There I Said It

I was talking to a 4th-year veterinary student recently, and he was telling me about the starting salaries his friends were signing on for with their first jobs. Figures in the $150,000 range were not uncommon. [I’ve heard anecdotally about salaries hitting $200,000 for new grads in some metropolitan areas]. This may not sound like a shocking amount of money for a veterinarian to make in a year, but we’re talking about graduates who have zero experience working as doctors and who presumably would like some support and mentorship from their fellow clinicians as they grow.

A few weeks ago, one of my friends who owns a veterinary practice mentioned to me her frustration about not being able to afford to hire a new graduate veterinarian. She said “I know practices are throwing a lot of money at new grads, and there’s no way I can match it. I don’t know how I’m going to hire now or in the future.” I have heard this concern voiced many times in the last few years.

We are living through a period of unprecedented change in our profession. Never before has money flowed into veterinary medicine the way it is coming in now, and that money is making a lot of things quite wonky. I think a lot of people are starting to believe that this “magical money” will become the new normal in our industry and that the old rules of economics have gone out the window for good. Well, at the risk of being the child who points out the emperor having no clothes, I think it’s important to state the truth that seems to be getting lost: Eventually, the numbers have to work.

Business is challenging… but it’s not complicated. You have to spend money to make money. Ultimately, you need to make more money than you spend. If you do this, you get to keep going. If you do not, you go out of business. Sometimes companies are able to go a LONG time without making more than they spend, but eventually… the numbers have to work.

I do not blame any veterinarian for being smart and negotiating when it comes to his or her salary. What I’m about to say is not a condemnation of anyone. In fact, I respect people who are willing to see opportunities in a time of change and take them. That said, the flow of money into our profession is not charity. It’s an investment, and the people behind it intend to get a nice ROI on their money.

In the last few years, we have seen businesses that were willing to spend tons of cash to buy up practices. Now those practices are willing to spend tons of cash to staff the practices they bought. These decisions are not being made for any reason other than the belief in an even greater upside in the coming years. One way or another, the wild spending phase we are seeing is going to end and the “where’s our return on investment?” phase will begin.

When that happens, veterinarians are going to be asked to account for the salaries they have agreed to. The strings in our contracts will be pulled tight. After all, there is no world where a venture capitalist is going to lose money paying a veterinarian’s salary over the long term and be fine with it. As the “where’s our return on investment?” phase approaches, I think it’s important to remind both veterinarians and practice leaders of a few things:

1. If it looks too good to be true, it probably is — Be wary of any agreement that doesn’t seem to make sense for both parties, even if you appear to be benefiting.
2. Money is important, but so are other things — Workplace culture, developmental opportunities, and work-life balance all matter… a lot.
3. Times change — This is a once-in-a-lifetime period of change in the profession. Don’t expect it to last much longer.

To my new graduate friend: I hope you’ll find a job that offers you a good salary which you will be able to grow to support. More importantly, I hope you will end up in a place that fills your cup, appreciates you, and develops you to be the person and doctor that you aspire to be.

To my practice owner friend: I hope you hang in there and continue to do all you can to make your practice a great place to work and visit. I hope you recognize all that you would have to offer the right young doctor, and that you keep pushing to make your practice one that can support new doctors and staff members going forward. I have faith that the right person will eventually cross your path. 

It’s an exciting time to be in veterinary medicine, and there are so many opportunities coming from the radical changes in our industry. Whether you are thrilled about the opportunities being offered or terrified of the shifting landscape, I hope you’ll try to keep at least this one thing in mind: Eventually, the numbers have to work.

I don’t know where I got the idea that the point of younger life was to set yourself up so that older life ran on autopilot, but I was pretty sure this was how things worked. It’s not that I didn’t think life would be challenging after the age of 40. It’s just that I thought the important decisions would already be made and thus I would be able to just kind of go through the motions without stressing too much. When I was in my 20s, it certainly looked like that’s what middle-aged people I knew were doing.

