People First. Profits Follow.
September 2, 2026
In December 2019, I completed my first private equity exit, and three months later I had time, capital, and a question I had never really stopped to answer properly: what did I actually learn about leading people over the last ten years?
The honest answer is that I learned most of it the hard way. Early in my career, my leadership style was essentially: I know what needs to happen, so do it. It was clear and efficient, and it was wrong in ways that took years to understand, because the turnover told me something was off and figuring out what it was took longer than I’d like to admit.
What I’ve built since then spans three very different organizations. Triangle Family Dentistry scaled to hundreds of clinical employees across multiple states, AB&B Commercial Real Estate operates with a team of about fifteen people distributed across time zones and continents, and Vantico is being built from scratch right now, person by person. Each one has taught me something different about what it actually means to lead, and each one has confirmed the same underlying truth: if you take care of your people first, the results take care of themselves.
Experiences Over Everything
At TFD, we used to debate what most companies debate: do you give people a gift card at five years, a plaque at ten, maybe a weekend getaway if you’re feeling generous? We tried some version of that early on and realized pretty quickly that people forget a gift, but they don’t forget an experience.
So we changed the model: when an employee hits their ten-year mark, we take them on a trip. Recent trips have included Egypt and a river cruise through Europe, roughly twenty people each time, and we include spouses. That last part matters more than it might seem, because on the clinical side of the business our team works evenings and weekends, showing up when most people have already gone home, and that schedule has a cost the family absorbs alongside the employee. The partner who covers the kids on Saturday mornings, the spouse who eats dinner alone on Wednesday nights, they’re part of what makes a long-tenured employee possible, and bringing them on the trip was a way of saying we see that too.
We do these every five years, and the next one is coming up with a group that will probably be closer to thirty people. As long as I have the means to do it, I’ll keep doing it, because what you’re really building when you invest in an experience like that is a shared memory that connects people to each other and to what they helped create, and you cannot put that in a gift card.
Between milestones, the gesture is simpler: when someone hits five years, I send them a personal note from me that says directly, I see you, this matters, thank you. It costs nothing and it lands differently than almost anything else, because people can tell the difference between acknowledgment and administration.
The Signal Before the Problem
Clinical teams burn out differently than office teams, because a dental assistant who is patient-facing for eight hours straight, managing anxious patients, keeping procedures on time, and staying calm when things go sideways is running a different kind of emotional gauntlet than someone with a flexible remote schedule. The pressure is continuous and interpersonal, and over time it accumulates in ways that don’t always surface in a survey.
Which is actually the first thing I’d tell anyone managing a clinical team: surveys rarely get you the information you actually need, because people who are disengaged will check the boxes quickly just to get it done, and the data looks fine while the problem keeps growing.
What actually works is cadence and proximity, and we structure that deliberately: our hygienists meet with management once a month, our assistants do the same, and partners and managers connect weekly. The goal is contact and engagement, because when you’re in front of people regularly you start to notice when something shifts. The person who used to be engaged is suddenly distracted, the one who always arrived early is coming in late, and the contributor who spoke freely has gone quiet. Those are the signals, and you only catch them if you’re paying close enough attention to know what the baseline looks like.
The intervention I keep coming back to is one of the simplest things we ever did. When I could feel morale tipping in an office, I would hand someone a credit card and say: take three people to lunch, at least one from a different department, and there’s no agenda. Just go. What happens when you put people from different departments at a table with nothing to accomplish except eating is that the walls come down, and people who had been quietly frustrated with each other remember that they actually like each other and come back a little lighter. The underlying principle is this: if you don’t give people a real outlet to tell you what’s wrong, they’ll hold it in until they leave, because morale problems whisper before they quit, and if nobody’s listening, they go.
One Company, Three Cultures
AB&B is a completely different kind of organization: fifteen people, some in the same office, some remote, some based in the Philippines, and the dynamics of running a distributed team are real. The temptation when people aren’t in the same room is to treat the distance as a gap you simply accept, but we don’t accept it; we build around it.
One of the things our COO, Jimmy Ricard, put in place a couple of years ago was a holiday dinner for the Philippines team, fully funded by AB&B and separate from our team dinner here in the Triangle. It was his idea, and the right one: if the local team gets to gather and celebrate at the end of the year, the remote team should too, because the point isn’t symmetry for its own sake, it’s that every person on this team deserves to feel seen and included in what we’re building together. People everywhere want to feel like they belong to something bigger than themselves, and successful organizations that are building something real generate a kind of goodwill and momentum people genuinely want to be part of. Your job as a leader is to make sure the people helping you build it can actually feel that they belong, regardless of where they’re sitting when they log on.
