Episode #88 – Dr. Tom Godwin

Do you work in the animal health industry or veterinary profession? Have you ever wondered how successful people got their start and what led them to where they are today? Hi, everyone. I’m Stacy Pursell, founder and CEO of The VET Recruiter, the leading executive search and recruiting firm specializing in the animal health industry and veterinary profession. I was the first recruiter in the United States to focus exclusively on this space, building the first search firm dedicated to this unique niche. Over the past 28+ years, I’ve developed relationships with many of the industry’s top leaders and trailblazers. The People of Animal Health Podcast features the incredible individuals I’ve had the privilege to connect with throughout my career.

In each episode, you’ll hear their stories, their career journeys, leadership lessons, and the impact they’ve made on the industry. With a wide range of expert guests, you’ll gain insights, inspiration, and ideas you can apply to your own career. Thanks for tuning in and enjoy the episode. Hello, everyone, and welcome to The People of Animal Health Podcast. Today’s guest on The People of Animal Health Podcast is Dr. Thomas L. Godwin, a pioneering veterinarian, entrepreneur, and rancher whose career has shaped modern veterinary medicine. A co-founder of one of the first animal emergency clinics in the United States and the first animal emergency clinic in Texas, Thomas helped redefine standards of veterinary care.

Over more than five decades, he built and scaled multiple hospitals, and he was one of the founders of ProVet, a veterinary supply company. He later led mergers and acquisitions for Pet’s Choice, helping it grow into a major national platform. Beyond veterinary medicine, Dr. Godwin has managed large-scale ranching operations, and he remains deeply committed to family, faith, and stewardship of the land. Tom, thank you for being here with me today on The People of Animal Health Podcast, and how are you today?

I’m great. Nice to talk with you.

Well, it’s so nice to talk with you too. I have known your son, Wes Godwin, for many years, and Wes is also here today to help tell his dad’s story. So, Tom, let’s start off at the very beginning. What was your life like growing up and where did you grow up?

I grew up in a small ranching community in North Central Texas called Granbury, Texas. It’s a large city now, but it was a Mayberry, Norman Rockwell-type community. When I grew up, it was an impoverished agricultural community, but no one knew that we were impoverished. Everybody was happy and just a great experience. There were 37 people in our graduating class. And of that class, I think there was one board-certified surgeon, two veterinarians, a lawyer, two PhD biochemist. If we were deprived of any educational deficiencies, we didn’t know it. So, people talk about small towns and poor opportunities and poor educational opportunities. It just didn’t exist. I think anybody in our 37 people that wanted to go to college went to college.

And even though during the time that we grew up was during the drought from 1951 to 1956, it did not rain. I can remember walking home from school in the seventh grade and experiencing rain for the first time. And what a dramatic change that was for the community and the people that lived there.

Well, you had a really impressive high school graduating class with a lot of success there. At what point during your life, and why did you decide to become a veterinarian?

Well, my main goal in life always was to ranch, but it appeared that I needed to find a way to get from point A to point B. And my uncle, my mother’s brother, returned from World War II. He was a Marine Corps veteran. He went to the Marine Corps when he was 17, and he came back in 1946 and went to A&M and became a veterinarian. And seeing his involvement at A&M, coming back into uniform, seeing the boots, he was such an impressive individual, and he interested me in becoming a veterinarian. And because of him and the example he set, why I decided I wanted to be a veterinarian, and I definitely decided I wanted to go to A&M and be in the corps.

When you came out of vet school in 1968, what did the veterinary profession actually look like day-to-day? And how different was it then from what young veterinarians are experiencing now today?

Well, tremendous difference. Through an act of faith, I never wanted to come to an urban county to practice. I wanted to do large animal or mixed practice, but an opportunity came up where I could come to a mixed practice, and of all places, Harris County, Texas. At that time, Harris County was very different than it is now. It was an urban county with a million people, but it was also a very rural county with the largest number of beef cattle of any county in Texas. And there were 21 dairies here and some racetracks, a lot of wealthy and high-end horse farms. So, there was a lot of opportunity here for a mixed practice. And so, I took the opportunity, accepted a job two weeks before I graduated, and came to Harris County.

Well, walk me through the early days. First of all, when you graduated, did you go to work right away? Did you start the job right away? And what were the early days like for you?

