Episode #77 – Dr. Christine Staten

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. On today’s show, I am talking with Dr. Christine Staten. Dr. Staten is a veterinarian, entrepreneur and mentor based in Tucson, Arizona. After earning her DVM from Colorado State University, Dr. Staten built Adobe Veterinary Center from a one doctor ambulatory practice into a thriving two location, 50 person mixed animal clinic. Passionate about leadership and sustainability, she also founded Veterinary MBA, helping practice owners design businesses that bring more time, freedom, and balance. A lifelong learner with an MBA from LSU, dr. Staten shares her wisdom on veterinary entrepreneurship, mentorship, and living unapologetically unbalanced while leading with purpose and passion. I’ve gotten to spend some time with Dr. Staten recently through Vet Partners where we had the opportunity to eat a couple of meals together, and I’m excited to have her here on my show today.

Dr. Staten, welcome to The People of Animal Health Podcast, and how are you today?

Fantastic. Thank you so much for having me here. I’m so excited that we’re finally doing this.

I am excited as well. Well, I would love to start off at the beginning. What was your life like growing up and where did you grow up?

So I grew up right here in Tucson, Arizona. I live and work in the community that I grew up in, which is something that I love that I’m taking care of the community that I grew up in. I grew up as a kid with horses and a bunch of livestock animals. I actually raised rabbits, miniature sheep, Pygmy goats, dogs, and we showed them all over the country. I had guinea pigs that we showed all over the country, and so raised all around animals having a good time in 4-H with them.

Well, you started your career as a labor and delivery technician before pursuing veterinary medicine. What inspired that shift and how has that early experience influenced the way you care for animals and people today?

Yeah, two questions are in there I’m hearing. One is the fact that I sometimes hate to admit this, but I did not want to be a veterinarian since I was five years old, and I think a lot of people did. I was wanting to be an obstetrician in human medicine, and I worked in labor and delivery all through college and after as a technician, I got to see thousands of babies born. I was a pre-med student. I was in the pre-med club. I took my MCATs and I applied to medical school with a bachelor’s in biology. And at my interviews for medical school, which back then were live, we didn’t have Zoom back then in the ’90s, those interviewers asked me over and over, “Why don’t you want to be a veterinarian?” And I thought, what a silly question? I don’t want to be a veterinarian. But I came home and this literally was a moment where I took pen to paper and I thought before I go to my next interview for medical school, I better have a better answer.

So I was going to write it down and I thought, why don’t I want to be a veterinarian? So I’m really analytical and I took two pieces of paper and I said, “Veterinarian and physician.” And I divided them and said, “Pro, con.” And I really thought maybe I do want to be a veterinarian. And I spent one week interviewing veterinarians and physicians. I knew a lot of both and literally changed my trajectory. So I pulled all my applications from medical school because I didn’t want to know if I got in, after all that hard work, it would be hard to turn down, and I started pursuing going to veterinary school. So that’s the story. It’s not like everybody else’s story. And I have never looked back. I have thought it’s the greatest decision.

And the two big things on my pro list for vet were entrepreneurship. I wanted to own a practice and I thought that was easier in vet med and I really wanted to serve my community and that was a way I could do that. And then the other thing was I really didn’t want to do an internship or residency, a fellowship, and those would be required. I was married. When I was applying to medical school, I was married young. We knew we wanted to have a lot of kids, and having my husband change his job all those times just didn’t seem very appealing. So that was the big switch. The second part of your question said, I think it said, what about that prepared me for this role?

Influence the way that you care for animals and people. How did that influence you?

Yeah. So first of all, in labor and delivery, everyone who’s had a baby remembers so many details about the delivery room and the people that were in there. And I think that was impressed upon me when I worked in labor and delivery that if you roll your eyes, that is going to be a memory, a core memory for them forever. So you have to really be on your game when you’re in the room and be present for that person. So that certainly helped. And then I don’t think I’ve ever talked about it before, but I asked to be trained as the stillbirth technician. And it was mostly because I would have to go into these stillbirths every now and then and I didn’t feel like I was as prepared as I should be. I wanted that experience for the parents to be perfect.

So they actually sent me to training for stillbirth training, and I was grateful for that. And then whenever there were stillbirths, I was in those. And I’m saying that without a lot of emotion, clearly unbelievably emotional thing, but I wanted to do it right, so I asked for that training. So I think that has helped me so much with euthanasias. It’s a different scenario, but you’re still sitting with a grieving family that again, every second of that encounter is going to be memorized in their brain and etched in their brain forever. So we just have to be really cautious with that.

