Episode #13 – Dr. David Haworth

Adapting in the Face of Adversity
Dr. Haworth represents the perfect case study for moving from practice to industry, culminating in a decorated career rooted in the love of animals.

Exploring the Career of Dr. David Haworth-David is here to talk about his transition from private veterinary practice to working for a major pharmaceutical company to becoming CEO of a non-profit organization and then to a start-up Animal Health Company

 

Transcript

Speaker 1:
Welcome to The People of Animal Health Podcast. The host of our podcast is Stacy Pursell. Stacy is the leading executive recruiter for the animal health and veterinary industries. She’s the founder of Therio Partners and The VET Recruiter. Stacy has placed more professionals and key positions within the animal health and veterinary industries than any executive search professional.

Speaker 1:
And along the way, Stacy has built relationships with some outstanding people who are doing incredible things to make a difference. The People of Animal Health Podcast features industry leaders and trailblazers who have made a significant impact or are making an impact in the animal health and veterinary industries. Stacy chats with them to learn more about their lives, their careers, and the unique and interesting things that they have done to contribute to the animal health or veterinary industry. She is here to share their stories with you. Now, here’s the host of our podcast, Stacy Pursell.

Stacy Pursell:
Hello everyone, and welcome to The People of Animal Health Podcast. On today’s show, we are talking with Dr. David Haworth, a veterinarian and PhD who is president and co-founder of Vidium Animal Health, a startup genomics diagnostic company founded inside The Translational Genomics Research Institute, TGen, in Phoenix. He also serves as a strategic consultant to companies and investors in the animal health and wellness space. He is the former President of PetSmart Charities in the US and Canada, the largest funder of animal welfare in North America and former President and CEO of Morris Animal Foundation, the largest non-profit funder of veterinary medical research in the world.

Stacy Pursell:
Prior to those roles, he spent 11 years at Pfizer Animal Health, now Zoetis in various roles, including director of global alliances within the business development group and director of clinical development within R&D. Before starting his corporate journey, he was an associate veterinarian at a small animal and emergency clinic in Washington State. Dr. Haworth received his Bachelor of Science in biology from the College of William & Mary and Doctor of Veterinary Medicine and Doctor of Philosophy from Colorado State University. He also completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Colorado State University’s Flint Animal Cancer Center.

Stacy Pursell:
David, his wife, Claudia, and their golden retriever, Bridger, split their time between Denver, Phoenix, and Bozeman, and occasionally get to see their two grown children. Welcome onto, The People of Animal Health Podcast. And how are you, David?

Dr. David Haworth:
I’m terrific, Stacy. Thanks so much. It’s always odd to hear your own bio read it back to you, but I appreciate the intro very much.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, David, we’re so glad to have you as our guest today. And thank you for being here. And David, I want to get started by noting that you have had tremendous success at this point in your career, but I’d love to start off at the bottom and the very beginning of your career. What was your life like growing up and where did you grow up?

Dr. David Haworth:
Well, certainly that’s kind and generous of you to say that I’ve had some success. And I think, like most people stand on the shoulders of giants of which we have lots of them in the animal health industry. To answer your question, I grew up in Tallahassee, Florida. I had a great idyllic childhood. My parents were professors of economics, both of them, in their ’70s at Florida State University. So I kind of grew up in the middle of a big time college football. And always understood with all the differences and the passions that are associated with college football.

Dr. David Haworth:
I was the middle child, and by far the least intelligent of all the three children in our family. And so animals and athletics were the way I made it through my childhood getting to play with lots of the cats and dogs around the neighborhood and then swimming almost all of the time.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, that’s awesome. When did you first figure out what you wanted to do professionally?

Dr. David Haworth:
I always loved biology. I loved figuring out the way things worked. It felt like I was getting secret instruction manuals, finding out how chlorophyll worked in plants and finding out what cells were and how they worked in the body. And then I absolutely loved animals. I just like to be around them. I felt much more comfortable and at ease. And so I think that the first time I told my parents, I wanted to be a veterinarian I was four. But as I went through junior high school and high school and started to find out that I enjoyed biology so much that I was okay at it, then it became more and more of a real thing.

Dr. David Haworth:
And then in college, all my friends, at a relatively small college at William & Mary, all of the friends who were in the bio area, all were going to go into medical school and it felt pretty good to be the one person who was going to go into veterinary school because that was what I wanted to do. Now, of course I couldn’t go right away after undergrad. I did have to take a couple of years while my wife was in law school in order to get my grades back up because I really enjoyed college.

Stacy Pursell:
So you had that intellectual curiosity as a young child and biology was your interest. Well, tell us a story of your early career. How did you get started in the veterinary profession?

Dr. David Haworth:
Well, in my bio, it said that as I got into that school, I realized pretty quickly that I was really curious and I wanted to learn more and I wanted to do more. So I enrolled and was lucky to surrounded by a lot of great people at Colorado State University and their combined degree program. Ended up having both the DVM and the PhD. And then while I was still in vet school, I was doing a postdoctoral fellowship for a guy named Steve Withrow, who is pretty accomplished in veterinary cancer circles.

Dr. David Haworth:
And I thought I was going to be an academic. I thought, we could live in Fort Collins for the rest of our lives, raise our kids there and it was going to be idyllic and wonderful, but two things happened in that tail end of my seven or eight years at Colorado State. The first thing was that the National Institutes of Health decided that they didn’t want to fund my grant applications that I thought were for sure going to be funded. And so I didn’t have any soft funding. And then the second thing, which I think probably was more impactful was I started getting really afraid that I was never going to be a real veterinarian.

