How did the St Pauli girl become a chief executive officer for a dental prosthetics company?
Now that we have your attention, the real question is, how did a young single mother graduate from Purdue University, with a double major, and rise to the notoriety of being one of the only women led dental prosthetics companies in the world?
Now, we have the real makings of a story.
Cadmus Dental Lab is a creator of dental prosthetics and plans to increase its space with a new lease, expand its staff over the next three years and move into new markets all around the globe.
The Tampa-based company has leased 21,400 square feet, at 5701 East Hillsborough Avenue, in the NetPark business park, and plans to grow from 50 employees to 100. The company is expected to be on a run rate of $60 million in revenue by December 2024.
Cadmus Dental Lab was founded by Kelly Boyd-Rivera, one of only three women, worldwide, who own a dental lab. The company creates implants, crowns and bridges, dentures and partials, and orthodontic appliances for dental practices.
A MIDWEST TOMBOY
Boyd-Rivera grew up in White County, Indiana, in the small town of Monticello.
She grew up near Lake Schafer, which had an amusement park called Indiana Beach. The name makes her laugh.
“There are no beaches in Indiana, just so you know,” explains Boyd-Rivera, just in case. “I was a girl in an all-boy neighborhood, but the boys only came down in the summertime because they were from Chicago.”
She describes her young self as a tomboy and shares she was often bullied, describing her appearance as “chunky, sheet white, bright red hair with a gap between my teeth.”
“I could put two toothpicks in side by side and thought it was the coolest thing in the world to be able to spit through it, because that’s how I was raised,” she says. “I was as wide as I was tall.”
She was the only child to her mother and father, so what other children lacked for kindness, she never went without at home, from her parents.
“As a result [bullying], you become this overachiever. You do whatever you have to do in life to prevent anyone from bullying you again,” she says. “My dad didn’t know how to deal with those situations, but my mother would tell me to ‘turn the other cheek.’”
Bullying didn’t prevent her from taking a liking to sports. She played volleyball and, during a few of her teen years, was a champion snowmobile racer.
“I was the son my father always wanted,” she says, fondly.
She was close to her parents. When they divorced, Mom moved to Southern California and Boyd-Rivera stayed close to Dad, in Indiana, explaining, “I was his world.”
Growing up, she watched both parents working more than one job, which instilled a relentless tenacity in her. “My hard work ethic is a derivative of them because that’s all I knew.”
She graduated high school with a small class of only 60 students and, as she planned her future, she got news that would change her course. She was 17 years old and pregnant. Before starting college, she would have her son, Jonathan.
PAULI AND PURDUE
While life-changing events were happening in Boyd-Rivera’s life, she also began to morph out of her self-described awkward stage and provided for herself, and her son, by modeling.
This work provided much-needed income to support her young son and, later, pay for her college education. It worked for a while. You’ve probably seen her work as the cartoon woman on St. Pauli Beer. But it wasn’t her long-term solution. “It only took being turned down for one job and then, you then go, okay, what are you really going to do with your life?”
In January 1992, she began her studies at Purdue University, in West Lafayette. She completed her four-year Bachelor of Science degree in just three years and was a double major.
“I went to [college] with a different attitude than everybody else because most people go and have this party scene experience,” she recalls.
Even through the summer, son in tow, Boyd-Rivera, determined to make it despite the obstacles, she would bring her son to class. There were no iPads, no iPhones, just a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle backpack with coloring books and crayons. “The professors loved him,” she says.
“He was such a good little boy, but you learn to do things differently when you’re faced with different situations in life,” Boyd-Rivera admits. “It was hard being a young mom and raising my child on my own.”
She ended up graduating with a degree in psychology and industrial management. She was the first in her family to earn a college degree.
Boyd-Rivera paid her own way through college and graduated, all while raising her son. She met her first husband and was planning her wedding. Life was starting for her, in many ways. But then she experienced a sudden loss that would stick with her for the rest of her life.
At 28 years old, her father lost his life to lung cancer, which was later found to be asbestos-related mesothelioma. He was only 54 years old.
“He was diagnosed and died in the span of, literally, two weeks,” she says. “The doctor came in, he told me, ‘Your daddy has lung cancer.’ I was like, okay, well give him one of my lungs. I’m going to fix this. Just take one of mine – I don’t need two. And then, he put up his X-rays. One lung was completely white, and the other one was white, but it had this little sliver of black. And I was like, oh, that’s where the cancer is. And he was like, no, that’s what’s left.”
