Episode #2 – Dr. Linda Rhodes

A Feather in Her Cap
Founder of A Feather in Her Cap, winner of the Iron Paw Award, and smasher of the glass ceiling, Dr. Rhodes has been a staunch advocate for women during her stellar career.

Speaker 1:
Welcome to the People of Animal Health podcast. The host of our podcast is Stacy Purcell. 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 in key positions within the animal health and veterinary industries than any executive search professional. Along the way, Stacy has built relationships with some outstanding people who are doing incredible things to make a difference.

Speaker 1:
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 Purcell.

Stacy Pursell:
Hello everyone, and welcome to The People of Animal Health podcast. On today’s show, we are talking with Dr. Linda Rhodes, who is a consultant working in the animal health industry for 30 years. Linda received her VMD from the university of Pennsylvania, College of Veterinary Medicine, and her PhD from Cornell University. After graduating from Penn Vet, she was a large animal practitioner for five years with a focus on dairy cows. She worked for Merck in human drug development, and for Merial as director of large animal development projects. She founded AlCheraBio, a contract research firms, specializing in developing new drugs for animals.

Stacy Pursell:
She then founded [inaudible 00:01:37] therapeutics when the company went public, and in 2016, Dr. Rhodes was appointed to the board of directors for [inaudible 00:01:45]. In 2017, she found Feather In Her Cap, an organization dedicated to recognizing high-achieving women in the animal health industry. Welcome to The People of Animal Health podcast. How are you, Linda?

Dr. Linda Rhodes:
Thank you, Stacy. I’m doing great. I really appreciate you doing this. I think it’s a really great project.

Stacy Pursell:
We’re so excited to have you on today’s show Linda, and I know that you have had much success in your career, but I’d love to start off at the bottom, in the very beginning of your career. Linda, what was your life growing up, and where did you grow up?

Dr. Linda Rhodes:
I grew up in Rochester, New York. My dad was going to Rochester Institute of Technology on the GI bill, back in the ‘50s, and he was interested in photography. That Rochester, New York was where Kodak was, and that was the center of the world of photography, so that’s where I grew up. My father was a scientist. He ended up being an inventor, a person who really was interested in a lot of different things. But his research led him to do work on color and color photography, and he was a co-inventor of the color copier for Xerox back in the ‘60s. I grew up in a house full of science and math and hard work, and my mother was a housewife, but she was also an artist. She did a lot of creative things, pottery, and clothing, and wall hangings. It was a house full of all kinds of things going on, but with a real emphasis on the joy of science.

Stacy Pursell:
That’s fascinating. My dad was also a photography. He used to take photographs out of airplanes. He served in the air national guard. Linda, when did you first figure out what you wanted to do professionally?

Dr. Linda Rhodes:
I majored in mathematics, undergrad, and I was a science snub, I was interested in math and physics and chemistry. But in 1970, when I graduated, was a real back to the land movement, and I had some friends who were living on a commune out in California, and they had a farm with goats and sheep and horses and chickens, and they invited me to come stay with them. That stay really turned into a two years of working on their farm and learning all about animals, and just falling in love with being outside, working with animals really getting back to the roots of how people used to live. But I got tired of being poor.

Dr. Linda Rhodes:
It occurred to me that I could be a veterinarian, and that would combine my interest in animals with science, with being outdoors. That was back in 1971, ’72. But the problem was I’d never taken any biology courses, so I had to go back and do my pre vet. I was fortunate enough to get into university of Pennsylvania back in 1974. That launched me into the world of veterinary medicine.

Stacy Pursell:
Then how did you transition from that into the animal health industry?

Dr. Linda Rhodes:
I was a dairy practitioner for about five years. I came, long complicated story about how I got my first job. It was very hard to break into large animal medicine then as a woman. But I ended up in Ithaca, New York, and I just by chance was offered a very low level instructor position at Cornell, to teach bovine palpation. When I was hanging around the college, I made friends with a couple of faculty members and they offered me a fellowship to do a PhD. I was tired of being in the barn, frankly, and ready for some new intellectual challenges, so I took them up on it. After I finished my PhD, I went straight into industry.