The early days for me, I did spend one year after I graduated. After I graduated, we were going to go into mixed practice. And the big emphasis in Texas at that time was on legalizing parimutuel gambling. And if that happened, it was envisioned that I-45 from Houston to Dallas would look like Lexington, Kentucky. So, the big emphasis was on high-end equine medicine and surgery. So, I did an externship in Lexington, Kentucky, working with Jim Sautter at Walnut Hall Farms. And I spent a year in Kentucky, and then came back here, but parimutuel failed. There was an oil bust about that time.

And most of the people that were in the high-end equine business were oil and gas people. They all lost their businesses. And so, parimutuel betting, the high-end equine work never really came to fruitation in Texas.

Well, can you walk me through the shift from large animal work to companion animals and share what you were seeing on the ground that signaled that change was happening there?

Well, mainly urbanization began to… First, it displaced the dairies. They just all disappeared from Harris County. And then, population growth began to break up all the big ranches that were in. There were several very large ranches in Harris County, but subdivisions, urbanization began to draw those things out and small animal medicine became more [inaudible 00:09:37]. I would say that when we came to Harris County, much of the small animal medicine was centered around dogs and that were more of working animals and around the cattle industry. And the emphasis of… On, then, dogs and cats were not family members. They were maybe companions, but they weren’t actually family members.

And I would say, with the increased urbanization and then the change in people’s attitudes from agribusiness and agricultural upbringing and generational change to an urban-type environment changed veterinary medicine to where the level of sophistication increased to the point that the mixed animal practitioner just basically disappeared.

Well, you have described a strong sense of collegiality among veterinarians. Can you give specific examples, like walking into another veterinary hospital, calling colleagues about shared clients, or even the social events like at the Harris County gatherings?

Well, when I first went to work, I would say, on the first day, the first lunch, the partner, the guy that hired me, ML Shin, took me to lunch with two or three neighboring veterinarians. And I would not say that a week did not go by that we did not have lunch with a neighboring veterinarian, a different one probably every time. And we developed, I would say, a very close network surrounding veterinarians. And then, we formed a veterinary association, the Greater Houston Large Animal Practitioners Association. And it was all mixed practice. We all had small animals practice, but we did large animals. And through that group, we began to have CE meetings. We would have picnics, and these picnics would involve real vigorous games of football and volleyball.

And we even had one of our members’ cousins die during the football game, and it interrupted it for a short period of time, but we would have hunting leases together. We would leave on hunting trips at least twice a year for several days. So, there was none of the competitiveness, you would say, among any of the neighboring practitioners. We were all friends and colleagues and knew our families. And it was just a wonderful opportunity to promote the profession among individuals.

Well, share some more of those stories from back then, including how veterinarians interacted outside of work, and maybe share a funny story about dealing with a mutual client.

Well, I guess we can talk about that for all these years. The funniest ones I can remember, all of us had a list back then of clients that owed us money, and everybody had a big long list. And some of the clients were notorious for sharing veterinarians and owing different veterinarians amounts of money. And I can remember one night that Buddy Smith, our colleague at Bayshore Animal Hospital, called ML about an individual that just called with a colicky horse, and he owed Bayshore Animal for quite a sum of money. And ML took the call from Buddy, and Buddy told him to expect a call to our answering service, which is how we took calls back then. We wore a pager to expect a call from this client, and then she owed him several thousand dollars.

And so, anyway, sure enough, within about five minutes, ML’s pager went off and mine went off, and it was this client with a colicky horse. And so, ML decided he’d take the call, and he got the client on the phone, and the client began to describe the colic, and ML would ask her every nuance of symptoms the horse was exhibiting, how long it was exhibiting. Then he went into where she lived and how to get there. And it probably took 15 or 20 minutes to gather all this information. And then, at the end, he asked her, “By the way, you owe Dr. Smith X number of dollars. Why have you not paid him?” And of course, that client automatically slammed the phone down, and that was the end of that. We don’t know who they found to.

We did eventually find out who they called, and the colic was taken care of, I think, by Matt Cooley’s group. But anyway, that was an example of probably something that would draw the board’s attention now.