Boyd-Rivera and her father were planning to move down to Florida. But he never made it to the Sunshine State. The last thing he did for “his girl” was look at wedding gowns in a magazine and, without his daughter knowing, had it paid for and shipped to her. She received the gown of her dreams, after he was gone.
“I was home dealing with the funeral arrangements, and I got this wedding confirmation from a bridal shop, in the mail. And I’m like, what the hell is this? So, I opened it up and it was confirmation of a wedding dress that had been ordered,” Boyd-Rivera tears up sharing this touching story. “He was a beautiful man. I miss him every day.”
FLORIDA LIVING
Boyd-Rivera, still grieving, pushed ahead to her future in Florida. She is quick to mention that her husband was an amazing dad to her son, but the loss of her father was tough on both her and her son, who had looked up to him as a father figure, his whole life.
“When I moved here to Florida, my ex-husband adopted my son. They are still very close,” she says.
After two daughters, Mia and Alexa, Boyd-Rivera and her husband went their separate ways.
Meanwhile, the seeds were planted for Boyd-Rivera to rise to powerhouse levels in the dental lab business. And it was all the right place, right time, magic.
She took a job for a promotional company, in Dunedin. She returned to modeling, doing agency work as a scout. It was in this role that she met a general manager at DDS Lab, a dental laboratory in Tampa.
“She was looking for somebody to be the sales engine of her company. And I was like, ‘What’s a dental lab?’” she recalls, smiling.
From there, Boyd-Rivera learned from square one, everything about the business of corporate dentistry and dental prosthetics.
When she joined the company, they were doing about $3 million and she stayed on, working up through the ranks, until the company was so big, it was ready to sell.
As the company grew, Boyd-Rivera built strong relationships, one of them being a Chinese Councilman named Vincent Zang, a rockstar in the dental prosthetic world – if there was such a thing.
Zang became Boyd-Rivera’s go-to man for outsourcing a robust pipeline, coming out of China, which she has visited no less than 28 times in her professional career.
DDS Lab first sold in 2014 for $105 million. Boyd-Rivera was promoted to chief revenue officer, and, in 2021, the company sold again, this time for $230 million.
“During those 11 years, I learned everything about running a dental lab, from crowns to operations, in two continents,” she says. “When we sold in 2021, the new private equity came in and I was faced with a glass ceiling. I was in an industry dominated by men. And I had asked about being the chief executive officer, and I was turned down.”
As the company made strategic changes to its executive leadership team, Boyd-Rivera made her exit. Her next big plan? Open a Chick-fil-A franchise.
She made it about halfway through that process when the “eat more chicken” company went with another franchisee.
“I’m like, now what am I going to do?” Boyd-Rivera says. “Do I retire? So, I thought, ‘I want to start a dental lab.’”
She contacted her “rockstar” friend Zang. His response was, “Kelly, what took you so long?”
In January 2022, Boyd-Rivera established Cadmus Dental Lab.
“By December 2022, we had started sprinting,” she says. And they haven’t slowed since.
This brings us to the company’s current growth spurt. It’s outgrown its previous office space and needs more heartbeats in the building to meet demand.
And, with a need for those heartbeats to be trained the “Cadmus Way,” Boyd-Rivera started her own not-for-profit Cadmus Academy, which will train the next generation of dental lab geniuses, as well as dentists who are yearning for education within dental specialties.
“By 2026, I want to expand into more geographic locations,” Boyd-Rivera says.
In Greek Mythology, Cadmus was a hero, or “she-ro,” as she playfully says. With a larger scale to work from and the grit to make it happen, it doesn’t seem like she’s really playing at all. ♦
Photos by Pamella Lee
MORE FUN FACTS ABOUT KELLY
• Kelly Boyd-Rivera’s mother currently lives in the Tampa Bay area, not far from her own home, in FishHawk Ranch.
• Every Sunday she hosts family dinners at her home with a themed meal to match the movie of the night. Most are Disney-related.
• She and her daughters created a theater room in the house. The walls are adorned with gold glitter wallpaper and framed Broadway and concert programs, memories of times with her children.
• Her youngest daughter, Alexa, is a musical theater major. During the pandemic, she was in an online performance of Disney’s Newsies.
• Her middle child, Mia, is getting married. While Boyd-Rivera is also engaged, she is only focused on her daughter’s nuptials, and she’s loving every minute of it.
• She loves to travel and still has many places she wants to visit, like Budapest and Croatia.
• Her son, after attending Purdue with her, is now chief operating officer at Cadmus.
