Daughter takes over dad’s longtime Riverside Dental business

At Riverside Dental, dentist Jasmin Rupp employs several women who used to babysit her.

“Which says something about the practice,” said Pam Blanchat, a 30-year employee and one of those former babysitters.

Rupp is the daughter of dentist Joe Steven Jr., who started the practice in 1978. Steven, a member of one of the city’s most prominent business families, died in May 2015 after battling bladder cancer.

It has been long enough that his daughter and former employees can talk about him and laugh rather than tear up. Most of the time.

Steven, they say, had the ability to make patients laugh and forget they were at a place that some people would rather never visit. Rupp pulls her father’s copy of “How To Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie off a bookshelf in her office to show a visitor.

“This was his go-to, since he was a little kid,” she said.

Steven sent his employees to Dale Carnegie courses, too. He also took them on trips to attend continuing education courses that always seemed to be held near a beach.

“His philosophy was you might as well go somewhere nice,” said Nancy Sheets, another former babysitter and 35-year employee.

Rupp said her father was one of the few members of his family to choose a profession other than business.

“It was either (dentistry) or become a priest,” she said.

But he was entrepreneurial, too. He invented and marketed dental products like a combination toothbrush-tongue scraper through a company called KISCO, short for “Keep It Simple Company.”

He traveled the country giving lectures to other dentists about how to build their practices. He and a brother, Rodney, started Genesis Health Club.

Steven had opened his practice in a small building owned by his father, who also owned the car wash next door. He eventually bought the building and started adding on. Today it has nine rooms for dentists and dental hygienists to work in, offices, a waiting area and more.

Rupp said her father “never once” encouraged her to enter dentistry. She was a pre-med major through most of her time at the University of Kansas.

“All of a sudden a light went off and I said, ‘What about dentistry?’ And he said ‘Yes!’ ”

She joined him in the practice in 2007, working part time while raising her two daughters. By the spring of 2014, however, Steven’s family and employees started to suspect something was wrong.

“I finally went to him and he said, ‘I have cancer,’ ” Rupp said.

Steven underwent surgery and chemotherapy and in December of that year got the news that his cancer had gone away.

“I’d never seen him cry, and he cried that day,” Rupp said.

A month later, the cancer was back.

Rupp said she couldn’t have kept the business open without employees like Blanchat and Sheets and several dentists – Josh Davis, Behnaz Raisdana and Mark Troilo – who filled in at the practice part time.

“Help, lots of help,” she said. “We had to keep the bank account up.”

Since then, Rupp has recruited two dentists to join her full-time: Andrew Neuman and Kristen Corrigan.

In addition to general dentistry for patients of all ages, the practice does a lot of implants and short-term adult braces.

Rupp bought the practice from her mother in December. Her husband, commercial real estate broker John Rupp, purchased the building.

She has made a few changes, including painting her dad’s old office purple. She moved the staff photographs he had taken every year out into the hallways where the changing hairstyles can been seen in all their splendor.

Her father’s name remains on the building outside.

“We’re going to keep that,” Rupp said.

This story was originally published January 25, 2017 at 6:02 PM with the headline "Daughter takes over dad’s longtime Riverside Dental business."