Stacy Pursell:
I’m curious how many women were in the field at that time?

Dr. Linda Rhodes:
Vanishingly few. I started my career at Merck on the human health side, but Merck had an AgVet group that was very close to exclusively men. I think there were some foundational women there that actually have seeded into the animal health industry. Susan Longhofer was there at the time, who is now heading up the science, and regulatory group at Dechrah. Michelle Haven was hired there right out of her residency, and she ended up being on the executive team of Zoetis. There were some women, but always at the very lowest of levels. On the human health side, it was a little better, but still slim pickings for women.

Stacy Pursell:
Linda, I know that you’ve had massive success in your career. But when do you feel like you were first beginning to gain traction with your career?

Dr. Linda Rhodes:
Honestly, it wasn’t until I quit big pharma. The glass ceiling was just too thick for women in big pharma back then. That was in the early ‘90s and I just hit the ceiling, and once I had a child and I was a mother and I wasn’t going to be spending 100% of my time at work, I was really passed over. I was passed. I was on the mommy track basically. It wasn’t until I quit and started my own business, that I began to feel like I was on the right track, and that I could do something significant. I was in my ‘50s by then.

Stacy Pursell:
I know that you’ve had some high points and also some low points throughout your career. Walk us through the highest high, and also the lowest low of your career.

Dr. Linda Rhodes:
That’s a hard choice. I think if you go back to the beginning, one of my proudest things and people laugh at this, is that I developed the ability to do very early pregnancy checks on cows. I had spent years and years doing bovine palpation. It’s a very hard skill to learn. I had gotten better and better at it, but when I got to the point where I could help the dairyman by doing very early pregnancy diagnosis, I was just really proud of it. It seems crazy now, but I walked away from that world. The true high point of my career was when I was appointed CEO of Aratana Therapeutics. That brought together all of the different skills that I had perfected except obviously palpation.

Dr. Linda Rhodes:
I was an entrepreneur, I had built and sold a business. I had been deep into drug development and became an expert in regulatory affairs. I had managed a large group of people as I grew my business, and the CEO position at Aratana was really a good fit for me. I was very flattered and excited to be able to start that company with $25 million in venture capital, and me and one other guy, and licensed to two really excellent drugs that finally made it to the market. As far as low point, I guess we already talked a little bit about that. It was when I really hit that glass ceiling, and felt like I didn’t know which way to go. I was frustrated, I was angry. I knew I had more potential, but there was no way forward. It felt like a brick wall. I was very fortunate to have the ability to just walk away from that. Otherwise, I think I would have ended up a very bitter and unhappy professional.

Stacy Pursell:
Linda, what did you learn from that experience with hitting the glass ceiling? Then you talked about that was also the time in your life when you had the most success when you walked away, but what did you learn from that experience?

Dr. Linda Rhodes:
I think I really learned that there’s so many different ways to succeed, and if you run into brick walls like that, it’s fine to pivot. I think a lot of people see success as just climbing the corporate ladder. I think what I learned the most is it was just wonderful to be my own boss and to make my own decisions. I think a lot of people looked at that as a failure. It wasn’t clear that my business was going to succeed. I started out being a consultant and people usually thought of when you quit big pharma and you called yourself a consultant, it just meant that you were looking for a job. But I was pretty serious about building that business, and it gave me great joy.

Dr. Linda Rhodes:
I remember the first time I did a consulting job when I had quit, and I got a check in my mailbox, and it was just this wonderful feeling of people are going to pay me for what I know and for my skills. It was the first time that I really felt like I had something really valuable to offer, and that was just a wonderful feeling. I think taking risks, the ability to walk away from a big paycheck and good benefits, but a dead end, that sometimes taking those risks can really vault you into a very different place.

