If you have schoolchildren in your life, you’ve likely seen the name White, Greer and Maggard Orthodontics on uniforms and game-day programs. The WGM orthodontics office sponsors events and sports leagues, as well as arts programs, within 200 schools and 65 community organizations throughout the Bluegrass.
Dr. Greg White
Supporting the community—care beyond the chair, as they call it—is important to Dr. Greg White and all 130 WGM employees. “You learn so much in being a business owner about how to be a good steward of your financial resources and your time, and how important it is to be actively involved in a community,” White said.
Now with 19 clinics, WGM has five orthodontics offices in Lexington and two in Louisville, plus clinics in Corbin, Cynthiana, Danville, Georgetown, London, Morehead, Mt. Sterling, Nicholasville, Paris, Richmond, Shepherdsville and Winchester. In November 2017, WGM opened a retail location at The Summit at Fritz Farm called The Smile Lab, offering a one-stop process for Invisalign clear braces.
White doesn’t practice as much as he once did because he has found the greatest impact he said he can have is setting up processes and systems, and getting the right people in the right places. An outwardly focused attitude means believing that “what you’re doing is more important than the task at hand,” he said, and “having a passion for making this a better place just because you were here.” This is a viewpoint that works within organizations, families, friendships and communities. He’s also big on avoiding the three main obstacles that he believes thwarts success: blaming, complaining and procrastinating.
In 2017 WGM founded a separate entity called PepperPointe, moving all back-office operations out of its orthodontics clinics and into a dedicated space in a converted warehouse in downtown Lexington. Marketing, financing, human resources and practice management take place in this centralized location, enabling each clinic to focus only on the patient experience and treatment.
PepperPointe is also involved in a revolution, of sorts, to maintain doctor-owned practices. When privately owned practices are purchased by corporations, they become bottom-line businesses instead of service providers, White said. “It has been lost in medicine, it has been lost in optometry and lost in pharmacy, to a large degree. The same forces are at work in dentistry that were at work in the consolidation of those industries,” he said. “Personally, I don’t think it has been favorable to the patient-consumer in those industries. We’re trying to use the platform we have built here to prevent that from happening on a large scale in dentistry.”
White, Greer and Maggard Orthodontics sponsors events, sports leagues and other programs within 200 schools and 65 community organizations throughout the Bluegrass.
White, Greer and Maggard Orthodontics has six decades of Kentucky roots, starting with Dr. Russell Greer’s practice opening in 1960. His son, Jim Greer, joined him in 1980. Dr. Brent Maggard came on board in 1998, and Dr. Greg White in 2000. White had opened his own orthodontics practice nine years earlier. Today he is working to extend the WGM legacy into the future.
“I don’t ever want it to be said that it was our generation of dentists that ended up making the decisions that closed the door for the next group,” White said. He will be speaking at the American Association of Orthodontists’ national conference in Atlanta next spring about the WGM business model.
Educating private practitioners involves bridging the gap between retiring dentists and the dental school graduates who are encumbered with debt. “See the practitioner down the road as your teammate, as opposed to your competitor,” is one example White gives. “You will not only preserve the heart and soul of the practice, but you preserve an opportunity for the next generation, and you preserve integrity in what you do for the very people you serve.”