Women of Western Wake: Dr. Bobbi Stanley

In the early 1990s, a new patient walked into Stanley Dentistry. Checkbook in hand, he was ready to pay before he sat down and filled out the line for the doctor’s name: Dr. Robert Stanley. The internet barely existed at the time, and a solo female dentist named “Bobby” didn’t compute. So he wrote a check to a doctor who wasn’t real.

Dr. Bobbi Stanley, DDS, still laughs telling that story, mostly because of how far things have come since. Thirty-three years later, she has built one of Cary’s longest-running dental practices from a single leased storefront into a family operation in the truest sense — one that includes her husband, a second-career dentist she gets to work beside every single day (who, coincidentally, is named Dr. Robert Stanley).

Stanley Dentistry opened in the early ’90s in the Preston Corners shopping center, a location Dr. Bobbi picked with the same instinct she would later apply to patient care, hiring, and just about everything else in her life. Fresh out of dental school, she walked into Cary’s Town Hall and asked which direction the town was growing. After being told it was pushing out toward Preston, she went looking for the shopping center rumored to be built there, found the right people to talk to, and signed a lease before she’d even treated a single patient.

“I opened the doors with one employee and prayed that somebody would walk through the door,” she says. Fortunately, being wedged between an ice cream shop and a video rental store meant foot traffic. Families would pick up a movie for the night, then wander over for a sweet treat. Brochures for the practice were tucked in a box by the door, and Dr. Bobbi recalls how she “would come in every Monday morning and all the brochures were gone. I had my own advertisement right there,” she says.

The notion of owning a practice rather than working for one took root while she was still in dental school. Dr. Bobbi knew she didn’t want to be handed someone else’s rules for treating patients, and she especially didn’t want her care determined by insurance companies. “Insurance dictates how you can treat your patients, and it limits the opportunities you can give to them,” she says. “I knew I never wanted to be that dentist.”

But going fee-for-service instead of in-network meant there was no built-in stream of referred patients. No safety net. Just the work of marketing herself.

Dr. Bobbi enjoys spending time with her four children, two grandchildren, and her husband and business partner of over 30 years.

Although Dr. Bobbi is now at a point where patients like Radu C. fly in for dental work, reasoning, “For me, it’s all about trust — being confident in the person you’re working with,” establishing that trust one patient at a time was the hardest part of starting out. But it also meant she never had to compromise on the level of care she wanted to provide. Even then, she says she knew, “If I give the Ritz-Carlton version of dentistry to all of my patients, everything else will work out fine.”

And it did. Dentistry wasn’t Dr. Bobbi’s first calling so much as the career that fit into the life she wanted to build for herself. As a young woman weighing a career in health care (because she knew she wanted to help people), she narrowed her choices to dentistry, plastic surgery, or dermatology. These were the fields that would let her be present at home in the evenings while still building something of her own.

A college summer spent working in a dental clinic on a reservation in Oklahoma sealed it. “I absolutely fell in love with everything about dentistry,” she says. “That was my aha moment.” Dentistry, it turned out, was less a plan than a kind of providence. “I truly feel like it was God put the pieces together. Here I am 33 years later, and I still love everything about it.”

That sense of purpose shows up in the language Dr. Bobbi uses for her own philosophy of care. “I always want to give the most cutting-edge dentistry, the best dentistry I can give,” she says. “I’m not going to cut on my supplies, I’m not going to cut on my lab services, and my team’s going to be educated and give the best customer service.”

Running a practice, though, meant learning skills dental school never taught her. “As a practice owner, you are not only a dentist but you’re a business owner,” she says. “I had to learn how to be a CEO. I had to learn how to manage people and be a leader.”

That education came the hard way. She once let her entire staff go in a single day after realizing the office culture had turned toxic. “It was a hard moment, but it was a powerful moment,” she says. “It showed me that I needed to develop my leadership skills more.” She rebuilt that team from scratch and, with it, a culture she’s protected ever since — one built on character over résumés.

