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Welcome to Voices from the Bench, a Dental Laboratory Podcast. Send us an email at info at voicesfromthebench.com and follow us on Facebook and Instagram. Greetings and welcome to episode 397 of Voices from the Bench. 

My name is Elvis. And my name is Barbara. Still. 

Still. Barbara, what's happening? Not much. Recording this early, getting ready for your big cruise. 

Three days, three more working days, and I am out of here for a while, so I'm excited. What happens to your department when you're gone for that long? Do they just don't do work? I can only tell you that when I went to Germany, I came back to over 300 units, and it was a little bit fierce. Hopefully, we've got a plan, and we're not going to jam up work, and they're going to kick butt.

So basically, you got to come back and do it all. I hope not. I hope that this trip, yeah, everything goes as planned, and I don't. 

But yeah, everybody deserves some balance in life, and everybody deserves to get away, and go out of town, and not stress. So I guess I'm kind of at the state of mind where bleep it. Well, are you working extra hard before you go, or is that? Yeah, for sure.

Yeah, you're knocking them out. My son and I were in the urgent care, but we're good. He's fine. 

And yeah, so probably tomorrow, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Be working late, going in early. Yeah, pretty much.

The sacrifice we do just for some time off. I know, but talk to me. Dental NOAC supplies.

Yeah, NOAC Dental Supply Lab Fest is this weekend in New Orleans. I couldn't be more excited. Super, super excited. 

I can't imagine we're going to convince anyone to register and buy a ticket for like this Thursday. I think, you know, if you were going to go, you're going to go. But they should, though.

So I will say, I do look forward to seeing everyone, and of course, to come find me at the Adite booth where we can chat about anything you want, within reason. You know they're going to come find you. I hope so. 

That's the idea. And since you're not going to be there, I can talk for hours if I wanted to. Yes, I know. 

I usually am the cutoff girl. But I know that you want to have plenty of content and there's going to be all kinds of great people. It's going to be a great event.

So for both of us, kick butt and have fun. Appreciate that. We're going to miss you.

And I know you will. Yeah. So this is also the last week. 

I know everybody's on social media, but if you find our shirts, it's a simple name tag on the front that says Dental Technician and the podcast logo on the back. They're selling a little slower than usual. So either everyone is strapped for cash because of the economy or y'all don't like the design.

Feel free to shoot us some ideas for future shirts. But this amazing design ends at the end of this week. And a reminder, guys, all the money goes to the Foundation for Dental Laboratory Technology.

So head over to VoicesFromTheBench.com forward slash shirts to see the styles and the colors and order one today. And just by the way, before I leave, I'm going to order at least three shirts. Yay.

Yeah. And everybody wants to do more than Barb. So the bar is set at four.

So this week, we got to have a very special conversation with a pretty special technician from Australia. Mark Rondau started in the dental lab industry at the age of 17. After discovering it, he was one of the 30 trying to get into a school with 300 applicants.

That's pretty fierce. That's insane. That was in the 70s. 

I guess there was a lot more people that wanted to be technicians back then. Yeah. After graduation, he learned in London and then came back to Australia and did what all technicians do. 

Basically, we work too much. Yep. And it kind of controlled our lives. 

But it was a horrible, but somehow lucky car accident that sent him on a path to a better work-life balance. He's now a full-time teacher at the same college that taught him. He owns his own boutique lab. 

And he DJs at nightclubs at 60 years young, and he seems pretty happy. Yeah. Did we also mention that he's the VP of the Australian Dental Technicians Association? Well, he's doing that too. 

So join us as we chat with Mark Rondau. In just a few short weeks, we're going to be dropping our long-awaited chat with Jordan Greenberg, the manager director of Follow Me Technology, but more affectionately known as the Hyperdent Dude. Yeah, Elvis. 

That was an interesting one. I don't think we've ever had somebody on the podcast that went into such depth about CAM software. Have we? No, of course we haven't. 

And it was long overdue because it seems like a ton of labs underestimate how much CAM dictates the efficiency and capabilities of their equipment. Well, machine manufacturers certainly don't, which is probably why Roland DGA, who truly recognize the value of CAM. They have partnered with Follow Me North America to offer their own Hyperdent bundle. 

