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W hen Dr. Kenneth Katz and his sister were in school, they stuffed bills and filed medical charts for their father's dermatology practice in Manitowoc. Even then, Ken Katz recognized ways to make things more efficient: While still in high school, the incipient entrepreneur developed a computer program to help complete universal insurance forms, says his sister, Tricia Wagner. Making things work better for patients and doctors has been a constant theme and a driving force behind Katz's vision. Now he's founder and president of what has become the second-largest dermatology practice in the United States, and runs it with a team that includes Wagner as the company's vice president of finance and business development. Amy Katz, Ken's wife, is the company's director of marketing. Manitowoc-based Dermatology Associates of Wisconsin/ Forefront Dermatology launched in 2004 with one clinic in Manitowoc, then expanded to include offices in Green Bay and Sturgeon Bay in 2005. The company has expanded to 37 locations statewide and in Grand Rapids, Mich., and Cedar Rapids, Iowa, with plans to keep growing in the Midwest. The company includes 42 doctors (24 of whom are shareholders) and 11 mid-level providers such as nurse practitioners, for a total of 393 employees … and counting. The company grew by 33 percent in 2012, 10 percent in 2013 and Ken Katz projects it will grow between 25 percent and 35 percent in 2014. "Dermatology's a specialty that's not dependent on hospital care," Ken Katz says. "We don't do a lot in the hospital – we don't order MRIs or do big surgeries in the operating room, so to a large extent dermatology was ignored during the consolidation of health care that occurred over the last 25 years. We saw that as an opportunity to consolidate dermatology. When you have more people working toward a common goal, it's much easier to achieve it." First employee: Dad K atz's first employee was his father, Dr. Henry Katz, who opened a dermatology practice in Manitowoc in 1977. Henry Katz was a third-generation physician, following his father and grandfather, who were general practitioners in Cedarburg. Henry Katz, who worked for his son for a few years before he retired about 2005, says he watched the field of medicine shift from mostly private practices to most doctors becoming employees of a hospital (in his father's day, medicine shifted from virtually all general practitioners to a wide field of specialists). "I didn't talk a lot of business with Ken because his ideas were so different than what I had done, and I knew I was going to retire," Henry Katz says. "He was going to run with the ball, and it's in a ballpark so different from mine that basically I just let him do it. I also kind of knew that you had 24 | Insight • J a n u a r y 2 014 "I'm fairly conservative, and I would've thought three clinics would be all two people could handle." Dr. David Bertler to be large to be able to have a significant chance of retaining a private practice model. You've got to do it big, and you've got to do it regionally." One of the other benefits of a large practice is having a network of colleagues with varied experiences, Henry Katz says. "They have a system where the beauty of it, over a private practice like I had alone, is that you can email or talk to your colleagues within the system in a matter of minutes on a difficult problem. Whereas for me, I almost had nobody – I had to call somebody in Marshfield or Madison." The Katzes' only plan was to set up a dermatology practice in Manitowoc, which they did in 2001, purchasing the dermatology practice from Henry, who kept working for his son. "Then a couple of years later the local hospital hired their own dermatologist, and then all of a sudden we were in this competitive situation," Ken Katz says. It's not that the practice wasn't busy – quite the opposite, in fact. "We thought that being booked out three months was fantastic, but the reality is that if people can't come see you for three months, they're going to go see the other guy. That was kind of an awakening moment for me." He built Dermatology Associates' first clinic in Manitowoc, then convinced Dr. David Bertler, who was working for Prevea at the time, to join him. w w w. i n s i g h t o n b u s i n e s s . c o m