“Character is who you are when nobody’s looking,” Dr. Bobbi shares. Skill, she says she can train. Fit, she can’t. She’s created positions for candidates she had no opening for; she once hired two people for a single open slot because she couldn’t imagine choosing between them. “You just go on a leap of faith where you’re like, I don’t have the budget, but these two people are perfect, and I’m going to do it,” she says. “And it always works out.”

Dentistry has not entirely shed its reputation as a male-dominated field. Advanced continuing education courses, Dr. Bobbi says, still skew heavily toward “gray-haired men, and then me.” But the tide has turned since the days of checks made out to Dr. Robert Stanley. Dental school classes are increasingly female, and Dr. Bobbi has watched respect for women in the field grow alongside their numbers.

What Dr. Bobbi wants young women — patients, employees, those mentors — to take from her career isn’t a story about sacrifice. It’s permission. “You can have it all,” she emphasizes. “You can be a career woman, a mother, and a wife. The issue is keeping your priorities straight.” For her, that order is God, husband, kids, then practice. It’s a hierarchy she has held to literally. When her children needed a cross-country coach, she started closing the office at 3 p.m. so she could be the one running practice with them after school. She still closes at that time today, long after her four children graduated.

Personal time, she says, must be scheduled with the same discipline, or dentistry — which she loves enough to do “all day long, all the time” — will simply take over. Even her flying, a hobby she’s pursued as a licensed pilot, goes on the calendar or it doesn’t happen.

Her husband has been part of the practice’s story from the very beginning. An engineer by training, he helped Dr. Bobbi research equipment when she was first setting up her office, staying close to the business even before he considered practicing himself.

Watching how fulfilled his wife was in the work eventually drew him into dentistry, and the couple now practices side by side. “It’s just a wonderful thing to be able to share those moments with him,” Dr. Bobbi says. So much so that they’ve had to set a rule for date nights: no talking about teeth.

From the start of their marriage, Drs. Bobbi and Robert committed to protecting time for each other, a practice Dr. Bobbi now recommends. “Your kids are only happy if mommy and daddy are happy,” she says. “You can’t let your career get in the way of your marriage either.”

These days, Dr. Bobbi is easing back, though not from dentistry itself (which she insists she has no plans to retire from), but from carrying the whole practice. A new associate, Dr. Bailey Petersen, has joined Stanley Dentistry, and Dr. Bobbi describes mentoring her with the same intention she has brought to every hire and every patient relationship.

“I see me in her,” she says. “It’s really exciting to share her passion and her future in dentistry.” Between herself, her husband, and their new associate, Dr. Bobbi jokes that patients now get three doctors for the price of one.

That freedom is opening space for the cause Dr. Bobbi says will define the next chapter of her career: airway health in children. She traces her passion for it back to one of her kids, who struggled with an undiagnosed airway issue years before she and the rest of the dental field understood how early intervention could change a child’s growth and development. “I wish I had known back then,” she says about her son. “I would have treated him differently.”

Now she’s building collaborations with functional therapists and ENTs to help guide young patients’ growth in ways that open their airways before problems set in. This is work she expects to define Stanley Dentistry’s next era, even as she stays hands-on with the dentistry she has practiced for more than three decades.

When she first opened her doors, she could count the other dentists in Cary on two hands. Now the town is dense with them. “I love Cary,” she says. “I love watching it grow. … I still think it’s the best place to raise a family.” That affection has only deepened as her own family has taken root, with her children settling nearby and her grandchildren growing up in the same community she chose for herself all those years ago.

Yet ask Dr. Bobbi what she wants to leave behind, and the answer has nothing to do with a building or a brand. “My legacy is always going to be my children and my grandchildren,” she says. Four grown children she describes as good human beings who understand the obligation to give back, plus two grandchildren and a third on the way.

But for the community, Dr. Bobbi’s legacy has also been built one patient at a time. “When I die, my gift to the world is going to be the beautiful smiles that I left behind,” she says. “They’ll be here long after I’m gone.”