Yeah, it takes so much compassion.

Yeah.

Well, Christine, you grew Adobe Veterinary Center from a one doctor ambulatory practice into a two location, 50-person operation. What were some of the biggest lessons and growing pains along that journey?

Well, if this was 24-hour podcast, I could tell you all of my growing pains and all of my hurdles. I struggled. I was not a business person. I wanted to be a business person. I had an entrepreneurial urge for sure, but I didn’t know how to do any of that. And back then we didn’t have a lot of access to a lot of mentors, or at least I didn’t know to look for them. There weren’t a lot of resources in Vet Med. Even at the conferences back in the early 2000s, there just wasn’t a lot of business stuff being talked about. I didn’t know any other practice owners. I just muddled through with a couple books, Jim Wilson’s book and Mark Opperman’s book were what I had, and that’s what I used to muddle through. I looked a little to dentistry, but I made a lot of mistakes.

I hit a lot of speed bumps, a lot of potholes, fell over a lot of hurdles, took roads that went the wrong direction. So I think I learned by making a lot of mistakes, and that is a way to learn, but it’s not the only way to learn. So I’m hoping that I’m helping other people see that journey. And that’s been the joy of Veterinary MBA is creating what I wish I would’ve had access to at the beginning, the support and the resources. I did it, but it wasn’t pretty. It was very messy.

Well, some veterinarians struggle with the business side of practice ownership. What motivated you to pursue your MBA from LSU and how has it changed the way you lead your practice?

So that was when I turned 50, I had a neurologist tell me, “You cannot do large animal medicine anymore.” And I’m a large animal doctor. I love it. There’s not a day I have ever regretted my degree. It was the best decision I made. And so when he told me, “Your neck and back are not going to tolerate this anymore, and you’re destroying yourself.” And I was in very chronic pain. I could not sleep. Every picture of me has my hand holding the back of my neck, providing counter pressure if I look at pictures of me. And I basically ignored him and said, “Thank you for your advice.” He was actually a horse client of mine, so he knew what I did and how I did it.

And then my first grandbaby was born and I was 50 and I went to lay that three-month-old baby in her crib and I couldn’t physically do it. I couldn’t lower her down because of the pain in my neck. And that was the moment when I thought, okay, he’s right. And I had a midlife crisis, panic on, what do I do with this degree? I don’t know what to do with this degree. I thought of all things. Should I go to small animal? Well, that’s physical. Should I maybe learn acupuncture? How can I use my degree without the physical side of it?

And during that time, I think it was my husband that said, “Well, what do you like most about it?” And I said, “Well, I like running the practice, but I also like working in it.” And so I just decided to get my MBA a midlife crisis, me trying to figure out what to do. And it was during that that I was like, I know what I can do with this degree without being overly physical. And that can maybe be helping some other people who were where I was a long time ago. So I did it online while I still worked full-time. It took me two years to get people in place so that I could actually move myself out of full-time patient care. And yeah, it was fun. I loved getting it.

Well, you have a company called Veterinary MBA. What common challenges do you see veterinary owners and managers facing and how do you help them build more sustainable, freedom-oriented businesses?

Most veterinary practice owners are veterinarians, so they’re the revenue generators. And some love both sides of it, but most that I work with love being a veterinarian. They wanted to be a practice owner, but that’s burdensome on them because they’re also trying to generate revenue. It’s very different than the model in the E-Myth or other books that talk about where you make great pies, so you open a pie shop and now you can’t make more pies because you’re busy, but you got to run your business. So you hire people to make pies. Well, as veterinarians, we’re the revenue generators. So we have to continue to generate revenue until we get to a certain point where we can back up a little bit. And I think so first, figuring out how to be the CEO of their company and dividing that out.

So one of the first things I tell people is try your best to create a CEO day every week. Maybe it’s a half a day where you are focused on the practice, not in the practice. And I do my CEO day away from my practice. I’m not in the building. It would never get done where I can focus on the practice on strategic planning, on visionary work, things that need to get done, but also things to think about the future. So that’s number one. The second problem I see is isolation. People feel very isolated. And I know you own a business, so you get this, but when you own a business, whether it’s veterinary or not, you feel the overwhelming responsibility of that, of employees, of caring for pets, caring for patients, staying true to your core values. Those are really important things. And unless somebody else owns a business, they don’t get that.

