Dr. Stacee Santi, veterinarian, tech founder, and author of Stop Acting Like a Girl, joins Dr. Andy Roark for a conversation that challenges the norms women are handed and how those expectations shape careers in veterinary medicine and beyond. From the ER to the boardroom, Stacee has walked the walk, founding Vet2Pet, navigating startup negotiations, and now stepping into authorship and podcasting with her new show Everyday Wonder Women. In this episode, she shares the pivotal moment that inspired her book title, how generational beliefs shaped her journey, and why so many high-performing women still hesitate to speak up or negotiate their worth. This one’s for anyone mentoring women in the profession, raising daughters, or trying to build a more inclusive clinic culture. You’ll walk away with new insight on how to empower quieter voices, rethink staff meetings, and encourage decisive leadership.
You can also listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts!
LINKS
Every Day Wonder Women Podcast
Dr. Andy Roark Charming the Angry Client Team Training Course
Dr. Andy Roark Swag: drandyroark.com/shop
All Links: linktr.ee/DrAndyRoark
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Dr. Stacee Santi is a 1996 DVM graduate from Colorado State University and the founder of Vet2Pet, a tech platform for veterinary practices that was sold to Vetsource in 2022. With over 20 years in small animal and emergency practice, Stacee offers practical solutions for veterinary teams in tech, workflows, client service, and leadership. She’s also the author of Stop Acting Like a Girl, a book that encourages women to break free from outdated expectations and embrace assertiveness, confidence, and ambition.
Stacee has served on multiple industry advisory boards, was past president of the Colorado Veterinary Medical Association, and was named 2021 Educator of the Year by the Western Veterinary Conference.
She lives in Durango, Colorado with her husband, 6 horses, 2 dogs, 1 cat, 4 chickens, and dreams of a baby burro.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Dr. Andy Roark: Welcome everybody to the Cone of Shame Veterinary Podcast. I am your host, Dr. Andy Roark I’m here with Dr. Stacee Santi author of the book, Stop Acting Like A Girl. And so I saw her book come out and I was like, oh, that seems Interesting. And I love Stacee Santi and think that she is such an interesting person and she is so creative and she’s so thoughtful and so anyway. I wanted to bring her on today and talk about her book, and she dives right into it. Without further ado, let’s get into this episode.
Kelsey Beth Carpenter: This is your show. We’re glad you’re here. We want to help you in your veterinary career. Welcome to the Cone of Shame with Dr. Andy Roark.
Dr. Andy Roark: Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Stacee Santi. How are you my friend?
Dr. Stacee Santi: Doing good. How are you today?
Dr. Andy Roark: I am great. I love having you on the podcast. You’re someone I always enjoy spending time with. You and I have been friends for a long time. I met you when you were the founder of Vet2Pet, the loyalty app, and I met you when you were working there.
You were a practicing veterinarian for over 20 years. You’ve done some consulting work and stuff. You were just someone I find deeply interesting, and I always like to spend time with you. And you have a new book that’s called Stop Acting Like A Girl, and you are launching a new podcast, which has been rolling out recently.
It’s called Everyday Wonder Women. And so let me just open up here at the beginning and say I, look at the title of the book and I was like. Okay. I’m not the target audience, I don’t think for this book, but I want to understand what is it, what does this mean? Stacee, when you say stop acting like a girl, what is that about?
Dr. Stacee Santi: You are a target audience just because you’re a dad of two daughters.
Dr. Andy Roark: That’s a fair point.
Dr. Stacee Santi: So the title is about this. When I was in high school, I lived with my grandparents for my senior year of high school. My parents’ jobs got moved and I grew up in a really small town in Eastern New Mexico, just on the Texas state line and I remember very clearly telling my mom, I’m gonna be a veterinarian, and she just could not wrap her head around this, right? She thought it was a horrible choice. She said, that is not something girls do, Stacee. Your choices are to be a teacher, be a secretary, or her dream job was to be a hairdresser in Amarillo. She said, I want, I think that’s what you ought to do. This is a great, this would be a great career for a woman. I said, me, mom, no. I wanna be a veterinarian. And she’s no, that’s a man’s job. You’re a girl. And I said, maybe I don’t wanna act like a girl, me, mom, maybe I’m going to do what I want.
Dr. Andy Roark: When was this? Like just ballpark?
Dr. Stacee Santi: 89, right?
So, not..
Dr. Andy Roark: This late eighties. Yeah.
Dr. Stacee Santi: Late eighties, but if you think about it, you, might not realize this, women couldn’t even get their own credit card until 1983.
Dr. Andy Roark: I had no idea.
Dr. Stacee Santi: Yeah, you had to have a man sign for you and my grandmother. That’s just so the book is about these generational things that we pass on and that women of today, like me I’m taking on the legacy of what my grandmother and her mother thought was okay to be as a girl.