Dr. David Haworth:
And if you ask me to define what a real veterinarian was, I probably could not have articulated it then and probably would do a poor job today, but it really was, are you going to be able to talk to a producer at their language, or are you going to be able to stand in a clinic with a family having to make a hard decision and help them through that? Are you going to be the person that is able to handle the obese golden retriever who needs a hysterectomy and is pregnant at the time? Can you do that? And so I decided at one point, I need to go out and be in practice.

Dr. David Haworth:
And so talking to my faculty members who had now, by that point, I’d been at Colorado State for a really long time, getting some advice, finding a friend of a friend who needed an associate veterinarian in Spokane, Washington. I jumped on the chance. The interview, you being your world. I flew go up to Spokane and he said, “Do you like Neil young because I’ve got some concert tickets for it tonight?” So I went to the clinic, saw the clinic, he was going to buy another clinic. I was going to take over that one. I figured that every afternoon at five o’clock or so we’d kick back, have some beer and pizza and talk about the interesting cases. And then on the weekends, we’d go see Neil Young concerts.

Dr. David Haworth:
It did not work out that way. Like most practices he was struggling. We ended up not buying that other practice. So there were two of us in an 800 square foot practice nestled between a Chinese restaurant and a dry cleaner and a strip mall in Spokane and the economics were tough. I loved my patients and I loved my clients, but living in that space was very difficult. And so that was when I started thinking, maybe I need to go into corporate industry. I certainly understood and appreciated the business aspect of things. So I started sending out a tone resumes. And by pure luck, and it really was lucky, that I ended up getting an entry-level position at Pfizer Animal Health.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, David, talk about that transition. How was that going from practice into industry? And so you sent out those applications, those resumes. You got a job with the Pfizer Animal Health, and then what happened next?

Dr. David Haworth:
I moved from Spokane to Groton Connecticut. I started the extraordinary learning path that anybody new in a corporate organization starts to learn where you never get things done by yourself. You only can work through teams. Pfizer at the time, and I think Zoetis still is a highly matrixed organization. So most of the time you’re trying to lead with influence instead of leading with authority. You can’t just tell people to go do something because, “I’m the boss and I’m telling you.” You have to convince them that this is the right way to get groups moving in the same direction.

Dr. David Haworth:
And to be honest, Stacy, I loved it. I loved that as much as I loved my clients and patients when I was in practice. Learning how to work with teams of individuals, many of whom had highly diverse backgrounds, many of whom didn’t have pets, didn’t really even like pets, but we were able to find the different arguments about why we should move a project forward and coordinate efforts and get the things together that needed to be gotten together in order to make the projects inside these large corporations move forward, which in aggregate makes up the business.

Dr. David Haworth:
And I would say for the first five years or so of that environment, it was a learning curve every day. And I was blessed to be around a whole lot of wonderful people, mentors, peers, people who we could share learnings with and who would be willing to cut me some slack and teach me the way things were supposed to work.

Stacy Pursell:
I’m curious, obviously Pfizer being a pharmaceutical company and coming from clinical practice, talk about the differences, working as a veterinarian in clinical practice, working as a veterinarian within Pfizer. Talk about those differences, if you will.

Dr. David Haworth:
Yeah. Great questions. And I think there are three big buckets when I think about that. The first one is lifestyle. Your hours when you’re working in a big corporation, you usually have pretty regular hours, but that was an age of travel. Pfizer was spread out over multiple institutions, over multiple states. And so I learned how to travel. And my mother used to tell us all the time that relationships are built face-to-face. And so as ironic as it is in the age of COVID, to me, one of the defining parts of my career was that I was always willing to say, “You know what? That sounds like we need to have a conversation. Let me get on a plane and I’ll come to you. And let’s meet. Let’s form a relationship.”

Dr. David Haworth:
And then the second big bucket was the metrics of success. When you’re in practice, metrics of success are medical outcomes and revenues. Are you able to sell what you’re doing to a specific client, whereas when you’re in a corporation, the metrics of success are very different. Are you able to create alliances? Are you able to move projects forward? Are you able to kill projects when they should be killed? Are you able to sit in a meeting for a long period of time and then be able to stay present, stay focused and bring some synopsis to it so that people feel as though their time was well spent? And how are you able to deliver your messages competently and succinctly?

Dr. David Haworth:
I mean, I think all of those are pretty different, but they’re all learnable skills. And I always tell young veterinarians that there’s nothing that’s going on there that you can’t learn. And then I think the third thing is what I would call non-veterinary knowledge that needs to be generated. So in veterinary practice, you need to become adept at billing systems, practice management systems. All those things which go into making a productive practice. In corporations, if you don’t know accounting, at least to the level that you can read a profit and loss statement, you’re at a disadvantage. And so you need to learn that secondary knowledge to a fairly reasonable level. And so all of that was really what went into me growing in those early parts of my career.

Stacy Pursell:
How did you learn those skills, David? How did you learn the accounting and how to manage the P&L?

Dr. David Haworth:
It’s one of those places, Stacy, that I think Pfizer did better than 90% of other companies. If you were a young professional at Pfizer in those years, and you asked, you raised your hand and said, “This is an area that I don’t understand very well. You had resources and a cultural willingness to teach, sometimes internal training, sometimes on the job training, and sometimes externally trained, but there was always that space. And I always found that they had a high appetite for letting their junior professionals step into some of those roles.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, tell us about the rest of your story. So you went to Pfizer and you got to do all these new things and learn new skills, then before working in a clinic. And then what? Where did you go after Pfizer?