At Vantico, where the team is still being assembled, we have a standing rule: cameras on during meetings. When everyone is an audio-only presence on a screen, you lose the human connection that makes a team a team, so getting people on camera, even imperfectly and even from a home office with a busy background, is a non-negotiable for us. The mechanics look different across TFD, AB&B, and Vantico, but the principle is identical in all three: show up, stay connected, and make the connection real, because culture doesn’t happen by accident and it has to be tended consistently or it drifts.
The Seed Buy-In
The leadership shift that changed everything for me was understanding the difference between directing people and enrolling them, and the model I keep coming back to I call the seed buy-in.
The reference point is the movie Inception, where the premise is that the most powerful thing is an idea, and the most powerful version of an idea is one that someone feels they originated. You plant it, you ask the right questions, and then you get out of the way, because when someone feels like the idea is partly theirs their commitment to it is fundamentally different than when they’re executing someone else’s directive.
Here’s what it looks like in practice at AB&B. Jimmy already has a deep affinity for technology and operational efficiency, and he’s been actively exploring, implementing, and building AI tools for the business on his own initiative. So when I want to bring AI agents into our operations more formally, the conversation isn’t me handing Jimmy a task: it’s me creating the runway for him to lead it, asking how he would structure it, what he’s already seen, what he thinks the right approach is. He brings the expertise, the initiative, and the conviction, and the result is something the whole organization gets behind because it came from inside it, through someone who genuinely owns it, rather than something handed down from the top.
Even when I already know where I want to end up, I still run the seed buy-in, because getting the team to arrive at the answer together produces a plan that the team will defend and execute with a fundamentally different level of energy than anything I could have directed them to do.
The Rules That Don't Move
Two things have stayed constant across every team I’ve ever led, regardless of the organization or its size.
The first: never critique publicly. Recognition can be public, but accountability is always private, because the moment you correct someone in front of their peers you’ve made the person you corrected feel small and made everyone else wonder when it will be their turn, and you build anxiety rather than trust.
The second: no favorites. If your team sees you investing disproportionate time and attention in one person, the people who aren’t receiving that attention notice and start doing the math on where they stand, and the damage accumulates quietly and compounds. Everyone has to be held to the same standard, and everyone has to be able to see that clearly.
The frame that has worked best for me when it comes to motivation is this: figure out what they want, figure out what the organization needs, and find where those two things overlap, because the overlap is where real commitment lives. Some people are driven by financial goals, some respond to team goals, and some need to understand the personal reason why something matters before they can fully commit to it. The paycheck covers the floor, but the why is what gets people to show up fully.
When Two of Your Best People Just Quit
Someone asked me recently what I would tell a young doctor who came to me having just lost two of their best employees, working sixty-hour weeks, and genuinely unsure whether the problem was them, the culture, or both.
The first thing I would tell them is: don’t guess. The instinct when morale breaks down is to start fixing things and making changes to show you’re taking action, but if you don’t actually know what the problem is then you’re moving furniture, not solving anything.
Get a neutral party: bring in a third-party consultant, run anonymous surveys, conduct real exit interviews, and if you have to pay people to participate then pay them, because the goal is honest information and you will not get honest information if people think it can be traced back to them. Then listen to what comes back without defending yourself. The same themes will emerge from multiple people, and those themes are your diagnosis; once you know what you’re actually dealing with you can build a real response.
The part that requires the most humility is this: sometimes the issue is you, and I’ve been there. There were moments in my own leadership where the feedback pointed directly at something I was doing or failing to do, and the only productive response was to absorb it and change, because the leaders who can’t hear that feedback keep losing good people and never understand why.
The act of asking is itself part of the fix. When people see that you’re genuinely trying to understand and care enough to bring someone in to listen, many of them will stay through a difficult moment because they believe the moment is going to change. Culture is the signal you send when something goes wrong about whether you’re the kind of leader worth staying for.
People first. The profits follow. That’s not a philosophy I arrived at in a classroom; it’s something I learned from watching what happened when I got it right and from sitting with what happened when I didn’t. Every team I’ve built since has been built around that sequence, and every time I’ve honored it the results have been better than anything I could have engineered by leading any other way.
About Dr. Hesham A. Baky
Dr. Hesham A. Baky is the Founder and Chairman of AB&B Commercial Real Estate and Vantico Investments, and a co-founder of Triangle Family Dentistry and Carolina Orthodontics & Children’s Dentistry. Since launching his first practice in 2009, he has helped scale a vertically integrated platform spanning healthcare operations, commercial real estate, and private investment. Dr. Baky regularly speaks on leadership, systems-driven growth, and operator-led investment strategy.
To inquire about speaking engagements or to connect, please contact marketing@abbcre.com.