Stacy Pursell:
I know that you’ve seen a lot of different things in your career. How have you seen the industry change over all of these years?

Dr. Linda Rhodes:
It’s funny. There’s been I think, two big trends. One is the consolidation. We have fewer companies and bigger companies, but then in contrast to that, we have so many more startups. There’s so much more energy to bring innovative ideas to the animal health industry. It used to be dominated as an Ag industry back in the ‘90s. It was really cattle and poultry and pigs. The shift into companion animals is really blasted that wide open, and we’re seeing all these amazingly creative startups in animal health, not only in the pet space, but in production animal too. I see it as the big got bigger, but it spawned a whole bunch of really exciting startups that I think are gaining quite a bit of traction. That’s really new, seeing the capital investment and the interest of private equity and venture in animal health is phenomenal.

Stacy Pursell:
What does your crystal ball say about the future of the industry? You just talked about the mergers and acquisitions, and we’ve been seeing that. I’m wondering about the future, even with the consolidations, how much more consolidated can the industry get? But what is your crystal ball say about that, and also the future in general of the industry?

Dr. Linda Rhodes:
I’ve been thinking about this question and I actually think the biggest impact in the future is going to be Artificial Intelligence. I don’t think we, it’s coming fast. Many companies are trying to figure out what AI means for them, but I think it’s going to be transformative to our industry. We’re going to have AI programs reading x-rays, we already do. We’re going to have AI programs diagnosing disease patterns, understanding the microbiome, impacting production animals in ways that we don’t even imagine. Now, I really see that accelerating as a amazing, and intimidating change in the industry, because many of us are of an age when AI just wasn’t part of the equation. I see that coming and I think it’s coming fast. I think the other big thing that’s going to be happening, or is already happening is this intersectionality between human health and animal health.

Dr. Linda Rhodes:
There’s more and more of an understanding that, as I like to joke to my human medicine colleagues, dogs get cancer too. Understanding that there’s a lot of species learnings that can inform human medicine and vice versa, I think is just now really gaining traction, and that’s going to have a really big impact. We saw it at Aratana when we took molecules from human health and brought them into animal health, and that was considered very unusual and difficult, and not a smart thing to do initially. But now that we’ve paved the way for that, I think more human biotech companies are beginning to look at animal health and vice-a-versa. I see that intersectionality growing pretty dramatically over the next 10 to 15 years.

Stacy Pursell:
All that seems so futuristic years ago, and now the future is here. I’d love for you to share with our audience about the kinds of projects that you’re up to right now.

Dr. Linda Rhodes:
My favorite one is I’m writing a memoir of my years as a large animal veterinarian in Utah, where all my clients were Mormons, it’s called the Lady Cal-vet because that was my nickname when I was in Utah. The manuscript is done, and I am in the process of working on getting that book published. As part of that effort, I’m starting up a website that will be called Ladycowvet.com, where I’m going to aggregate not only information about the memoir, but also stories of other women who were pioneers in large animal medicine, or who are right now struggling with issues of gender and large animal medicine. I’m going to put a bunch of history about women in the profession on the website, I’m going to have it be a discussion board for people who want to talk about women in large animal medicine, and I’m really looking forward to getting that set up, so stay tuned for that.

Dr. Linda Rhodes:
Then I’m working on, I think, what I think will be the next really transformative product in animal health, and it’s being developed by a nonprofit group called the Michelson Found Animals foundation, and it’s a single injection sterilant for female cats, and hopefully also for female dogs, that will be the alternative to spay surgery. A single injection in the clinic, no side effects, minimal side effects, and a lifetime sterilization. That has been in the works. Dr. Michelson who has funded this research has spent almost $17 million over the past 10 years funding research for a nonsurgical sterilant. We finally found something that we think is going to work, and I’m volunteering to help bring that through regulatory approval. Stay tuned. I know it sounds like a pipe dream, but it’s coming.