Dr. David Haworth:
well at Pfizer, I actually have two big pieces of the career. I spent seven years in research and development. And mostly, first starting at the bench and then leading projects and then leading groups of projects. And I have to say that a lot of that was just because Pfizer at that time was in a high acquisition mode, if you remember. We were picking up companies left and right and moving things. There was a lot of disruption. And since we would lose people, people who would just tap out, go to the human side, do something else.

Dr. David Haworth:
And when that happened, someone would look around and say, “Well, who’s going to lead the project. We just lost the project leader. [inaudible 00:15:48] was still standing there and he keeps talking. So why don’t we give him that responsibility?” So I was able to get up to be a director of clinical development in the R&D unit. And what I was finding in those last few years there was I really loved the business, almost as much as I liked the science. And in fact, sometimes the science would get a little slow for me and the business side of things really was exciting.

Dr. David Haworth:
And so I made a career change in 2007 to the business development team where I got to be responsible in the US for our relationships with universities, our relationships with nonprofits. And then you had to do a lot of the mergers and acquisition company evaluations. So I would come in from the technical side and usually would be partnered with a business professional who could look at the business aspect, but they were always very kind and generous and teaching me about, “This is the way you evaluate a company. And this is how you look at their finances. This is how you learn about that.”

Dr. David Haworth:
And so I thought that that was where I was going to be. I enjoyed it. I loved flying around, finding out about other animal health companies, seeing good ideas that they were actually able to execute much better than a big company like ours would be able to. And then I had an opportunity with one of the nonprofits that I worked with, which was Morris Animal Foundation. And Morris was going through a transition themselves, but they were also just about to start what was, at the time, and we think still is the largest research study that’s ever happened in veterinary medicine.

Dr. David Haworth:
So that was the Golden Retriever Lifetime Study. I had some experience with clinical development building these outcome-based studies. And so they had asked me, and I took the opportunity to be president and CEO. And that was another lesson too, Stacy, [inaudible 00:17:40]. And I think I might even send to you at the time, if you spend all your career asking me for more responsibility and someone’s willing to give you a president, CEO title, you either have to take that opportunity or sit down and shut up. And I really wasn’t ready to shut up at the time.

Dr. David Haworth:
So spent five years, wonderful years at Morris. Really got to understand what it was like to be a chief executive. Had lots of responsibilities. Learned how to deal with a board. And I think nonprofit board governance is a fascinating and always interesting way to govern a business, but we made a lot of impact and I think we funded a lot of good science. And I think that the world is bit better for that. It also brought us back to Colorado, which was a nice homecoming for us.

Stacy Pursell:
David, how was that different going from a for-profit organization like Pfizer and then going to work for a nonprofit? Tell us about the differences there.

Dr. David Haworth:
I think there are a lot fewer than many people would argue that there are. I think that at the end of the day, a nonprofit corporation still needs to be a corporation. You still need to do things efficiently. You still need to watch your expenses and you still need to worry about revenues. In that case, they happen to be donations instead of sales, but they’re still revenues. And in order to make the impact that you want to be able to make, or your organization claims that it wants to make, you need to be an efficient group of human beings working towards the same goal.

Dr. David Haworth:
I think the biggest difference that I would point to is, again, it’s a metric of success. In a for-profit company, it’s financial return to your shareholders, whereas in a nonprofit company, it’s movement towards the end goal of the mission. And once you clearly defined your mission, are you making progress towards that mission? And if you can say definitively at the end of the year, “yes, we are. And we’re still financially solvent and we have good plans on being financially solvent next year as well.” Then you’re returning good value to your participants, your stakeholders in this case.

Stacy Pursell:
And then you went from Morris Animal Foundation to PetSmart, and you continued your journey in the nonprofit space. Tell us about that transition.

Dr. David Haworth:
Yeah, that’s right, Stacy. So after leaving Morris, I really wondered if I wanted to go back into the nonprofit space, but PetSmart almost offered the best of all worlds. I was very comfortable in large organizations. The pet retail space was something that I felt was really exciting because I was going to be able to learn a whole bunch of new skills and new technologies, new approaches, because I hadn’t ever actually dealt primarily with the pet owner before.

Dr. David Haworth:
And PetSmart Charities was a much larger organization than Morris Animal Foundation. On a relative scale, Morris Animal Foundation gives away about $15 million a year in grants, whereas PetSmart gives between 70 and $80 million a year in grants. And so it allowed me to not only stay in nonprofits, and I think do some lot of the work, but we also got to learn as a senior leader within the PetSmart organization, I got to learn a lot more about how the retail organizations approach this space and where is the marketing end and the good work begin. How do you think about that? And also in a space that was very dynamic, it still is, of moving from in-stores to online.

Dr. David Haworth:
And so I was there during the Chewy acquisition. I was there throughout that phase of PetSmart’s time. And I would say it was wonderful. That also got us an opportunity to move to Phoenix, which I will always say is one of the loveliest places to live. Not exactly home for us, but it is a absolutely lovely place to live.

Stacy Pursell:
What was the biggest thing that you learned working in the nonprofit world?

Dr. David Haworth:
I think I learned that emotions drive us. I think when we’re in the for-profit world, we tend to shy away from that. And I remembered living for 11 years at Pfizer thinking, the real reason that people want to buy this drug is not because it’s more efficacious or it is a little safer than the competitor. They want to buy it because they love their pet, or they love their lifestyle as a producer and they want these animals to live the best lives that they can.

