Team Member Spotlight - Jacki Churchman
Jacki Churchman (center of the group) surrounded by other members of the Pfister Orthodontics Team
As we turn the corner toward Fall…
Oh my gosh, my wife is after me that I cannot wear white and it’s time to change the wardrobe to Fall colors. “Why?” Labor Day has had its due and we are on to Halloween, Thanksgiving, and the great season of Fall in Ohio. I don’t know about you, but while I like Summer, I love Fall. Wearing flannel shirts, jeans, and a leather jacket… phew, for me it doesn’t get much better!
And the food. Yes, I love potato salad and three bean salads with deviled eggs on a Summer picnic at the lake; but a clambake in the Fall, that is the best. Hmmm Hmmm. Maybe I’m driven by nostalgia and, to some degree, maybe we are all trapped in nostalgia. The nostalgic feelings of past Falls, as kids blowing off steam as we get used to being back in class again and eagerly waiting for the weekend. The excitement of Friday night football where seeing our friends and maybe meeting up with a special “one” was the high point of our week! As Aaron Wallace so eloquently quips in his book “Hocus Pocus in Focus”, the thing about nostalgia is it can only be fleetingly quenched. And as he goes on to say, we can never return to the past but, for brief stretches of time, it can return to us. And so we re-rent movies, line up at museums, and clamor for sequels steeped in reminiscence. So go out this weekend and re-live a past memory. Stoke up a fire Saturday night and roast a hotdog, marshmallow or - as we did in Hinckley while I was growing up - roast an apple from Hillside Orchard on a stick. And if everything was just right, we did this to a slowly rising orange glow of a full moon with the wisping mist coming off the lake and slowly enveloping the graves of the cemetery on the north side of Center road!
This week it is my pleasure to showcase our fourth longest Team member at sixteen years, Jacki Churchman.
Jacki was born in Brunswick, Ohio, and graduated from Padua High School. Jacki has a brother, Brian, and a sister (who you met last week, our third longest team member, Kelly). I know I can hear all of you now saying, “You hired sisters! Are you nuts?” No guts no glory they say, one of the best decisions I ever made.
Jacki is married to the love of her life, Lance, and they enjoy two beautiful children, Hunter and Savannah. But most of her energy (and a lot of love) goes to her twin hairy four-legged daughters, Rosie and Ruby, sister Rottweilers. Jacki’s favorite vacation spot is the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, where she loves to read, relax, and watch for bears, preferably not in her hot tub! Lance and she love this area so much they hope to retire there when the time comes.
Jacki’s goals in life are simple: to be a good mom, wife, and sister. And all agree she is pretty good at all three!
Jacki was the first Team member that I hired with no dental experience at all. In fact, after high school Jacki went on to train to be a pharmacy technician and was working at a local drug store when she decided to make a career change. My concerns about her lack of dental education quickly evaporated as her organizational skills and amazing creativity began to surface again and again.
Jacki complements all of my weaknesses. While I’m sort of organized, Jacki is amazingly adept at keeping the entire insurance department on track. She sits for long intervals on the phone trying to get insurance people to answer where benefits are and she keeps her composure far better than I ever could when dealing with them. But organization is only one of Jacki’s strong attributes. Creativity is probably her strongest suit. She re-creates job descriptions better than anybody I know. Just when I don’t think it’s in her job description, she proves me wrong.
After she mastered our finance department, she wanted something else to do and so she became our part-time receptionist. Then, Jacki decided to blend the two jobs and create a new job, financial coordinator for the patients. This entailed Jacki creating and presenting the financial plans with each patient as they start and coordinating it with their insurance plans. A couple years later, I needed a private secretary to take dictation for letters to doctors on various issues with their patients in our care. Yep, Jacki jumped in and, for the next several years, she would type dictated letters on topics quite foreign to her. We write 10-20 letters a week to various doctors and insurance companies for our patients. In the last year, Jacki wanted more of a challenge, so I give her bullet points of salient data that needs to be explained to the doctors and Jacki creates the letters. I proof them and add any afterthoughts and off it goes. It has been a very efficient use of both of our times to create the needed communication for our referring doctors.
All this being said, it’s what Jacki does outside the office that shows her true passion for creating the magic of our office. We try to be as creative as possible with thanking our referring offices for allowing us to work with their patients. Jacki is off to hobby lobby many times a year for vases, boxes, jars - you name it - to create thoughtful thank-you messages for our doctors. Christmas time is when Jacki really shines, no bah-humbug here! She decorates 3-5 trees at home, one at our office, organizes our staff Christmas party, organizes and purchases all doctor gifts, and designs the route for us to visit 20-30 offices, spreading cheer to their patients.
Last but not least, Jacki has been partly-to-totally behind some of the most interesting and impressive Christmas gifts my wife and I have ever received! Creative gifts, such as writing songs and poems; creating a Greatest Showman photo album with staff and doctor photos over actors’ and actresses’ faces; a 6 foot 12 Days Of Christmas Tower; an 18-inch ball of double-sided strapping tape with dinner tickets, movie tickets, and tiny bottles of champaign with a center of weekend get-away tickets… the list goes on and on.
The office is truly a better place with Jacki on board and we all appreciate her being there every single day. When asked what she likes best about her job and how she has stayed with us all these years, Jacki is quick to remark, “I like the challenges and I like my co-workers… even my sister!”
- Dr. P