In December 2019, I completed my first private equity exit, and three months later I had time, capital, and a question I had never really stopped to answer properly: what did I actually learn about leading people over the last ten years?
The honest answer is that I learned most of it the hard way. Early in my career, my leadership style was essentially: I know what needs to happen, so do it. It was clear and efficient, and it was wrong in ways that took years to understand, because the turnover told me something was off and figuring out what it was took longer than I’d like to admit.
What I’ve built since then spans three very different organizations. Triangle Family Dentistry scaled to hundreds of clinical employees across multiple states, AB&B Commercial Real Estate operates with a team of about fifteen people distributed across time zones and continents, and Vantico is being built from scratch right now, person by person. Each one has taught me something different about what it actually means to lead, and each one has confirmed the same underlying truth: if you take care of your people first, the results take care of themselves.
Experiences Over Everything
At TFD, we used to debate what most companies debate: do you give people a gift card at five years, a plaque at ten, maybe a weekend getaway if you’re feeling generous? We tried some version of that early on and realized pretty quickly that people forget a gift, but they don’t forget an experience.
So we changed the model: when an employee hits their ten-year mark, we take them on a trip. Recent trips have included Egypt and a river cruise through Europe, roughly twenty people each time, and we include spouses. That last part matters more than it might seem, because on the clinical side of the business our team works evenings and weekends, showing up when most people have already gone home, and that schedule has a cost the family absorbs alongside the employee. The partner who covers the kids on Saturday mornings, the spouse who eats dinner alone on Wednesday nights, they’re part of what makes a long-tenured employee possible, and bringing them on the trip was a way of saying we see that too.
We do these every five years, and the next one is coming up with a group that will probably be closer to thirty people. As long as I have the means to do it, I’ll keep doing it, because what you’re really building when you invest in an experience like that is a shared memory that connects people to each other and to what they helped create, and you cannot put that in a gift card.
Between milestones, the gesture is simpler: when someone hits five years, I send them a personal note from me that says directly, I see you, this matters, thank you. It costs nothing and it lands differently than almost anything else, because people can tell the difference between acknowledgment and administration.
The Signal Before the Problem
Clinical teams burn out differently than office teams, because a dental assistant who is patient-facing for eight hours straight, managing anxious patients, keeping procedures on time, and staying calm when things go sideways is running a different kind of emotional gauntlet than someone with a flexible remote schedule. The pressure is continuous and interpersonal, and over time it accumulates in ways that don’t always surface in a survey.
Which is actually the first thing I’d tell anyone managing a clinical team: surveys rarely get you the information you actually need, because people who are disengaged will check the boxes quickly just to get it done, and the data looks fine while the problem keeps growing.
What actually works is cadence and proximity, and we structure that deliberately: our hygienists meet with management once a month, our assistants do the same, and partners and managers connect weekly. The goal is contact and engagement, because when you’re in front of people regularly you start to notice when something shifts. The person who used to be engaged is suddenly distracted, the one who always arrived early is coming in late, and the contributor who spoke freely has gone quiet. Those are the signals, and you only catch them if you’re paying close enough attention to know what the baseline looks like.
The intervention I keep coming back to is one of the simplest things we ever did. When I could feel morale tipping in an office, I would hand someone a credit card and say: take three people to lunch, at least one from a different department, and there’s no agenda. Just go. What happens when you put people from different departments at a table with nothing to accomplish except eating is that the walls come down, and people who had been quietly frustrated with each other remember that they actually like each other and come back a little lighter. The underlying principle is this: if you don’t give people a real outlet to tell you what’s wrong, they’ll hold it in until they leave, because morale problems whisper before they quit, and if nobody’s listening, they go.
One Company, Three Cultures
AB&B is a completely different kind of organization: fifteen people, some in the same office, some remote, some based in the Philippines, and the dynamics of running a distributed team are real. The temptation when people aren’t in the same room is to treat the distance as a gap you simply accept, but we don’t accept it; we build around it.
One of the things our COO, Jimmy Ricard, put in place a couple of years ago was a holiday dinner for the Philippines team, fully funded by AB&B and separate from our team dinner here in the Triangle. It was his idea, and the right one: if the local team gets to gather and celebrate at the end of the year, the remote team should too, because the point isn’t symmetry for its own sake, it’s that every person on this team deserves to feel seen and included in what we’re building together. People everywhere want to feel like they belong to something bigger than themselves, and successful organizations that are building something real generate a kind of goodwill and momentum people genuinely want to be part of. Your job as a leader is to make sure the people helping you build it can actually feel that they belong, regardless of where they’re sitting when they log on.
