The Trillium Show with Dr. Jason Hall

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Being busy and being profitable are not the same thing.

In this episode of The Trillium Show, Amanda joins me again to talk about one of the biggest lessons we’ve learned building Trillium Plastic Surgery from the ground up: revenue coming in means very little if just as much money is going right back out.

We break practice overhead down into three areas I call the “three S’s” — space, staff, and stuff — and talk about where new practice owners can get themselves into trouble. From leasing an office that’s too big, to hiring before there’s a real need, to financing a $300,000 device because a sales rep promises it will “pay for itself,” expenses can get out of control quickly.

Amanda also shares how she watches the numbers behind the scenes, why a packed schedule isn’t necessarily a successful schedule, and why five great patients can sometimes be more valuable to a practice than a day that simply looks busy.

If you’re starting a private practice, considering leaving an employed position, or trying to figure out why your practice is generating revenue without generating the profit you expected, this episode is about learning to control what you can control before chasing growth.

Because at the end of the day, the money coming in isn’t what you make. It’s what’s left after everything goes out.

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Amanda is back with me on The Trillium Show, and you’re going to be hearing a lot more from the two of us together.

After almost 20 years of marriage and 12 years of owning a practice together, we get asked all the time how we manage working together, raising a family, and still making time for each other. The answer is that, over the years, we’ve developed a handful of things that simply aren’t negotiable.

In this episode, Amanda and I talk about the routines that have helped keep our family connected: our weekly date night, Friday family nights, sitting down for dinner together, making fitness part of the schedule, creating one-on-one time with our daughters, and even the rules we’ve put around phones and social media.

None of this is meant to be a blueprint for somebody else’s family. It’s simply what has worked for ours.

As Amanda joins me more often on the podcast, we’re going to share more of what we’ve learned building a business and a life together—the things that have worked, the things we’ve gotten wrong, and what it actually looks like behind the scenes at work and at home.

If you enjoy these conversations, subscribe to The Trillium Show so you don’t miss the next one!

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In 2024, Dr. Jason Hall recorded one of his most provocative episodes of The Trillium Show: “Smart Kids—Don’t Go to Medical School.” Two years later, he’s revisiting it—and some of the predictions feel even more relevant.

The episode looks at three major changes reshaping medicine: the loss of physician autonomy, the growing influence of hospital systems and insurance companies, and the rapidly expanding role of AI in diagnosis and patient care.

If medicine increasingly becomes a profession built around protocols, algorithms, and pattern recognition, what happens when AI can do more of that work faster and cheaper? And what does that mean for a student committing the next decade of their life to becoming a physician?

Jason still loves medicine and surgery. But the profession has changed dramatically since he entered it, and the path that made sense for one generation may not make the same sense for the next.

Whether you’re considering medical school, raising a child who is, or simply wondering where American medicine is headed, this episode asks a question that has only become harder to ignore:

Is becoming a doctor still worth it?

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In the fourth and final episode of our business lessons series, Amanda and I take an honest look at the financial side of owning and growing a plastic surgery practice.

Having money in the bank does not necessarily mean your business is profitable. We discuss how we use profit-and-loss statements, detailed spreadsheets, overhead calculations, and procedure costs to understand what the practice is actually earning—and why simply copying a competitor’s pricing can quickly put you in a position where you are losing money on a treatment.

We also explain why staying small has been one of the smartest decisions we have made, how unnecessary staff and oversized office spaces can quietly drain a business, and why controlling expenses is just as important as generating revenue.

Finally, we share our biggest financial regrets, including expensive devices that failed to deliver, financing contracts we should have read more carefully, and the hidden costs of running a business that many new owners never anticipate. From employee benefits and payroll taxes to insurance, marketing, and vendor expenses, this conversation covers the financial lessons we had to learn through experience.

Whether you are opening a medical practice, growing a med spa, or running another type of small business, this episode offers practical advice for protecting your cash flow, making smarter investments, and building a profitable business without getting distracted by what everyone else is doing.

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What happens when your spouse is also your business partner?

In Part 3 of our business series, Amanda and I talk honestly about what it has been like to build Trillium together while raising a family and navigating nearly 20 years of marriage.

We get into the years when work followed us home every night, the boundaries we’ve had to learn to set, and why our very different personalities have ultimately made us better business partners. I’m the big-picture person who is always thinking about what’s next. Amanda is the detail-oriented one asking how we’re actually going to make it happen. That combination has helped us grow, but it has also created some hard lessons along the way.

We also talk about how building the practice affected our daughters, the sacrifices we made early on, working through disagreements when you still have to show up together the next morning, and whether we expect our kids to someday carry on the family business.

