Be The Category of One With Jenn Brown — Episode 4

Introduction: Building a Practice and a Life Together

Jen Brown: Welcome to Be the Category of One. I’m Jen Brown. Each week, we explore growth, mindset, and leadership because standing apart starts from the inside out. I’m so happy to have both of you here. When I started thinking about who I wanted to talk with on the podcast, I immediately thought of the two of you because you’re husband and wife, you practice together, and you’ve made it work so naturally. Patients notice it, the staff notices it, and I’ve always thought that was incredible.

Dr. David: Thank you for having us.

Dr. Chelsea Diamond: Thank you. We’re happy to be here.

Jen Brown: I was thinking on my drive here about how we met. I met David first through a recruiter, and we talked a lot about the opportunity. Then, of course, he mentioned his wife. In the back of my mind I remember wondering, “Could this possibly work?” Eventually, you both wanted to join, and it has been really nice to watch. You also have a young family, so I want to talk about how your professional and family lives have grown together.

Meeting on the First Day of Dental School

Jen Brown: Let’s go all the way back. How did you two meet?

Dr. David: We literally met on the first day of dental school at Midwestern University in Glendale, Arizona. We were in a big lecture hall looking for seats and randomly ended up sitting next to each other.

Jen Brown: And you came from opposite sides of the country. David, you were from California, and Chelsea, you were from Long Island.

Dr. David: Exactly. At first we were just sitting near each other in lectures. I remember Chelsea always bringing these huge smoothies in mason jars. One day she spilled this bright pink smoothie all over the lecture hall carpet. I joke that’s when I fell for her.

Dr. Chelsea Diamond: That is definitely not when it happened! We eventually started studying together, especially around anatomy, and then we were spending almost every day together. We became best friends first.

Jen Brown: And then around your second year of dental school, friendship became something more.

Choosing Austin and Starting Their Dental Careers

Jen Brown: So you graduate, and then what?

Dr. David: We moved to Austin. I’m originally from Los Angeles and Chelsea is from Long Island, so our families and friends were on opposite coasts. We couldn’t really choose both. At the time, the dental board exam you selected also affected which states you could practice in. We chose the ADEX exam because it covered a broader range of states, although at that time it effectively took California off the table unless I wanted to take another board exam.

Dr. Chelsea Diamond: Texas felt like a reasonable middle ground, and Austin was growing quickly. It seemed like a good place for two young dentists to start their careers.

Dr. David: My first job out of dental school was at a corporate dental office in Austin. Chelsea worked for essentially the same company, but at a different location. What was interesting is that we had completely different experiences even within the same organization.

Dr. Chelsea Diamond: David had an owner doctor at his location. I didn’t have anyone physically on site providing that kind of mentorship. As a new graduate, having or not having someone there to guide you makes a huge difference.

COVID, Dentistry, and Learning to Adapt

Jen Brown: Were you practicing during COVID?

Dr. Chelsea Diamond: I had just left my corporate office and started at a private practice in March. On basically my first day they pulled me aside and said there was something called COVID happening. Suddenly I was out of work for about three months.

Jen Brown: That whole period was like the Wild West for dentistry. Nobody really knew what the rules were going to be, and there wasn’t a standard playbook for how to operate safely. At Babylon Dental Care, we were dealing with anxious patients, anxious staff, changing regulations, and the challenge of continuing to help people who had real dental emergencies.

Dr. David: It was a strange way to begin a career because you’re already learning how to be a dentist in the real world, and then suddenly the entire healthcare environment changes around you.

Marriage, the Delayed Honeymoon, and Returning East

Jen Brown: You got through COVID, still loved each other, and still wanted to be dentists. What happened next?

Dr. David: We got married during that period, but because of COVID and travel restrictions we didn’t really get the honeymoon we had planned. Japan wasn’t allowing visitors in, so we eventually took our delayed honeymoon a couple of years later.

Dr. Chelsea Diamond: It felt like it had just happened, but it was actually two years later when we finally made that trip.