They pair it with their DWX-53D series devices. But since Roland wants everyone to benefit from this collaboration, including their existing users, they're offering a Hyperdent trade-in promo. Oh my God, what a great opportunity, especially for labs that want to optimize the quality and efficiency of their advanced workflows, like those tricky, full-arch, direct-to-multi-unit cases.

Oh, I know about those. I know you do. We're talking real benefits. 

Jordan said that some labs have achieved almost two hours in cycle time savings, all without sacrificing quality. Two hours? That is like literally no joke. Maybe us lab techs would finally make it home for dinner. 

For once. I don't think... I wouldn't count on that, Barb. Don't you like eating at 11pm? No.

But if you're running a Roland mill, definitely talk to your dealer about the Roland DGA Hyperdent bundle, especially that trade-in promo. Good call, everybody. Our friends at NOAC, by the way, are participating. 

And as an added bonus for NOLA LabFest attendees, they'll be tacking on an extra feature, multiple instances at no cost. Wow, that's pretty awesome, huh? Yeah, I'll say. Hey, speaking of NOLA LabFest, did you realize it's less than two weeks away? Yes, guys. 

I'll be on vacation, but November 7th to the 8th. Yes, you're right, Elvis. It is literally right around the corner.

Yep. And you know who else will be there? Jordan. So definitely snag one of the last remaining spots at LabFest, track them down, and we can all talk about Hyperdent Cam in the bayou.

In the bayous, right. Perfect. Let's go, guys.

Voices from the bench. The interview. So Barb and I are actually recording late in the day today in order to compensate to talk to a gentleman who's recording early in the morning of tomorrow, all the way from Sydney, Australia, Mark Rondo. 

How are you, sir? I'm good, thank you. A pleasure to be with you. Good morning.

This is so exciting. Yeah, totally. Barb and I love talking to people from all around the world and accents. 

It works. Barb loves accents. It does a podcast good, but we don't get very many from Australia just because of the time difference. 

And I appreciate you, again, getting up early and talking to us. Well, if you're a dental technician or if you're in the dental industry, eight o'clock is not early. That is true.

As you said, you're already multitasking. You've probably already scanned half a dozen cases, pulled a zirconia out of the furnace, and been harassed by two or three dentists. There you go.

Actually, pretty much, yes. So Mark, tell us your story. How did you get into the dental lab field? Okay. 

All right. Well, I'll just give you a bit of background about me, and then I'll sort of start from the beginning. I'm 60 years of age.

I've been in the industry since I was 17. Me too. Wow. 

Your voice sounds like you're 40. Look, my mind tells me I'm 25. I know.

My mind says I'm 25. My wife still thinks I'm 10, but that's another story. The mind of a 13-year-old, the humor.

When I was at high school, my parents sort of saw in me someone who was very good with their hands. I was always building things. I was always pulling stuff apart and putting it back together.

I was always using power tools and helping my dad do construction stuff, and was just basically a really hands-on sort of guy. And I really enjoyed that sort of stuff. My main sort of idea in the late 70s, early 80s was I wanted to go into building or construction or carpentry or something like that.

And at the time, our industry was in, well, pretty much recession, and there was no work available. I spoke to a couple of people about other sort of things that I might be interested in, where it was creative, using your hands, and one of them was dental technology. And so through various contacts, I went and looked at a few labs and a few dentists and a few other sort of connections through the dental industry, and I discovered that there's this job called dental technician.

And what they do is they create mini sculptures. What they do is they carve and they make and they cast and they use acrylics and they use, you know, all that sort of stuff that we know about. As a 16-year-old, I thought, wow, this could be really quite interesting for me.

So I did some more research. I found out that we had a technical college that taught that, and so I applied to get in. And in our college in New South Wales, in Sydney, there's only one college that trains dental technicians, and that's always been the way, well, since I can remember, in the 50s and 60s, it was an apprenticeship scheme where you would go and do an apprenticeship with an existing dental technician.

And I think it was about 1979, they changed it to a traineeship, which is sort of like a level above apprenticeship. Anyway, so I applied to do that course, along with 300 other people. Really, 300 people? Yeah, 300 people each year.

