David Charnowitz
David Charnowitz is the owner of DC Dental, which has over 100 employees and serves 8,000 dentists — mostly the mom-and-pops — throughout the mid-Atlantic region. Charnowitz has upended the traditional model of the dental supply business. “What we’ve done is taken a business that was done the old way, where companies send sales representatives to the dentist office to take orders, and we developed a model built primarily on telesales,” said Charnowitz, who has been nurturing this ugly-but-essential slice of the economy since he was 21. “We have a hybrid, where we gain efficiency by taking the order electronically, but we still maintain face-to-face relationships with our docs.”
DC Dental also sponsors dental education seminars at its showroom and training center in Pikesville, where dentists can get the professional credits they need to keep their license. In return, Charnowitz’s marketers get one-on-one time with the doctors. Because it doesn’t have big, one-stop clients, DC Dental grinds out its sales organically, day by day, getting its foot in the door, forming relationships and building on that.