Dr Angelique Freking of Park Slope Dentistry Seventh Avenue: 5 Things You Need To Create A Successful Career As A Dentist
An Interview With Luke Kervin
Commit to continuing education for the duration of your career. Within the last 5 years technological advancements have really pushed dentistry to the forefront of innovation. The sheer amount of peer-reviewed research out there compared to even 20 years ago is incredible. If you don’t make an effort to continue to learn after school is over, you will not be able to keep up. Importantly, you will also get bored and burn out. Staying excited about your profession is the key to happiness in a long-term career.
As part of our series about healthcare leaders, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Angelique Freking.
Dr. Freking is the owner and Director of Dentistry at Park Slope Dentistry Seventh Avenue in Brooklyn, NY. Her practice is dedicated to staying current with technological and evidence-based developments in dentistry so she can provide high quality, comfortable treatment for her patients. Dr. Freking resides in Brooklyn with her husband and two sons.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! What is your “backstory”?
You’re welcome, thank you for asking me. I was born and raised in rural, southwestern Minnesota, and then moved to Denver, Colorado after graduating from college. After a few years of snowboarding, working in labs, and studying, I graduated with a masters from Colorado State University and a DDS from the University of Colorado and then moved to New York City for dental residency. People ask me all the time how I ended up in NYC, but once they get to know me it makes sense. I love Minnesota, it’s part of my DNA. But somehow, NYC is in my bones.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?
For me, it’s been the transition from being an employee to a small business owner. I worked for other dentists for the first 8 years of my career, which allowed me to really focus on the dentistry itself. Then I bought my practice and took on the additional roles of human resources manager, accountant, marketing manager, SEO manager, website developer, social media manager, plumber…the list goes on. The scope of responsibilities is truly insane. You can hire all the professionals you want, but you have to know enough about their job to supervise what they are providing for you. All small business owners, regardless of profession, experience and understand this realization of what they’ve undertaken.
I bought my practice in May 2019, when I look back over the last two years I cannot believe the amount of personal and professional growth I’ve experienced. I also became a mother a few months into ownership and am about to have my second child. And of course, all of this has happened during the pandemic! I don’t know how I’m currently maintaining my sanity but I’m also so proud of what I’ve accomplished and looking forward to continuing to learn and grow my practice — both from a clinical and business perspective.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
I’m pretty sure no one wants to hear about new dentists making “funny mistakes!” But early in my career, in my youthful earnestness to please my employer I spent 4 hours the morning after Hurricane Sandy trying to get from south Brooklyn to northern Queens for work. It was a dental office I recently started working for 1 day a week. Obviously, the city was in chaos, there were no taxis (Uber didn’t exist yet!) and public transportation was a mess. I ended up getting stranded in Queens and having to walk for an hour, and once I did arrive, I got yelled at for being late. The biggest mistake I made that day was bothering going in and/or not walking out for good. To all the recent grads out there — work hard and prove yourself to be valuable…but know what’s reasonable for your employers to expect, and what is not.
Are you working on any new or exciting projects now?
Yes! Dentistry today is rapidly evolving thanks to technological developments in 3D printing & imaging and advancements in resin-bonding technology. The days of relying on a handful of treatment modalities and limited peer-reviewed literature are in the past. Thus, I’m outfitting my office with a significant amount of technology geared towards modern digital dentistry and smile design. For example, traditionally a standard custom night guard can take over 2 weeks to fabricate. With 3D printing and scanning, a patient can have a custom night guard the day after their scanning appointment. It’s incredibly exciting, and one of the best parts of being a business owner is I am able to invest in the technology that excites me most.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
My previous employer and now friend and mentor Dr. Adriana Leone. I was employed by Dr. Leone as an associate general dentist for three years. She was the only dentist I worked for that I felt had a strong grasp of the business aspect of dentistry. Dentists do NOT go to school to learn business, and there isn’t really enough time for the schools to fully educate and train us in this aspect of our careers. I tell her this all the time — not a day goes by that I don’t think of her, and how I viewed her decisions as an employee and how I see them through the eyes of a business owner. I believe my success in the last two years has been in part due to being part of her team and her subsequent mentorship.
Is there a particular book that made an impact on you? Can you share a story?
I have been a voracious reader since I was very young, and almost everything I’ve read has some sort of impact. Instead of citing one book, I’d just like to say that reading anything- whether it’s magazine articles, graphic novels, ‘very important fiction’ or nonfiction biographies 4 inches thick — it’s a valuable use of your time, so don’t let other people’s perceptions of what is important keep you from reading what you like. Also, I read paper books but I also read a lot on my phone, especially before bed to unwind. Sorry sleep specialists, I know it’s ‘bad,’ but it works for me.
How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?
In general, the business of dentistry seems to financially underpay the dental assistants and administrative team members that are absolutely vital to a well-running office, simply because they are positions that don’t require post-graduate degrees. During the pandemic, nothing could’ve been more instructive as to how important my team is to providing cohesive treatment and smoothly running operations, I’ll be traumatized for life from that understaffed period of time. Many of these employees live paycheck-to-paycheck, have extremely complex and challenging childcare and family lives and don’t have long-term financial plans. I had been running a business for a mere seven months before I went on maternity leave and then shutdown for the pandemic. I had no idea if I could afford to do it, but I decided to increase my employees pay rates by 25% and offer retirement and medical benefits in 2021. I had no idea if I could do it, but did it anyway — and it turns out, I can. Stable, healthy employees make for smooth-running businesses and in turn, happy patients. I have only 13 employees, but I know it’s made a direct, positive impact on their lives. I’d suggest to anyone struggling with a decision that puts personal ethics and your business model head to head — go with your ethics. Once your ethics are in the right place, everything else falls into its right place too.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share a story about how that was relevant to you in your own life?