Well, when I did it, 300 people would apply to do that course, but the course only took 30 people. So I was lucky enough to be one of those people. When you say lucky enough, how did they get 30 people out of 300? Who'd you pay off? Like, how did you get that? Okay, it was a very, very stringent selection process.

We had to do a biology exam, a maths exam, an English exam, a knowledge exam on the course. And then we had an interview with two of the head teachers there to find out whether we knew about the course and what our intentions were. And then we had to sit a manual dexterity test.

You had to carve a block of wax into a specific shape. And then you were given some ortho wire and you had to bend the ortho wire into a couple of specific shapes as well. So from all of those tasks, all of those assessment criteria, then they'd pick their 30 out of that 300.

And as I said, I've always been very good with my hands. So the manual dexterity part wasn't that difficult. The English was fairly easy.

Biology was, for me, quite tough. And the knowledge of the course, I'd read up on it. And I knew it like the back of my hand.

So I impressed the head teachers with that. So obviously, I faked it until I made it, you know? That is so great. I don't think Elvis and I have ever talked to anybody that's been a 30 out of 300.

And you actually have been kind of good at it. Yeah, that's a great story. When I did our course, it was 3,700 hours over two years.

So it was a full-time course as a dental technician. And then after that two years, you had to go and work in a laboratory as on-site work. And you had to work for two years in a lab.

And back then, we had registration, state registration for dental technicians. Registration means that if you're a healthcare worker, you get registered with the state government and you're responsible to them. And what we had to do is after we finished our two years working in a laboratory, we then had to sit a four-day exam where you were tested on basically everything in dental technology.

So that's crown and bridge, ortho, acrylic, chrome, the whole gamut, everything. And so you had to do repairs. You had to do a full setup, adjustable.

You had to do a platinum foil coping. You had to do a build-up. You had to do ortho wires.

There was everything you had to do, right? And it was a very, very, very tough exam to get through. And again, luckily, I managed to pass that first go. I achieved registration with New South Wales government.

And I went out and started to become a dental technician. Now, the funny thing is, the funny thing is after doing all of that, you're still only a beginner. You're still only learning.

You're still only like 20-something. You've got to be pretty awesome though. Damn.

Well, you know, I was a bit of a legend in my own mind, tell you the truth. You're a legend in my mind right now, just saying. Don't tell your wife.

You're still getting hired for like entry-level positions after all that? Yes, you are. Because don't forget our career or our work is a skill set. It's a skill-based set.

So, you know, I suppose a lot of the younger dental technicians now are all on CAD-CAM and they're doing all the CAD-CAM stuff. But back when I did it, it was all analog. It was all manual.

So you only started to get good at it after about 5 or 10 years. You know, to be a good ceramist, you had to get those numbers through. You had to learn how to do a thousand crowns.

To wax a gold crown, you had to learn how to wax a thousand gold crowns. To do a full over full setup, you had to do that a lot of times before you started to get it done well. But also quickly too.

Like, you know, if I sat there for a day, I could probably wax up a gold crown that was absolutely perfect. But, you know, no boss is going to let you sit there and wax one gold crown all day. Yeah.

So anyway, the point is, is you start to get good after about 5 or 10 years and you really sort of reach the peak of your skill level about a couple of years before you retire. That's kind of funny. After you passed that exam so well and stellar, so you went to work, where'd you go? Yeah, okay.

First of all, during that two years of training, on-the-job training, your goal is to do all types of dental restorations. Because when you sit that exam, you have to do all types of restorations. So you'd be crazy just to sit there and wax your gold crowns for two years and then you wouldn't know how to do a full.

That was my goal for that first two years, was to try and work in either one big lab and get moved around or work in a few various different labs. That's what I did. I ended up working in probably two or three different smaller labs, getting experience in all aspects of it.

From that, what was great about that was, was that I discovered that what I really enjoyed was crown and bridge. So are you saying like waxing, metal finishing and building? Yeah, so full gold crowns, PFMs, metal-free restorations. Implants hadn't really started at that stage.

