Dr. Thomas Connelly: Inside the Masterclass to Scaling Luxury Diamond Dentistry and Elite Patient Experiences

As a part of our series about healthcare leaders, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Thomas Connelly.

Dr. Thomas Connelly is best known as the “Father of Diamond Dentistry.” He is a trailblazer in the dental field with his remarkable and one-of-a-kind multi-million dollar dental creations seen on some of the most recognized faces in entertainment and sports such as Post Malone, Offset, Odell Beckham Jr, Shaquille O’Neal, Marcus Stroman (Pitcher, Chicago Cubs), Dennis Schroder (Toronto Raptors) and many more. Dr. Connelly offers anything but the ordinary Dentistry menu out of his Beverly Hills location. When he’s not in the office, Dr. Connelly is training for his next bodybuilding competition. Named “the most jacked dentist in the world,” Dr. Connelly is competing in the 2023 Masters Olympia contest August 26–27. Dr. Connelly received his dental training at the Mayo Clinic, the University of Detroit Mercy, and Louisiana State University. He has served as a clinical professor at Harvard University Dental School in Boston, and Columbia School of Dental Medicine in New York City.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! What is your “backstory”?

As a child I always had an affinity to Art, painting and drawing. Dentistry allowed me to combine science and art into a profession that fulfilled my creative mind. With the addition of diamonds and precious metals I’ve been able to take my creative to the next level developing an entire new profession within dentistry.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?

As a young man growing up watching sports and paying attention to the media there is always a certain athlete or supermodel that would catch your eye. Fast forward 25 years later and suddenly these people are actually my patients. It’s very surreal to grow up looking up to somebody or admiring them for what they do and then suddenly you’re taking care of them and helping them achieve their best self with some creative dental work.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

Having practiced for over 25 years I’ve made plenty of mistakes. I think the goal is to only make those mistakes one time. In the very beginning of my career I can remember placing the veneers on the wrong teeth and not realizing until the bonding had completely set. The only way to fix this is to cut the veneers off and make them again. This is one of those mistakes everything else has made one time and then employed systems to make sure it never happened again.

Are you working on any new or exciting projects now?

I think this is the greatest part of my profession as a diamond-focused dentist. Every patient want something different nobody wants with someone else has so we’re always jumping into the creative world dreaming of ideas and designs with different cuts different colors and different layouts of precious gems and metals.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

Dr. Mark Lowenberg in New York City brought me into his practice in the year 2000 for a couple of years after I had only been practicing for three years. Dr. Lowenberg exposed me to dentistry that I had never seen before and a clientele I had never experienced. I believe Mark was a very large part of pointing me into the direction I am today.

How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?

Every year we pick out a handful of patients who don’t really have the means to rebuild their mouth and we do everything for free as if they were a full-paying customer. The costs we incur to do this free work are significant but because our practice has done so well over the years we are able to absorb these costs easily.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share a story about how that was relevant to you in your own life?

Fortune favors the brave — this is tattooed my forehead. If you don’t take chances you never going to see what’s on the other side !

Can you share your top three “oral hygiene tweaks” that will help people look and feel great?

I cannot emphasize a good tongue scraper enough. The amount of dead skin cells bacteria in food particles that remain dormant on the back of our tongue is extremely disgusting and most people live a lifetime without ever cleaning it.

Stick the basic toothpaste work out all the added ingredients. A lot of these antibacterial ingredients are not really meant for human consumption and we don’t really need to bombard our mouth with antibiotics on a regular basis this also goes for mouth rinses.

Ok thank you for all of that. Here is the main question of our interview. Based on your experience, what are your “5 Things You Need To Create A Successful Career As A Dentist” and why?

1. You have to have the skills necessary to prepare the teeth properly. Many people want to be dentists but unfortunately, not everybody is good with their hands in fact I’d go so far as to say that most dentists are not good with their hands unfortunately.

2. You need a good ceramist partner. If you can drill the teeth properly that’s only half the battle. You need a skilled ceramist to build the veneers and crown work on the drill tooth you have prepared and they need to be able to do this efficiently, and also create porcelain that is life like.

3. You need to be yourself. You need to be able to speak to people on their level not as a doctor. The day you have conversations with your patience speaking truth and science is the day your patience will put their trust in you wholeheartedly.

4. Unfortunately you need to have a good social media. People want to see visual results and I think that’s a reasonable expectation in this era.

5. You need to have a good people working with you in your office as your partners. Your employees need to make enough money so that their job is a career that they want to work the rest of their life and dedicate their sweat tears and precious time to.

If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of wellness to the most amount of people, what would that be?

I think something simple like scraping your tongue has been overlooked for decades. There is a cesspool of bacteria and dead skin cells along with food just baking in the back of your tongue creating bad breath in preventing you from tasting all your food properly. A simple tongue scraper from breath RX can be purchased on Amazon and it works beautifully.

We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them :-)

I would love to have a meeting with Seth Rogan and offer him my services, I would also love to meet with Johnny Depp and create custom diamond teeth for him as well.

Thank you so much for these wonderful insights, and for the time you spent on this interview. We wish you continued success and good health!