Dr. David Haworth:
And I think getting comfortable with the idea that our relationship with animals is a purely, a deeply emotional one was something that I had permission to do in the non-profit space. And so getting comfortable with those emotions was I think a really important thing that I think it’s benefited me since then as well. Recognizing that emotions drive us, they can also drive us out of control, but if you can couple the power of emotions with some discipline of thought, I think it’s a real winning combination.

Stacy Pursell:
Yeah. Emotions do drive a lot of our decisions. So you left PetSmart and where did you go next?

Dr. David Haworth:
So I was consulting for a little bit, and actually loved that. I thought for a period of time that I would just consult. We are blessed as a sector of the economy that there’s a lot of money coming into this space. And a lot of investors who are very interested in the macro trends and the dynamics. And so being able to talk to financial advisors, to investment management people, investors themselves has always been a real fun thing for me because I love the way that they look at an industry and at a profession.

Dr. David Haworth:
And so that was going to be my, I guess my retirement plan. But one of the consultancies was an old friend who currently leads, TGen, The Translational Genomics Research Institute in Phoenix. And he for a long time, he’s a world-class genomicist, Dr. Jeff Trent. And he was the chief scientific officer for the Human Genome Project back with Francis Collins back in the late ’90s. And Jeff realized that there was a real opportunity in the government academic research nonprofit overlap space. And that’s where he started TGen. But he also was very, was and is fascinated by comparative oncology, by the similarities and differences between dogs, canine cancer and human cancer.

Dr. David Haworth:
And they approached me about starting a genomic diagnostic company and using the technology that TGen has, the extraordinary knowledge and cutting edge information that they have in order to benefit pets with cancer, a foundation medicine [inaudible 00:25:32] health. And so the first thing I said was, “Jeff, I would love to help you. Happy to talk about business plans, but I have to tell you, I’m not a startup guy. I mean, I’ve worked for really big companies.”

Dr. David Haworth:
And then the second thing was, “We’re going to need some money to do this. We need some investors.” And Jeff, to his credit, took care of much of that. We lined up a number of investor conversations. We’ve got one particular investor who’s got a lot of resources and has been one of the, just a wonderful joyous person to work with in terms of managing this early seed stage. And we were able to launch a product, a genomic diagnostic called SearchLight DNA, where we look at the 120 most important genes, all the different kinds of mutations that can be done. And we can do that in, well, just about any kind of biopsy, as long as we, whether it’s a fine needle or a fusion or it’s a part of a biopsy.

Dr. David Haworth:
So we’ve been able to build this wonderful little company. We’ve got about 15 of us now and we’re selling our tests surprisingly well. And we’ve really been able to take a lot of the lessons that I’ve learned from the other companies that I’ve worked with and put them into practice here. The biggest of which, Stacy, without you asking, is culture. Being able to be very intentional about having a caring, safe, entrepreneurial culture where science dictates all of our decisions is just a joy. We have a great team. We work really well together and we’re doing some pretty fun things.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, you worked for the largest company in the animal health industry, Pfizer, which is now Zoetis, and now you’re working for a startup company. What have you learned?

Dr. David Haworth:
I think it might be smallest.

Stacy Pursell:
So the biggest animal health company to the smallest startup company, what have you learned from being a part of a startup company?

Dr. David Haworth:
I think it is that small focused groups of people can accomplish tremendous things. The metaphors are so easy between turning an aircraft carrier and a little speed boats, if the reason that you show up to work every day is to make an impact, being in that small entrepreneurial world or being able to make an impact, make the micro pivots that all small businesses have to be making constantly in order to respond or direct the creation of new things, then there’s no better place for it.

Dr. David Haworth:
The downside of course is that there’s also not nearly the security that you might find in a larger organization. But to be honest, I mean, having spent quite a lot of time in large organizations, I can’t remember feeling tremendously secure. I always thought that you do your best, you make your good choices. Sometimes those choices don’t pan out and no one’s guaranteed you a job. So the working in this small startup space has been very fun. And to be clear, we also have a little caveat in that we are a small startup, but we are still fully incubated within TGen. So I have some significantly unfair advantages out there. I could focus really on our products and our technical staff, our administrative stuff sometimes gets taken care of by the mothership.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, I think job security is a myth. And sometimes people will say to me, going to a small startup company is risky, but then I look at all the mergers and acquisitions that we’ve had over the years throughout the industry. There was one last year where one big company bought another big company and there were over 900 people let go. So there’s not always the job security even working at one of the larger companies. But couple of things you said there, you said, small groups of people can make a big impact or can get a lot of things done. And then you also talked about making an impact. I think sometimes working in a smaller company, you have more control over the impact with a fewer number of people.

Stacy Pursell:
But I know that you have certainly, David, made an impact over the course of your career in all these different positions that you’ve talked about. I’m curious, and I know you still have a lot of career left, but I’m curious, looking back, when did you first feel like you were truly beginning to gain traction with your career? Was there ever a point in time when you felt that way?

Dr. David Haworth:
I still wonder sometimes whether I’m making any traction in my career, Stacy, but I think to answer your question, I think much of the culture that we had at Pfizer Animal Health in the 2000s was very positive. I don’t mean to make it out to a Shangri-La, clearly, we had friction and we had travel and we had lots of disruptive growth that was going on. But the thing about that space is that it normalized success. It felt normal to have large projects well-funded moving forward in a direction. You never felt a surprise when you met a milestone. In fact, you were supposed to meet your milestones. That’s what you did. And if you could give a good product, it would get sold.

