, and what actually keeps customers loyal — not the hardware, but someone picking up the phone on the first ring. He offers blunt advice to indebted young dentists about whether dentistry was ever the right fit, predicts DSO penetration could reach 70%, and shares his distaste for exit-strategy thinking and EBITDA-driven ownership, noting that most dentists he meets who sold to private equity wish they hadn’t. He also talks about his management philosophy of staying out of employees’ way, the AI avatars now handling customer calls, his son leaving college to learn in-house, and his near-death experience with COVID, when he was intubated at 32 pounds down with less than a 10% chance of survival. Asked why he’s still first in the door at 81, his answer is simple: this isn’t a business he’s building to sell. His exit strategy is death.

For more information on Glidewell TV: https://glidewelldental.com/company/tv 

Episode #1736 : Dentistry Uncensored with Howard Farran, Howard sits down with his longtime idol and mentor — Jim Glidewell, founder of Glidewell Dental and, in Howard’s words, “the GOAT” of crown and bridge.

From a one-room Kentucky schoolhouse with no electricity, to the largest private employer in Orange County with a million square feet of space. From selling insurance at 21 to building an empire on a simple belief: the winner is whoever delivers the most value for the lowest price.

🎧 A candid, wide-ranging conversation on AI, dentures, DSOs, private equity, and why at 81 he still shows up at 7:15 every morning.

#DentistryUncensored #GlidewellDental #DentalLab #DigitalDentistry #DentalIndustry #Zirconia