“Success is not final, failure is not fatal, it is the courage to continue that counts.” — Sir Winston Churchill. I can think of about 4,343 moments in the last 6 months where I let that float through my consciousness, took a breath and kept moving through a difficult moment. Although I admit, one could argue Winston’s stakes were a tad higher than mine.
Can you share your top three “oral hygiene tweaks” that will help people look and feel great?
Brush your tongue! Your tongue harbors a huge amount of bacteria, you have to remove it to maintain the freshest breath. It’ll be the gift that gives back while wearing a mask. And since everyone is always looking for whitening tips, your clear ortho aligners/retainers work as custom whitening trays. You can buy the proper whitening gel at the dentists’ office pretty affordably. Finally, treat yourself to a fancy pack of floss or a power toothbrush if you’re struggling with maintaining good habits.
Ok thank you for all of that. Here is the main question of our interview. Based on your experience, what are your “5 Things You Need To Create A Successful Career As A Dentist” and why? (Please share a story or example for each.)
1- Commit to continuing education for the duration of your career. Within the last 5 years technological advancements have really pushed dentistry to the forefront of innovation. The sheer amount of peer-reviewed research out there compared to even 20 years ago is incredible. If you don’t make an effort to continue to learn after school is over, you will not be able to keep up. Importantly, you will also get bored and burn out. Staying excited about your profession is the key to happiness in a long-term career.
2- Learn and grow from failures, but don’t internalize them. This is incredibly important, and incredibly hard. After a decade of practice I still struggle to not feel like a failure rather than learn from failure. Most highly-skilled people by nature, and then through training, are perfectionists and crave complete control over what we are passionate about. However — at least for dentists — the very nature of our jobs does not allow for complete control. The human bodies (and minds) of our patients are unique, variable, and don’t always respond in the way we expect. We as practitioners are going to make mistakes or errors in judgment — not a single person on the planet is perfect, yet I know exactly zero dentists who don’t feel fully responsible when treatment doesn’t go as planned, even if we have done everything “right” to make it so. It has taken years to accept that I might not have all the answers or easily navigate every situation a patient brings to my office. But in that acceptance, I’m much more confident that whatever happens, I’ve done what I can to make a dental visit, notoriously anxiety-inducing for a massive amount of people, as predictable and comfortable as possible.
3- If possible, work for multiple dental offices with various treatment & business philosophies. I live in NYC — there is no shortage of dental offices looking to hire dentists and they all vary in the types of patients they serve, and the types of business models, workflows, and cultures they maintain. You’ll learn so much working for multiple employers. I have worked in at least 8 different offices that varied widely amongst all three of those factors, and although many of us graduate wanting to work for the “fancy” office, one of my most valuable early work experiences was at practice that accepted all forms of dental Medicaid insurance.
The implications for a dentist working in a “Medicaid practice” is that these plans do not pay the provider well. This translates to having extremely limited time, materials, and technology to get the job done. Thus, this office is where I learned you don’t need every tool in the textbook, material on the planet, and all the time in the world to do a job well. Efficiency in treatment translates to lower costs and better clinical experiences for patients, and that lesson will continue to be extraordinarily valuable throughout my career.
4- Create as many professional relationships with colleagues — especially specialists (if you’re a general dentist). For new dentists, it’s important to spend the time learning what you truly like to do and are good at, and what makes sense to send to a colleague who might be better suited to provide that treatment. I’m a better dentist because of the professional relationships I’ve developed over the years, and on a personal-level I have more friends who understand the pressure of our careers.
5- To be an effective manager and leader, learn when you need to let it slide. This is incredibly important, and extremely difficult for people who tend to be extreme perfectionists. Many dentists fit into this category and I’m certainly no exception. But if you insist on everything being done your way, you’re going to end up doing everything yourself — a recipe for mental health disaster. Figure out what you need to be hands on with, the tasks you can give direction and let others do how they see best, and then the little tasks that are okay being done totally differently that you would do it yourself (hey — they’re done). If you can’t let it go, be ok with doing it entirely yourself. And last bit of advice, don’t take your complaints about it home to your friends/partner!
If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of wellness to the most amount of people, what would that be?
If I chose a dental wellness movement, the good news (for me) is I don’t have to start anything, it’s already in place — fluoridation of the public water supply. There is no bigger impact on a patients’ overall lifetime dental health``````` than having been exposed to a proper amount of fluoride while tooth development occurs, both for primary and permanent teeth. The margin of safety for fluoride treatment of water is wide and the benefits have proven to be one of the most successful public health campaigns in history. If I have a patient who disagrees or is concerned about the overall health effects of fluoride, I never argue — it’s their personal choice. I just let them know they’ll be spending a lot more time and money with me in my office over the course of our professional relationship.
We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them :-)
Sir Lewis Hamilton — I’ll wait patiently in line, pretty sure there are a few more people who’d like a moment with him. Even before the final F1 race for 2021, his commitment to social justice awareness, respectfulness to others and sportsmanlike conduct in extremely challenging situations was a sight to behold. I’d love to just talk to him about music and his dog over a vegetarian breakfast, to be honest. What a guy!
What is the best way for our readers to follow you online?
Instagram at ‘slopedental’ or slopedental.com for more information on the practice.
Thank you so much for these wonderful insights!
You’re welcome! These are great questions and I enjoyed thinking them through.
