Meet Amy Thompson

Amy Thompson, DDS, is a dentist, practice owner, author and mentor to women dentists who want to build successful careers without building their entire lives around dentistry.

A top-ten graduate of the University of Washington School of Dentistry, Amy opened New Life Dental Arts in 2007 at age twenty-nine with a huge startup loan, three employees, three equipped operatories and almost no patients. Over the years, she grew the practice, expanded it, built an incredible team, hired an associate, made some very good decisions, made some very expensive bad ones and learned that building a successful business and building a life you actually want are not always the same thing.

Today, Amy practices dentistry three days a week while continuing to own and lead the practice she built. Her experience as a dentist, business owner, wife, mother and mentor shaped her belief that there is no single right way to build a career in dentistry—and ambition does not have to come at the expense of the rest of your life.

Over the years, Amy has grown to deeply value the relationships that develop when women are willing to be vulnerable with one another. She has experienced what happens when women stop performing, stop pretending everything is fine and start talking honestly about ambition, motherhood, marriage, money, leadership, failure, success and the parts of life that don’t fit neatly into a professional bio. Those are the rooms where she has learned the most, laughed and cried the hardest and found some of the relationships she values most.

After more than twenty years in dentistry, Amy has seen how often women dentists are trying to build meaningful careers while also trying to make room for everything else that matters to them. She doesn’t believe women need another person telling them what their careers are supposed to look like. She believes they need honest conversations, trusted relationships and the chance to see how other women are doing it—not as a roadmap to copy, but as evidence that there is more than one way.

That belief led Amy to found Resin Legacy, a community for women dentists built around the honest conversations and close relationships that change the trajectory of their careers—and their lives. Through her writing, teaching and mentorship, Amy is building the kind of honest, supportive community she wishes had existed when she was finding her own way through dentistry, ownership, leadership and life: a real room, not a bigger crowd.

Her faith has been central to the way she thinks about leadership, purpose and service. Amy and her husband spent ten years leading a church together and have run a nonprofit ministry since 2000. That experience helped shape a conviction that has followed Amy into every part of her work: what we build matters, but what becomes possible for other people because we built it matters even more.

Amy lives in Snohomish County, Washington, with her husband, Kevin, their two boys, and their retired racing greyhounds and two horses. When she isn’t practicing dentistry, writing, teaching or dreaming up her next idea, she is probably feeding someone—human, canine or equine—or trying to convince her family that another trip to Maui is entirely reasonable.

Amy is the author of Dentistry That Fits: Building a CareerAround the Life You Actually Want.