So I think surrounding yourself with other practice owners has just been so transformative for myself and really transformative for others. Finding community, creating relationships with other owners, just sitting at a table with somebody who gets it is, even if you don’t have a lot of things to talk about, there’s something, there’s a commonality that you’re like, I’m not alone in this.

If somebody’s listening and they’re interested in being a part of Veterinary MBA, how would they connect with you about that?

Well, I love being in Instagram. So on Instagram, I’m Veterinary_MBA and I love chatting through the DMs, but I also have a website and there’s some contact information on their veterinary-mba.com. And yeah, I love to talk to practice owners and managers that are struggling because I think it’s a really sustainable business model. I think the data out there says 99.7% succeed of veterinary practices. So I talked to somebody yesterday who was just struggling and said, “I think I made a wrong decision. I think I’m failing at this ownership thing.” And I was like, “First of all, your business isn’t failing, but there are things you can do to make your life easier and get yourself a little bit of freedom and a little bit of you could back up from your practice and outsource a little. Let some of your team do some of those things so that you don’t feel the burden of being responsible for every little decision in your practice.”

Well, your practice hosts more than 30 veterinary student externs each year, and you run programs like Future Practitioners Weekend. What advice do you give young veterinarians entering the profession today?

Yes, I love veterinary students, pre-vet students. Today, we have two veterinary students and a pre-vet student in our practice. I was just over there with them. They’re helping us do some surgeries on some pigs. I tell them that it is the greatest profession in the world that they are making the right decision to pursue it. If they don’t get in the first time, apply again. If they don’t pass their NAVLE, take it again. That this career affords you so much flexibility that if you ever are at a point where you’re not happy, you can do a thousand other things with this degree. It’s just a very, very versatile degree. And there’s so much joy and there’s a place for each person in vet med. So I love it. We do bring veterinary externs. They do four-week rotations at our practice, mostly through the University of Arizona. They have a distributive model.

I think other practitioners should think about bringing on externs. There’s a lot of distributed models out there. Bring on those externs. You don’t have to be a perfect practice. In fact, that’s better that you’re not a perfect practice. We had a case today that we did not know what was wrong. I have been working on this poor patient for three days hospitalized and literally know a few things that it’s not, but did not know what was wrong. And that’s reality and that’s the reality of practice. So I encourage veterinary practice owners, please, please think about bringing externs in, but also it just makes us better. We get excited. They’re excited. We get to learn a little bit more. They teach us some stuff, but it makes us learn more if we’re teaching them. It’s just a win-win-win for our whole team.

You describe yourself as unapologetically unbalanced. What does that mean to you and how do you navigate the demands of running a business, mentoring students and raising a large family?

Yes. So like you, I have five kids. I had them while I was before, during, and after veterinary school. Before, during, and after building our physical first building. And I think to me, balance implies some sort of scales where it’s equal and there’s no day in my life where things are equal. There’s no seasons of my life where they’re equal. There’s ebb and flow. And I feel like if I try to achieve balance and my happiness is dependent upon me achieving this, and it’s not really attainable to have this undescribable thing, then I’m going to be unhappy all the time. So I feel like throwing that out the window and trying to find joy in everything I do, depending on what season I’m in, becomes really important and relevant.

And I worked… So as an example, and people may hear this and think I would never do that, but my first job that I took was with a solo ambulatory vet, my vet growing up, and we sat down to try to figure out how to do our work schedule. And I had little kids at the time. It was my first job ever, well, first job out of veterinary school ever. And what we decided on was I was going to work 12-hour days, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and do night call those four nights around it. So I was going to put in, I ended up putting in about 50, 60-hour work weeks, but I was off Monday through Thursday. So I don’t know if that was balance because I never saw my son play football, which I’m okay with. He had other family members there, but I got to be the room mom. So there was a lot of that going on.

