🎙️ Host: Jen Brown, COO of Babylon Dental Care
🎙️ Guest: Angela Ward, CEO of Toothweares LLC
Jen Brown: Welcome to Be the Category of One. I’m Jen Brown, leadership coach and COO. This podcast is about growth, mindset, and leading the way by choosing to stand apart in how you think, how you lead, and how you serve.
Hi, Angela!
Angela Ward: Hello, Jen. How are you? I am so excited to be with you today.
Jen Brown: Me too. I want to say “Happy New Year,” but I keep seeing from Larry David that after the 7th of January, you cannot say “Happy New Year” anymore. So, I feel like I need to withdraw that. Happy Friday!
Angela Ward: Happy Friday! I love that.
Jen Brown: Thanks for joining me on our first podcast. We’re so happy to have you and I’m excited about all the things we’re going to talk about today.
Angela Ward: I’m very excited, and to be first is such an honor. Thank you so much. But yes, look at what you have coming for 2026. It’s so exciting.
Jen Brown: Just a little bit about you: Angela Ward is the President and CEO of Toothweares LLC, a Texas-based dental practice consulting firm known for her deep expertise in practice systems, emotional intelligence, and team performance coaching. She’s been a great partner in helping train our team over the last year, and I’m sure many others.
Angela Ward: You have an amazing team to work with. First of all, amazing leadership with a vision of health and wellness that just resonates with my passion. It is such a pleasure to work with you all.
Jen Brown: I love hearing that. It makes me excited for 2026. I was thinking when I was driving here today about what drew me to look for someone like you. I wasn’t just “internet shopping” for you, but I was looking for someone who could bring what you bring to our practice.
Jen Brown: One of the reasons I was looking for you was to help us view the insurance companies we are in network with. I wanted to decide if this is the way we should be treating patients in the future. For those of you who don’t understand, on some level, while it’s a great thing that our patients have dental coverage, providers are often directed on how to care for patients—or what to do for them—based on what whoever is making the decisions in those companies wants to pay, rather than being invested in what’s best for someone’s oral health.
Looking at the companies we work with was something that actually drew us together.
Angela Ward: Right, that’s what we started with. And so often it’s hard to understand insurance, but it serves a purpose. However, its purpose is not to keep you healthy. It is to help you pay for the decisions you want to make for your own health. Do not let insurance dictate your treatment. They will limit your care, and it’s not necessarily the care that’s proper for you. Your healthcare provider, your dentist, and your hygienist are the people you align yourself with. They will guide you based on clinical findings. Insurance can help you, but don’t rely on it 100%.
Jen Brown: Exactly. One of the things I find interesting when I’m looking at insurance companies and talking to my team is what I’m calling “financial transparency” in 2026. This means educating our patients about their coverage—what the company will pay for and what they may not.
The struggle for us is that patients often view us as part of the insurance company. My husband started this practice 43 years ago with the intention of treating people like family and creating an experience that exceeds expectations. That doesn’t really fit in the intention of dental insurance. In looking at it, we’re really going deep this year to find ways to align more with the patient, becoming their advocate and standing with them in their space on what’s best for them.
Angela Ward: Exactly. As your providers look at treatment planning, it’s based on clinical findings. I make a joke of this, but I am sincere: in my 36 years, I have yet to see any dental insurance company representative show up to a comprehensive exam for a dental patient. To allow a third party who is honestly not involved in the healthcare portion of your life to drive your decisions—versus trusting the providers who know you and your clinical findings—gets us “off the reservation” a little bit.
Jen Brown: Five thoughts came to mind when you said that! My job as COO of Babylon Dental Care is to help create tools for my team to talk to our patients. I don’t want to bash insurance companies, and if patients feel they need that coverage, I’m happy to help them with it. But I need them to understand that it’s not “us versus the insurance company versus the patient.” It’s actually us standing with the patient. Oftentimes, it’s the patient and BDC against the carrier.
I can’t advocate for any one of our professionals to promote care that is not in the best interest of that patient. It just doesn’t flow with who we are. I look at Cliff’s career and I realize he couldn’t even stomach it if I asked him to do that. It would erode trust immediately, and trust is the foundation of your relationship.
Angela Ward: As COO, you have selected someone who is equally passionate. You do the right thing because it’s the right thing, not because insurance does or does not pay for it. You can flip that coin either way: doing a treatment because insurance pays for it when it’s not medically necessary, or not doing something necessary because insurance won’t pay. Both erode the relationship and trust.
