Surviving the Test of Time: Savannah Dental ~ 22 Years in Business

Photo by D. Paul Graham

If you are looking for a warm, welcoming dental practice for you and your family that is always on the cutting edge of the latest advances and technological breakthroughs in dentistry, then Dr. Stephanie Joy Sweeney and Kevin Dickinson and team at Savannah Dental is the perfect practice for you!

Entrepreneurial Inspiration

When Dr. Stephanie Joy Sweeney was in high school, she worked for a retail store that was an example of how a great culture can drive growth and customer service. On the flip side of the coin, after dental school, she worked for dental offices that had a negative culture. Co-workers often hid in her office crying due to team relationship issues. She purchased Savannah Dental with the vision for creating a dental office with an amazing culture: A place where everyone enjoyed coming to work knowing that positivity will create a patient-centric dental office. Sweeney met Dickinson at a dental educational seminar and realized he had been striving for the same goals. He soon joined Savannah Dental, understanding that they can provide more for their patients together than alone.

Biggest Challenge

Well 100-percent the biggest challenge that we have faced is the COVID-19 pandemic. Once we reopened, it was our team that gave us extraordinary support to deal with the backlog of patients. March 1, 2020 was the day we moved back into our current location after a remodel and expansion of Dickinson’s office. We had just taken on a lot of debt, and to have to close our doors for six weeks to non-emergency treatment was very scary.

Best advice

Find a good role model and listen to them. Learn from the mistakes and successes of other business owners, and not just in your industry. I have a great group of entrepreneurs I meet with regularly in Savannah.

Motto to live by

We start each day with a team meeting. We begin by sharing what we are grateful for and end with our motto: “Today, it is my pleasure to ‘WOW’ all patients and treat them with the utmost kindness and best possible care that I can.”  It is a daily reminder of why we are here.

If you could change history

The one thing I would change is I would have started my own business sooner. It is scary to dive into being responsible for your salary and others, but; it is also very rewarding to watch your vision come to life.

Career Highlight

Being approached by Invisalign^TM to help educate other doctors on how to use Invisalign^TM successfully in their offices. You don’t get recognition from your colleagues very often about your clinical skills after graduation from school, so it was really nice to be recognized for my clinical success by Invisalign^TM.

Secret to Success

I think our secret is that we have built an extraordinary team and have empowered them to be able to do whatever is necessary to ensure that every visit and experience with us is the best possible. Your dentist is only a small part of your experience with a practice, and we work hard to create an amazing group that allows for the best patient care possible.

Savannah Dental
Savannah, GA.
savannah.dental

Average number of employees

[26+]

Favorite charities:

Oatland Island, One Hundred Miles (working to keep the 100 miles of Georgia’s coastline, clean and safe), and a double platinum sponsor of CCA Skidaway Island, JEA, Surfrider, the Telfair Museum and others.

To read this story in its entirety, subscribe now to the print edition for the full article or get instant access to our interactive digital edition.