Dr. David Haworth:
And it was such a well-run organization operationally, that you would be able to learn about finance from true financial experts who were well-versed in the field. You would be able to talk to a marketer and realize, only after the fact that you were talking to one of the top five marketers in animal health. That this is the same group that launched [inaudible 00:32:18] in the ’90s and really knew a lot about how to get messages across. And the way that they could frame things taught us so much. And so while I was there, I think there was a few overnight trips to New York City where I was like, “Wow. So this is what a career feels like. Okay. I kind of like that. That feels good.”

Stacy Pursell:
Well, I know that some successful people, or many successful people have some low points in their career and then they have some high points. Walk us through the highest high and the lowest low point of your career.

Dr. David Haworth:
Wow. I struggle sometimes with low points only because it’s not that I ignore them, it’s that, I always have felt that it’s a little disingenuous to lament a low point when you are happy with where you are because there’s no way, of course, you could have gotten here having not gone through that space. I think one of the high points was certainly getting the job at Morris Animal Foundation. I had been a Morris Animal Foundation scholar when I was in veterinary school. I had always looked up to and appreciated their mission of funding research, funding the very best research. The way that they went about funding that research, I loved the operations of it. And I loved the freedom that the research that was being funded by them was, one could call it esoteric, but it really was basic research in many cases.

Dr. David Haworth:
And so that was so fundamental to be able to take that and then make it applied. And so that was a wonderful time. Looking back on it, it also meant that I was moving my children from a great place where we lived in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Moving my wife from a good career that she was doing and we were all moving back to Colorado. They have thrived? They are great, but I also recognize the price that they had to pay for that great career moment for me. I would also say, being asked to resign from Morris Animal Foundation was also probably one of the low, was probably the lowest of the low points.

Dr. David Haworth:
I think at that point it was, I’m sure the board had all their good reasons. I know I did fine afterwards, but I think that first moment, and Stacy, you and I probably spoke several times during that time period. You’re not sure. You think you have all these relationships and friendships, frankly, throughout the industry. You think you’ll be okay, but you’re really not sure. There were a number of conversations that were, “Well, If you’d like to meet with me, I’d love to. If you’d like to meet with the CEO of Morris Animal Foundation, I can get you their name.”

Dr. David Haworth:
But I will say this about our profession, while extraordinarily large, it is also extraordinarily small. And we share so many similar value systems and these touchstones. I like to remind veterinarians that at some point every veterinarian you met thought to themselves, “Well, I guess I do love animals. And I guess I would like to spend a career helping them.” And every one of us has that same touchstone, no matter how we look at the world today. So I think, again, that was a pretty rough patch trying to figure out what our next step was going to be. But by that same token, it was so wonderful the way our friends and our colleagues and the entire profession really was like, “Oh, that’s fine. We’ve got lots of more opportunities.” And I think really ours is a profession of opportunities.

Stacy Pursell:
What did you learn from that experience?

Dr. David Haworth:
Which one? The high one or the low one?

Stacy Pursell:
The low one. Leaving Morris Animal Foundation. I know that was a tough time for you. What was the biggest takeaway that you learned from that?

Dr. David Haworth:
Well Stacy, I always try to get the right lessons. I think one of the interesting things about challenging times in your life is that it’s fairly easy to take the wrong lessons out of them. You could certainly take the lesson. Well, people are jerks and they’ll always take advantage of you if you can. That was never the lesson that I took from that experience. I think that the lesson was that people can’t read your mind. They don’t know your intentions. You need to be explicit about those intentions if it’s important. You need to slow down long enough to listen and not just listen to people’s words or arguments, but listen to their worldviews and listen for their values.

Dr. David Haworth:
I’d like to say in my youth and enthusiasm, I probably blew past that and made a million mistakes along the way. So I think there’s a fair degree of humility that came with that which is always a good lesson. And I also think that I learned a little bit about the transience of our professional careers, as you said it earlier, that job security is a myth no matter where you are on the spectrum. You’re always reporting to someone. And if you want to make an impact, there is a slow game to be played. But I’ve also learned about myself that I’m not very good at the slow game. I’m much better at trying to make immediate or short-term impacts and you tie enough good positive short-term impacts together and you will have some positive long-term impacts.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, and something that I took away from that too is that, that setback did not keep you from moving forward in your career because you mentioned how PetSmart, you were leading a larger organization. So you had incredible opportunities after the low point in your career.

Dr. David Haworth:
Well, I think almost everyone does. And again, this is that place where you say, “Well, if I had not had the low point with Morris Animal Foundation, would I have been able to take the role that I had at PetSmart?” Obviously, probably not. It wasn’t an obvious switch to go from Morris Animal Foundation to PetSmart Charities. And so it took some searching and finding to be able to connect those dots. And then for that matter, would I be able to be in the role that I am now, where I wake up every morning excited about what we’re doing and excited about what the day can bring? Probably not. So I am not a believer in predestination, but I do think that if you’re happy with where you are, it’s awfully hard to devalue all of the experiences and totality.

Stacy Pursell:
Yeah. And sometimes if those things don’t happen, then you can miss out on great opportunities.

Dr. David Haworth:
For sure. For sure. And I think there’s also, we’ve been extraordinarily fortunate. I’ve always been able to be pretty flexible about where we lived and the deep relationships that we have, I have been able to carry from one place to another as we’ve moved around the country and been able to live in eight different states and 17 houses in the last 30 years. But I would also argue, I’m a little tired of that. It’d be nice to settle for a little while.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, I think you hit on a really important point there, and that’s flexibility because I’ve always said that it can be a career limiting move when somebody is wanting to advance in their career and go onto those greater opportunities, but they’re unwilling to relocate. And you said 17 houses in eight states. And you mentioned how that impacted your family. And David, I know you have a very supportive family. You have to have a very supportive family to move that many times. Do you mind sharing a little bit about your family and how that impacted them?