In the center of all that is a patient. What happens in their mouth affects their entire body. Science is extremely clear: what is in the mouth affects the heart, Alzheimer’s, and colon cancer. The list is a mile long. If we can get the mouth healthy, the body will follow.
You don’t buy a car and never have the oil changed. You take care of yourself by aligning with providers committed to the same thing you are. Dentistry is elevating itself to the position of major healthcare. You cannot have a healthy body without a healthy mouth.
Jen Brown: We went into the insurance topic, but it’s all interrelated. I want to spend some time talking about your “whole body” positioning with dentistry. At our team dinner with the doctors, you started talking about it and it blew my mind.
One thing I’ve been passionate about for 12 years is when Dr. Cliff decided he wanted to pay attention to sleep apnea. Back then, no one spoke about it. It wasn’t acknowledged, but true to Cliff wanting to treat people like family, he saw people were suffering. He learned about treating sleep apnea with oral appliances. He learned how a CPAP machine can be invasive and isn’t always the best way to care for a mouth.
It was a side passion project for him. He was like, “Oh, I’ll make oral appliances.” He connected with Dr. Moses and started that journey. I was the Director of Marketing then, and he handed me the Dr. Moses book and told me to build a website. There was no Google searching or AI then! I read that book front to back to write the content. The woman I was working with at the web company even said, “Jen, I’m learning so much, I think I have it and my husband definitely has it!”
All these years later, he has an Airway Health department. We have an Airway Health Director, a specialized billing department, and assistants who only see airway patients. Then you came into our world and started talking about whole body health—it was another piece to what we were already building.
Angela Ward: That night, we broke ground on the topic of saliva testing. I speak plainly about this because it deserves no confusion: whoever you’re swapping spit with, you’re getting their “bugs.”
Jen Brown: Oh, yeah. There you go.
Angela Ward: So, there is a thing about who you’re kissing—and never kiss a baby on the mouth, please! But saliva holds both good and bad bacteria. You swallow at least 900 times a day; that goes right into your stomach and your gut. It’s no surprise gut health drives your healthcare bus. Then, if you have a little bleeding in the gums, where does that bacteria go? Wherever your blood goes—your entire body.
It took us forever in dentistry to get acknowledgement for the mouth-heart connection, but the connection to the whole body is now coming from the saliva testing side.
Jen Brown: That reminds me of a crazy story. Every weekend I get phone calls from friends asking Cliff for advice. One call was about a friend’s mother who had an oral infection. Cliff said, “Go immediately to the oral surgeon; she’s swollen.” She went to the ER instead, got a prescription for an antibiotic—the wrong strain—and she died in 48 hours.
Now, I have no qualms telling that story. I tell people, “No, don’t just go to the ER.” They don’t even know what strain of oral infection you have or the proper protocol.
Angela Ward: I’m so sorry for the loss of your friend. But that speaks to the validity that the mouth is so much more than just teeth. Saliva bacteria—you need them both, but you need the proper ones in the proper balance.
Jen Brown: My doctors lit up that night hearing this. My periodontist’s face lit up when you mentioned saliva markers for implants.
Angela Ward: Anytime before you place an implant, you want to have a saliva test. It gives you a risk assessment. If your risk is moderate or high, let’s treat the bacteria first. Those bacteria affect the gum tissue and how the bone can respond. Without bone responding appropriately, I don’t care how great your implant is, it’s not going to stay.
Certain bacteria also affect pregnancy outcomes. Every patient deserves the right to have this test offered to them. We’re working on that right now, and you’ve been a strong advocate for getting that into your practice.
Jen Brown: It’s a no-brainer. I think it was around $165. From where I stand, it’s the least expensive test you can get to give you a broad-spectrum look. My daughter might spend more on Starbucks in a week!
Angela Ward: Many do! And we’re feeding bacteria at Starbucks.
Jen Brown: It benefits us to know that what we’re doing in care is moving forward in sustainable, healthy care.
Angela Ward: Exactly. You don’t know what you don’t know until you test for it. Many times patients say, “Oh, it’s just a cleaning.” It is never just a cleaning. You’re taking care of things connected to your whole body. Let’s test to know we have the appropriate hygiene care and watch those bacteria become non-detectable, which in turn gives you a healthy mouth.
