At 8 years old, Tonya Lanthier lost control of her bike after the chain fell off. She had a choice — swerve into the side of a dumpster or a parked car.
She went for the car, smashing her front teeth and knocking one out.
Lanthier tears up when she tells this story. Not from the pain of the accident, but because of how the dental group that treated her made her feel.
"They made me feel safe, like everything was going to be OK,” Lanthier said. “They made me feel better when I was a scared little girl.”
That moment inspired her to become a dental hygienist, where she would do temp work at more than 100 offices. During those stints, she got a feel for each office’s culture and let employees know where there were open roles if they weren’t happy with their office.
As her phone calls increased, she felt another wave of inspiration. These dental professionals needed a job platform that could automate much of what she was doing by hand. She founded DentalPost Inc. in 2005, a completely bootstrapped company that started — and stayed — in her basement.
DentalPost started as a job and resume-sharing website for dental professionals and evolved to include an app, customer relations management system and software to reduce biases in hiring.
Lanthier passed $1 million in revenue with no employees. Now, she has 10 team members and an approximately 40% year-to-date growth rate in 2021.
The mother of twins took the skills she knew from temping at dental offices and joined the Entrepreneurs’ Organization, which led her to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s entrepreneur program and certificate programs at London Business School and Harvard Business School.
As the company grew, she continued to rewrite the platform and add new features to keep up with demand. In September 2021, she added SmartView, a screening feature that removes the photos and names from job candidates in the first phases of the hiring process to remove unconscious bias in hiring managers.
"I thought it was my responsibility to keep improving my site and make it better for people,” Lanthier said.
DentalPost is about making sure all patients receive the same level of care Lanthier did as a child. Unhappy employees trickle down to the patients, Lanthier said. She wants to make sure candidates are paired with employers for whom they’re happy to work.
With a labor force that’s already stretched thin — and strained further because of the pandemic — Lanthier hopes DentalPost can aid the job search process. She usually sees an uptick in business when there’s a supply-and-demand problem in the industry.
As for Lanthier, she never fully traded her dental hygienist mask and scrubs for the plain T-shirt look of a startup founder. During the pandemic, she stepped in as a much-needed hygienist and still picks up her dental tools from time to time.
“I always had my foot in the door because I love it,” Lanthier said. “I really had a hard time giving up dental hygiene.”