Jen Brown: And eventually life brought you back toward Long Island. One thing I think about a lot is how easy it is to focus on the difficult parts of life and stop noticing the good things around you. Whether it’s a snowstorm, a beautiful home, family, or a career opportunity, you have to consciously snap back and appreciate what’s there.

Finding Babylon Dental Care

Jen Brown: One of the things that really mattered to me when I first talked with David was that our philosophy seemed to resonate with him naturally. At Babylon Dental Care, we talk constantly about treating patients like family and creating an experience that doesn’t feel like the traditional dental experience people may have learned to fear.

Dr. David: That was a big part of what attracted me. The philosophy felt aligned with the way I already wanted to practice.

Jen Brown: I remember there was a period where I didn’t hear back from you and I was genuinely disappointed. I felt like you were the kind of provider who would thrive in the right environment, but could get chewed up in the wrong one. Sometimes a practice says it believes certain things, but you don’t really know whether the culture matches those beliefs until you’re inside it.

Dr. David: Once I joined, I had a good experience, and Chelsea could see that.

Jen Brown: Then Chelsea was working somewhere else, hearing about your experience and seeing the reviews. Eventually the idea came up of both of you working here.

Working Together as Husband and Wife

Jen Brown: Had you always planned to work in the same practice?

Dr. Chelsea Diamond: I always wanted to work with David, but it was never something we actively searched for. The right opportunity just hadn’t presented itself.

Dr. David: When the opportunity finally came up, I was more nervous about how everyone else would feel about hiring a married couple than I was about us actually working together.

Jen Brown: I’ll admit I had that thought too! I didn’t want to be responsible if working together somehow made your whole life explode. But it has worked beautifully.

Jen Brown: Do patients know that you’re married?

Dr. David: A lot of them do now because we’ve been there long enough. Sometimes a patient will say, “I met your lovely wife the other day.”

Dr. Chelsea Diamond: And if a patient is raving about David, I’m the proud wife saying, “That’s my husband.” We don’t hide it, but we don’t make it the center of the experience either.

Growing Their Family: Miles and Cooper

Jen Brown: Let’s talk about your family. Miles is almost four now, right?

Dr. Chelsea Diamond: Yes. He turns four in September. He’s a wonderful older brother. It’s amazing watching his personality develop and getting little glimpses of the person he’s becoming. He’s funny, sensitive, and a little cautious in new environments.

Dr. David: He reminds me a lot of myself when I was younger. He makes us incredibly happy.

Jen Brown: And then Cooper came along.

Dr. Chelsea Diamond: At our 20-week anatomy scan, we learned that Cooper would be born with a cleft lip, and at first they believed he also had a cleft palate. We had already done genetic testing earlier in the pregnancy and everything had looked fine, so we went into that appointment not expecting bad news at all.

Dr. David: It was incredibly difficult news to process because you go into those scans expecting everything to be normal. Suddenly you have to learn an entirely new vocabulary and understand what your child may need.

Understanding Cleft Lip and Cooper’s Treatment

Dr. Chelsea Diamond: Globally, cleft lip occurs in roughly one in 700 births, and in the United States it’s closer to one in a thousand. It develops very early in pregnancy when the facial structures are forming and the tissues of the lip don’t fuse completely. A cleft lip and cleft palate form at different times, so a child can have one without the other.

Jen Brown: As dentists, you had some background knowledge, but being the parents of the patient is completely different.

Dr. David: Exactly. We found a multidisciplinary medical team where the different specialists Cooper might need were connected. That included the surgeon, orthodontic care, nutrition, and speech support if needed.

Dr. Chelsea Diamond: Before surgery we worked with an orthodontist on things like nasal stents and lip taping. The goal was to gently reshape and approximate the tissues so the surgeon could repair the lip with less tension and create a better result.

Jen Brown: Watching you navigate that while raising a family and maintaining your careers has been remarkable.

The Patient Experience: Treating People Like Family

Jen Brown: Let’s shift back to dentistry. One thing I always repeat is that the patient experience doesn’t belong to one person. It starts with the patient experience coordinator greeting someone, continues with the assistant, hygienist and doctor, and carries through to the patient coordinator at checkout. Everyone may have a different personality or energy, but the intention has to be aligned.