But then there was a season where the veterinary partner was out for six months with a back injury, and I was all in a hundred percent call that whole time. Clearly, there’s no balance there. And then there was a time when my son had heart surgery. I need to be with him more than I’m at work. So I think finding joy and not trying, for me, not trying to separate the two, not trying to create this boundary between them. I love both of them. Intertwining them doesn’t bother me. And so if I read lab work while I’m sitting on the beach because I want to, I don’t care. I love both parts of my job. And if somebody’s shaming and saying, “You don’t have balance, you don’t have boundaries.” And I get that in my head, then it becomes a problem. But if I don’t listen to those voices and say, “This is working for me,” then I can find joy in just about everything I’m doing and intertwine them really well.

Yeah, it’s working for you and everybody has to do what works for them. Right? I mean-

Right.

And I agree with you, that’s how I live my life the same way, being a mom of five kids, running a business, loving what I do, I agree with that approach. Now, you have spoken about creating sustainable models that give owners more time, money, and freedom. Why do you think entrepreneurship and business education are so essential for modern veterinarians?

Well, I don’t think a bunch of formal education is necessary. Getting my MBA was a bucket list thing for me. I could cash flow it. I didn’t know what I was doing and I needed to add something to my life to distract me. And again, it was on my bucket list. It was something I’d wanted to do. I don’t think formal education is necessary. I do think figuring out what your pain points are and finding help makes life easier for you. And one of the big pain points for most people is outsourcing, is doing it all and not passing it off. And once you start to pass off little things, then it becomes easier to pass off big things. And I am saying this from a place of someone who took a long time to pass stuff off. And sometimes I pass it off and grab it right back because I’m like, “You’re not doing it as good as I could do it.”

And so I think learning how to outsource and delegate well is a really important skill to learn. I think that you can outsource so much that you don’t need to learn at all as long as you trust the team you’re outsourcing it to. I do not know how to do bookkeeping for my practice. If I was asked to do it right now, I don’t know how, but that’s okay because I trust the people that are doing the bookkeeping for me.

So I think it’s a little bit of that. Figuring out what your core competencies are, what you should be doing, and then what things you’re not as good at or things that you hate doing and getting them off of your plate so that the things that you’re good at and the things that you like doing are what you’re spending your time and energy on and giving yourself that freedom to say, “You know what? They don’t have to do it exactly like me. In fact, they don’t even have to do it 100%. If they do it 80% as well as I think I would do it, and I get a night off or an afternoon off, I think that’s worth it.” And the reality is once you start doing it, you realize that it’s not that they’re doing it 80%, most of them are doing it significantly better than you were doing it. At least that’s been my experience.

Yeah. Do your strengths and let other people do their strengths.

Yes.

Well, Christine, you also dabble in real estate, including commercial property, student rentals, and even an Airbnb. How has investing outside of veterinary medicine influenced your approach to business and financial freedom?

I think anyone listening that’s an entrepreneur gets it, that you just try to find the next opportunity. And for us, initially we attacked our debt. We had credit card debt, student loan debt, and we just attacked it viciously. We used the Dave Ramsey program. We were all in. I mean, we fell off the grid. Our extended family was like, “We didn’t see you for years.” We’re like, “Yeah, because we didn’t leave our house for years. We never went out to eat. We didn’t go to the parties.” And we really attacked our debt dramatically. Then after we did that, we thought, well, what’s next for us? And so we did some real estate investing. My dad had owned a duplex and we purchased that from him. And it mostly was because my kids were going to college here in town. And so we’re like, “Well, let’s just buy the place that we stayed in when we went to college for my parents.”

And then we bought another one. And so we ended up, we have four doors of student rentals, and then we have an Airbnb, which is a combo of our personal vacation cabin as well. It’s four hours from our house in Northern Arizona in the Pine Forest. Arizona’s got desert down here and pine forest up there. So it’s our personal dream vacation home, and it was something we couldn’t just afford by itself. So by having it be an Airbnb, we can afford it. Basically, the guests pay for us to have a free vacation rental, but it also has a lot of tax strategy. So having real estate, having multiple businesses allows you to really use the tax code to your advantage legally and write off a lot of things and make a lot of what would’ve been personal expenses, now deductible expenses. And so that’s become my obsession is how much can we write off? And the real estate really helps us with that.

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Well, with a 10 doctor, 50 person team, leadership has to be key. How do you cultivate a positive culture in your practice and keep your team aligned through growth and change?

