Episode #71 – Dr. Jason Epstein

Do you work in the animal health industry or veterinary profession? Have you ever wondered how people began their careers and how they got to where they are today? Hi, everyone. I’m Stacy Pursell, the founder and CEO of The VET Recruiter, the leading executive search and recruiting firm for the animal health industry and veterinary profession. I was the first recruiter to specialize in the animal health industry and veterinary profession in the United States and built the first search firm to serve this unique niche. For the past 25 plus years, I have built relationships with the industry’s top leaders and trailblazers. The People of Animal Health Podcast highlights incredible individuals I have connected with throughout my career. You will be able to learn more about their lives, careers, and contributions. With our wide range of expert guests, you’ll be sure to learn something new in every episode. Thanks for tuning in, and enjoy the episode.

Welcome to The People of Animal Health Podcast. Today, we’re joined by Dr. Jason Epstein, a dedicated veterinarian and seasoned leader with a passion for advancing pet care and veterinary teams. Originally from Charleston, South Carolina, Dr. Epstein earned his DVM from the University of Georgia and has since built a diverse career across the southeast and Colorado. Most recently, he served as executive medical director at My Pets Wellness where he led multi-state expansion, mentored more than 20 veterinarians, and championed client education and team development. Outside of work, he’s a devoted father, music lover, traveler, and proud dog dad to Moxie. Jason, thank you for being on The People of Animal Health Podcast today.

Thank you for having me. That was quite an intro. I appreciate it.

Well, Jason, looking back throughout your life, was there a defining moment or mentor that helped solidify your decision to pursue veterinary medicine as a lifelong career?

That was a great question. Kind of both. I first got the idea because I thought our veterinarian was super. I was like 12, and I thought he was the coolest dude ever. He went to Georgia. I was like, “All right. This is great. I’ve been a Georgia fan since birth.” I was like, “We’re going to be friends,” and I got a chance to skip a day of school in middle school and do a work shadowing. I walked into his clinic, and they were in the middle of what I now know to be a medial patellar luxation surgery, but knee open, chisel out, doing the ortho things. I was like, “That’s super cool. I want to do this,” and that was the spark. Over the years, just as I explored other options and looked at all the things I wanted to do, it just always kept coming back to the culture of veterinary medicine and kind of what this industry and field is really about.

Well, I’d love to learn more about your early days, love to learn, dive into your first job out of vet school and how did you get started?

Yeah, so I always wanted to live in Colorado. I’m a South Carolinian and then eight years in Athens, Georgia. And so, when the chance came to graduate and find a place to live, I sent a letter and resume to every practice in Colorado Springs where my fiance at the time had a friend in town, and it all kind of fell into place. I ended up at a practice with two mid to mid-late career veterinarians that were good friends and good mentors to me in the early days. It was just the three of us in a small practice. When they extended the offer to me, I still had about three, four months of school left.

And so, I was able to curate my last few months of clinical rotations and to focus on areas I knew I was going to be doing more in general practice, so a lot more emphasis on dentistry and soft tissue and a lot less emphasis on spay, neuter because the shelter in Colorado Springs did the majority of them. So they informed me. They’re like, “We don’t really do a lot, so get good at these other things.” But yeah, that first practice, I kind of cut my teeth and learned how to be a leader with technicians that were closer in age to me and learned how to navigate some interesting situations with a range of clients.

Well, Jason, you’ve practiced in multiple states, including Colorado and Tennessee. How did those diverse regional experiences influence your approach to veterinary care and client relationships?

I think what I’ve learned most, I mean, I’ve practiced… You can add Florida, Texas, and New York, and South Carolina to those lists. I think what I’ve found that’s unifying among them all is that every single patient and every single client is unique and needs to be treated as such. You can’t be a great veterinarian unless you truly find a way to care about the person in the room. I think those of us who got into this industry with a giant heart for animals and a tolerance for humans often are the ones that I see struggling the most because at the end of the day, this is a industry where we help people through veterinary medicine. And so, I would say, I mean, there’s not a lot of differentiators between a pet owner in Greenville, South Carolina versus Knoxville, Tennessee versus Dallas versus Colorado. Some people view them as their kids. Some of them, it’s just a cat, and some of them, they would sell their own kidney to fund their care. It’s very individual.

That makes a lot of sense. And then, Jason, as executive medical director at My Pets Wellness, you oversaw growth. What were some of the key challenges in scaling from three practices to a multi-state network?