At some level, my understanding was that if I got the education, spouse, children, house, pet(s), etc then I would kind of be set until it was time to downsize and move into a retirement community. Then I could REALLY just go with the flow. Dinner at the cafeteria, scheduled social time, a coach/helper for bathing… Talk about coasting!

Anyway, this anticipated period of going with the flow has not happened at all. It turns out that, regardless of what we do or accomplish, life is always going to require our full attention. Whether it’s navigating the US healthcare system, dealing with a complete change in your workplace management structure, or battling a local homeowners’ association, our full and active engagement in this life appears to be both mandatory and continuous.

I’ll be honest here. When I graduated from veterinary school, I knew I would need to keep up with advances in medicine to stay competent at my job as a veterinarian. That didn’t seem like such a big investment on my part in exchange for having a livelihood that I enjoyed and found meaningful. Again, I thought I’d kind of done the hard part and, after getting some experience, I would be able to kind of just… keep on keeping on.

Today, I am not just keeping up with new advances in medicine (and boy howdy there are a lot of them!). I’m also trying to:

• Leverage new AI technology to help make up for being shorthanded
• Advise veterinarians on how to advocate for themselves to the venture capitalists who want a 10x return on their investment
• Talk to clients who have shot right past learning from Dr. Google and gone on to passionately educate themselves with 40-second TikTok animal influencer videos
• Raise wages for support staff while keeping pet care affordable

Remember when the answer to the question of “What do I do if I’m shorthanded” was simply “hire someone?” What a simpler time. I just assumed things would kind of stay like that.

I’m not saying all of this to complain. I’m honestly not. I love vet medicine and the life it’s given me. I genuinely find the challenges I listed above to be interesting and worthy of our attention. I just didn’t think the profession (and life outside it) would require my full attentiveness every day after 15 years of practice. I suspect I was not alone in this delusion.

I’m pointing all of this out now for two reasons. The first is that I know I’m not the only person who has been secretly wondering when the cruise control part of life would be starting. If you have had these thoughts and decided that you must be doing something wrong since you still can’t take your hands off the wheel, I want to tell you that you are not. Practice (and life) are never going to be “hands off,” even if other people make it look that way. You are probably doing just fine and should be proud of yourself for how you are handling everything. You are not failing because things have not gotten easy. You are making your way through an interesting life, and interesting lives are apparently averse to letting us relax for very long.

The second reason I’m bringing up the idea that life was supposed to get easier is because the expectations we set for ourselves matter. Nothing makes a hectic day in the clinic more draining than going in and hoping for an empty schedule. The same is true in all aspects of our lives. If we anticipate being challenged and engaged, the days fly by and we feel proud of what we have accomplished. When we instead think we are supposed to be relaxing, hectic days feel like a slap in the face.

The lesson for me has been to give up the false idea that life is a big climb and then a steady downhill toward the retirement home. Most of us mid-to-late career people are working as hard and making as many challenging choices as we ever have, and that’s not going to change. It turns out we chose the path of an interesting life, and that means a life requiring our active engagement day after day.

We might as well get excited about doing a job (and having a life) that keeps us on our toes because that, it seems, is what we are in for.

The most common personal development mistake I see when it comes to working on new leadership or communication skills is not positioning yourself to get credit for your work. Yes, I’m looking at you team leads, associate veterinarians, medical directors, managers, and anyone working in corporate practices working hard on your skillset. 

You work so hard on making yourself a better communicator, more supportive of the team, or more efficient with your time. And that work tends to be invisible to the people who give your performance review. Think about it. You’re doing work that is going to benefit the practice, but no one acknowledges the effort. They often don’t even know about it. 

It’s a shame for both individuals working hard on themselves and for the practice that should want to encourage this kind of growth.

If you’re going to work on yourself as a leader or communicator, set yourself up to get rewarded for that work as much as possible. Why shouldn’t you get pats on the back just like the doctor who focuses on dentistry or dermatology? The way to do that is simple: focus on impact.

Focus on the impact of your growth

Think about what your personal or professional development goal will be. How will that growth manifest in your clinic? 

