Bermudian dental technician Anderica Gilbert becomes emotional discussing her early difficulties balancing entrepreneurship with motherhood.

Ms Gilbert had to take a step back from her business, Bermuda Dental Studio, to focus on having her first baby.

She went back to running her lab, making and repairing dentures on the lower floor of her Devonshire home, two months post-partum. But it was rough.

“After having my daughter I had pregnancy-induced joint inflammation,” she said. “I was in a lot of pain. Laying down would make it worse because then I would stiffen up.”

Bringing her mother in to watch the baby relieved a lot of her stress.

Ms Gilbert continued to make and repair dental prosthetics, but at a measured pace.

“I did not advertise because I did not want a surge of clients,” Ms Gilbert said.

Her client list shrank.

With her daughter now a toddler, she is building up her business again.

“I’m ready,” she said.

Ms Gilbert was inspired to go into dentistry after getting braces as a teenager. Impressed by the difference they made to her self confidence, she interviewed her orthodontist for high school careers day. However, when it was time to enter a university dentistry programme, she did not have the grades.

“Dentist school is very competitive,” she said.

Instead, she earned a bachelor of science in dental technology from Manchester Metropolitan University in Manchester, England.

Ms Gilbert loved the blend of science and artistry involved in creating dentures.

She uses traditional and high-tech methods to make her bridges, crowns and dentures.

Her dental lab is a mixture of pressure cookers, drawers of artificial teeth, a 3D printer combined with little paintbrushes, tubes of paint and other materials. There are framed photographs of smiling teeth on the walls.

“They are my inspiration,” she said.

When she first moved back to Bermuda after graduating from university in 2011, there was only one dental lab on the island and they were not hiring.

“When I started I was young and naive,” she said. “I did not know my own worth.”

She helped a local dentist build a dental lab business from scratch.

“I didn’t get compensated for all the extra hours I put into it,” she said. “I was building a business for someone else but I was an employee.”

She eventually started her own lab in the basement of Verity Dental in Paget in 2017, with the support of dentist Ronda James. She was working as a dental receptionist there and would run downstairs during her lunch break or after work.

A year after starting, the Bermuda Economic Development Corporation named Ms Gilbert entrepreneur of the year.

In February 2020, she went full-time with the laboratory, opening in a much larger space on the south shore in Paget. The work was flowing in when the pandemic hit a month later.

“Suddenly, we had this airborne disease,” she said. All dentist offices closed.

“Luckily, I had family support to get me through,” she said. “I had no income.”

When social-distancing restrictions eased in June, she had the opposite problem.

“I was deluged with work,” she said. “I didn’t foresee it. This was one of those entrepreneurial hurdles. I was not prepared for it.”

She experienced burnout for the first time.

“I sometimes slept in the lab,” she said. “Being a dental technician is very labour-intensive. Everything is handcrafted.”

Over time, she learnt to set boundaries with her clients.

“If dentists sent something overseas they were happy to wait weeks for it,” she said. “If they had the same thing done locally, some dentists expected it right away. I need a certain amount of time to do things. There were roughly 40 local dentists and one of me.”

She has built a website that showcases what she does and also seeks to educate dental patients about the process of getting dentures.

Today, she knows of two other dental technicians in Bermuda. One started a dental lab of his own and the other works for a dentist.

She would like to see more people in Bermuda involved in the denture-making business. To that end, she has mentored young people interested in the industry. Not all of them ultimately decided to become dental technicians but she is OK with that.