So that’s why I called it that Stop Acting Like a Girl and can rub you wrong a little if you don’t understand the context, but I thought, that’s good too.
Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah. Oh, it definitely gets attention. Like when you see a book called Stop Acting Like a Girl, you’re like, oh, it’s, definitely provocative. Talk to me a bit about this. So you go on and, I think one of the reasons I think that you’re so interesting is you’ve just done so many things, and in my estimation, you’re pretty fearless.
You’ve reinvented yourself multiple times. You’ve done just, just different careers. You, write a book, you’re doing this podcast you don’t even live in one place. You split between Arizona and Colorado and just, you travel back and forth and you definitely seem to play by your own rules. Talk to me at, a high level when you set out to, do this, and so it sounds like you’re, looking at vet medicine, I’m assuming, and looking at, we’ve got a female ccc profession, and you were saying, what are the societal weights and roles that are being assigned to women? Like what, constraints are they being given? How do you start to parse that apart, Stacee, into a way that you can even get your head around it or start to talk in a productive way?
Dr. Stacee Santi: For me, what happened was, my first job was predominantly with women in the ER clinic in Portland. My next job in Durango at the clinic, predominantly women. I start my tech company. It’s predominantly women that I hired. And then at one point I needed a real sales person. This is five years into this company.
I’m like, I’m gonna have to really get professional sales person and I put the ad out on LinkedIn and I find this great guy. He applies for the job and he is such a stern negotiator with me on the salary and I had saved up all this money to be able to hire this person and he is just best in me to get me to hire him.
But at this higher rate, higher commission, at the same time I’m doing all the, annual performance for my team who are by far and away way better than this guy. Not that he’s not amazing, but these women are saying things like, I said, what do you want for your wage? What do you think of your salary?
And they’re like, I got anything from whatever you think to what can the company afford to, I, I don’t know, like whatever. What do you think I’m worth? Versus I’m with this other gentleman who’s I want X amount of money and this much vacation and this much commission. And I started thinking about, okay, there’s some stark differences here between women and men, and then I go push forward to where I am at the clinic, my company was acquired by corporate, so I’m dealing with mothership, who’s mostly men, and then I go to raise money for my app company and eventually sell it. And I’m in the room with mostly men, but there are some women in there, not a lot, but they’re there and they do things differently and I start pay attention to okay, what are these differences that these women that are really going forward are doing different than the other women that are trying, but struggling to get there. So that’s my perspective in where I came up with these things for the book.
Dr. Andy Roark: What were the things that you found in yourself? So here you are in the room you’re looking around and you’re saying, wow, this room is full of men, and these men are behaving differently how I was raised or, what’s been modeled for me. What were actual pieces of sort of behavior communication that you, that early on you thought, I need to do this differently, or I need to change the way that I personally do this.
Dr. Stacee Santi: I needed to share my opinion a lot. Even if I didn’t, I don’t think I’m the only one, and it turns out I’m not, but I. I don’t always understand these conversations that are going on in a boardroom. They use a lot of big corporate words, oh, can this scale? And oh, we need to circle back and, oh, we, there’s all this lingo going on and
Dr. Andy Roark: We need to cascade this down to maintain visibility and make sure we are all in alighment.
Dr. Stacee Santi: That’s it.
Dr. Andy Roark: I’m familiar.
Dr. Stacee Santi: And I’m trying to think, saying, I have no idea what this conversation’s about. And so I would just, maybe, ’cause I’m from West Texas, I would just come in and say, I, I’m sorry can we back up a few paces? Because I don’t really know even what we’re talking about. And it turns out well other people in the room didn’t know what we’re talking about either.
So I just found that speaking up was something I had to do more of and asked lots of questions and, I had to shed this whole thing of worrying about if I appeared a certain way, I just brought my real self into the meetings and I just was nice about it and, but I’m like, okay. And I’m smart. I know that about myself. So I wasn’t intimidated so much that I couldn’t make myself look vulnerable, if that makes sense. But that got me further than anything because people at that point felt like comfortable being real with me.
Dr. Andy Roark: Was that a scary transition when you said, I’m just gonna go and be my authentic self, and I’m gonna say I don’t understand what’s going on. What are
Dr. Stacee Santi: we talking about here?
Yes.
Dr. Andy Roark: How did you manage that? Did you make an intentional effort going in if I’m going to do this?
Did you look at yourself in the mirror and hype yourself up before you went into the meetings? what was that like from a personal level to say, I’m going to change the way that I behave and I’m, going to put myself out there in a different way.
Dr. Stacee Santi: I did get this sign that says, what would Beyonce do?
Dr. Andy Roark: I like it. That’s a hundred percent fantastic.
