Perfect Teeth smiling

“Start check!” a technician called, and Dr. Ben Burris stood up from his MacBook in an anteroom of one of his 22 offices, a recent acquisition in the unlikely empire he’s building around the State of Arkansas: as of last year, the world’s largest privately owned orthodontics practice. “I mean, it’s not rocket science, ” he said, rounding the corner to return to the immaculate, U-shaped treatment room that was pulsing with activity. Light was flooding through a bank of windows overlooking a strip-mall parking lot and a highway in Siloam Springs, near the Oklahoma border. Seven occupied chairs sat beside seven computer terminals. Technicians — young, all female, each wearing matching slim-cut pink scrubs — were whirling back and forth from the overflowing waiting room to the chairs to a giant island in the middle of the room, where they gathered hardware, chatted, and gooped huge blops of alginate for various orthodontic impressions. Rihanna beamed in via satellite: “We found love in a hopeless place, we found love in a — hopeless — place.”

Snapping on a pair of blue nitrile gloves and glancing at the patient’s name and information on the adjacent screen, Burris saddled up at the farthest chair. Behind him on the wall hung two marker-board thought-clouds inviting patients to tag their Instagram selfies with “#bracesbyburris for a chance to win a BeatBox by Dr. Dre.” Burris is 43, well over six feet tall and burly, with buzz-cut thinning gray hair and a flawless set of teeth. It was not yet 10 a.m., and so far he’d seen more than three dozen patients.