Running a business with your spouse isn’t always easy, but after more than a decade of doing it together, we’ve learned a lot about partnership, boundaries, family, and knowing when the next big idea needs to wait.

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Neither Amanda nor I had any formal business training when we decided to open a medical practice. We had backgrounds in medicine, a young family, and plenty of lessons we would have to learn the hard way.

So in this second episode of our business series, Amanda and I are sharing how the decisions we made years before opening Trillium helped make it possible. We talk about living below our means, our early Dave Ramsey envelope system, the $4,000 furniture purchase that became an unexpected lesson in taxes, and why we chose to start small and open the practice without debt.

We also discuss leaving Houston, moving closer to family in Knoxville, the mistakes we made while building the business, and why we both wish we had asked more questions and sought out experienced mentors sooner.

Finally, we answer one of the questions we hear most often: Is working together harder on the business—or on the marriage?

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In this episode of The Trillium Show, I’m joined by my wife and business partner, Amanda Hall, for the first episode in a four-part series about what it really takes to run a plastic surgery practice together.

Over the next few episodes, we’re pulling back the curtain on the business side of medicine: how we started, what we got wrong, what we’ve learned the hard way, and how our roles have evolved over the last 11 years.

This episode starts with what may be the hardest part of owning a practice: hiring and managing people.

Amanda and I talk through our first hires, what we were looking for in the beginning, why we learned to be slow to hire and quick to fire, and how much a bad fit can affect the entire team. We also get into the role of an office manager, why policies and procedures have to be built from the inside, how hard delegation can be for two type A people, and what we look for now when someone applies to work in our office.

This is a candid conversation about employee management, team culture, leadership mistakes, and the reality that people can make or break a business.

If you’re a physician, surgeon, business owner, or someone thinking about starting your own practice, this episode is a look at the lessons we wish we had understood sooner.

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Tummy tucks and body contouring procedures are consistently some of the most popular surgeries in plastic surgery, and for good reason. Patients want to remove excess skin, repair their core, improve their waistline, and feel more confident in their body.

But what happens when the goal shifts from improving shape to changing the structure of the ribs?

In this episode of The Trillium Show, I’m joined again by Dr. Jessica Walker to talk about RibXcar, RibX, rib remodeling, rib removal, and the growing conversation around surgically altering the floating ribs to create a smaller, more dramatic waistline.

We break down what these procedures are designed to do, how rib remodeling differs from rib removal, why ultrasound technology is being used, and why post-operative compliance with a corset or waist trainer is such a major part of the result.

We also talk about the concerns that come with this trend: pneumothorax, bleeding, nerve or vessel injury, asymmetry, unrealistic expectations, and the bigger question of whether changing someone’s skeletal structure for a cosmetic waistline is really worth the risk.

This is one of those procedures that may look impressive online, but deserves a much deeper conversation before patients decide to pursue it. If you’ve seen RibXcar or rib contouring on social media and wondered what plastic surgeons actually think about it, this episode is for you.

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Breast implant sizing is one of the most important conversations in any breast augmentation consultation, but bigger is not always better.

In this episode of The Trillium Show, Dr. Jason Hall is joined by Dr. Jessica Walker to talk about how they help patients choose the right implant size based on goals, anatomy, measurements, frame, tissue quality, and long-term outcomes. They discuss why cup size and implant volume alone can be misleading, why goal photos can be helpful, and what patients should understand before choosing a larger implant.

They also explain what can happen when implants are too large for a patient’s body, including stretched skin, thinning breast tissue, neck and back pain, more complicated revision surgery, and why using a bigger implant to avoid a lift is usually not the right answer.

If you are considering breast augmentation, this conversation will help you think beyond the number of cc’s and focus on what is safe, proportional, and sustainable for your body long-term. 

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In this episode of The Trillium Show, I’m joined by my wife and business partner, Amanda Hall, for the first episode in a four-part series about what it really takes to run a plastic surgery practice together.

Over the next few episodes, we’re pulling back the curtain on the business side of medicine: how we started, what we got wrong, what we’ve learned the hard way, and how our roles have evolved over the last 11 years.

This episode starts with what may be the hardest part of owning a practice: hiring and managing people.

Amanda and I talk through our first hires, what we were looking for in the beginning, why we learned to be slow to hire and quick to fire, and how much a bad fit can affect the entire team. We also get into the role of an office manager, why policies and procedures have to be built from the inside, how hard delegation can be for two type A people, and what we look for now when someone applies to work in our office.

This is a candid conversation about employee management, team culture, leadership mistakes, and the reality that people can make or break a business.

If you’re a physician, surgeon, business owner, or someone thinking about starting your own practice, this episode is a look at the lessons we wish we had understood sooner.