Well, take me back to the moment. You and your colleagues decided to build one of the first emergency clinics in the United States and the first ER clinic for animals in Texas. And walk me through how you actually made that idea a reality.

Okay. Well, it probably all started through our close-knit group in the Greater Harris County Large Animal Practitioners Association, but mainly the veterinarians in Southeast Houston. And there were seven people. They were John Henley, Bill Shaw, Charlie Wilson, Earl Waddell, Dan Sanders, ML Shin, and myself. All of them were small animal practitioners with the exception of ML Shin and myself. We were partners in a clinic, but we both did mixed practice out of the same clinic. Bill Shaw and John Henley, I would say, were the drivers. And they may have come up with the idea. I think they did come up with the idea of a small animal practice, but we could not convince them to do large animal at the same time.

They just only wanted to do small animal. If they would’ve agreed to do large animal, they would’ve had a lot more people that would’ve come into it, but no one else besides ML and I would do it because it didn’t take care of large animals at the same time. But we agreed that we would form an emergency clinic. So, we actually went out and leased a very small shopping center in [inaudible 00:18:17] actually in Houston on Broadway and Park Place and finished it out ourselves. It took us one month. We built all the cabinets, we put in all the fixtures, ordered the equipment. I think we spent a grand sum of $3,000 and we furnished all the labor.

Oh, wow.

… and had no idea if it would work or not, but we drew straws for the first night, April 1st, 1972, and all seven of us were there. And Charlie Wilson drew the short straw to take the first call. He answered the call himself. We had one technician, and that was it. But we answered the phone call. He did Caesarean on Ms. Jordan’s puppy, little poodle, and the check bounced. So, the first night didn’t look real good, but we continued on and we operated it ourselves with only one technician till midnight, and then we were by ourselves the rest of the night. We did the treatments after midnight, collected the money, released the animal the next day, and always had to go back to the referring veterinarian. And that was the big thing that made it successful, is making sure that that veterinarian got…

Even if they weren’t a member of our clinic, we made sure that it went back to the referring veterinarian, and that caused it to grow exponentially very quickly when we began to take calls. At first, we wouldn’t take calls, but just for our seven clinics, but we realized right away that was not good for growth. And so, we expanded it. We’d take anybody’s calls and we’d send that client back to the referring veterinarian. And after one year, it had grown enough that we decided that we could turn it over to some other veterinarians that we could hire. And ML and I really needed to do this because while the five of the veterinarians were strictly small animal, ML and I were a large animal or mixed practice, so we were still taking calls every night.

For that year, the volume, by taking the small animal off of us, the volume decreased, but we were still taking calls every night, and we wanted to do everything we could to decrease our involvement that one night, even that one night a week. Because we always worked our night, ML and I did, and we never took a day off the next day. We always just worked straight through. And so, we were really anxious to try and hire somebody. So, we hired Gerald Flottmann, Richard Denny, and Mark Gassaway to come in and run the emergency clinic. And they came in, but they only worked for us about six months to a year, and we had a disagreement.

And so, we hired Mike Jacob and Terry Dobson, and they ran that emergency clinic along with a veterinarian named Mark Rubash, who was our technician at that time. He became our technician all through high school, technician all through college, came back to workforce as a veterinarian, became board-certified in emergency medicine critical care at the clinic, and still works there today.

Wow.

And Mike Jacob, for reference, this is 2026. Mike Jacobs and Terry Dobson ran it into 2024. So, we basically had the same continuity of veterinarians for 40 years.

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Oh, probably 50 to 60, I would say. Yeah, yeah-

Go ahead.

I might mention, I want to give credit, the original founders, so many of them were veterans. For instance, Earl Waddell, our first, he was our first… One of us had to be office, had to be medical director. Earl Waddell was the first medical director. He became a veterinarian after World War II. He was a Marine Carrier pilot. He served as medical director, I think only three years, and then had a heart attack and passed away. And then, so, Leland Thompson became our next medical director. He was a veteran, saw combat, drove an LTV back across the Pacific to Washington State, docked it, went to veterinary school. Charlie Wilson, Earl Waddell also was on the state board. He was also a past TVMA president. Leland Thompson was a decorated combat veteran.