Dr. David Haworth:
Unfortunately, you probably don’t have enough time for me to talk about my family as well. I already mentioned my parents and my brother and sister, they are great. It’s actually, it turns out as we’re recording this, Stacy, it’s my father’s 84th birthday. So I got to have a long call with him this morning. He’s playing golf on the Oregon Coast. My wife of 30 years, Claudia, is an attorney by training. She’s a force of nature and just wonderful support. When we moved to the third state, after she had completed the bar here in Colorado, she looked and said, “If you want me to continue being a lawyer, you’re going to have to stop moving states.” To which, I was working at Pfizer. And I said, “I don’t know if I can promise that.” And she said, “Okay, so I’m going to go into fundraising for nonprofits at this point. So I don’t have to pass the bar exam every time we move.”

Dr. David Haworth:
We’ve got two grown kids. My son is a wilderness firefighter and search and rescue specialist based in Bozeman, Montana. He is that cool. He’s that guy you just really like to have around, whenever things start going sideways. He’s wonderful. He’s empathic. He’s strong as an ox and he cares deeply about everyone around him. And my daughter is equally amazing and lives in Washington, DC and is in political campaigns. She’s at 24 now in her seventh national level political campaign as a senior staffer now where she runs digital organizing campaigns. So they’re all a lot to be proud of. I would tell you also, say all that with the caveat that most of my professional career, I was flying over 150,000 miles a year. So Claudia gets all the credit for how cool my kids turned out to be. I just get to talk about them.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, I know your wife, Claudia. She is a beautiful person on the inside and out and super smart. You have such a great family. And I know that was not, we weren’t going to… I didn’t tell you upfront we were going to talk about your family, but I know you have such a great family. So I like to hear about them. Well, David, I know-

Dr. David Haworth:
It’s the only thing, I think you’re allowed to brag on. Stacy, I’d say it’s the only thing you’re allowed to brag on.

Stacy Pursell:
So David, how have you seen the animal health industry change over the years?

Dr. David Haworth:
It’s fun, Stacy. It’s an interesting question because it’s almost schizophrenic in the answer. I think it’s easy to say we’ve consolidated. And I remember even when I was at Pfizer, I used to have a slide that had the 36 real animal health companies of the early ’90s that had consolidated down to the big eight. And we had said at the time, “I don’t really don’t think there’s going to be much more consolidation because they’re just too big already.” And now of course, we’re down to four in the pharma industry.

Dr. David Haworth:
The thing that strikes me juxtapose to that is, we’re still so small. Yes, there are new people coming into the space all the time, and yes, there’re some really exciting, innovative, new things that are going on, but I still go to conferences and I see the same people and it’s always positive. Some of my greatest friendships have been sustained by five times a year at different conferences and getting to go out for a meal or sharing a coffee and catching back up again. And so I think I’ve seen it change in that it’s getting bigger. I think that probably the biggest change to point to is that we are now attracting real money. There are multi-billion dollar companies who are saying not just, “Hmm, that’s an interesting space,” but, “How do I get into that space? And how can I now compete with these [BIMAS 00:45:11] that are out there?”

Dr. David Haworth:
And the answer is there’s lots of smaller companies coming up all the time. I mean, there is certainly the consolidation in the practices, but there’s also innovative technologies that are popping up all the time. And sometimes they make sense to partner with a larger organization that’s already in animal health. Sometimes they don’t. And there’s great value that can be created just by little companies all the time. So I’d say that’s where I’ve seen it mostly change. Somebody pointed out to me that the suits have gotten much more expensive at VMX and Western States Veterinary Conference as we watch some of these new investors come in.

Stacy Pursell:
Yes. There is a lot of money pouring into the industry and that’s good for everyone. That’s good for the pet owners, that’s good for the people. There’re so many opportunities out there right now in this industry. So what does your crystal ball say about the future of the animal health industry?

Dr. David Haworth:
I think the macro trends in the animal health industry are extraordinarily positive. I don’t know if we’ll be able to capitalize on all of those macro trends. Some of them I’m not sure if the veterinarians are going to be able to pivot. If our animal health, all the different sectors within animal health are going to be able to pivot to take most advantage of those wins, but they are all positive wins. The human animal bond has never been stronger. The amount of resources that people are willing to commit based on the emotions that they have with their pets has never been stronger.

Dr. David Haworth:
And I used to think 15 years ago that it was awfully strong. Now, it’s even more so. And that I think it is fair to say there has never been a better time, at least in North America to be an animal. And that also goes for production animals. I think the entire conversation of emotional wellbeing of production animals while they’re alive and during the processing process is it was something that was an anathema. And I will give one of my old professors, Temple Grandin, a whole lot of bandwidth on this one because she forced this conversation that healthy animals, emotionally, psychologically healthier animals are better. They’re better for us. And they are better from an economic standpoint.

Dr. David Haworth:
So I think the crystal ball tells us that it’s tremendous. I certainly hope that veterinarians can stay a vital part of that conversation. Sometimes I worry a little bit that we start to turtle as a profession and we decide that the rest of this can’t really be handled by us. So we’re going to leave all the retail conversations and the online conversations and we’re going to shy away from opening up our practices to try to maximize our impact because we’re afraid of the impacts on revenue. I worry a little bit about that, but I think, overall, to listen to the young people in this industry talk and hear the ideas that they’ve got and the enthusiasm, I think it’s extraordinarily bright.