Well, again, I did it wrong for a long time. I’ve been a practice owner for 23 years now, and I probably think the first 15, I did this horribly. I think now the most important thing to cultivate our culture is to make sure we let the right people in and keep the wrong people out. I really think that my general manager, I have a general manager who’s in charge of HR, she knows it’s more important to keep the wrong people out because bringing one wrong person in can really disrupt us. So if she’s on the fence about somebody, I’d rather her err on the side of not bringing them on board. And that’s been key. But then once they get here, everyone has a policy manual, a employee handbook. I think you’re required by law to have a lot of legal stuff in there. And then you have your own personal stuff, whatever your policies are.

But we also have a code of conduct, which is behavioral standards that are required in our practice. And those behavioral standards and expectations are not negotiable. And we have had people who have chosen not to work at our place because of those, and that’s fine. Perfect. We’re keeping our culture. There’s nothing wrong with that person. They’re succeeding down the road, but our culture is very protected and trying to create a culture like that without behavioral expectations, I think is really hard. So an example of a behavioral expectation, they’re all I statements, I, whatever, and everyone initials every single one of them. So an example would be, I will come to work on time, fed and ready to work. So that’s a behavioral standard. So that might be different somewhere else. But what we found was people arriving, the fed part came in, half the people were going to the lounge and making breakfast, and the other half were getting to work, and that was causing some tension.

And tension is not something we want in our culture. So we’re going to eliminate that by saying, “Breakfast is not… We don’t eat breakfast here. Come fed. You’re fed and ready to work.” And that just is one of many of our behavioral expectations that we have. Those shape us and we use those to course correct. So if somebody, I can call somebody in to the office and say, “Hey, can you read number seven?” And they’ve initialed each one and they read it. And I said, “So that interaction this morning with Mr. Brown, can we talk about that interaction and how it relates to this behavioral expectation?” And nine times out of 10, the person sitting across from me is going to say, “Yeah, you’re right. Yeah, I messed that up and that’s not how we behave around here and I need to do some stuff to change that.”

And really it’s easy. It’s an easy conversation. We’re like, “Okay, I just needed to bring it to your attention because this isn’t what we do here. This isn’t the Adobe way, what I saw this morning or what happened this morning, but this is.” And there are things that we all agreed on. We met and we said, “What would the perfect environment be?” And that’s where these behavioral expectations came out of is what would be perfect if you could come to work and love driving to work every day. So because of that, the team protects them. The team calls each other out. I’ll hear somebody, my favorite words that I ever hear are, “Oh, we don’t do that here.” And it’s usually somebody who’s been here a while to a new person and I’m like, oh, that’s so… It’s just beautiful to hear.

We do not speak negatively about any patient, any client, any other practice ever, ever. That’s written in there. So if you come back and gripe about a patient, somebody will stop you and say, “We don’t do that here. That’s not part of our culture.” Now, is it perfect every day? No, but it’s set up to work and be pretty self-regulated. I don’t have to be in the building for it to work.

One of the things you share with me during dinner when we connected earlier in the year was about your onsite childcare facility at your practice. I would love for our audience to hear about this.

Yeah. So it’s something I wanted forever and thought, that’s weird. Nobody else has that. And then I met someone who did. I met a veterinarian in Texas who has onsite childcare. And when I asked her about it, she said, “I just built it. It made sense for my practice and it made me frustrated that I hadn’t done it earlier.” So I knew we were going to do it at some point. I didn’t know exactly how or when we were going to make that happen, but we closed our pet resort a year ago and we knew we were doing an expansion on our building that included that area plus a little bit of an expansion. And in that new expansion, we added a two-room, kitchenette, bathroom building. It’s connected to our building, but there’s no door that goes into ours. And it’s a full childcare center.

We bought out a childcare center or a preschool that went out of business, so we have all the furniture for it. And it’s amazing. So my team, basically it’s a bring-your-child-to-work workplace. That’s the true definition of it. So they have to be working. They have to be on the clock while their kids are in there. They can’t drop them off on a different day. And that’s keeping us under the radar of having to meet all the childcare codes because it’s a bring-your-child-to-work. It’s also completely free for them. And for me, it made sense in a bunch of reasons. The big one is we have a big family. We love having a big family. I want to support people who want to have a family, enough. That by itself could be enough to do it. But the other thing is I lost my technicians when they had their second baby.