Charlie Wilson went in the Navy before he became a veterinarian. A lot of the guys in that original group were of our greatest generation. I want to give them credit. Leland Thompson was the second medical director, and I was the third, and I think I was medical director about 25 years.

Wow.

And during that time, we expanded the emergency clinic to a second location in League City, and it eventually became bigger than the original location. And then, when VCA took over, we actually expanded it to a third emergency clinical, which I was national director of all three, and that was on the 1960 area. But going back to the EC, once we got it going, we would try and bring in other clinics in the area, and we would do it by establishing a value of, say, I think the first shares were $8,000 a share, and we would finance those shares for the members coming in, and the dividends paid out would finance the shares. So, they had a net-zero cost, and eventually we grew it to 32 members. And not only did we develop this great organization, but we did some things for the profession.

We established a Waddell scholarship fund through TVMA at Texas A&M for our students in emergency medicine and critical care. Well, I can remember one time, one of our veterinarians that was working for us, a young veterinarian didn’t have insurance and needed a kidney transplant, and we were able to furnish her $25,000 toward a kidney transplant.

That’s incredible.

We did a lot of, I would say, things for the community financially that probably no one ever knows about and knew about.

I love that. Well, Tom, you helped build ProVet. So, how did you identify that opportunity? How did you grow that business? And what was the process like when you decided to sell it?

Okay. Well, originally, after we had grown it to 32 members, we suddenly had… Most of the members were older, and we had a death of two or three members, and it made us cognizant, as we settled the estates of the ones that had died, we had had a bylaw where a non-veterinarian could not own a share. And so, we’re, all of a sudden, possibly stuck in a legal procurement where we’ve got three shares out there that are now owned by non-veterinarians, which didn’t bother so much except these three shares were no longer producing income, but they were receiving dividends. And we needed for everyone that owned the share to have a facility that was producing income. So, we realized, if this continued, we were going to have a problem at some point.

And each time this had happened in settling up the various estates, different complications that were really uncomfortable arose. So, we were able to buy those shares at a much greater sum than they had paid for them, back from each one of the three widows. But we decided at that point that, possibly, we should look for an outside source to buy the emergency clinic to run it and perpetuate. And we could not find an individual that would be able to handle this situation. So, some… And I can’t remember the exact circumstances, but I got in touch with NVA and they came down and looked… And that was my first experience with corporate medicine. For some reason, we had had batched some kind of publicity situation or issue with VCA.

And when they bought their first clinic in Dallas, and we didn’t contact VCA, but we did contact NVA, talk to them. And somehow in the discussion, we found out about ProVet and I found out about Bob Featherston. And I called Bob Featherston and Bob Featherston called Shane. And the next thing I know, Shane, Bob Featherston, Tad Gornell, and Barry Matthews were in my office in Houston, Texas, and they wanted to come to Texas. And I think I misstated there. I meant Pet’s Choice, Shane Kelly with Pet’s Choice. And Shane and Bob Featherston particularly convinced us that they could continue on with our philosophy. I had the first AAHA clinic in Pasadena in Deer Park, and I was convinced that… And so, therefore, I had made both ECs at AAHA clinics.

And Shane was okay with continuing that as a company policy in Texas, and he did. And he was willing to maintain the structure and the philosophy, and was interested in expanding the emergency clinic more. So, we decided to sell to Pet’s Choice, and I went to work for Pet’s Choice in M&A capacity with a guy named Chuck Hoover, who was another… He’d been two years in the submarine service before he became a veterinarian, so another of the greatest generation. And Chuck and I, for several years, grew the Pet’s Choice in Texas to around 40 clinics, and they expanded outside of Chuck’s and I was influence in Arizona, maybe 15 more clinics. And anyway, we got it up to about 60 clinics before VCA bought Pet’s Choice. And I’m sure you’re familiar with the story from then on.

Well, I knew Bob Featherston, and he lived in Tulsa at the time, and that’s how I got connected with Pet’s Choice. And I remember going up there and seeing their corporate office. They had a beautiful fish tank with some exotic fish. And Shane Kelly’s been on this podcast too. So, our listeners who are listening today, be sure to also check out the episode where I talked to Shane Kelly.

