What do you do when the career path you thought you were building suddenly disappears?

In this episode of FEM, MD, Dr. Lauren Umstattd sits down with board-certified plastic surgeon and practice owner Dr. Alexis Parcells to talk about ambition, failure, leadership, and building a medical practice on your own terms.

Alexis shares a career path that was anything but straightforward. After struggling academically and being told that medical school might not be the right path for her, she attended St. George’s University in the Caribbean and eventually fought her way into plastic surgery. Years later, after joining a practice with the expectation of becoming a partner, she was fired just eight days after her non-compete went into effect.

That experience forced a decision: join someone else’s practice or build her own.

Today, Alexis leads a growing, all-female plastic surgery practice with three locations across New Jersey and Manhattan. She and Lauren discuss what those career “rock bottoms” taught her, why work ethic and emotional intelligence can matter more than test scores, and how she deliberately built a culture different from the one she experienced early in her career.

They also get into the business of growing a surgical practice, hiring for attitude instead of skill alone, helping new associates build full schedules, creating a collaborative operating room, learning to delegate, and why the person answering your practice phone may have one of the hardest jobs in the entire office.

Finally, Alexis and Lauren talk about motherhood, entrepreneurship, healthy ambition, and the ongoing challenge of actually turning off “boss mode.”

Host: Dr. Lauren Umstattd

Connect with Lauren: @lauren_umstattd_md

Guest: Alexis Parcells, MD

Connect with Alexis: @alexisparcellsmd

Produced by: The Hippocratic Collective

See more shows and content at hippocratic-collective.com