We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jasmine a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Jasmine, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Was there a defining moment in your professional career? A moment that changed the trajectory of your career?

Yes, and looking back it’s clear to me now even though it didn’t feel like a turning point in the moment.
Early in my career I was working in a corporate dental environment. The pace was fast, the production targets were aggressive, and a lot of the clinical decisions were being shaped by people who had never sat across from a scared patient in their life.

I remember one afternoon I had a woman in my chair, probably in her mid-forties, who had been putting off care for years because she couldn’t afford what another office had quoted her. She was embarrassed. She cried before I even picked up an instrument. And I realized that whatever I did next was going to either confirm everything she feared about dentistry or change her relationship with it forever.

I treated her, we worked out a plan she could actually afford, and she came back. That was the part that stuck with me. She came back. She brought her husband. Eventually she brought her kids. And I started paying attention to how many patients walked into my operatory carrying that same shame, that same fear that they had waited too long or couldn’t possibly say yes to the treatment plan.

That was when I decided I wanted to build something different with my brother, Dr. Sonny Naderi. We had always talked about practicing together, but that experience clarified the why for me. We wanted a practice where the prices were transparent, where families weren’t choosing between a crown and their car payment, and where the front desk wasn’t trained to upsell. Best Dental in Richmond grew out of that conviction. Flat pricing on the procedures people actually need, honest conversations about what can wait and what can’t, and a team that treats every patient the same whether they’re paying cash or running it through insurance.

The lesson I’d offer anyone earlier in their career is this. Pay attention to the moments that bother you. The ones that sit with you on the drive home. Those are usually pointing at something you’re supposed to build or change. I almost talked myself out of leaving the corporate setup because the paycheck was comfortable and the path was laid out. But comfortable isn’t the same as right, and the patients who needed me most were never going to find me there.

Building a practice with a sibling has its own challenges, and we’ve had to learn how to disagree well, how to divide the work, how to let each other lead in the areas where we’re each stronger. But the core decision, the one to do this our way, came from that one afternoon and that one patient. I think about her sometimes when I’m reviewing a treatment plan for someone new. I ask myself if I would be proud to hand it to her. If the answer is yes, we’re doing it right.

Jasmine, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’m Dr. Jasmine Naderi, and I’m a general dentist practicing in Richmond, Texas at Best Dental, which I run alongside my brother, Dr. Sonny Naderi. We’re a brother-sister team, which I know is unusual in this field, and it’s honestly one of the things I love most about what we’ve built.

I got into dentistry the way a lot of people do, which is to say it wasn’t a straight line. I was drawn to medicine early but I wanted a field where I could actually use my hands, build something physical, and see results the same day. Dentistry checked all of those boxes. What I didn’t expect was how much of the work would turn out to be about trust. You can be a brilliant clinician, but if the person in your chair doesn’t believe you have their best interest at heart, none of the rest matters. That realization shaped almost everything that came after.

After dental school I spent time in different practice settings, including corporate environments, and I saw firsthand what happens when production numbers start driving clinical decisions. Patients get oversold. They get scared. They walk out with treatment plans they can’t afford and don’t come back. That experience is a big part of why Sonny and I decided to build our own practice the way we did.

At Best Dental we offer the full range of general and cosmetic dentistry. Cleanings and exams, fillings, crowns, root canals, extractions including wisdom teeth, implants, veneers, dentures, Invisalign and traditional braces, IV and oral sedation for patients who need it, and emergency care for the days when something goes wrong and you can’t wait. We also run an in-house discount plan for patients without insurance, because the system as it exists today leaves a lot of people without good options.

The problem we solve, more than any specific procedure, is the gap between what good dentistry costs and what families can actually afford. Our pricing is flat and transparent. An implant is $1,995 all in, placement, abutment, and crown. A wisdom tooth extraction is $250 regardless of how impacted it is. A root canal is priced by tooth, not by what we think we can charge you. We don’t run promotional pricing that turns into something else once you sit down. The number on the website is the number on the invoice.

What I think sets us apart, beyond the pricing, is that we genuinely treat every patient the same. The cash-pay patient gets the same chair time, the same materials, the same care as the patient with premium PPO coverage. We don’t have a tiered experience. We also don’t push treatment that can wait. If you have a small lesion that we can watch for six months, I’ll tell you that. If you need work done now, I’ll tell you that too, and I’ll explain why in terms you can actually follow.

What I’m most proud of is the patients who have been with us for years. The families where I treated the parents and now I’m treating their kids. The patients who came in terrified after a bad experience somewhere else and now they bring me homemade tamales at Christmas. That kind of relationship is the reason I went into this field, and it’s the part of the job no marketing campaign can manufacture.

If there’s one thing I want potential patients to know, it’s that they don’t have to be afraid of the conversation. Call us, come in, let us show you the X-rays and walk you through what’s going on in your mouth. You won’t get a hard sell. You won’t get a number that changes when you sit down. You’ll get an honest assessment and a plan that fits your life. Whether you choose us or someone else after that, at least you’ll know where you actually stand. That’s the standard Sonny and I built this practice on, and it’s the standard we hold ourselves to every day.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

The honest answer is that the first year after Sonny and I opened Best Dental almost broke me.