Well, Stacy, could I interrupt you? One thing that was very important, and I saw your podcast with Shane. It was very good. When we started the emergency clinic, we did one other unique thing that I think was possibly the first. We hired a surgeon, brought a gentleman named Bill Daly into our EC as a referral surgeon, and that was a really unusual situation at the time. And I don’t know of anyone else in private practice at that time that was doing that. And to do that, we had to guarantee him a base salary, which we did, but we never had to act upon it because the business always took care of it. And then, after we added the surgeon, it was so successful, we added Steve Susaneck as an internal medicine doctor.

And then, we added two cardiologists, Jenifer Lunney and Kyle Brayley, and then we had a dermatologist. They were all in-house. The surgeon, the internist, the cardiologist, the two cardiologists. And then, we had an ophthalmologist, Kohle Herrmann, come in once a week, and a dermatologist, Bill McDougall, come in once a week. So, we had a full house of referral veterinarians in the daytime, in addition to the emergency clinic at night.

Mm-hmm. Well, Tom, would you paint a picture of Texas in the early 1980s during the boom years, including what life looked like for veterinarians who owned planes and ranches and even savings and loans?

Stacy, could you repeat that? For some reason, it didn’t come through.

Would you paint a picture of Texas in the early 1980s during the boom years, including what life looked like for veterinarians who owned planes, ranches, and even savings and loans?

Oh, yes, okay. Well, veterinary medicine, I’d say, in the early ’80s was becoming very lucrative. And I would say, the transition from an agribusiness environment, rural environment to an urban environment, the pet becoming more of a family member, veterinarians were doing quite well and veterinarians always being entrepreneurial. And I was in partners with a very entrepreneurial veterinarian, ML Shin, they were always looking for different ways to start businesses. I remember we had car washes, we had a skateboard park, but he started a savings and loan, and a very lucrative savings loan, and one that became quite famous, unfortunately, but savings and loans were growing in Texas. At that time, there were hundreds, hundreds of them.

They were probably, I would say, in home finance, they took up a third of the banking business in Texas. And for instance, ML, he had ranches, he had planes, he had boats. He never enjoyed them because he was always working so hard, but there was a monetary crash of all the savings and loans in the early ’80s that just wiped out. Oh, even if you weren’t involved in the banking business personally, it affected your business so much that it affected the veterinary industry throughout. And so, that was a little hiccup in the road, not only for veterinarians, but for almost, universally, any type of business for four or five years. There were so many repossessions of real estate homes, businesses that it took years to recover.

Well, when the oil economy collapsed, how did that downturn affect your career, and then what led you to retire and move to a ranch in Colorado?

Well, I had sold my clinic in Deer Park to another colleague down the road, Dale Lonsford, who still owns that clinic to this day. It’s been 50 years. He became president of TVMA and been very active in our EC all these years. And we bought a 120,000-acre ranch in Colorado and ran it for four years. I was the managing partner. I owned it in conjunction with 11 other people, but I was the managing partner. And actually, on site, did much of the physical work that it required. And I think I came back to Texas after… We had an opportunity to sell it and cash out. And I came back to Texas and was able to lease 12,000 acres in Harris County and, say, continue the ranching tradition, which my family has continued to this day.

And my son, Wes, he’d taken over part of it several years ago and he took over the last of it this year. And we have a grandson involved in the ranching business also, but we came back to Texas. And at that time, I think the… Earl Waddell that had passed away, Leland Thompson, the second manager of the emergency clinic had decided to move to Alabama. So, they recruited me to become medical director of the emergency clinic, and I did so, and it stayed on until, I think, for about 25 years.

Tom, what has been the most surprising thing to you during the time that you were involved in the veterinary profession?

The most change, would you say? Did you say-

What’s been the most surprising thing to you in the veterinary profession?

Okay. Well, I think, I would say, the change from a male-dominated profession to a female-dominated profession would be the most major change that I have seen.

Were you anticipating that change?

I was not. When my generation, almost all the veterinarians came from a rural background, or if they weren’t actually from an actual rural background, they were only one generation removed. And now, I would say, most people in veterinary school come from an urban background or they’re three or four generations removed from agriculture.

What does your crystal ball say about the future of the veterinary profession? What do you think the future’s going to look like?