Basically, I knew I wanted to go into crown and bridge. I knew that I wanted to be a crown and bridge dental technician. So after I got registration, I then sought out a crown and bridge lab and probably worked in about two or three.

And then I moved overseas. I moved to London and I worked in Harley Street in one of the big... Well, hold up, hold up. How old were you and how did that happen? Okay, by this stage, I was... I think I left in about 1988.

So I would have been 22, 23, 24, something like that. How did you do that? Well, my mother's English and my father's French. So I had residency in England and I had a European passport anyway, as well as an Australian passport.

So I could live and work anywhere in Europe or the UK anytime I want. So I took that opportunity. That's pretty awesome, actually.

It's fantastic. It's fantastic, yeah. I'd like to be you back then.

I decided to take that opportunity up and I moved to London and I worked in Harley Street for a company called VHF Dental Laboratories and they were a crown and bridge lab. And the benefit of them was that the owner, his father was a leading professor of dentistry in Harley Street, who was at the forefront of dental implants. So I got my first taste of dental implant work in about 1990, 1991.

And I basically started doing implants as a young guy back then. And again, that really interested me because it was sort of like that whole Meccano set sort of ideology where you get bits and pieces and bolt it all together and make a crown. And it was all pretty exciting.

Back in the 90s, man, implants. Yeah. Here's the Wild West.

Yeah, I was working on those crazy zygomatic implants that were like six inches long that went through into, like, I don't know if you remember those, but it was crazy, crazy stuff. It was crazy, crazy stuff. And, you know, the new Branemark, you know, Branemark was the new kid on the block and they had all this whiz-bang, fantastic implant systems and Stereos and a few other names like that that were sort of starting out.

So I got to experience a lot of that early in implant history, I suppose. The other benefit of working in the UK is they have a two-tiered system there. They have National Health, which is the government-subsidised health.

Yeah, yeah. For the general public. And then they have a private health system.

Now, being in Harley Street, which is the medical sort of hub of London, it's where all the top labs and doctors and specialists are, I got to work on some of the, you know, really top-end work. But we also did a part of it which was part of National Health. Now, the National Health, you know, for all of its benefits and so forth, is still a budget system, right? You'd make budget crowns and you'd bang them out.

And I learned how to do 25 models in a morning and wax 25 units in the afternoon and cast them and trim them and sort of, you know, get to be very good very quickly and be able to do a fairly high standard of work at a very fast rate. The benefit for that was that when I came back to Australia, I was sort of a lot better than a lot of the locals because I had the speed and the quality from that pressure in the National Health system. So I left London.

I came back to Australia. I then got a job with a German technician who'd emigrated to Australia who was extraordinarily good. Like, we used to get quite a few German technicians that would come over and emigrate to Australia.

And 99% of the technicians that came over from Germany were at an extraordinary standard level. Yeah, we've heard that. And it was so good for our industry to have these guys turn up and show a level that we all wanted to aspire to.

So I worked for a company called Physident for three years and then I had an associate or a friend of mine, sort of like a mentor, who was working as a freelance dental technician. So he'd owned a lab in the 60s and 70s and he sort of sold that lab and went off and retired and then decided he wanted to get back in the industry and he freelanced. So he'd go out to different labs all over New South Wales and go spend a couple of days there when they're flat out busy and basically run the lab if the guy, the principal, wanted to go overseas over holiday or just needed extra hands.

And he did that for a couple of years. But towards the end of that, he approached me and said, look, do you want to start a lab? And I said, well, yeah, sure. Because he was getting to the point where he was sick and tired of travelling all over the place and he thought, okay, well, I'll set up a lab in my house and you can set up your lab wherever you want and we'll work together.

And so that's what we did. I started a company called North Shore Dental Ceramics and we started out as just the two of us and we did crown and bridge work and that started in 1993 and I sold it in 2017. And during that 27 years or whatever it was, 25 years, we'd built up a very, very successful big lab medium to big lab for Australia or for Sydney.

At one point, we had 10 staff. We were turning over nearly a million dollars a year. During that time, I think I'd constructed about 8,000 implant crowns.

God knows how many other crowns. We were doing like full arch restorations every month. So I've got a question.