If you’re going to focus on appreciation, that might translate to increased team or employee engagement, higher staff retention, better job satisfaction scores, etc. Working on your communication skills might mean reduced absenteeism, more frequent and productive training for staff, and so on. Decide what impact your personal growth might have. Then communicate to those around you that you are working to make this impact happen.

Too often I see people make real progress in their skills and knowledge only to be ignored at the end of the year or told “You didn’t hit the numbers we set at the beginning of the year.”

My goal in writing this is to encourage you:

1. Set your goal
2. Determine how your success will be visible and beneficial to the team you lead
3. To communicate that impact to your practice so that your personal success will be seen as a team success. 

Ideally, I’d like to see your goals affect which numbers you will be measured against at the end of the year. If you can do this, you’ll not only have the benefit of the growth you achieved, but your success may be recognized and even rewarded!

Final Thought

Never forget that leaders in practice get opportunities based more on what people hear them working on than results they actually achieve. (I know. It’s a bummer). Turning your personal development goals into impact statements lets people know what you are working on. It puts you into their minds as someone who is trying to make a difference. That is how we build a reputation that serves us well year-after-year.

Good luck!

Every week I write a letter like this. I talk to clients in the exam room, publish two podcasts, and post social media content. I teach multiple classes on communication, leadership, and management in Uncharted, and sometimes I travel and speak at conferences. All that to say… I put a lot of heart and ideas out into the world.

I put myself out there because I want to help, I love our profession, and I care deeply about my fellow veterinary professionals who are making the world a better place. I believe that each of us can lift others up, and that there’s not much that’s more important than that.

But how do you know if what you are putting out into the world is being received by others?

The one thing that correlates with your impact

To be honest, it’s hard to gauge if I am actually making an impact. Even when I can see how many people are reading a post on social media or listening to an episode of The Cone of Shame podcast, it’s hard to see. Afterall, there are terrible things on social media that have gotten much higher engagement than anything I have ever done, so the number of people you “reach” has little to do with the amount of good you do in the world. 

I often feel like I’m just shouting into the void.

However, there is one thing I’ve found that does correlate with the impact you have on other people. Do you know what it is? Hearing from someone that you’ve done or said something that has resonated with them.

Last week at the VMX conference in Orlando, a few people came up to me and spoke with phrasing that always gets my attention… “Andy, you wrote/said/did a very specific thing, and it really helped me.” 

The pieces they mentioned were all rather obscure, none of which I considered to be my best work. They were emails, stories I told on a podcast when I didn’t know what question to ask my guest, or videos I shot on my phone when I just wanted to send out an encouraging word. Still, they had an impact and these people gave me the gift of letting me know.

You’re not shouting into the void

I have looked at a million metrics around communication in the digital world. I’ve studied likes, reach, upvotes, retweets, plays, downloads, opens, and click-throughs. And I’m here to tell you, if you care about making a difference, I don’t think any of those metrics should be your primary measures of success. Instead, focus on the number of people who come and tell you that you did a specific thing that meant a lot to them. 

Sometimes we all feel like we are shouting into the void. Sometimes we all feel like we are pouring our compassion into an endless ocean. The truth is, if you are putting out love, care, and support into the world, you are NEVER shouting into the void. You are making an impact, even though you only hear about it rarely.

Final thought

Today, I want you to think about the people who have told you “when you did this, it meant so much to me.” I want you to recognize that for every person who has said that to you, there are thousands of people who have felt that way but never verbalized it. For every pet owner who has taken the time to write a note to you or your team, there are probably a thousand others who have felt that gratitude but did not pick up a pen.

I want you to recognize this pattern of speech from people you have touched, because that phrasing is the greatest signal I’ve found that you are having a real impact. And when you hear it, I want you to listen like you’ve never listened before. I want you to absorb it into your bones so that it permeates you. I want it to fuel a thousand more acts of kindness… and out of those thousand acts of kindness, I suspect one more person will come up to you and say “when you did this thing for me, it really meant the world.”