Dr. Stacee Santi: I would look at that a lot and these, some of these meetings on Zoom, and I’d have that right there, but I, would just, you gotta at some point put the tr on and go for it, right? and the thing that happened is I got so much positive results from doing that, that it gave me the fuel to keep doing it. I knew I was in the right path because I was getting tapped on the shoulder. Oh, can you head up this committee? Oh, you can you do this? And I said yes to a lot of things. Because I am a learner and I might not understand what we’re talking about, but if you gimme something I don’t understand, I guarantee you I’m gonna understand it better than everybody else when I’m done.
Dr. Andy Roark: I think that’s fantastic. Bring this around back to the vet clinic for me, if you don’t mind. So these you’re learning and you’re in a boardroom and blah, blah, blah. But, when you’re a veterinarian and you came up through vet school, I don’t expect that there’s a lot of language getting thrown around that, you’re not a privy to.
How does this change in mindset. How do you think that manifests in the clinic? If you were mentoring a young female veterinarian, what points would you really try to emphasize?
Dr. Stacee Santi: One of the main points too, but one is encouraging my team members to be more decisive. The women on my team, they’ve got to make some decisions like be decisive. And it’s things like as a woman, as a girl, you’re raised to go with the flow, right? To not rock the boat.
You’re more popular if everybody likes you because you’re chill and fun to be around. So you try to order pizza in a vet clinic for lunch and you’ll get almost all of the people on the team will say, I don’t care. Whatever you want. I don’t care what flavor we get, I don’t care. And that is everybody cares what kind of pizza they’re gonna get and so you have to make an effort to say, I like pepperoni and black olive within crust. Do you like that? And it’s just making decisions. And those are small ones, but then there’s bigger ones. Like, where do you want your life to go? What do you want your career path to be?
Are you a receptionist that’s trying to get into the technician role? ’cause for some reason we seem to put ’em through this pathway a lot of times. Or are you a doctor? You are associate, but you see yourself wanting to be a leader someday, or if you keep all those things inside you and either you don’t know or you don’t share, how can your boss help you?
How can people around you even know what you want? The other thing I think that I learned in the clinic too is you’ve got to know your numbers. You gotta know your salary. You gotta know what you’re worth, and you’re gonna have to fight like a dog for it.
Dr. Andy Roark: if this is where you would like to see things go or, behaviors, in the clinic go around in your mind, Stacee, given where we are today, where do we need to change so that people start to get that message? What do we need to do so that people say specifically women feel comfortable making decisions?
I think there’s a lot, I think there’s a lot of men out there who not confident in making decisions as well, but that sort of be being assertive. Just like you say, standing up for yourself confidently saying, this is what I need. where does that mentorship happen?
Dr. Stacee Santi: One of the places I see it happening, you gotta watch out for is in staff meetings.
Dr. Andy Roark: Okay.
Dr. Stacee Santi: Because there will be some people that suck up more oxygen than the other people in the room and it’s the quiet ones that need a little bit of carving out for the floor, right? Hey, Leslie, tell me what you’re thinking on this.
Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah.
Dr. Stacee Santi: And it may be that this person just panics and doesn’t feel comfortable speaking up in front of people. So you’ve gotta find that out about that person and try to coach them to speak up and, make space for them to share. You gotta sometimes quiet down some of the other people in the room so that these people have a voice, because I don’t know about you, but there were people on my team that did not interrupt, that would sit quietly and they would have brilliant thoughts and ideas that the other people just were too much noise in the room for them to get their word out. And those people have a ton of great ideas and you gotta make it possible for them to share.
Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah.
Dr. Stacee Santi: They need a little coaching to get up there and, take the mic.
Dr. Andy Roark: That makes sense. We’ve got two on my team right now who just, they are deep thinkers and I know that I have missed tricks by not basically wrangling the rest of the muppets down, down give them, an opportunity and say, I want to, hear what you guys are thinking about.
And that really resonates when you start to think about putting the book out, and so you’ve, put your time and you’ve put your effort into this. What has the response to the book been then, and have you been surprised by?
Dr. Stacee Santi: You never know what’s gonna happen. You know, like a podcast or anything, you put it out there and you’re like, hello?
Dr. Andy Roark: Yes, you shout out into the void and see what happens.
Dr. Stacee Santi: I know you have no idea if people even are hearing it. But I’ve gotten a few messages that really just keep me going. one of the messages came from a friend she was a couple years older than me in high school, so I knew her, but not well. But she randomly messaged me and she said, Stacy, oh my gosh, I am an engineer, and if I’d had this book 20 years ago, my life would’ve been so much I needed this.
Dr. Andy Roark: Wow.
