Live and Die by Your Core Values | Ep. 171 | Dr. Anushka Gaglani

Core values on a poster don't build a company. Core values you hire and fire by do.

This episode is about holding a high standard while you grow, and getting people to follow you there.

Greg sits down with Dr. Anushka Gaglani, co-founder and co-CEO of Areo Dental Group, a multi-location dental organization across Illinois and Indiana. They talk accountability without burnout, how Areo moved patient follow-up to a call center, the mentor and career-path structure behind their teams, and how her thinking on leadership and debt has changed as the group has scaled.

They discuss:

- Why Areo hires and terminates based on its core values, and what happens to the whole industry when practices lower the standard

- Rolling out change one priority at a time: build the habit, hold people accountable, then move to the next thing

- Moving follow-up on unscheduled treatment from the practices to a call center, and holding a 100% follow-up rate for months

- The "handoff, hand up": why the follow-up call has to carry something specific from the patient's visit

- Taking non-patient tasks out of the office so teams can deliver a boutique experience at group scale

- A mentor for every new hire and a clear career path from assistant to patient care ambassador, and practice leader to director of operations

- Moving from "tell" to "sell" to "collaborate," and why people get on board once they understand the why

- How business school changed her view of debt, calculated risk, and growing fast enough to create careers, not just jobs