They either left because the math didn’t math. Two kids in daycare versus what we could pay them did not balance out or many cases where their parents were watching one, but their parents could not watch two. So I had, over the years, I’ve seen so many of my good team members that left the workforce or left the veterinary workforce when they had that second baby. So I didn’t want that to continue to happen. And what’s really fun about this is that once we opened, we have one technician who has two kids who was part-time and she immediately went to full-time. And then we had another technician that left three years ago when she had her second baby who came back and is now working for us. So I see… The ROI, if I need to look at that, is clearly there.

We also had a veterinarian who at the end of her maternity leave wasn’t ready to come back after three months. So I said, “Take another month off.” Because private practice owners, we can do that. And she was very grateful and she stayed home another month with her kiddo. But I think if we’d had this facility and her baby was on site, she may have come back that month. And just that month of revenue is going to pay for a year’s worth of the daycare workers that we have. So there’s an ROI-

I love that.

… but there’s also just a… It makes sense for our practice and it feels good.

I wish more businesses would do that, especially with the veterinary profession being mostly females graduating from veterinary school now. I love that you’re doing that. Well, Christine, between your veterinary practice, MBA work, and mentoring, what’s next for you and Veterinary MBA, and where do you see the biggest opportunities for innovation in the veterinary profession?

Well, right now I’m having the time of my life. I think I spoke at 12 conferences this year on business. I had my first live retreat that I put on for veterinary practice owners. It was so fun. We’re going to keep doing those. It was at a dude ranch and we just had a blast. We had a lot of connection and community that happened there. I continue to work with veterinary practice owners and managers through their… I have a membership, so they’re in the membership and we do three Zooms a month. And I’m having a lot of fun. I feel like staying in this for a while is good for Veterinary MBA. I would love to expand to more retreats or more focused retreats. Maybe I have retreats where there’s newer business owners or people getting ready to do their practice. I think some of the disadvantages of those are that combining people that have been there is really helpful.

So those are on the horizon. For my own actual practice, we’re doing a big remodel in our small animal clinic where we’re going to make it fully transparent so the exam rooms will be able to see the treatment area. And as a large animal veterinarian, everything I do is in front of a client and generally a stranger that wandered up. So I’m proud of what we do. I’m proud of what my team does, and we’re going to really work to manage that change very safely so everyone has the psychological safety that they feel like this is a good thing.

So as a leader and a manager, my role this year is going to be making sure people understand that it’s safe and it’s a good thing. And that change management is really hard to tackle, but if you don’t tackle that, if I just put windows in and did nothing else in terms of working with my team, it would be a disaster. So that’s a big part of what I’m going to be doing in my own practice.

That’s so exciting. Well, what has been the most surprising thing to you during your career so far in the veterinary profession?

Just how sustainable it is. I think that I did not think of all of the pros when I made my pro, con list. And we now know that as a general practice, we’re pretty recession-proof. We’re pretty pandemic-proof. We’re essential. We are a very successful business model. And as a private practitioner, we can do whatever we want with that. I think that there’s some innovation. You asked about innovation in a previous question. There’s some changes that we can do. One of the things I’ve wanted to do, and I’m not sure that I will, but I would love if I had a couple practices to have only one that did surgery and all the surgeries go to that surgery center or one of them has the lab, decrease our overhead by not having so much stuff at each.

I love that we’re outsourcing the pharmacy with online pharmacies and scripts to human pharmacies. That’s just been wonderful. All these things that keep our overhead so high, I think we need to start really critically thinking about does every single practice need a full radiology center, a full surgery suite, a full laboratory, a full pharmacy? Those are all just eating away at potential profits. And that’s, in my opinion, why team wages end up being lower. It’s why we can’t really get that non-doctor payroll significantly higher than 20% safely. But if we could decrease our overhead, we could put that towards non-doctor payroll. So I think there’s fun ideas out there, and I hope some people are going to jump into them.

How have you seen the veterinary profession change over the years you’ve been involved?

I think we’ve become more innovative, more creative. I think that the introduction of corporations, corporate medicine and private equity into our profession has made us all elevate a little bit if we have to admit that. I am not anti-corporate. I am definitely for private practice. And my concerns with corporate is an overwhelming overtaking of the industry. I think that in any industry, you do not want to totally eliminate private practices. So I’m not anti-them, but I definitely have leveled up because of them. We’ve become better at marketing to employees, to team members. We’ve definitely, in terms of attracting an associate veterinarian, we’ve had to level up. We’ve had to redesign a lot of things in our practice. Mentorship probably wasn’t a word when I graduated, and now we all have to have a pretty robust mentorship program to even have a new grad think of working at our place as an associate.