Yeah. That long list. I think everything from timing and logistics of picking out, making sure equipment’s the same because your training is based on what’s in each facility, and finding a way to have standards across an organization without coming off like you don’t trust your staff or that you’re micromanaging teams. We were fortunate to have a phenomenal recruiting team and talent acquisition team, and with a mission that we kept at the forefront, we really didn’t struggle finding doctors that aligned with our culture. I think finding clinical teams that are vested financially to the success of the practice and vested emotionally to the mission of the organization is one of the biggest challenges because we all want to help every single pet that we can. We want to help every owner that we can, and balancing that with a way to treat the practice dollars, the practice revenue as if it’s coming out of your pocket is a challenge.

It really is because we never want to create a sense of practicing based on… We don’t want to have to think about money all the time. None of us do, but we also have to accept that we can’t help every pet. And I’d say the biggest challenge was navigating the messaging that as an organization, we care about our patients, we care about our clients, but also having to say no to certain things and care for patients because at the end of the day, we also have to run a business and pay for people’s healthcare and paychecks, which is important.

Yeah, that is very important. Well, now, Jason, you have mentored more than 20 veterinarians and launched technician training programs. What do you think is most essential when developing future veterinary leaders?

I think finding a way to learn someone’s passion and encourage them to grow and not force them into a box. I think letting your doctors know that they’re supported, that they’re going to make mistakes, and that’s okay. Mistakes happen. It is how we learn from them. Resilience coaching is something really critical in this industry, whether it’s technicians or doctors. We have to find a way to forgive ourselves and to accept that it is part of the growth trajectory. I think being able to be vulnerable and admit failures and mistakes that I’ve made in my career, I think, is extremely important because as a leader curating leaders, transparency and intention and accountability are really important. You can’t sit up on a high horse and act like you know everything and talk to people like you know better than them. It’s about sharing a perspective and finding data when you need to share a conflicting opinion because veterinarians, we as a species, we don’t listen unless there’s proof. So coming to the table with evidence to have a discussion is really important as well.

Yeah, that’s really good. Well, palliative care and dentistry are sometimes overlooked areas in general practice. What drew you to focus on them and how do you communicate their value to clients?

So I’ll take them side by side. Dentistry, I’m a self-proclaimed proud tooth nerd. I love to teach dentistry. I can’t say that in the middle of every dental procedure it is my favorite thing in the world because there are frustrating moments, but what I’ve come to love about dentistry is the dramatic change in quality of life and bond that you can generate between a patient and their family. I had a family in Nashville, and this is the turning point for me with dentistry because we’d been prolonging and putting off his dental. It was a cat with severe resorptive lesions, and as most of us know, those are extremely painful, and cats are superheroes, and they hide it. So they’d been putting this off because of his kidney disease, and we got a stable enough point, and I finally got them on board, and he started showing enough signs of pain.

They came in two weeks after his procedure and said, “I didn’t know I lost my cat, but I have my cat back,” and that completely changed everything for me because with the way we’re able to dramatically improve their quality of life, and it’s this unknown decrease in quality because it happens silently, it happens slowly, that really, it’s like, “Oh, this isn’t an old lazy, non-playful patient. This is a kiddo with chronic headaches from oral pain that’s life kind of sucks,” and you don’t really know it until you fix it. Dentistry is such an area of opportunity to really improve quality of life. It just became a big passion of mine. I think that, build with the fact that I get to play with power tools and drill things and do hands-on stuff as a tinkerer, got that from my grandfather, that’s, I think, where my dental passion came from.

Palliative medicine, on the other hand, is to me something that I don’t know if we have addressed it with intention as doctors as often as it should be. I think that there are clients that come in that can do the works, and we go look for a diagnosis and fix the problem, and there are clients that can’t afford the diagnosis, and we do short-term treat management, go home, come back, go home, come back. As we near end of life where we have these major chronic conditions, I think every pet gets to a point in its life where the goal with that family and that pet is no longer curative. For some pets, it’s at the age of eight. Some, it’s 18. But I have this conversation with pet owners, and I think it’s one that it’s not had often enough, and it’s okay. They’re born, and their entire life, they’re at this top of the line graph of find the problem, fix the problem, solve the problem, and at some point, the willingness to do that starts to go down, and the just make them feel better starts to go up.