Take me back a little bit though. When you're that young and you guys decided to partner up, how did you start marketing and or promoting a lab without clients to build it like that? Like what did you do? What's the secret sauce? I'm really curious. Okay, there's a couple of things you need to know.

First of all, my associate, a guy called Ivis Landskirst. Ivis was, I think he's 20, 30 years older than me. So he'd been around the block already.

Like he knew the industry. He'd owned his business. He was the brains.

He had the knowledge. I was the young kid with all the get up and go and wanting to make it work. And he had all the knowledge and the experience.

And that's what worked really, really well together. We got on like a house on fire. That's so cool.

And he had clients that he'd been doing work for for years that he asked if they wanted to be part of our team, part of our lab, and they agreed. And then during the time, we sort of slowly built it up. Now, the first five years were hard.

The first five years, I worked three jobs. And the other two jobs were so I could eat and pay rent. And the laboratory, basically, any money I made went into buying equipment.

So for five years, I just worked my backside off and bought equipment. Every time I had a spare $4,000 or $10,000, I'd go buy something. That's actually genius, though.

I mean, it kept you above the curve, obviously. Well, I've never been a lazy person. And I think that's probably my edge to everybody else is the fact that working hard doesn't scare me.

And even now at 60, I'm really working three jobs still. You know, I've got my dental laboratory. I've got a technical education position.

And I've got a hobby job, which I do at night, which is a DJ. I'm a nightclub DJ. Oh, my.

60-year-old Australian nightclub DJ. That's awesome. Absolutely.

Absolutely. So anyway, let's leave that for a little bit because we'll go back to the lab. We'll go back to North Shore Dental Ceramics.

Yep. Obviously, you didn't stay in a house. No.

You must have bought a place. I mean, 10 people fitting in your bedroom is awkward. I bought a business unit.

We moved the lab into the business unit. And we set it up. I think we set it up in about 1993.

And it was a state-of-the-art lab. I spent an arm and a leg getting it to the level that I wanted it to be. So we had all the brand new cavo benches.

We had all the brand new fume cabinets. And it was a state-of-the-art lab in 1993, right? And I bought the business unit that we put it in. And then we fitted it out.

And we started working. And we started working like crazy. One good friend of mine, when he knew I was going into business, he said to me, look, the best thing you can do is you take the biggest bite you can and you chew like hell.

That's great advice. And you know what? That's exactly what I did. And it's exactly what happened.

And it worked. So we worked in the lab. It was a great experience.

I enjoyed the lab. It was hard work. I made a reasonable amount of money out of it.

Only because I worked hard, not because we get paid really well, as everyone knows in the dental industry. You know, we're not earning $3,000 an hour. So you can make money in this business.

But you've got to work twice as hard as everybody else. At what point did you quit your other two jobs? When I got too busy in the lab. When the lab started to take over, as far as the workload is concerned, then the other two jobs sort of disappeared, I suppose.

And in a way, that was OK. I was happy with that. Because the other two jobs had done what they wanted to do, which was feed me and pay my rent.

Now the lab was doing all of that for me. So that was good. And I sold that lab.

This is a funny story. This is a funny story. I had no intention of selling the lab.

I was only 57 or something. And I thought, I'll keep going for another 10 years. And then we'll look at maybe downsizing or selling the lab or whatever.

And as it happened at the time, this is when the whole digital thing started to explode in Sydney. And there was a couple of big labs that wanted to expand and wanted to take advantage of that digital sort of transformation, as far as laboratories are concerned. So they were out looking at different labs to purchase.

They approached me, and I was just not interested. I just said, look, I'm not interested. They said, well, give us a price.

So I gave them a stupid price, right? I thought, OK. And they said yes? And they said yes. Oh, my God.

So then I was stuck in a situation. I was like, well, do I sell it or do I not sell it? And then I thought to myself, I don't know what it's like in America, but in Sydney, a dental laboratory is worth zero, OK? Without the principal, the lab is really worth a bunch of secondhand equipment, which is maybe a couple of hundred dollars. It doesn't matter what sort of lab you got, right? So these guys offered me an extraordinary amount of money.

So I had to take it.

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