Dr. Stacee Santi: I’m giving it to every girl in my life and I’ve heard messages like this that really prompted me to start the podcast because I’m like, who are these women? What are their stories?
Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah. Oh, that’s fantastic. Tell me more about the podcast. So it’s called Everyday Wonder Women, and so I checked it out I, I’ve checked it out a little bit. Tell me more how the book transitioned into this and goal in starting this was.
Dr. Stacee Santi: I didn’t just magically come up with all of these ideas. I’ve been influenced by women around me, and you look at the trailblazers in front of me that have had to carve out certain paths, my mom, she was an executive or a with the railroad in a very male dominated field, and her friends, they get together here in Arizona and they, I hang out with them and other older people and I’m like, there’s so much wisdom from older people and people who have lived a few minutes and they’ve done some things and you, you realize that.
And this isn’t unique for women but I find that people have pain. They have experienced things in their life that detoured them. Nobody gets out of this thing unscathed, right?
Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah.
Dr. Stacee Santi: It’s just whether or not you know what their story is. It’s not if they have one, it’s whether or not you’re lucky enough to know what it is.
But women that have put themselves in difficult men’s worlds and knocked down some doors, that, that’s who I’m interested in learning from in the podcast.
Dr. Andy Roark: When you think about sort of the professional development opportunities that we have today and how you take someone who is, let’s say, an associate veterinarian and you grow them into being a medical director, or maybe you grow them into being a regional medical director or the chief medical officer, of a multi-practice organization or things like that. What would you like to see in professional development that’s not there now?
Dr. Stacee Santi: I think I would like to see more specific nuance training for women to recognize some of the behaviors we’ve, that were placed upon us, right? Things that men don’t necessarily have placed upon them.
Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah.
Dr. Stacee Santi: It’s no wonder that women aren’t that great with money. Typically as not as educated as a man on things like we, we feel very inferior, 401k all the stock stuff.
Like we’re, like, I don’t know what that means. And I think it’s because we haven’t had the responsibility of owning our own money for that long. And, when you look at the big picture of things, getting the right to vote. Later than men getting access to money much later. So I think giving women the confidence or the a space to ask questions to not feel stupid is gonna be really important and training them as well to speak up.
Dr. Andy Roark: As a man who, as a team of women you know, essentially, and who works with, predominantly women, I would like to create these opportunities. So in your mind, if you were gonna give me advice or say, how do I open, how do I make sure that my team feels comfortable asking questions feels comfortable, sharing insight, are there things that I can do far as trying to build a culture or a culture in the company or a way that we do our team meetings or a way that we do one-on-ones? What are the subtle things that I can do without saying, I know you’re a woman, and so I want to do these things, but that feels terrible. That feels terrible, I don’t want to do that.
Dr. Stacee Santi: You can’t do that.
Dr. Andy Roark: That’s awful. How do I start to build a culture that is supportive and opens up these doors for growth that, are gonna be helpful to young leaders coming up?
Dr. Stacee Santi: It’s gonna be doing things like holding a class that says, how money works. How to ask for a raise with confidence. How to speak up when you’re scared, how to share your opinion when it’s different than everybody else’s.
It might look like really basic things, but I think when you start talking about some of the basic things, you’ll see people say, wait a minute, I don’t know how to do that and women just seem to have a little bit bigger dose of that than guys.
And to be honest, some Peter Weinstein’s maybe you should write a book that says Stop Acting Like a Guy. And I’m like, I don’t really know how to write that ’cause my perspective is only as a girl. So the other thing too is you might need some women leaders to come and talk to the women on your team to feel really comfortable.
Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah, that makes sense. Dr. Stacee Santi thanks so much for being here. Where can people, where can they find you online?
Dr. Stacee Santi: That’s a good question. So the books on Amazon, that’s easy enough. I’m still struggling where to be online. I’m currently on Facebook. I stay there. I like that. I’m a Gen Xer. I dunno, like I’ll probably be on Facebook forever. I’m dabbling in Instagram. I’m on LinkedIn.
Dr. Andy Roark: All right, sounds good. we’ll link up definitely the book for sure, and then if we can find your social media accounts.
Dr. Stacee Santi: Good luck.
Dr. Andy Roark: We’ll link up to that. Anyway, thanks for being here guys. Thanks for tuning in. Everybody. Take care of yourselves, gang.
Dr. Stacee Santi: Bye everybody.
Dr. Andy Roark: And that’s it, that’s what I got for you guys. Thanks for being here. Thanks to Stacee for being here. Guys, if you get a chance, check out her book. It’s called Stop Acting Like A Girl, check Out her podcast. It’s called Everyday Wonder Women. And yeah, make Stacee a regular part of your listening routine. Anyway, guys, take care of yourselves, everybody. I’ll talk to you later. Bye.
