This month, we’re working backwards. Many of you are familiar with the name Deborah Dopson-Hartley, RDH. Whether you’ve heard her speak, read an article she’s written, or met her at a tradeshow, she’s a dental hygienist who is out there, making the case for the business of dental hygiene on the national stage.

Someone on that kind of platform is often too easily dismissed as an anomaly in the profession or too intimidating to be a “mentor.” We want to share some of Ms. Dopson-Hartley’s history so that you can draw connections to your own story and appreciate the personal side of a more public personality in the dental hygiene community.

Soon, she decided to “make it legal” and attend dental hygiene school at Pensacola Junior College in Florida. Those years of training laid a critical foundation that Ms. Dopson-Hartley would build on in the years to come. “With the love in my heart, the knowledge in my brain and the skill in my hands, I can help lead patients from infection and disease to health and wellness for not much money and not much time,” she explains. “No other profession can do that.”

“My very first patient—my dentist’s brother!—was a cardiologist,” she says. “I remember going to pick up my trusty scaler and he stopped me. He said, ‘You’re not going to clean me before you clean me. I wouldn’t cut you open without cleaning your chest.’ I was slightly taken aback, but I ended up polishing him first. Then, I handed him the mirror and began to show him how to floss. He started to hemorrhage heavily.

“That was an eye-opener for me. I realized that bacteria can get in through the blood and enter the heart—and this was my very first patient in 1976. Since then, I’ve always polished and flossed first, showing the patient what disease is instead of just telling them and going into scaling.”

Ms. Dopson-Hartley has heard all this before, but making her way to lecture halls to address crowds about the hidden profits of hygiene wasn’t nearly as calculated as some might imagine.

“My practice wasn’t dictated by insurance in the ’80s, and my last 12 years of practice we were insurance-independent, so we had to be better than everyone else—people aren’t just coming to you because you’re on their policy. My prophy fee in the early ’90s was more than $200. I was able to discover patients’ needs through instrumentation and then turn the needs into wants, into desires, into production.”

When “dental hygiene guru” Dr. Ken James came to her office to talk practice management, he saw Ms. Dopson-Hartley’s numbers and how they were tracking with sales and case presentation and was quite impressed. “He told me I needed to be out there and teach,” she says with a laugh. “I told him I didn’t know what I was doing. I was just doing my job.”

And that’s where it started. From Dr. James’ discovery, to Dr. Woody Oakes of The Profitable Dentist who put her on the podium, to Dr. Dianne Wright who introduced her to holistic dentistry, Ms. Dopson-Hartley’s journey—and this is just the beginning— is one of a mother, a healthcare provider and yes, a businesswoman.