At Vantico, where the team is still being assembled, we have a standing rule: cameras on during meetings. When everyone is an audio-only presence on a screen, you lose the human connection that makes a team a team, so getting people on camera, even imperfectly and even from a home office with a busy background, is a non-negotiable for us. The mechanics look different across TFD, AB&B, and Vantico, but the principle is identical in all three: show up, stay connected, and make the connection real, because culture doesn’t happen by accident and it has to be tended consistently or it drifts.
The Seed Buy-In
The leadership shift that changed everything for me was understanding the difference between directing people and enrolling them, and the model I keep coming back to I call the seed buy-in.
The reference point is the movie Inception, where the premise is that the most powerful thing is an idea, and the most powerful version of an idea is one that someone feels they originated. You plant it, you ask the right questions, and then you get out of the way, because when someone feels like the idea is partly theirs their commitment to it is fundamentally different than when they’re executing someone else’s directive.
Here’s what it looks like in practice at AB&B. Jimmy already has a deep affinity for technology and operational efficiency, and he’s been actively exploring, implementing, and building AI tools for the business on his own initiative. So when I want to bring AI agents into our operations more formally, the conversation isn’t me handing Jimmy a task: it’s me creating the runway for him to lead it, asking how he would structure it, what he’s already seen, what he thinks the right approach is. He brings the expertise, the initiative, and the conviction, and the result is something the whole organization gets behind because it came from inside it, through someone who genuinely owns it, rather than something handed down from the top.
Even when I already know where I want to end up, I still run the seed buy-in, because getting the team to arrive at the answer together produces a plan that the team will defend and execute with a fundamentally different level of energy than anything I could have directed them to do.
The Rules That Don't Move
Two things have stayed constant across every team I’ve ever led, regardless of the organization or its size.
The first: never critique publicly. Recognition can be public, but accountability is always private, because the moment you correct someone in front of their peers you’ve made the person you corrected feel small and made everyone else wonder when it will be their turn, and you build anxiety rather than trust.
The second: no favorites. If your team sees you investing disproportionate time and attention in one person, the people who aren’t receiving that attention notice and start doing the math on where they stand, and the damage accumulates quietly and compounds. Everyone has to be held to the same standard, and everyone has to be able to see that clearly.
The frame that has worked best for me when it comes to motivation is this: figure out what they want, figure out what the organization needs, and find where those two things overlap, because the overlap is where real commitment lives. Some people are driven by financial goals, some respond to team goals, and some need to understand the personal reason why something matters before they can fully commit to it. The paycheck covers the floor, but the why is what gets people to show up fully.
When Two of Your Best People Just Quit
Someone asked me recently what I would tell a young doctor who came to me having just lost two of their best employees, working sixty-hour weeks, and genuinely unsure whether the problem was them, the culture, or both.
The first thing I would tell them is: don’t guess. The instinct when morale breaks down is to start fixing things and making changes to show you’re taking action, but if you don’t actually know what the problem is then you’re moving furniture, not solving anything.
Get a neutral party: bring in a third-party consultant, run anonymous surveys, conduct real exit interviews, and if you have to pay people to participate then pay them, because the goal is honest information and you will not get honest information if people think it can be traced back to them. Then listen to what comes back without defending yourself. The same themes will emerge from multiple people, and those themes are your diagnosis; once you know what you’re actually dealing with you can build a real response.
The part that requires the most humility is this: sometimes the issue is you, and I’ve been there. There were moments in my own leadership where the feedback pointed directly at something I was doing or failing to do, and the only productive response was to absorb it and change, because the leaders who can’t hear that feedback keep losing good people and never understand why.
The act of asking is itself part of the fix. When people see that you’re genuinely trying to understand and care enough to bring someone in to listen, many of them will stay through a difficult moment because they believe the moment is going to change. Culture is the signal you send when something goes wrong about whether you’re the kind of leader worth staying for.
People first. The profits follow. That’s not a philosophy I arrived at in a classroom; it’s something I learned from watching what happened when I got it right and from sitting with what happened when I didn’t. Every team I’ve built since has been built around that sequence, and every time I’ve honored it the results have been better than anything I could have engineered by leading any other way.
About Dr. Hesham A. Baky
Dr. Hesham A. Baky is the Founder and Chairman of AB&B Commercial Real Estate and Vantico Investments, and a co-founder of Triangle Family Dentistry and Carolina Orthodontics & Children’s Dentistry. Since launching his first practice in 2009, he has helped scale a vertically integrated platform spanning healthcare operations, commercial real estate, and private investment. Dr. Baky regularly speaks on leadership, systems-driven growth, and operator-led investment strategy.
To inquire about speaking engagements or to connect, please contact marketing@abbcre.com.
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