Byron Emmons

Recruited to stand up a greenfield practice from an empty building. I owned the entire non-clinical function. There was no back office beneath me, no IT vendor, and no marketing agency. Every system the practice ran on, I designed, built, and maintained.

• Greenfield Build-Out: Took the practice from pre-construction through opening and into steady-state operation, sequencing infrastructure, vendor selection, staffing, and systems so clinical delivery could begin on schedule without carrying forward operational debt.
• Operations & Administration: Served as sole back-office administrator covering billing submission and reconciliation, HR, payroll, supplier relationships, and daily practice operations, while simultaneously building the processes to be handed to a hired team.
• IT & Infrastructure: Designed and administered the practice’s Windows Server 2022 domain from scratch: directory services, workstation imaging, group policy, backup strategy, and disaster recovery. Managed FortiGate firewall policy, segmentation, and VPN. Performed Open Dental database administration at the SQL level, including custom reporting and data integrity work that off-the-shelf tooling does not cover.
• Self-Hosted Infrastructure: Deployed and maintained the practice’s self-hosted stack on Ubuntu: Nextcloud for document collaboration, Moodle for staff training delivery, and WordPress for the public web presence, fronted by Apache with reverse proxy and TLS termination. Chose self-hosting over SaaS where patient-adjacent data and recurring vendor cost made it the better call.
• Information Security: Built the security posture from a blank slate rather than remediating inherited weakness. Endpoint control, least-privilege access, patch discipline, monitored backups, and documented recovery procedures appropriate to a practice holding sensitive health records.
• Compliance: Owned PHIPA and PIPEDA obligations end to end: mapping where patient data lived, how it moved, who could reach it, and what happened if it was exposed. Maintained the documentation and system controls that make those obligations defensible rather than aspirational.
• Digital Marketing & SEO: Built the practice’s web presence and service-page architecture from nothing, implemented structured data and schema markup, optimized and maintained the Google Business Profile, and ran ongoing technical SEO audits, treating organic visibility as an operational asset for a new practice with no patient base and no referral history.
• Patient Financing: Evaluated and implemented third-party financing options, weighing merchant cost against treatment acceptance to widen access to care without eroding margin.

Brought in to lead operations at an established multi-provider clinic carrying legacy systems and loose process. My mandate was to tighten the operation technically, procedurally, and financially, to a standard that could support growth without regulatory or security exposure.

• Team Leadership: Directly led a back-office team of two and three front-desk administrators, all reporting to me, spanning billing, HR, payroll, and practice administration. Restructured responsibilities so that coverage no longer depended on individual heroics.
• Compliance & Oversight: Managed compliance across dental assistants and associate dentists, plus financial compliance of payroll. Audited existing systems, services, and operational practices against current legislation and closed the gaps, converting informal habit into documented, auditable process.
• IT Systems & Infrastructure: Administered FortiGate firewalls, remote access tooling (TeamViewer, later RustDesk), and AbelDent practice management software. Introduced MaxAssist for patient communication, handling sourcing, evaluation, implementation, and staff training, and built custom treatment planning tools and patient-facing portals where commercial products didn’t fit the workflow.
• Security & Incident Response: Led security remediation on a practice running legacy infrastructure: identified exposure, prioritized by real risk to patient data and continuity, hardened systems, and brought the environment up to current standards. Owned incident response when issues arose.
• Growth Support: Aligned services and operational practice with the ownership group’s growth objectives, ensuring that added volume landed on systems that could absorb it.

Dentalcorp, Trenton, ON | December 2023 – May 2024

Ran day-to-day operations of a corporate-owned practice inside Dentalcorp’s centralized support structure, owning on-the-ground execution and performance while translating head-office strategy into something a single location could actually run.

• Hiring & People: Led hiring across clinical and administrative roles from sourcing through onboarding, coordinating with corporate HR while retaining judgment on fit for the specific practice.
• IPAC & Regulatory Compliance: Owned Infection Prevention and Control compliance for the practice, ensuring adherence to RCDSO standards, CDA/PHO guidelines, and internal corporate policy, including protocol maintenance, staff competency, and audit readiness.
• Systems & Rollouts: Managed practice management software rollouts, hardware deployments, and process changes pushed from head office, absorbing the disruption of centrally-mandated change without stalling production.
• Training: Delivered on-site staff training across clinical protocols, software workflows, and operational procedures, meeting staff where their actual competency was rather than where the corporate deck assumed it was.
• Associate Contract Administration: Administered associate dentist contracts end to end: onboarding, schedule management, production tracking, and contract compliance.
• Financial Accountability: Held P&L accountability for the location, monitoring revenue, controlling expenses, and reporting against corporate targets.
• Performance Analysis: Provided performance insight to ownership and corporate leadership, identifying the specific operational levers behind production, collections, and patient retention rather than reporting the numbers alone.
• Corporate Liaison: Acted as the connective tissue between corporate strategy and clinical execution, balancing standardized process against the practical realities of a single-location operation and ensuring central initiatives actually landed at the practice level.

• Served as external director covering the HR and IT functions for the practice, advising on staffing structure, employment practice, and technology decisions while remaining outside day-to-day operations.

• Provided the technical and people-side judgment a single-owner practice typically lacks in-house, from systems selection through hiring and compliance questions

Maintained customer sales documentation and product vendor information. Researched product availability across all vendors and placed special requests for products not yet stocked. Reviewed appliance specifications weekly to ensure accuracy in client presentations, and communicated with management on campaigns, strategies, and updates from the central corporate appliance team.

Scheduled department hours, managed promotions and sales staff, and was regularly called on to troubleshoot IT issues with respect to work computing equipment and appliance product offerings. Managed communications between store administrative staff and head office to provide clear directives on policy, procedure, and working expectations.