I think a lot of people see a successful practice and assume it always looked the way it looks now. It didn’t. When we opened our doors in Richmond, we were not the established name in town. We were two siblings with a lot of education, a lot of debt, and a building we were paying rent on whether patients walked in or not. Some days they didn’t. I would sit in a quiet operatory between appointments and do the math in my head about how long we could keep this going if the schedule didn’t fill up. It was a deeply uncomfortable feeling, because I had spent my entire adult life being the person who had it together academically, and now the variable I couldn’t control was whether anyone in this community would trust us enough to come in.

The pressure to compromise was constant. There were moments I could have raised prices on the procedures we had committed to keeping affordable. There were moments I could have started recommending treatment that wasn’t strictly necessary, the way I had seen done in the corporate setting. Every one of those moments would have made the math easier in the short term. And every one of them would have made me into the kind of dentist I left corporate to stop being.

What got me through it wasn’t some big motivational moment. It was much smaller than that. It was the patients who came in scared and left calm. It was the woman who hadn’t been to a dentist in eleven years because of trauma from a childhood appointment, and who hugged me on her way out after her first cleaning with us. It was a kid who let me work on him without sedation because his mom told him I was nice. Those moments stacked up, one at a time, and they reminded me why we were doing this the hard way.

The schedule did fill up eventually. The reputation built itself, slowly, the way reputations actually build, one patient telling one family member telling one neighbor. We didn’t get there because we ran a clever marketing campaign or because we got lucky. We got there because we kept showing up and doing the work the way we said we would, even on the days when it would have been easier not to.

The lesson I took from that period is that resilience isn’t a personality trait. It’s a daily decision you make about who you want to be when the easier path is right in front of you. Anybody can hold their principles when things are going well. The test is what you do when the lights are about to get turned off and someone hands you a shortcut. If you take the shortcut once, you’ll take it again, and eventually you’ve built a practice you don’t recognize. We didn’t. And every patient who walks through our door today is a quiet vindication of that choice.
I tell younger dentists this when they ask me for advice. The first few years are going to be harder than you think. You’re going to question yourself. You’re going to wonder if the people who took the shortcuts had it figured out and you didn’t. Stay the course. The patients you want are the ones who will find you precisely because you didn’t take those shortcuts. They’ll come slowly at first. Then they won’t stop coming.

Do you think you’d choose a different profession or specialty if you were starting now?

Yes. Without hesitation, and I’ll tell you why.

I’ve thought about this question more than people probably realize. Anyone who has been in dentistry long enough has had the day where you wonder what your life would look like if you’d gone into something else. The schooling is brutal, the debt is real, the physical toll on your neck and back and shoulders is not something they warn you about loudly enough, and the emotional weight of caring about your patients in a healthcare system that doesn’t always make it easy to do right by them adds up over the years. So no, I’m not going to pretend it’s all been easy.

But every time I sit with the question honestly, I come back to the same answer. This is the work I was supposed to do.

Part of it is the craft itself. Dentistry sits at this strange intersection of medicine, engineering, and art that I don’t think exists in quite the same way in any other field. I’m making clinical decisions, I’m working with my hands at a millimeter level of precision, and I’m doing something that has to be functional and beautiful at the same time, because people have to live with the result every time they smile or eat or look in the mirror. I still find that combination satisfying after all these years. The day I stop finding it satisfying is the day I’ll know it’s time to step back.
Part of it is the relationships. I genuinely don’t know another profession where you get to know families across generations the way you do in dentistry. I have patients whose weddings I’ve heard about, whose kids I’ve watched grow up in my chair, whose parents I treated before they passed. That kind of continuity is rare in modern life and I don’t take it for granted.

And part of it, honestly, is getting to do this with my brother. Sonny and I built something together that neither of us would have built alone, and there is a specific kind of pride that comes from working alongside family without it destroying the relationship. We’ve had to learn how to disagree, how to give each other room to lead, how to be partners and siblings at the same time. That’s been one of the most rewarding parts of my career, and it wouldn’t exist if I’d picked a different path.

If I’m being fully honest, the only thing I might do differently is go a little easier on myself in the early years. I was so focused on being excellent that I forgot to actually enjoy the journey. I wish I had taken a few more weekends off. I wish I had told myself that the practice was going to be okay before I had the evidence that the practice was going to be okay. But would I trade the profession? No. Would I trade general dentistry for a specialty? No. The variety of what I get to do in a single day, from a routine cleaning to a complex implant case to a kid’s first checkup, is exactly the kind of work I want to be doing.

So yes, I would choose this again. And the version of me who picked it the first time, with all the uncertainty she had, would be proud of where it led.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://richmondtxdentists.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DrJasmineNaderi/

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