I think the future is bright for veterinary medicine, the growth is just unbelievable. With the increased medical sophistication in the profession and the increased acceptance of the pet as a member of the family, I don’t see anything that is going to keep the profession from continuing to grow. The addition of corporate medicine has been huge. I probably… I would say, maybe the addition of corporate medicine may have been the number one factor in the growth of veterinary medicine, and I don’t see that changing either.

Well, successful people have habits that help them to be successful. Tom, what are a few of your daily habits that you believe have helped you achieve success along the way?

Well, I would say that I have been blessed, for some reason, with the ability to wake up refreshed at 4:00 every morning. The things I do every morning require quite a bit of time before I go into work. And the first thing is daily communication with my Lord and Savior. And after I do that, I have to have some sort of physical workout, and as long as my body’s held up, I’ve been able to do that. And I think, 11 years, I did a Navy SEAL [inaudible 00:46:20] program, and I’ve always been able to get into the clinic by about 7:00. And I’m able to treat patients, look at my records, get ready to go. By the time the clinic opens at 8:00, start seeing clients at 9:00. I’m comfortable working every day till 7:00 and still feel untired. So, I’ve been blessed with that.

That’s impressive. So, careers have ups and downs. There’s highs, there’s lows, there’s challenges along the way. What would you say has been the biggest challenge that you’ve encountered throughout your career?

Oh, the number one challenge I ever ran into when we started the emergency clinic was convincing the members that it needed to be treated as a business, that we needed to increase the quality of care from a band-aid-type of emergency service to a full-service emergency clinic. The initial effort, when it was first put in, was to get it through the night, then send it to the referring clinic the next day, and that clinic got to work that case up and get the revenue from it. I was convinced from the get-go that we needed to work the case up at the emergency clinic as much as possible from a business perspective and from an ethical perspective.

And that was a difficult argument for a lot of practitioners, giving up the income from that case or having a fear of giving up the income from that case, and allowing that income to be transferred to the emergency clinic. Once we did that, the emergency clinic exploded overnight, and financially, became very lucrative and very successful, and grew even more. And the amount of dividends the member clinics received back more than compensating for any loss of income they received from those cases not being worked up by them.

Mm-hmm. Well, Tom, what advice would you give the younger version of yourself and what message or principle do you wish you could teach everyone listening to our podcast?

Well, I would say, for a new vet practitioner, the first practice you go to work for is going to most likely be the determining factor that shapes the rest of your practice career. And so, I would encourage any young person to find the highest-quality practice with the highest ethical standards that you can find to go to work for.

That’s great advice. Well, Tom, some of our guests say they’ve had a key book they read that helped them along the way. Do you have a key book in your life that’s impacted you the most?

I would have to say, Jesus Christ would be the number one influence that’s affected me in my life. And that’s what I’d like to base my life on and that would be my advice to any young practitioner.

Well, Tom, you’ve got the mic. What is one thing that you want to share with our listeners of The People of Animal Health Podcast before you drop the mic today?

I would have to say that veterinary medicine is a great profession. I’ve really never had a day’s work since I have been a veterinarian. It has always been interesting and fun. And I also have never lost my love of the cattle business, which I’m also still in.

Well, Tom, thank you for being my guest today on The People of Animal Health Podcast. Wes, thank you for being here as well and for helping us get this set up. And Wes, I’m going to have you on my podcast here soon. So, thank you, Wes and Tom, for both being here. And Wes, before we go, is there anything that you would like to share about your dad?

Sure, Stacy. Thank you for the time today. Appreciate you having us both on. Looking forward to our call later, but I do have to say a few comments about my dad. He’s incredibly humble and he doesn’t like to take a lot of the credit for himself. But the things that he’s achieved, he’s understated a lot of the achievements he’s made, contributions to the industry that he’s made, the impact he’s made on people’s lives that I’ve seen in my entire life and my entire career, that he’s made on people’s lives within the industry, has been just beyond count. So, once again, just, I’m grateful and blessed to have been exposed to the industry through him and very proud of the things he’s done.

Well, thank you, Wes. Tom, you have accomplished some incredible things. I love the stories that you shared with us today. And Wes, you’ve accomplished so much too. I look forward to hearing you tell your story. And thank you again, both Wes and Tom, for being here today.

Thank you, Stacy.

Thank you. We enjoyed it.