And so, that crossing point to me is where we transfer into palliative care, and that is I don’t really care if this is the best to find the problem. I’m not trying to solve an issue. I want this kiddo to feel better every day, to be a 10 out of 10 quality day, as good as I can get it there for as many days as I’m going to have left. The level of strengthening you can get between that cat and that family, between that dog and that family by increasing their quality and no longer stressing over, “I still don’t know what the problem is,” it’s a big relief when you get a family on board and they understand that we’re now in this phase of life, and you really do make a difference.

That makes so much sense. Well, I know that some veterinarians struggle with balancing clinical care and business leadership. How did you navigate that tension, if I can call that tension, in your own career?

I stunk at it for a long time. I think step one is accept that you’re not good, and the majority of veterinarians, myself included, don’t get enough business training, and we tend to look at things in a very narrow scope. Starting with what do I not know and finding opportunities to learn more about the business side is, I think, something that we should all be taking advantage of. I would love to see more curriculum in vet schools around understanding margins and P&Ls and COGS. I mean, it wasn’t until I was in a leadership position that I even knew how to unabbreviate the word EBITDA, which I still am not 100% on, has something to do with profits. But I think that in clinical practice, a lot of doctors pay attention to their revenue numbers because it ties directly into their paychecks, but the area that I think a lot of us forget is of those revenue numbers, what’s the actual margin?

We’re running a blood test that has a margin of 80% versus I’m sending home a prescription that has a margin of 20%, and I’m giving a 30% discount on this invoice or on certain products. So it’s the ability to learn and want to learn and then be able to sit down with your leadership and say, “Okay, if I need to give discounts, if I’m going to finagle things, how do I think it through like a business owner? How do I think about where’s it coming from and what’s the impact to the organization and to the business?” It’s tough, and there’s no easy way to get there.

Yeah. I also wish that there was more business training in vet school. I think that would be so helpful. Well, Jason, you have led initiatives in client education. Can you share an example of an innovative approach that really resonated with the pet owner?

That’s a good question. I think some of the things that I’ve found resonate the best are side-by-side examples when you can compare this is what something looks like in human to animal. I think that’s some of the initiatives in the education lines we’ve gone down that resonate the best because just saying, here, I’m sticking with dental again, tooth nerd, saying, “Your pet’s teeth, look at this, grade one, two, three, four. Look at the chart. Look at the tartar.” I think for us, dog teeth look like dog teeth. Cat teeth look like cat teeth. It’s like, “Okay. Yeah, they’re not pristine and white. They don’t brush every day.” But when you put stage one gingivitis and periodontal disease, a picture of a dog next to a picture of a person or a stage four next to a picture of a human mouth and they’re seeing bone exposed, that gets a pretty visceral reaction. It really makes an impact of like, “Oh, if that was my face, I would be in the dentist six months ago.” It helps to really relay that.

So I think finding a way to connect it to themselves is really key. I mean, even something as simple as explaining creatinine and kidney disease, that is one of the main things that I use to describe how they don’t feel well. I kind of correlate that. I’m like, “Listen, the reason cats with kidney disease don’t feel good is the same reason you don’t feel good after a night with 20 tequila shots because you’re dehydrated and you are achy. You’re nauseous. You don’t want to eat. That’s what a high creatinine feels like in a kidney cat. So you know how you feel on that Saturday morning after a Friday night? That is how your kidney cat feels. That is why we have to talk about fluid therapy and anti-nauseas and appetite stimulants is because when this number goes up, that’s how they feel.” So relating it to the owners is really my advice on key successful initiatives when it comes to getting their understanding, which is what leads to compliance.

Yeah, that’s really good. Well, retention and morale are big concerns in veterinary medicine today. What strategies have you found most effective for keeping teams engaged and empowered?

I think that that’s a really great question as well. I’m not taking credit for the success we had at My Pets Wellness. That falls 100% on Dr. Rebekah Zahedi that led our culture and did a phenomenal job. I’ll say what I’ve seen in successful organizations is the ability to genuinely care about their team members, to put in the time and resources to solve communication gaps within clinical teams and to not let things fester. Creating ways of getting feedback from your team, finding that if you have a cancerous individual in a practice in an organization, that it is better to lose a high skill, high revenue, high cancerous individual than it is to maintain them for the sake of the business and have them damage the culture. So I think there’s a lot of things that need to be done as a leadership team, and it’s that willingness to choose culture over profits, which is not an easy decision to make, the willingness to intervene and lead when there’s conflict and your teams always knowing that they have an outlet, and that outlet, that leadership group has their back and their best interest in mind.

