After spending five years with this nutritional company, I felt like I needed to get back into veterinary medicine. I was in a new city, Jacksonville, Florida and needed to make a decision to start a new practice from scratch or buy an existing one. As things would work out, I found two practices for sale close to where we lived. I decided to purchase them and possibly depending on how things went, expand and start some more. I knew going in to the practices that the previous owner had a bad reputation and this was something I would need to overcome.
I have always developed a culture of friendliness and taking great care of the client as well as the patient. I quickly found out that culture here was everything but that. Employees were mean to clients and did not care if they took good care of them or not. I had to make a quick decision to make the changes, and I did. I immediately released the entire staff except for one technician that is still with me today, 9 years later. We brought in people that wanted to be part of our culture. So now I had two practices and two veterinarians, and the other veterinarian was of the same culture as the old employees. You would think a professional would step it up and adapt to the changes, but I learned a valuable lesson that education, smarts, and status have nothing to do with your attitude. Your attitude is your own, and if it is bad, it will always be bad if you decide to not make a change. I had to let her go also, and now I was running two practices at the same time.
This is where leadership becomes very important because it can be very easy to get down and depressed when you are working this hard. As a leader, you have to pick it up and stay focused on the long term goal in order to make it happen. Now, after nine years, I have two practices that are running very smoothly. They have grown from a little over $1 million in sales to over $4 million in sales. I have six veterinarians working with me and have a group of around 40 employees. We have a culture that everyone wishes they had. Right now anyone with a bad attitude would be so out of place they would not want to work at the clinic. Through all my experiences from childhood to now, I have taken some inherent attributes and some learned attributes of leadership and turned them into a practice that I am very proud of. The practice supports many families including 2 of my sons who are married with their own families (they both work for me, one is COO and the other is Vice President of Development). It supports my wife, my daughter in college, and my other son at home, and yet I am only working a few days a week. This is a good example of how understanding a few principles and being willing to work hard will allow you to develop into a leader and accomplish anything you want. Next time I will talk about the desire to be a leader and why that is such a necessary attribute.
Tags: dr dean severidt, Leadership, pet doctors of america, veterinary management