So I think the changes have been that. They also have been that not every practice is practicing the same. And I like that. I think when I was a kid, every practice was exactly the same, the same equipment, the same everything. And now we can find our niche. We work with the other practices around us. There was a time when I remember early on, I talked to a practice and they had a EquiHaler, which was an inhaler for a horse, and it’s rarely used, but we had antivenom and they had that and we said, “Hey, if we need an EquiHaler, can we borrow yours?” “Hey, if we need antivenom, can we buy some from you?” Just working together and being smart about those collegial relationships, I think has been a good change.

What does your crystal ball say about the future of the veterinary profession?

I’m an optimist and I think it’s fantastic. I think people, as long as people have pets, as long as… The truth is that a lot of veterinarians work outside of private practice, as we know, and there’s place in research in industry. So as long as humans need medications, veterinarians are going to be necessary. We know that we’re the best at herd health, foreign animal disease detection, things like that. Veterinarians were brought in, I think, way late to the COVID situation. We were so equipped to handle that. It’s a bummer that the vets couldn’t have a little more control because we’re so trained for that. So I think that I’m incredibly optimistic. I think private practice is strong. I think that our market continues to be strong. It’s provided me a life financially that’s incredibly rewarding, but deep in my soul, just a job that’s incredibly rewarding.

What are some of the daily habits that you believe have allowed you to achieve success along the way?

Time blocking my life. So time management, for sure. An example, my book here, I doubt you can even see it, but everything is blocked. My whole life. So I time block my life. I set aside blocks of time, hours, half hours that I’m going to get stuff done, and I am a very distracted person. So for me, that’s been very helpful, and that helps to have that CEO day. So I have a CEO day where I focus on the practice, but I don’t just decide I’m going to do that. It’s blocked off into what I’m actually going to do that day. That’s helped me run my practice a whole lot better. So if I have a patient care day here, or I have a CEO day here. I might have a day here where I’m watching my grandkids, but it’s blocked off. So I’m not doing other stuff that day.

Compartmentalizing it has really been helpful personally for me. And I think a lot of other practice owners have this same… I’ve never been diagnosed as ADHD, but I’ve also never taken any tests. I’m pretty sure that I have some tendencies there. And I think a lot of us do that where we’re scattered and just concentrating on one thing at a time, forcing ourselves to helps a whole lot.

What’s been the biggest challenge that you’ve encountered through your career so far?

I think human resources and learning about people. Empowering my team was something that I did not do well at the beginning. I was the boss and I made the decisions and my decisions in my mind were the best. And I say that and it hurts my heart now to even say it, but it’s true. And a great example of that is I remember when we started, I had my reception team, we originally had everybody in scrubs and I thought, no, I want them to stand out. I think a few years in, I said, “Okay.” And I handed them a Lands’ End catalog and I had said, “This is the polo tops I’m going to get for everybody. Based on their chart, tell me what size you want.” And what I received back when I came back from my calls, because I was ambulatory all day on my desk was the catalog with some dog ears and some stickers, and they said, “We like these better.” And I took offense at that.

This was a while ago, and I thought, no, I didn’t ask them to find something they like better. I asked them for their sizes. And I literally went back to them and said that. “I don’t know what you guys were thinking. I just need your sizes. I’ve already picked what you’re wearing up front.” And it hurts me that I did that, but it made sense to me at the time. Flash forward three years ago, they came to me and said, “We need new chairs.” Or they asked, “Can we get new chairs?” And I handed them a credit card and said, “You only have two rules. One is they have to match. Two is you all have to agree. Go get whatever chairs you want.” And they had a blast. They went out on the weekends together. They tried out chairs. When they finally decided to order those chairs, they paid probably half of what I would’ve paid.

And I told them, “No budget. Take whatever you want.” And they paid half of what I would’ve paid for a chair. And then when they arrived, they assembled them. They love their chairs. Because they were empowered, they’re happy about them. They were not happy about wearing the polos because they weren’t empowered. And that’s a extreme real example. But my goal now is to empower my team to make sure that they’re making the decisions. They know the problems, they know the solutions. So we have a lot of things in play in our clinic where they… So an example of that is we have our PAWS system, which is problems and workable solutions. So they have to, if there’s any issue in the clinic, let’s say anesthesia machine’s leaking or this person is not being kind to clients with their words, any issue in the clinic, they have to fill out a PAWS form.