Stacy Pursell:
That will be truly transformative. Linda, I also would love for you to talk about the feather in her cap, because I know that has been something that you have started with some other high profile women in the industry. I know that’s dear to your heart, and I know that I’ve been a part of that too. I’d love for you to talk about that. What gave you the inspiration? Why did you start it? Tell us more about Feather In Her cap, if you will.

Dr. Linda Rhodes:
Thank you, Stacy, and thank you for being an early supporter of the organization. It actually came out of my frustration with the [inaudible 00:18:39]. As much as I love Kansas, and I was happy to start Aratana in Kansas, every year when another man would get the Iron Paw Award, I would think about all the deserving women who really should be considered for the award, and yet year after year after year that didn’t happen. I just had this bug in my head about it. I went to the veterinary meeting and I gathered a bunch of my women friends and said, “I’ve got this crazy idea to do an award just for women, high-achieving women in the animal health industry. What do you guys think?” I was prepared for a little pushback, but everybody liked the idea, and we just literally made the board of directors from that group, and got a tremendous amount of help from the industry. From Zoetis was an early supporter, Boehringer, Elanco all stepped up, because I think it was time for this to be a reality.

Dr. Linda Rhodes:
We did our first award ceremony and there was 28 nominees. It was just amazing the number of high-achieving women that should be recognized, and we couldn’t just choose one, so the first year we had four awards that we gave out. We had a sold out dinner event, and people had a great time, and the rest is history. We’ve done four years worth of awards. My funnest fact is that the year after we started Feather and gave an award, Kim Allen, who had been the president of Henry Schein and was really well-deserving, and we had given the award to her, won the Iron Paw ward next year. Then the year after that, I won the Iron Paw Award.

Stacy Pursell:
I was going to say, that’s full circle, because you did win the Iron Paw Award.

Dr. Linda Rhodes:
One of the things that I had always wanted to do was, if and when I won the Iron Paw Award aWard, to put up a montage of all the deserving women. That’s what I did. I just said, “this is not just me. This is standing on the backs of a whole group of really underappreciated women leaders in animal health.” I was very happy to do that. Then I ask people women who have been in the industry for more than five years to stand up at the event. There were like 1,000 people there, and all these women stood up, and I said, “These are your future leaders. Get to know them.” I think we’ve made a difference. I think that there’s now much more acknowledgement about the gender issues in our industry, and things are changing.

Stacy Pursell:
You’ve been a big part of that. I remember I was at that event, I heard you say that, and I remember looking around and seeing all of the women in the industry that are making and have made an impact. Thank you for that. It’s so good to see the Feather in Her Cap getting such good support. I can’t wait to see who the nominees are for next year.

Dr. Linda Rhodes:
I would urge everybody to nominate. You can nominate at any time during the year, all the information about it is on the Feather in Her Cap website. If you know of a woman that’s 10 years in the industry, a significant accomplishment that you can point to, and some history of mentoring other people, they qualify and we’d love to have them. Go to the website and nominate. There’s lots of well-deserved people out there.

Stacy Pursell:
Yes. I hope all of our listeners will go to the Feather in Her Cap website and nominate a woman or several women that you know that are deserving. Linda, successful people are typically proactive people that are very organized. I’d love to hear how you typically organize the first few hours of your day. What time do you typically wake up, and what is your morning routine like?

Dr. Linda Rhodes:
I am the great, good fortune to be retired, so I don’t have to set an alarm clock anymore, but I do wake up pretty early because I have an old arthritic cat that wants breakfast. She’s my alarm clock. But I start slow in the morning. I like to read, I like to read a lot, and I usually grab a cup of coffee and sit down in an armchair in my library and do at least half an hour, 45 minutes of reading. Whether it’s the New Yorker, or I read a lot of non-fiction. Right now I’m reading Obama’s first book that he wrote called Dreams Of My Father, which is just a fantastic book. But I start out slow. I start out reading. Then one of the key things for me is I need to get some exercise every day.