Stacy Pursell:
So there’s never been a better time to be an animal. And I know there’s also never been a better time to be a veterinarian.

Dr. David Haworth:
Well, for some things, you say that Stacy, and I would agree with you. I don’t think it’s ever been a better time to be an old veterinarian. I worry very much about the statistics that we see about burnout, about compassion, fatigue, about our student debt problems. And I think that it is, in many ways, our practice is, and I’m struggling with these words because I want to be careful. I think that in general, the practicing experience for veterinarians is very Balkanized. And when something has been Balkanized and you don’t get to talk to one another and you don’t get clearing houses of information that everyone can kind of agree upon, then you can get a lot of despair and loneliness.

Dr. David Haworth:
And so, while I think from an economic standpoint, the future has never been brighter for veterinarians. I think from an emotional standpoint, on a day-to-day basis, we need to be very conscious of how do we reach out to one another? How do we make sure that people don’t feel the despair and don’t feel alone? And I mean, some of that is always inevitable, but I think veterinarians are struggling right now. I think probably we’ve asked too much of them as a profession, of us as a profession. So I think you’re right. I think it has never been a better time to be an animal. I think it’s probably an abstract, never been a better time to be a veterinarian, but I do worry about the individual’s stories within there that… I think what breaks my heart is when you read the statistics that over half veterinarians wouldn’t recommend the profession to a young person.

Dr. David Haworth:
All right, that breaks my heart. There’s never been a moment in my life since I was four years old and wanted to be a veterinarian that I’ve ever wished that I had made a different decision.

Stacy Pursell:
Yeah. And when I say that to you, I’m talking about the number of job opportunities. We were talking earlier, before this podcast, David, about with the growth of the industry, with the consolidators, there’s not just an opportunity to own your own practice or be an associate now. With the consolidation with these corporations, you can move into a medical director, there’s field positions, there’s corporate positions, there’s so many different job opportunities other than being an associate or being a practice owner. And your own career is an example of all the different kinds of jobs out there. But there’s certainly a lot of challenges like the ones that you just mentioned.

Dr. David Haworth:
Well, for sure. And I think your perspective on these things, Stacy, has always been a real beacon of light. You really do see where the rubber meets the road and you can see those opportunities that need to be filled. And so again, I applaud you for always letting the rest of us here that there really are a lot opportunities. I think that’s something particularly those younger veterinarians who haven’t had it beaten into them that there are so many opportunities out there. They need to hear that.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, speaking of younger veterinarians, what advice would you give the younger version of yourself?

Dr. David Haworth:
I think as trite as it may be, I think I would tell myself to spend a little bit more time with your family. I think having spoken at depth with both of my kids, they both think they had pretty good childhoods. That said, I know I missed a lot. But boy, it’s awfully hard to give yourself lessons if you like where you are. So I would also give that caveat, but it’s pretty good place where we are. So what would I do differently, probably sleep better. Don’t worry about those things at two o’clock in the morning when the darker voices start to talk. Tell them to shut up. But I might’ve done it even a little bit better on the presentation here or there just because I woke up at 2:00 in the morning, afraid that it was going to be a terrible flop. So who’s to say.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, and I’m also curious what mentor has made the biggest impact on your career.

Dr. David Haworth:
Oh man. I’ve had so many wonderful mentors. People who have gone out of their way, and really even in retrospect, done more than anybody could have been expected to. People in the animal health space, David McGavin, Fabian Kausche, Michelle Haven, Clint Lewis, Kristin Peck, Ed Kanara, all of them were bosses or supervisors of mine at some point. And all of them were giants in this industry. And I could go through each one of them and tell you specific lessons that they taught.

Dr. David Haworth:
I think if I had to pick one of them out of all of that, maybe go back to school, and Steve Withrow, who was my postdoctoral advisor and a giant, he normalized greatness. He was the guy who would say, “Well, why can’t you be the best in the world at something?” Well, even then, I don’t think I had the ego that said, “Well, sure, I can be.” At least it made it attainable. Made boldness achievable and normal. And so I would say, there are so many good ones.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, those are some good lessons. What message or principle do you wish that you could teach everyone?

Dr. David Haworth:
I think optimism in this space. And by that, I mean, why is optimism? So the two things I would say is the world is never as bad or as good as you might think it is at the moment. But wake up in the morning knowing that there are more opportunities than there really are challenges. And if you can stay optimistic, you tend to find those opportunities because the pessimists stop looking and the optimists are always looking for something.

Dr. David Haworth:
And that doesn’t mean you have to be blind to the reality. It just simply means you need to be constantly looking for new opportunities. The other thing I would say is to be kind. Michelle Haven, one of my bosses in business development used to say, “Never let them mistake kindness for weakness because you can be strong and kind at the same time.” And I’ve always taken that to heart. There’s just no reason to be objectionable. It’s not in a very effective form of communication and it doesn’t really get you very far in the end. So it’s okay to be kind and it’s okay to be an optimist.

Stacy Pursell:
I love that. I love both of those. My mother used to say, “Kill them with kindness.” And that always stuck in my head and that’s something that I’ve always tried to do.

Dr. David Haworth:
For sure.

Stacy Pursell:
So I like that. You can be kind in business. I’m curious too, David, some people say that they have a key book that they’ve read that helped them in their career. Do you have a key book in your life that’s impacted you the most?