Jen Brown: I’m very careful about language in the marketing department. I avoid the word “cleaning” because it says something to a patient that isn’t even there. We have hygiene visits, and then we have deep hygiene periodontal maintenance therapies. We clean our teeth each day with home care, but it takes the experts to see gum evaluation and bone evaluation.
Angela Ward: When pocket depths continue to increase, we’re losing bone. When gum tissue is infected, we’re losing bone. It doesn’t come back. We are not like a lizard tail. Keeping gums healthy affects your whole body.
Jen Brown: I have a trainer and nutritionist I’ve worked with for nine years. He loves learning about total wellness. I keep nudging him that as a trainer, he wants to transition clients from the short-term goal of losing weight to the long-term goal of fitness and wellness. Peter Attia is constantly talking about range of motion at age 74. Do you want to be on the floor with your grandkids or sitting in a chair because you can’t get down?
I nudge him to connect with Cliff about airway health. He deals with nutrition and supplements, which are huge, but airway health and oral wellness are the other aspects. He has clients on GLP-1s right now who aren’t seeing doctors to regulate them. I think at some point everyone will be on them for various reasons, but you should have a healthcare provider overseeing that journey—one you trust.
Angela Ward: Exactly. You talked about how old we’ll be at 64 or 85. You can be 85 chronologically and still be able to function.
Jen Brown: My dad just stopped figure skating at 85! He skated until 85 and he looked awesome. He had custom boots and blades. This past year, the gentleman who makes his skates told me, “Jen, he really should hang it up.” He had taken three falls and at that age, it’s a risk factor. So now he’s in chair yoga, but he’s still doing something. If he hadn’t fallen, he would still be skating. That’s how we want to show up later in years.
Angela Ward: Chronologically we can’t change the numbers, but how we show up at that age can be altered. Healthcare is a huge player in that.
Jen Brown: I’m very active in motivating my team. I’ve been saying for six months that I am very excited for dentistry because we’re talking about concepts that aren’t mainstream yet. I really believe all these things we’re talking about are going to start coming through dental schools and be mandated across state lines.
Angela Ward: The more a patient asks for something, the more available it has to become. Babylon Dental Care is committing to things right now that are not mainstream. There’s starting to be talk about sleep apnea, but how much does sleep affect you? You get three bad nights of sleep—how are you functioning?
Jen Brown: I had my grandson for nine nights. He was up every two to three hours. I was daily delirious! I recalibrated by night three, but imagine a lifetime of that. I have to have eight hours of sleep. You don’t want to talk to me if I don’t have eight hours.
Angela Ward: I’m the same. I lived with sleep apnea unknowingly until about seven years ago. You go to the doctor and they ask, “How are you sleeping?” and you say, “Good,” because you don’t know any different. I know now my sleep was horrible. Babylon Dental Care has an entire sleep department. You’re committing to myofunctional therapies, which is tongue-tie related.
Jen Brown: When I told my sleep director about Jack, she said, “He’s got a tongue-tie.” And yes, to our audience: adults can have a tongue-tie. You’re born this way; it’s just often not diagnosed.
Angela Ward: In traditional dentistry, tongue-tie is never looked at. That is how I, at 63, learned I was tongue-tied from the day I was born. My dentist is the type who does comprehensive care. My own life experiences drive a lot of the passion I bring.
Jen Brown: We’re just starting this process of branching out, and as I talk to team members, they’re a little hesitant because they’re nervous the message will fall on deaf ears. But my belief is: let’s have ownership. We’ll talk to everyone who’s ready to learn. When the student is ready, the teacher appears. We just open the door. Put your toe in the water and ask a couple of sleep questions: Are you sleeping through the night? Are you dreaming? Do you wake up feeling like you need to go back to bed?
Angela Ward: And what have you been asking?
Jen Brown: What time were you up? If you tell me the time you were up, we have problems! My belief is if someone wakes up enough to look at the clock, they have a sleep problem.
Angela Ward: Right. You have a breathing problem at that moment because the body is designed to go into sleep paralysis. Think about caveman days—if you hustled about in the cave, something outside was going to eat you. Our functions actually shut down. When someone says, “I woke up at 3:30,” that’s a message. Let’s explore it before you become a grumpy bear.