Dr. Linda Rhodes:
I either walk, or I get on my Peloton, or I do pushups, or whatever I need to do. I take inspiration from Ruth Bader Ginsburg who was a big exerciser. The other thing that I’ve done recently is I have tried to restrict Monday and Tuesday as being the days that I work on consulting, or my drug development projects, or phone calls, or any professional related stuff. Then I have Wednesday through the rest of the week to, can you have a blank calendar? That way, that gives me space for my writing. That was really critical for me to be able to finish my memoir, and now I’m starting to work on the sequel. I want to have those big empty spots in my calendar now, and I’ve tried to make that happen.

Stacy Pursell:
You’re going to have a sequel too. I can’t wait to read your first book, and then that’s good to know there’s a sequel coming. You mentioned some of your daily habits, exercise, you like to read. What are some other daily habits that you believe have allowed you to achieve success throughout your career?

Dr. Linda Rhodes:
That’s a hard one. When you’re in the middle of your daily habits, it’s hard to point to what exactly they are. I try to get outside every day. I live in a beautiful place in New Hampshire. I have 17 acres of woods. I like to just go out and watch the birds, and wander around and see what’s blossoming in the garden, and pull some weeds. I have a big vegetable garden. But I’m a pretty organized person. I sit at my computer at least an hour or two a day responding to emails, thinking about projects, doing my board work. But I try not to sit down too much. I get up, I walk around. I don’t think it’s healthy to be sitting at the computer for hours every day.

Dr. Linda Rhodes:
Then I think the other important thing that I try to do almost on a daily basis is check in with a friend. I live by myself. I don’t feel lonely, but I really feel it’s important to stay in contact with my network, and I just have such a great supportive network of friends and colleagues all over the world, that I try to make a check-in at least with one person. Often with somebody I haven’t talked to in a long time, every day. That’s just wonderful, because I learn all kinds of new things and I plug into what people are doing. It gives me a way to connect people. I have a lot of people who were asking me about jobs, and about contacts, and about fundraising. It gives me great joy to connect my friends to opportunities. That’s a fun part of my day.

Stacy Pursell:
I think it’s so important, especially in these times we’ve been living in, it’s important to stay, to keep connected. I’m curious about mentorship, because I know that you are a mentor to many in the industry, but I’m curious what mentor has made the biggest impact on your career?

Dr. Linda Rhodes:
I’ve been thinking about this question, and I have to say that I’ve really never had the benefit of a formal mentor. I had connections with people that helped me on individual things, but I never really was able to develop a real mentoring relationship. This was because I think the majority of my career happened before mentoring was really much of a thing. I’d say my father, because he was in industry and he taught me a lot, and he was an inspiration to me. I’ll give you one example. I had a connection with a woman at Merck on the human health side. Her name was Dr. Liz Stoner. She was head of the whole clinical trials group at Merck. I first met her as she was head of a project team, and she was the one who helped me through the initial craziness of balancing motherhood and work, because she had two kids.

Dr. Linda Rhodes:
She was maybe five years older than me. She just gave me a lot of really good advice about how to deal with working full-time and having an infant. Fast forward years later, Liz ended up being a managing partner at MPM capital, which was the venture capital group that had the idea for Aratana. When they were looking for a CEO, Liz thought, “Oh, I know a veterinarian,” and she connected them with me. Even though we didn’t have a mentoring relationship throughout my entire career, at a couple of key moments, she was there for me. I guess I would choose Liz Stoner.

Stacy Pursell:
That’s a wonderful story. That’s why it’s so important to maintain those relationships throughout your career. Linda, what advice would you give the younger version of yourself?