Dr. David Haworth:
Somebody once told me that books are just mentors that are written on paper and can’t talk back. So I have a tremendous number of books. It’s one of my favorite things to read widely, fiction and nonfiction. And so of course, Stacy, when I’ve got all the classics, 7 Habits by Stephen Covey, Man’s Search for Meaning in the universe by Frankl, those would be easy. I think one that’s impacted me the most in the last decade is by a guy named Steven Pinker, it’s called Enlightenment Now. And in it, he talks about the philosophy of enlightenment, which is simply, “It’s okay to identify an ignorance in an area, whether a society or an individual, and then seek scientifically to answer those questions, to fill that void of information.”

Dr. David Haworth:
And then he goes through 17 chapters, each one, a topic of why the world is a better place today than it was in 1750. And that’s wealth, and that is disease, and that is violence. And it really beats away a lot of the inherent biases that we all have, availability bias of we see bad things happening on the news all the time. We read about bad things happening. And it’s easy for us to think, “Well, this must be the worst it’s ever been because I’ve never heard of this many bad things before.” And unfortunately, that turns out to be just not the case. Excuse me.

Stacy Pursell:
Yeah, I think about that too, especially with all of the advances in technology we have now. And I think about how hard some of the people had it. Even my grandparents all the things that they did not have available to them when it came to the technology. And makes a lot of sense.

Dr. David Haworth:
100%. Yeah. How much do you think the richest man in the world in year 1000 would have paid for a Gore-Tex jacket? Probably a whole lot. So I think the world is a better place. We are moving against the three great things, pestilence, famine and conflict. And we continue to make great progress against each of those. And that’s something we should point to whenever we feel particularly down.

Stacy Pursell:
Yes, yes. Good advice. Well, one of the things that I’ve noticed about successful people is that they typically have some daily habits that help them to achieve success. David, what are a few of your daily habits that you believe have allowed you to achieve success during your career?

Dr. David Haworth:
Interesting question. The first thing I would say is exercise. I tend to be a pretty high energy person. And so I think having some form of exercise every day, if not six days a week is been a really helpful thing, because it also allows me to take the time to let my brain work the way it’s supposed to work. So I can get some more deep thinking in that, I couldn’t otherwise be able to do. But the other things that I do, I try to do a daily gratitude. So I try to write down three things every day that I’m grateful for. I also, as odd as it might sound, I write poetry every day. I will never share that with anyone, the poems, I mean, not the fact that I write them because they’re really bad, but it does give me a chance to reflect and touch down onto emotions and also try to expand vocabulary.

Stacy Pursell:
And I’m sure creative outlet too.

Dr. David Haworth:
Yes, yes, for sure. And those, I think kind of set me up for the day pretty well on. On the mornings when I can get all three of those boxes checked, that’s a pretty cool thing.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, today I’d love for you to share with the listeners about the kinds of projects that you’re up to.

Dr. David Haworth:
So the Vidium project is a tremendous one. It does pretty much take up most of my time and energy. I had probably underappreciated how much work a startup is. There’s always something to do and there’s always something behind as opposed to being in a large organization where you honestly do wait on others quite a bit of time. In a startup, you don’t have anyone to wait on except yourself. So we’re focused largely on growth. We’ve got some really cool customer feedback that we’re now incorporating and we’re trying to use the lean startup method of get products in front of your customers, listen to what they have to say in response, iterate based on that.

Dr. David Haworth:
And it’s a very dynamic and interesting area of our profession right now because it is very cutting edge. There’s probably not enough drugs that genetic genomics would indicate you should use. So people could say, “Well, why should I run this?” The answer of course is that there are more drugs out there, and we do know more about them than some people will give us credit for, but I would think there’s no one who’s going to claim that we have all the drugs that we need as compared to the human side of things.

Dr. David Haworth:
So these projects keep us going. I also, am still very involved with the Human Animal Bond Research Institute, HABRI. I’ve been lucky enough to chair their research committee from the beginning. And we’re now 10 and a half years into it. And I have funded several million dollars worth of very good studies about trying to understand the basis of the human animal bond. And then as I mentioned earlier, I’ve got two kids in their 20s which is keeping me trying to get in front of them as often as I possibly can because one of the interesting things about having young adults as your children, they no longer can come to you. Their lives are too busy. So you need to find ways to get to them.

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

Dr. David Haworth:
Boy, drop the mic, it makes me sad. But I think I would say this, I would say that we have a lot of challenges. And anybody who denies that isn’t paying attention, especially in the veterinary profession. And it’s easy to get discouraged inside, but there are more resources than can even be estimated pouring into this profession. And that’s an amazing thing. And then secondly, it is a very small profession. We get to be together in a way that very few other professions can because we have a touchstone that nobody else has. We have this extraordinary calling.

Dr. David Haworth:
And then the last thing I would say is, for everyone in the animal health industry, we have a very noble calling. That calling is not just healers, but healers of the innocent. And that’s really cool because healing the innocent and improving the lives of animals and those who love and depend on them, I mean, that’s a really hard thing not to think is laudable. So I think we’ve got a great future ahead of us and no reasons at all to despair.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, David, thank you so much for being here today on The People of Animal Health Podcast. I enjoyed visiting with you and thank you for being here to share the story of your career with us today.

Dr. David Haworth:
Stacy, it is a joy. It’s always nice to talk with you. And in this context, it’s even nicer. So appreciate the opportunity. And as always, please, everyone, I hope feels free to reach out to me. I do love this profession very much.

Stacy Pursell:
Thank you again, David.