Dr. David: I try to think about every appointment from the patient’s point of view. If I were sitting in that chair, or if it were my mom or dad, how would I want the appointment to go?

Jen Brown: That’s exactly why I’m so repetitive about our protocols. When you have a large team, you have to find ways to make the experience consistent without making people robotic. The intention should be the same even when individual personalities are different.

Dr. Chelsea Diamond: Small things matter. Eye contact matters. Listening matters. We’ve all had medical experiences where the provider walks in, barely looks at you, does what they need to do, and leaves. That changes the way you feel about the entire appointment.

Dental Anxiety, Grinding, and Whole-Body Health

Jen Brown: Dental anxiety is something I understand personally. I had a lot of anxiety growing up and I was a grinder. I remember having a bulky, uncomfortable night guard.

Dr. Chelsea Diamond: Before dental school I started getting what I thought were chronic ear infections. I went to doctors, was given steroids, and eventually saw an ENT who told me, “It’s not your ear. You’re grinding your teeth.” I didn’t even know that could cause those symptoms.

Jen Brown: That’s such a good example of why dentistry can’t be isolated from the rest of the body.

Dr. Chelsea Diamond: Exactly. I became interested in muscular issues and how the bite, jaw muscles, airway and other systems can interact. A traditional night guard isn’t automatically the answer for every patient; depending on how it’s designed and what is actually causing the symptoms, it can sometimes make things worse.

Jen Brown: One of the things I’m excited about in the practice is that more of our providers are integrating those whole-body perspectives—airway, muscular health, oral cancer screening, wellness scans and other technologies.

Conservative Cosmetic Dentistry

Jen Brown: You’ve also been doing some very conservative cosmetic treatments. Talk about the white spots people sometimes have on their teeth.

Dr. David: White lesions can appear for different reasons, including decalcification after braces or fluorosis. Traditionally, some patients were told that the only way to correct them was to drill out healthy tooth structure and place restorative material.

Dr. Chelsea Diamond: Now there are minimally invasive approaches that can improve those areas without drilling healthy tooth structure or giving injections. For the right patient, you can get a strong aesthetic result in a much more conservative way.

Jen Brown: I love anything that lets us improve someone’s confidence while preserving as much natural tooth structure as possible.

Wellness Scans and Digital Dentistry

Jen Brown: I know both of you are big believers in wellness scans. What makes them so useful?

Dr. David: A lot of patients have never seen anything like it. A wellness scan is essentially a full-mouth digital impression created with an intraoral scanner. Instead of the old goopy impression material and a stone model, we can digitally archive a patient’s mouth.

Dr. Chelsea Diamond: It gives us a baseline. Over time we can compare scans and show patients changes in their bite, tooth wear, gum position and other structures. It makes the conversation much more visual.

Jen Brown: That visual component is huge. When patients can actually see what you’re talking about, dentistry becomes less mysterious. It supports the kind of transparent, collaborative relationship we want to have with patients.

What “Category of One” Means

Jen Brown: This podcast is called Be the Category of One. What does creating a “Category of One” experience mean to you?

Dr. David: It means making sure the patient feels like more than an appointment on the schedule. They should feel heard, comfortable, and cared for as an individual.

Dr. Chelsea Diamond: It’s also about being intentional in the way you show up. Patients notice it, but your team notices it too.

Jen Brown: Exactly. When you take time with the patient, you’re also modeling that behavior for your dental assistants and patient coordinators. Without even saying it directly, you’re showing them that it’s safe—and expected—to slow down, connect, and elevate the way they interact with people. That’s how a culture spreads.

Closing

Jen Brown: I appreciate both of you coming in on a Friday, especially on your day off. I love watching the way you’ve built your careers, your family, and the way you care for patients together. Thank you for being here.

Dr. David: Thank you for having us.

Dr. Chelsea Diamond: Thank you. This was great.