Practice Stories
VP of Sales, Solmetex · 30 years in healthcare sales
Thirty years into selling to healthcare practices, Solmetex's VP of Sales explains why the next dental billionaire won't build a new tool — they'll get the fifteen existing ones to talk to each other.
Steve Craig didn't plan on office equipment. He wanted healthcare sales straight out of college, and college didn't want him back. "I just found out when I graduated college they don't hire you right out of college to go into healthcare sales." So he took the job in front of him, expecting to stay six months. He stayed five years, and what he learned in that detour became the foundation for everything after: "how to hire, develop, and train people." Before that, he'd sold cars. "I left the car dealership cuz I didn't want to keep screwing people over. I actually wanted to help people."
From office equipment he moved into ophthalmology, working every seat in the room — pharma rep, OR rep, managed care, eventually leadership — helping build a model where ophthalmologists who didn't want to answer to a hospital could build their own surgical centers instead. "They wanted to control their destiny." Johnson & Johnson recruited him from there, and that's how he entered dentistry roughly twenty-three years ago, building out J&J's presence in the DSO space — multi-practice dental groups ranging from three offices to, at the largest scale in the US, nineteen hundred.
The move to Solmetex came through a familiar face. His former CEO from the J&J years had taken the top job at a company merging five businesses into a single end-to-end water solution provider for dentistry, and asked Craig to join. He said yes. What he now oversees sits in a part of the practice almost nobody outside dentistry thinks about. "Water is the number one instrument used in dentistry. You can't do any procedures without water." And yet, "it's probably the dirty secret in dentistry, because about seventy percent of practices in the US don't test, shock, or treat their water. They just hope it's good."
He explains the stakes with an image that sticks: a swimming pool used three days a week, seven hours a day, and never cleaned in between. In a backyard, everyone would notice. In a dental practice, the lines run invisibly through walls, floors, and chairs — "you can't see that." Solmetex handles water leaving the practice and capturing amalgam; a sister brand, Sterisil, tests, shocks, and treats water coming in; two more divisions build isolation systems that free assistants and hygienists to work four-handed. What changed his own understanding of the stakes was a discovery from COVID: "seventy-eight percent of the aerosols come out of the dental unit water lines" — not, as most practices assumed, from the patient in the chair. "Our device captures ninety-six percent of aerosols," which he thinks explains a pattern dental teams have lived with for years without naming it — eye and sinus irritation that shows up at work and disappears on days off.
Ask Craig where AI fits into all of this and he doesn't hedge. "AI is here to stay. AI is a great tool... I don't think AI is going to take people's jobs. Now, jobs are going to shift in structure and look differently. But I think it's people that know how to use AI that are going to be the people that end up at top." He watches it show up in scheduling, revenue-cycle tools, phone answering, clinical diagnostics — the kind of repeated task nobody wants to do by hand.
But the line he keeps coming back to, the one that sounds less like sales talk and more like a diagnosis, is about fragmentation. "I think who's going to be the next billionaire in dentistry is the one that can figure out how to get all these AI tools to talk to each other. That's kind of the gap right now. The average dental practice, especially in the DSO space, will probably have fifteen different AI tools and none of them talk to each other." He notes this isn't entirely new — the software before AI didn't talk to each other either — but the stakes of the disconnect have grown as more of the practice runs through these systems.
Craig's actual advice, the thing he says he wishes someone had told him decades ago, isn't about any specific tool. It's about visibility. "If you build a personal brand, AI is going to find you, other people are going to find you." He tells the story of a dentist who landed a patient because she'd seen him post about racing — her late husband had taken their kids to races his whole life, and that was enough for her to skip three hundred closer dentists to sit in his chair. Craig's read on it: "people vote with their feet... the average patient doesn't know if that was a good clinical experience or a bad clinical experience, but they do know how you made them feel."
He tells dental students the same thing he tells young sales hires: choose mentorship over the bigger paycheck. "I would take the mentorship any day over the money." And on the fear that keeps practices sitting on outdated, on-premise systems while AI reshapes the industry around them, his diagnosis is simple. "I don't believe humans fear change, they fear sudden change." His prescription is small — eighteen minutes a day of deliberate exposure, roughly what it takes to log a hundred hours across a year, which he says is enough to outpace ninety percent of people in any given subject.
Craig hasn't built the tool that gets those fifteen systems talking to each other — nobody has, by his own account, and he's candid that it's the single biggest opening in dental technology right now, not a problem he's already solved for his own clients. He knows the fragmentation is real because he lives inside it, watching practices try to stitch together scheduling AI, diagnostic AI, phone AI, and billing AI that were never built to share a room. His answer to the discomfort of not having solved it yet is the same one he gives to everything: stay in motion, stay consistent, and don't wait for the whole system to arrive at once. "Choose your hard. It's either hard now and easy later, or it's easy now and it's hard later."
Watch the conversation for the swimming pool analogy, the F1 dentist story, and the eighteen-minute rule he says built his whole career.