I think a lot of organizations or teams that see issues with culture and turnover, if you ask what’s most important to ownership, the answer is profit. The answer is revenue. The answer is these three people. “What’s most important to them?” “Oh, well, it’s their lead tech and these two, and all of the rest of us, they don’t care about.” That is a first nail in the coffin of culture, and all of your team members need to feel valued. You can’t have favoritism feeling. You can’t tolerate bulliness. We had a zero tolerance policy for bullying. We had a zero tolerance policy for being disrespectful and rude to the patients or the clients. We let go of some great people because of one bad day, but that echoes, and that standing up for what is right makes the world of difference to the rest of your team.

What advice would you give to a practice owner that has a high producer on their team, but they’re cancerous to the team?

I think they know the answer. I think you have to decide, “Do you want to deal with staff turnover and customer frustrations from supporting staff turnover in order to prioritize revenue from your high producer, or do you want to potentially take a dip and go find someone that’s a culture fit?” Because there are plenty of financially successful practices that have a cancerous personality either at the top or near the top, and they’re financially successful, and they probably have a practice manager that hates their life because the staff is constantly frustrated and angry. They’re constantly training new staff and doing offboarding, and it’s a decision you have to make philosophically as an organization. There’s no right or wrong answer. I can’t tell someone what’s most important to them, but I would not want to be associated with an organization that prioritizes profits over people.

Yeah. It all comes down to decisions, right? Well, Jason, you shared with me about your new adventure. I would love for you to share with the audience of The People of Animal Health Podcast what you’re up to today.

Yeah. No, I appreciate the opportunity and the platform. So I am very honored and excited to be on the founding team of CatsOnly Veterinary Services. We are setting out to elevate care for cats at scale. And so, while our starting is going to be small, our goals and our dreams are really high because the FelineVMA has done a ton of great work. The CATalyst Council has done a ton of great work to really elevate and improve the care for cats within the current care system. But it’s our belief as the founders of this organization that cats are long overdue to have their own care system, and while there are some really good cat-only practices in the US, we need 100 times more because cats deserve an entire care system that is built with their mindset and their lens as the pure focus.

We, as veterinary medicine, we evolved from ag to companion animal and built hospitals for companions, and those were built in for ease of doctors, ease of owners, and that was about it. There’s some features that we’ve added and things that we’ve done to make this a better experience for dogs or a better experience for cats. But what we’re setting out to do is everything from architecture to conversations to color choice to workflow to communication. We’re looking at every decision we make with intentionality through the lens of the cat. And so, we’re really excited.

We are finalizing our first location selection. We’re going to be in the Denver, Colorado area for our first handful of hospitals and then growing from there across the US. I’m really proud to work with a team that is committed to remaining true to our mission, true to our core values, and true to our ethos of CatsOnly, that is everything through the lens of the cat and everything for what is going to be best for that journey and that experience for not just the cat, but for the caregiver and truly serving the bond that they have.

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Well, my 23-year-old daughter just got two cats of her own. One of her co-workers had this ragdoll cat, and then she got a dog, and I don’t know if they just didn’t get along or what, but she was looking for a new home for the cat. So my daughter adopted her, and her name is Lovey. And then, loved her so much, she got a second cat that’s gray, and so she named her Graylin. So my daughter has Lovey and Graylin, and I get daily photos in our text group with what my grandcats are doing, so especially excited-

Love that.

… about your new venture with CatsOnly.

Yes.

Well, Jason, I’m curious, what has been the most surprising thing to you during your career in the veterinary profession?

How big and small this industry is. I’ve been fortunate enough to get to know a ton of people throughout this industry, from doctors, technicians, to people that are in the diagnostic space, to the manufacturing space, to the recruiting, to all sorts of organizations. The amount of times I mention a name, and it’s like, “Oh, I know them, but we go way back, and we used to work together.” It’s just the way that it is such a small community that can somehow still have a conference with 20,000 people there. The fact that I can fly to the other side of the country to a conference and run into someone that I haven’t seen since undergrad, that I didn’t even know had gone into vet school better yet, a feline specialty. I think that the beauty of this industry is that despite its size, it remains to feel so small.