Jen Brown: In the last quarter of 2025, I made it mandatory that our staff sleep test. When I dropped that at a staff meeting, you should have seen the faces! When we started with sleep apnea, we did home studies with bulky boxes. Now, it’s a ring.
When I announced the mandatory testing, I thought it was the dumbest thing I’d done as a leader—I thought they would think I’d lost it. But they are so grateful. They’re so excited. We’ve had a sleep department for 13 years, but it finally became personal for them. We’ve done more than half the staff now. Your team is talking about their own reports. Now, a hygienist can share her own story with the patient.
I don’t want a team of professionals “selling” dentistry. I always say: let’s share it. I remember an interview during COVID with someone from a corporate practice. They were being pushed to sell “add-ons” to make money, and it gave her a bad taste in her mouth. I told her, “In your tenure with us, we aren’t going to talk to you about selling dentistry. We’re going to talk about sharing it.”
That goes back to treating people like family. If you want to come in ten times and ignore your airway health results, I’m okay with it. When you’re ready, we’re here. It has to be the patient’s choice.
Angela Ward: Exactly. We can offer education and value, and then the day will come when the patient is ready.
Jen Brown: Talk to us about wellness scans.
Angela Ward: Isn’t it the best thing? Our healthcare system has been so “sick-driven” for so long, and now companies are coming out with preventative tools. Let’s look before there’s a problem. Let’s get the scans now and see if we can improve your health before it needs “help.” I’m in love with this idea.
Jen Brown: We’ve been doing wellness scans for about two years. They really start showcasing things when you have the second or third scan to compare. If we can shift the perspective of what dentistry is—moving it to a healthcare tool designed for long-term benefit—it guides people to whole body health.
Angela Ward: You all are going out on a limb and educating your patients. It’s phenomenal.
Jen Brown: I was a dental consultant for years like you. It’s a fun place to swim in. But I know it’s not easy to adopt this service-based space because it’s much easier to just do the bare minimum. In working with us, what would you say are our “special bells and whistles”?
Angela Ward: The fact that you even want to invest in your team and their education. And your team is accepting it! Today, I walked into the office and people were excited to show me what they’d done since the last time. Your team is having a shift in their own belief systems. They are venturing off the traditional path, and now they see the benefit for their own families and children. When they speak with a patient, it’s: “May I share my experience with you?”
Jen Brown: They really are like sponges. It’s hard to describe the energy component—they are energetically aligned to goodness and relationships. I drive to staff meetings and ask to be given the words to serve. I deliver the messages I feel they need. I might be hit by a thousand fires to put out afterward, but I get in the car feeling joyful about the time spent with them.
We had an opportunity this week where we “failed” a patient. The patient brought it to us, and we immediately got leadership involved. I’m a big believer that when something like that is presented, it’s there for a reason. We’re going to “fail forward.” We rectified the relationship. She is still going to another practice, and I’m fine with that. I sent her flowers and thanked her because truthfully, she helped us. I couldn’t have gotten that insight from a thousand trainings. What it did for the team involved is going to be amazing.
Angela Ward: The fact that you take it into a learning context rather than a blaming context is everything. No one’s perfect. That’s maturity and transparency.
Jen Brown: Which is exactly why we want to do this podcast. It’s a commitment, and yes, a little anxiety-producing, but we’re going with it!
Jen Brown: As we wrap up—we learned not to say “Happy New Year” after the 7th! Anything you want to throw out there to patients about dental wellness or to my team?
Angela Ward: For patients: please keep in mind that dentistry is the window. Your mouth is the window to your body. It is deserving of care and attention from providers that you trust and who are aligned with your values. It’s your body; it’s your choice.
To the team: appreciation is not a strong enough word. Your willingness to trust in a vision that is very new to dentistry—and to adopt it so willingly—is inspiring. You lead with belief. I am inspired each time I work with you because I see that what we do together makes a difference for a whole third party. We can have a healthier body and a healthier mouth, one person at a time.
Jen Brown: I love that. Thank you. I told you before we started that if Deb had asked who I should start with first, I would have said Angela Ward.
Angela Ward: I do what Deb tells me to do!
Jen Brown: I’m so grateful we could chat like this. I’m looking forward to continuing our relationship and doing things together—and having more margaritas, because those were good last night!
Angela Ward: Those were good! There are the settlers and there are the pioneers. You are pioneers. Let’s move into that new frontier.
Jen Brown: Love it. Thank you so much.