Dr. Linda Rhodes:
Speaking about this motherhood thing, and I do give this advice a lot to young women professionals. Don’t wait. It’s really great to be a mom. It was one of the best things I ever did. I didn’t have my son until I was 42. I used to joke that if I’d known how wonderful it was to be a mother, I probably would have had 10 kids. But I was very happy to have one healthy, wonderful young son who’s now 30. But I think a lot of women struggle on if they want to be successful in their career, they focus on their career and they think, later on I can be a mom. I tell them, don’t wait. There’s never a good time. It’s always challenging to balance motherhood and work. You want to be young because it takes a lot of energy. I guess the other thing I would say is that focus more in your working world on relationships.

Dr. Linda Rhodes:
I had the attitude as I think most young women do, of if I just put my nose down and I did a really good job and I worked hard, my good work would be recognized, and I would get ahead. That’s just not the case. I did not understand that building relationships at work was more important than the actual work. That’s the advice I give young women. Don’t forget to step away from your desk and go out to lunch with somebody, to connect with somebody who’s your superior, who can help you in some way, to build your social network. Because a lot of what happens in your career is going to rely on people liking you, and people wanting to spend time with you, and not so much looking at the fact that you’ve created this great work product, but you sat at your desk for a year and didn’t talk to anybody. Don’t just put your nose down, reach out, meet other people.

Stacy Pursell:
That’s really good advice. Going back to what you said about motherhood, I think so many women think you can’t do both. You’re an example of how you can do both. You can have a successful career, and be a mother, and I like what you said about don’t wait.

Dr. Linda Rhodes:
You’re an example too Stacy. You have a successful career and you’re a mother, so you must have found a way to balance it as well.

Stacy Pursell:
What you said about there’s never a good time. I’ve said that too. There’s never a good time to have a family, there’s never a good time to get married, there’s never a good time to have kids. But like you said, don’t wait. I had the same philosophy. One of the things that we noticed with successful people is that they tend to have idiosyncrasies that are actually their super powers. Linda, I’m curious what idiosyncrasy do you have?

Dr. Linda Rhodes:
That’s a hard question. I guess, I don’t know if you’d call this an idiosyncrasy, but I don’t get embarrassed asking what might be stupid questions. I’m the one in the room who’s always willing to say “I don’t get it,” or “I don’t understand,” or “this doesn’t make sense to me.” In many big professional meetings I remember sitting at the Merck R&D annual review of research. Everybody tried to pretend that they knew, they understood everything, and I just never did. I would just say, “You know, that’s not clear to me. I don’t get that.” Maybe that was one of the reasons I didn’t get promoted at Merck, but I think an idiosyncrasy that I have is I’m willing to show that I don’t know something, and that I don’t understand something, even if it might make me look stupid. I think some people might think that’s a weakness. I find it a strength.

Stacy Pursell:
No, and it served you well. What is a message or principle that you wish you could teach everyone?

Dr. Linda Rhodes:
As stepping outside of the professional realm, certainly right now, I think we all see the need for this. I would want to teach people to cultivate compassion. We often forget about this in our professional life. So many people have so many things going on in their lives. They’re suffering from an illness, they have a spouse that’s suffering from an illness. They’re going through a divorce, they’re having problems with their, they have an autistic kid, there’s so many people that have issues and problems outside of work, that we’re not aware of. I would just urge people to focus on compassion. Be kind, be kind to everyone because you don’t know what people are going through, and especially now in the time of the pandemic and all the challenges that we’re facing.

Dr. Linda Rhodes:
I think I’ve learned over the years that kindness is probably the most important thing that we can offer to other people. I try to practice that even in the most difficult situations. But I guess that would be the message that I would like to send to people, is take a deep breath when you’re feeling angry, your colleague has let you down, your boss is asking you to do too much, you’re feeling passed over, or you’re upset about something. Just take a step back and try to be compassionate.

Stacy Pursell:
That’s such good advice because like you said, so many people, most people are going through something that they often don’t bring that to work, to talk about it at work, so you never know what somebody might be going through at home behind the scenes. That’s very good advice. Linda some successful people say that they’ve had a key book that they’ve read that really helped them to change their mindset and their approach to success. Do you have a key book that has impacted you the most? I’d love to hear that story.