And that PAWS form can be electronic or on paper. And it says, “What’s the problem? Give me all the details about it.” So with an anesthesia machine, it would be, “What have you troubleshooted? What have you done?” And then, “What is the solution?” And we require them to give us the solution, and 99% of the time, whatever the solution is, we do. So an anesthesia machine example, what they write there might say, “It was leaking.” Or whatever, whatever. “I called the anesthesia company. I troubleshooted with them over the phone.” Da, da, da, da, da. “We need this gasket. Here’s the link to it.” It might be that dramatic. Well, think of all that they took off of me instead of an anesthesia machine rolled into my office that says broken on a tag. Now I’ve got to go troubleshoot it when somebody else probably already has.

So we really empower them. We do a satisfaction survey. I think it’s 17 pages that they fill out for our strategic planning. They guide our practice forward. We’re choosing people that already align with our vision, our mission, and our core values. So they should be the ones to help us decide where we take this practice. And we let them. Every meeting is a discussion, not me standing up front telling them a list of things that could be an email.

That’s all so good. Christine, what advice would you give the younger version of yourself?

Seek other practice owners. That’s it. Find somebody else doing it and learn. Nothing that they tell you is gospel. That’s the other thing I would say. I would go to a conference and listen to a business lecture and come home and say, “Because they did it, it’s going to work for me.” And then I’d come home and it would fail and I’d feel like I failed. But really looking back, it wasn’t right for my practice. So really put on a good lens of, well, that’s working for them. Is that right for my practice? I wish I would’ve done that a little bit more. I would’ve had a lot less initiatives that I created or tried to roll out that failed in my practice, but really talking to other practice owners, aligning with them, forming communities with them, I think is what I wish I had.

What message or principle do you wish you could teach everyone listening to our podcast?

Find joy in this profession. There’s so much negative stuff out on social media. And the reality is if you step back and think of what you got to do that day, the privileges that we have in this profession, we are invited into people’s most intimate, intimate moments. And we know their families. We’re just a part of their family. We’re a part of our communities. We’re a well-respected profession. When I’m on an airplane and somebody finds out I’m a veterinarian, I know there’s people out there that say, “I would never tell anybody that.” I love it because what do they say? They say, “Oh, that’s such a great profession.” Or, “I wanted to be a vet.” It’s always a positive thing. And then they generally show me a picture of their dog’s tumor. Great, I don’t care. I’m thrilled that they recognize that I might even want to look at that tumor.

So I think just putting on a positive lens and looking for the good in our profession, because there’s so much of it and being so grateful for what we get to do every day and how we get to impact our communities and our world, I wish more people could feel that every single day.

I do too. Well, some of our guests say they’ve had a key book that they read that helped them along the way. Do you have a key book in your life that has impacted you the most?

For me, I think a book called 168 Hours. It’s by Laura Vanderkam, I believe, and I read it every three or four years and it’s about time management and it’s about outsourcing and delegating and using your core competencies. And so I really like that book. I think The E-Myth was very helpful in the beginning as well for me to recognize that there’s two different persons. There’s the person that’s the vet and the person that’s the CEO, and I can be both of them, but they’re very different and I have to dedicate time and energy to both, not just assume that the CEO stuff will happen.

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

Well, I think I shared just finding the joy in it. I think if you’re overwhelmed, if you’re exhausted, if you’re anxious, if you’re stressed, you need to take some stuff off your plate and pass it to somebody else. You need to take care of yourself, but finding joy and looking for the joy in your day, you are going to be a happier person in all areas of your life. And I know I’m saying that like it’s simple. I don’t think it’s always that simple. The other part of that is if you are in an environment that’s not working for you, move out of it. You can do anything. When I hear there’s a toxic workplace, I’m confused. How? If everyone left, it would not exist. And maybe I’m very naive here, but I do feel like in most cases there’s a place for you, there’s a fit for you that’s safe, that’s wonderful. And if you’re not in that right now, I think that you just need to look for one.

And they can call me. I can help.

Yes, absolutely.

Well, Christine, it was such a pleasure to have you on The People of Animal Health Podcast today. Thank you for being my guest.

I have loved it. Thank you so much for the invite.