Many years ago, my wife and I decided to put our kids on the swim team. We wanted them to do something athletic, and I was frankly a little concerned that my oldest daughter seemed deeply opposed to doing anything remotely competitive. She would routinely let people tag her on the playground because “everyone should feel like a winner.”
While I recognize this is the absolute correct answer from a meaning-of-life perspective, it was very concerning to those of us who lack spiritual enlightenment and think our kid might need, at some point, to out-compete another person to support aging parents have a good life. Anyway, swim team seemed like a great way to combine something the kids enjoyed (swimming) with experiences that would get them used to life as an adult (e.g. working as a team, learning to grind competitors to dust, and being exhausted all the time).
So, we signed our kids up thinking they would become competitive swimmers. We had no idea we were actually signing ourselves up to become swim team parents. In a few short weeks, our lives transformed. There were daily practices, which we were prepared for. But then came the swim meets. If you’ve never been to a kid’s swim meet, you need to know that they usually take place in the middle of the work week, start at 10am, and continue indefinitely. I’m pretty sure the first swim meet we ever attended is still happening at a municipal pool two hours away. The original competitors have likely aged out, traded in their Speedos for mortgages, and tagged in their younger siblings to keep the nightmare alive. In another couple years, the children of the kids who started the meet will be thrown into the water with floaties and goggles and the Sisyphusan event will continue for another generation.
Parents at these meets are drafted into all sorts of services (and I do mean drafted). Some of them are recruited to sell concessions, some keep times and scores, and others check people in and out of each event. Our family was consigned to the task of child organization. We were responsible for preparing the completely distracted competitors to move to the pool at the appropriate time without losing anyone to wandering off. If you wonder what that’s like, imagine trying to keep things moving at a security checkpoint outside a country music concert. There’s lots of stumbling around, strange injuries that are hard to understand, and singing.
As the swim season went on, the asks for the parents (or perhaps just the asks of my hyper-competent wife) continued to increase. At the same time, the number of events my kids were participating in steadily declined. When I asked Jacquelyn why she wasn’t doing more events, she said that it’s because she wasn’t winning any races in practice. I probed deeper and asked, “but don’t you want to win a medal?” to which she replied, “No. I just like being with my friends.”
This is a very mature and healthy perspective and, in the eyes of her father, total horseshit. I didn’t care that she wasn’t winning, but I really struggled with the idea that winning wasn’t even on her bingo card when she arrived at the pool. By the end of the season, swim team dominated everyone’s time and efforts except for the people it was intended to occupy. Jacquelyn had made it clear that she would prefer to do other things with her time, and Hannah had zero percent body fat and began to shiver and not want to be in the pool after the first lap or so.
Ultimately, we quit the swim team. It just became too obvious that the parents who hatched this entire idea were doing an insane amount of work, and the people who were supposed to be actually working to make the dream happen were spending far more time drinking Capri Sun than doing laps.
So why am I telling you all this? I love this story because it’s incredibly similar to what I’ve seen happen again and again with small business owners. At some point, an aspiring vet gets the bright idea that owning a practice would be a swell adventure. They buy or build a clinic, hire a team to make the magic happen, and settle back to watch the sunset. In some cases, the practice takes off and the owner(s) actually get to enjoy the experience they created.
But in a lot of cases, practice owners find themselves becoming parents on the swim team. I don’t mean the people you brought in are lazy or don’t care. I mean that you, the person who had the vision, are working yourself to death so that people who don’t really share that dream can have something to do.
A vet clinic should function to support its owner. The people working inside of it should make life better for pets, people (including themselves), and the leaders who willed this clinic into existence in the first place. The question that I want to ask practice owners today is this: Is your practice working for you the way that you hoped it would, or are you working yourself to death so that the practice can exist and other people can have jobs?
Again, this isn’t a condemnation of the team putting in effort to provide patient care. It’s an honest question about whether the thing you brought into existence is serving the goals you started out with, or if it has become a massive, grinding burden.
If your clinic is working for you, then fantastic. No notes. You’re living the dream. If you’re working for the practice just so it can keep the lights on and occupy everyone else, pause with that for a moment.
Your practice doesn’t have to be this way. Just because you built it a certain way doesn’t mean you’re chained to the starting blocks forever. If your business isn’t working for you, acknowledging it is the first step to fixing it. Please, don’t just keep swimming out of sheer muscle memory.