Dr. Linda Rhodes:
That’s also a very hard question. When I was very young, I read Tolstoy’s War In Peace. It’s a sweeping novel about humanity. I didn’t really understand it then, but I understood that there were patterns in history that we could learn from. I’ve gone back to that book three or four times. It’s an intimidating book. It’s a huge book, it has a gazillion characters, but it’s just fabulous. When I read it a second time, I had a completely different view of what it was saying, and when I read it a third time, actually fairly recently, it just seemed like an allegory for our time. I think that I would point to that book as the big picture book that I learned a lot from. The whole idea that things that we’re going through now are things that humans have gone through throughout history.

Dr. Linda Rhodes:
We’re not unique. These problems have been there, and we just have to be capitulate them, and we can learn from looking at what happened in history. But in terms of a professional book that just hit me straight between the eyes is a book called Power. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it. It’s called 48. Let me look. I wrote it down here, so I wouldn’t forget. It’s called 48 Laws of Power and it’s by a man named Robert Green. That was the book that helped me understand the power dynamics in my professional life. I guess I could summarize it by saying that before I read that book, I was playing Scrabble at work, and I was playing the game, the word game, which in my head was Scrabble, and I wasn’t succeeding. I was failing.

Dr. Linda Rhodes:
Then after I read that book, I realized, I was playing scrabble, but everybody else was playing monopoly. I couldn’t possibly win at work because I wasn’t even playing the same game. That book on power gives examples of power dynamics in a number of different, and all throughout history, and it just woke me up, and I realized, I wasn’t playing the game I needed to play to be successful.

Stacy Pursell:
I have not read that book but I’m going to get that book. That sounds very interesting.

Dr. Linda Rhodes:
I highly recommend it.

Stacy Pursell:
Thank you for sharing that with our audience. Linda, you’ve got the mic. What is one thing that you’d like to share with our listeners at The People of Animal Health podcast before you drop the mic today?

Dr. Linda Rhodes:
Thanks for giving me the opportunity to talk with you about these lessons learned. I have had a long and varied career. I guess I would like to say two things. The first is, that when you start out in your career, you never know what twists and turns it’s going to take. If somebody had told me when I was out doing those 30 day pregnancy checks on cows in Utah, that eventually I’d be the CEO of an animal health startup company that was going to do an IPO, I would’ve said you are crazy. I think our ability to be flexible and to seize new opportunities as they come up and to not just say, “Well, this is what I learned, and this is what I’m going to be for the rest of my life,” is so important, and being willing to take those kinds of risks, and just be creative about your career, I think is just so critical.

Dr. Linda Rhodes:
Then I think that’s really the last and probably most important thing, is that there’s more to life than work. That we all focus on our professional success. We’re ambitious, we’re hard working, but it’s just so critical to take time, to enjoy your kids. They grow up very fast, to enjoy nature, to enjoy your friendships. Because I have a little thing on my wall here that says, “The trouble is, you think you have time.” It really highlights my philosophy of you never know how much time you have, and if you postpone all the fun stuff and all the family stuff, and all the things that give you joy, until you have a certain level of success in your work, you may be very disappointed. Don’t wait, make a balance, it’ll pay off.

Stacy Pursell:
That’s such good advice because so many people I think they think someday I’ll do this, or someday I’ll do that, when I hit this goal or when I achieve that level of success. What you’re saying is to enjoy every day, enjoy the time, and don’t wait. That’s such good advice and what a good note to leave our listeners with today. Linda, thank you so much for joining us. We enjoyed having you on our show and sharing your career with us, and all of your wisdom and the history as you’ve been in the animal health industry. I really enjoyed having you as our guests today Linda, thank you so much.

Dr. Linda Rhodes:
Thank you so much for having me, Stacy. It was a pleasure.