Yeah, no, it’s so true. In fact, just the other day, I saw a company’s social media post on LinkedIn. There were like three or four different conferences going on in the same week, and they had all these different booths. So our industry is big enough to have so many different conferences, but like you said, it’s small in terms of the degrees of separation, and you will see a lot of the same people at different conferences, which is what I love about it. Well, how have you seen the veterinary profession change over the years you’ve been involved?

I think the first reach is specialization of care and advancements in both technology from the EMR side and technology from the diagnostics and things we actually use with our patient side. Obviously, there were specialties, and that’s who trained us in vet school. But I think we’ve become more and more accepting and more and more quick to lean on our specialists and refer to our specialists. We’ve seen a large growth of the specialist community across the US that are outside of universities. And so, I think that is something that makes perfect sense. We are taking better and better care of these patients, and so it’s great to see the need for oncologists and ophthalmologists and more and more radiologists and internists and surgeons all across the country. When I was growing up, there wasn’t a specialist in Charleston where I grew up. That wasn’t a thing. So we’re seeing that become more and more of the norm, and that gives me a lot of confidence heading into what I’ve been working on because I strongly believe that the next phase of veterinary medicine, now that we’ve specialized, is to speciate. It’s time.

Humans have a different doctor for preemie, neonate, and pediatrics and adults and senior care and geriatrics. We get different doctors based on our age, and we’re all the same species, so I think it’s time that we… Not because we as doctors can’t, but because our patients deserve a care system that is really built for that species. So I think that’s the biggest way I’ve seen it evolve. Obviously, in the last five years, we’ve seen AI, and we’ve seen scribes, and we’ve seen some really cool new tech come and go. We’re seeing ultrasound become an extension of the stethoscope. I love what Dr. Lisciandro says about that, and I’m a strong believer that quick scan ultrasound should be included with a physical because it’s such… And now that you can get one for a couple thousand dollars, there’s no reason you shouldn’t have it in every hospital. So I think the technology, the accessibility, there’s a lot, but those are kind of my standouts as what’s evolved.

And you wrote an article about that in Animal Health News and Views on speciation. And for our listeners, if you’re not familiar with the Animal Health News and Views publication, Jason is a regular contributor. So Animal Health News and Views aggregates the news and then shows the viewpoints and opinions of different people across the animal health industry and veterinary profession, so be sure to check out Jason’s article in the publication. So Jason, you mentioned the speciation, but what does your crystal ball say about the future of the veterinary profession? What else do you see in the future?

I think I hope and I believe that we are heading to an area where we will see cat hospitals, we will see dog hospitals, and we will see mixed companion animal hospitals. I truly think we’re headed there over… It’s going to take a decade. It’s going to take two decades to really make that that needle move because we’re talking about a convenience factor for owners, but it’s giving up the convenience of single practice for what is best for their pet and for that patient. I think the other crystal ball is what’s going to happen with the mid-level concept and the mid-level practitioner. Whether we like it or not, it’s approved and it’s happening. And so, we can sit here with our arms crossed as veterinarians and as organizations and say, “Well, this is our thing and you can’t,” or we figure out a way to embrace it and find the right balance and find the right way to have it not leapfrog our technicians, especially our CVT, LVT, RVTs.

I think a licensed technician is worth their weight in gold, and finding a way for this mid-level idea to elevate them even further, I think, is something that intrigues me, that we have a responsibility now to figure out. And so, how does that work with licensing and liability, and if they see a patient and something goes wrong, is it on me as the doctor? Is it on them as a licensed mid-level? That’s for people that deal with legal stuff to figure out. But I think it’s going to have to be, and in order for doctors in organizations to find the right ways to accept it, we need to define it. So I can’t look in that ball and tell you what it’s going to look like. I can make some guesses, but I think I would love to see where doctors are practicing high-end medicine and surgery.

If you have a doctor that’s passionate about volume, then they can remain in higher volume or mixed companion and maybe have a mid-level or two at their hip, or maybe we find a way that mid-level can improve access to care, which is really the motive. It wasn’t to drop the prices. It was for all the areas that don’t have access to care, get someone that can help provide access to care. So how do we find that balance? And I don’t know the answer, but it’s going to be interesting to see.

Well, I had a doctor’s appointment this week, and I saw a nurse practitioner. The doctor wasn’t available for several weeks, but they were able to get me in with a nurse practitioner.

Yep. No, I see NPs and PAs all the time. It’s the norm, and I think the ease on the human side is that their physicians are making X dollars, which leaves room for PAs and NPs and RNs and then all the way down. The struggle we get to is our doctors are starting to see salaries that are getting closer to reflective of what I believe veterinarians deserve. Our RVTs are not there yet. And so, to find another position that is going to need compensation that is between a nurse and a doctor, that’s where the trick becomes is because we’re not in an industry where we pay doctors 300K and we can pay a PA 110. We’re just 150, or I don’t know what PAs make, but I don’t think we’re in a position where that makes sense yet. So it’s going to be interesting to see how that unfolds.

Yeah, it will be. Well, Jason, what has been the biggest adversity or biggest challenge that you’ve had to encounter so far during your career?

I think the biggest challenge was the transition from colleague and clinical doctor to leader and management, learning how to become the we on the leadership team and not the we on the clinical team. Letting go of that rope of, “I’m with you. I’m on your team. I’m a doctor. I got you by my side,” learning the hard way through plenty of mistakes that as a leader, you can be on the team’s side, but you ultimately are in the position of leadership. So going to them and saying, “Hey, okay, I hear you. Yep, let me go talk to them about this issue,” and then coming back and going, “Well, they said we can’t do that,” when I’m on that discussion, but I don’t want to take the blame for it, right? I want to be, “I’m on the doctor team. I agree with you. This can’t happen. We have to do this. We need to hire seven more techs. Of course. Yeah, I’m on your side, but they said no.” Stopping that habit was one of the most important things because when I do that, when any of us do that, we become useless.

It is, “Oh, okay, this person is just a monkey in the middle, but they can’t get me anything I want,” and it’s creating this there’s a leadership enemy that doesn’t get it, either I, as the middleman, not doing a good job communicating or the ultimate they that said no don’t actually care, the organization, the HQ. So finding a way to say, “I hear you. I’m with you. This makes a ton of sense. Let me take it back to the team, and we will come back to you,” and coming back and saying, “Hey, we went through all of this, and here’s the decision we made, and this is why,” and owning it and being willing to have someone go, “That’s a stupid decision. I disagree,” and go, “Well, this is where we’re at right now.” Having to own those uncomfortable conversations, that’s been the biggest challenge. Getting over that hurdle made a world of difference in how effective my communication was to my teams and their ability to see me as a valued leader.

The problem with some is the damage was already done, that there was already an us-them mentality, and you can’t undo those things. So it’s a lesson that unfortunately carries consequences for a long time when you create that narrative.

What advice would you give a younger version of yourself?

Half of what I just said and I think take responsibility for the decisions of the leadership team. Accept that you are on that team and you’re no longer on the clinical team as soon as you left and went to that side. Don’t be afraid to speak up ever. I think I saw a lot of things that I accepted out of ignorance and said, “I guess that’s how it’s done. I guess that’s supposed to be done, or I guess that’s what normal looks like,” instead of speaking up and sharing my opinion when it didn’t make sense to me because I was a young leader or maybe I didn’t know any better. For whatever reason, I think I kept my mouth… I would encourage myself to speak up because the worst that can happen is they’re going to say no and then move on. So that would be my pieces of advice for me in a leadership seat, for sure.

And what message or principle do you wish you could teach everyone listening to our podcast today?

Oh, take accountability for your decisions. Take responsibility for what you do, and if you’re in a position of leadership, accountability starts with I. If you are in a position of leadership or you want to become a leader in any organization, live and breathe, “Accountability starts with I.” It is my responsibility as a leader to give tools. It is my responsibility to train my team. It is my responsibility to set expectations, and it is my responsibility to make sure that those expectations were met, and I follow up. If something goes wrong, before, it is, “Who did it? Who did it? What happened,” it is okay. Time out. Accountability starts with I. Did I do those four things? Did I train them? Did they get the tools they needed to do the job? Did I tell them that’s what I expected of them, and did I make sure they actually did it?

Because if there’s a failure on any of those, then the person that maybe made the mistake, where the gap happened, where the problem happened, they’re not to blame. It’s on me. And so, accountability starts with I as a leader, as a doctor, and any role is critical because it gets you out of that blame mindset. It gets you into a blameless problem-solving approach. And if you can solve problems without looking for or caring who to blame and really looking for where the problem started, what the missing piece was, you’ll become a lot more effective as a team member and a lot more effective as a leader.

Such good advice. Well, Jason, some of our guests have said they’ve had a key book that’s helped them along the way. Do you have a key book in your life that has impacted you the most?

I have a handful. I think from a professional standpoint, I thrive at structure, and so the Traction book that goes over the entrepreneurial operating system, the EOS system, was really good for me because it helped give me a way to look at things, whether it is how to run a meeting or how to organize my thoughts or how to evaluate talent, how to evaluate a person, and just sit down and go, “Okay. Is this right person in the right seat, or is it right person wrong seat or wrong person rights? How do I look at them, and how do I objectively evaluate? Okay, do they align to our core values? Let me actually rank it.” The ideas out of that book,, I think helped me as a leader.

I think emotionally, I really liked the Kind Folks Finish First book. I think that validated a lot of my thoughts of someone else doesn’t have to lose for me to win. I think that’s an important mentality, and it’s especially in the veterinary space. The clinic down the road doesn’t have to fail for my clinic to succeed. There’s space for everybody. So those are probably the two professionally that I think made the biggest impact on me.

That’s what I call the abundance mentality.

Mm-hmm.

Well, outside the clinic, you have a passion for music, sports, and travel. How do those pursuits help you stay grounded in such a demanding field?

Well, travel’s easy. That’s how I disconnect, and I have a rule with work is that if I leave the country, then everything’s off. If I’m in the country, then I’m somewhat accessible. And so, my fiance and I try to get out of the country once every year to year and a half, and finding an organization that supports the true concept of PTO, supports the true concept of, “I’m out for 10 days. You can call me. My phone’s on airplane mode for 10 days. I’m not answering,” and understands the importance of truly disconnecting, I think I get a lot of perspective. I get a lot of energy from seeing new places and experiencing new cultures, so I think travel is important for me as my way to really disconnect and reset.

On more of a daily basis, that’s, I think, where music plays a role. Music’s been a huge part of my life. I started playing clarinet at the age of seven and played all the way through college. I’ve played guitar in bands throughout my vet school career, and I still like to play and write music, and it’s an escape. It’s a coping mechanism. If I have something I can’t get off my mind and I can’t sleep, I’ll sit in bed with my guitar. I think we all have our outlet, and music has such an ability to be very emotionally powerful, and it definitely does for me. Songs can take you back to certain moments, just like certain smells can take you back to certain places and certain moments in time. I think knowing what fills your cup, knowing what helps you relax, knowing what helps turn your brain off when there’s that case you can’t get out of your head and your mind is just running and running, knowing how you can put a pause on that is really important for all of us.

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

Oh, boy. I think I’ve said a lot. I think I’m proud to be sitting where I am, and I will share that this industry and this career has so many opportunities. Don’t be scared to take a leap. Don’t be scared to ask for help and know that there are way, way more people out there that support you, that want to encourage you, and that will help you in any way they can than there are people that don’t think you can do it. The majority of the I don’t think I can do this voice is all in our head, and there will be setbacks. There will be people that tell you, “You’re not good at your job.” Ignore them. I’ve had to ignore them, and it’s something that we all have to figure out a way to process through.

No one in this… They call it a practice of medicine for a reason. We’re going to make mistakes. We’re going to learn and grow. We’re going to have adversity, and find what truly brings you joy in a daily basis. Figure out what your motivating factor is, what drives you, and then find a way to go do that. If it is clinical practice and caring for patients firsthand, then do that and find an organization that’s going to support you to allow you to do it the way you want. I love helping people. I thought I was going to be a therapist for a while because I just love talking and seeing the world through points of view and hearing people out. How can I help each person I talk to and each person I meet succeed? And so, I really enjoyed my time of just networking and not in clinical practice because it was introducing friends and meeting all of these companies and figuring out where I was going to land next. Just don’t be afraid to try something new. Don’t be afraid to put yourself out there.

That’s good advice. So everybody listening, try something new, don’t be afraid to put yourself out there, and find the joy on a daily basis. Well, Jason, thank you so much for being my guest today on The People of Animal Health Podcast. It was a pleasure to have you here.

Yeah, I enjoyed it. Thanks for having me. And yeah, just spread the joy. That’s the right way to say it, so thank you.

Thank you, Jason.