Practice Profile: Barossa Veterinary Service

In a country with 10 times as many sheep as pet dogs and more cattle than people, some might think the veterinary sector in Australia is primarily focused on the needs of its farmed animals.

But while a massive veterinary infrastructure is in place to support the health of the nation’s 75 million sheep and 26 million cattle, the companion animal sector Down Under is anything but small.

According to Animal Medicines Australia, ownership rates of companion animals in the country are among the highest in the world, with more than 6.3 million dogs and 4.9 million cats kept as pets.

Almost half of all Australian households own either a dog or a cat – a higher penetration of ownership than the UK – which makes looking after the “smallies” a potentially highly profitable business to be in.

And that’s certainly been the experience for Catherine Harper, who owns Barossa Veterinary Service, a practice with sites in the towns of Nuriootpa and Kapunda, 20 miles north-east of Adelaide.

Although Catherine euphemistically describes the Barossa Veterinary Service as “old school” when she took over in 2015, the underperforming business has since been transformed into a super-slick, super-profitable, small animal-focused operation.

Turnover has tripled from AU$1.5 million (£823,000) to almost AU$5 million (£2,743,000) during the past seven years, with revenue growing at a rate of between 15% and 20% per every month.

That would be impressive enough for a seasoned practice owner with years of experience – even more so considering Catherine had only been out of vet school for 18 months when she first bought the practice.

She said: “I had always been interested in the idea of owning my own practice and, to be honest, I think the previous owner took me on with that in mind as he knew I had that ambition.

“At the time I came to Barossa, straight out of vet school, the owner was nearly 70 and keen to retire. So, the two things probably worked quite nicely together. I hadn’t intended to buy a business quite so quickly – I was really keen to travel – but my boss wanted out and it was a great opportunity.

“The former owner had been here for 40 years and had contributed hugely to animal welfare and the community, and he wanted to hand it over into safe hands, and we’ve just taken it from there.

“It was a fairly old school-run practice and hadn’t had much recent investment – we were still using handwritten records, hand developing x-rays, you know, these sorts of things, so there were lots of things I knew we could do to grow and improve it straight away.”

A business brain

Catherine’s first job was to computerise the practice, which was still using a system where all records were handwritten before being typed into the practice’s single computer at the end of the day.

The paper diary also went online and within six months, the practice had been completely computerised, and PMS systems put in place to ensure clients were being charged appropriately for services such as hospitalisation and theatre fees.

Catherine added: “Because we bought an established practice, there was money coming in from day one, so we’ve been very fortunate that we’ve not really had financial stress, which I think would have made it far more difficult to make the changes we made and help the practice realise its true potential.”

One of the things that might have helped Catherine reach her own true potential as a business owner so quickly was the fact she had a somewhat unorthodox route into the profession. Rather than heading straight from high school into a veterinary degree programme, she instead decided to see a bit of the world and gain some valuable life experience first.

A softball scholarship provided the opportunity for the keen sportswoman to spend four years overseas and gain some new perspectives at a US university where she graduated with a bachelor of science in biology before returning to Australia and a place at Murdoch Veterinary School in Perth.

And while the bulk of her time at Murdoch was spent learning how to be a vet, the programme also allowed her to continue to develop her business interests.

She said: “Murdoch has a programme called Masterclass where you complete units from an MBA while you’re for studying your primary degree, culminating in a Certificate in Business Administration. It’s cool because it’s multi-interdisciplinary. So, the classes are taken by students from different degrees, so it was quite a fun programme, where you got to talk and meet people who otherwise wouldn’t.

“We had arts degree people in the marketing class or law students in the leadership class, so the sharing of ideas and learning to communicate outside our science bubble helped a lot.”

Learning on the job

Those MBA modules and prior business interest certainly proved invaluable when it came to dealing with the nuts and bolts of running a practice, but they did little to prepare Catherine for managing the human side of the business.

This was something she admits proved to a huge challenge in the early years.

She said: “Initially, when my husband and I bought the practice, we kept all the staff and in a small country town, that was important, but that definitely had its challenges.

“We didn’t understand what it really was to manage staff or take them through a transition period – most of them had been there 10-plus years with the previous owner, and some of them more than 30.

“You walk into a building and there’s all this stuff that’s not right, but you’re actually the only person who sees that way. Other people don’t have the same level of investment and aren’t going to see things the way that you do – even more so when you’re dealing with people who’ve done something one way for 20 years.

“The older staff, as in people who’d been here the longest, were the real challenges – particularly the ones who had been senior to me, as they had taught me as a new graduate, helped me and got me through that first year, but then I’m the one making decisions and needing them to listen, and so yes, it was very tricky in those first years.”

Tricky is probably an understatement as the practice experienced massive churn during Catherine’s first three years at the helm, a period she describes as being “horrific” at times.

She added: “That first three years we had quite a high turnover of staff and things were really tough – to put it into perspective, we only have one team member left here from the time I took over.

“And I have got to take responsibility for that, as I had to learn about that side of things on the job just 18 months out of vet school, and it wasn’t just problems with experienced members of the vet team, either. We had a couple of new grads and I just didn’t have enough time to give them the support they needed, and we didn’t know the conversations we had to have. And then, nursing-wise, we hadn’t learned about that ‘hire for attitude, train for competency’ type of thing.

“We’ve really refined our interview process and now understand what we’re looking for. We’ve learned from mistakes and tried to improve by investing in training on recruitment.

“So, we learned our lessons and we have also been very lucky as we have had several younger vets join the practice in the past two years with great attitudes and personalities – they’ve just been wonderful for the team and clients.

“With them on board, it has created stability that we’ve then been able to really drive forward in a way we just couldn’t do before, because we had no surety around staffing.”

Horses for courses

With the right team in place, the practice began to thrive and while it still does offer mixed animal services, the source of its revival has largely been down to a renewed focus on its small animal clients.

Large animals are still catered for at both sites, but, as Catherine explained, this is less to do with driving revenue and more about providing a long-established service relied on by local farmers.

“There’s not enough cattle or sheep work to support a clinic or an individual in only doing that; we keep it going because the practice has always done that to support the local community,” she said.

“These days, people are looking to be more specialised and I guess what we’re really trying to do is allow that within our mixed practice.

“So, we have three vets who don’t ever see a large animal – they may see a pet lamb or something in the clinic, but they’re not certainly going out to see horses, cows and sheep.

“The mixed work is something that is nice to be able to offer, but it has not driven the growth – that has come putting real focus all the way through on customer service and making sure we have the conversations about preventive care, even if sometimes they’re difficult, and I think that’s resonated with people.

“And we’ve also done a good job of the vetting, which makes people come back, and so it’s [business growth] kind of looked after itself, if you like – plus, the area is growing, so we’re naturally getting more clients and business, because there are more people, and we don’t have a whole lot of competition.”

The practice now employs 7 vets and 12 full-time vet nurses, and Catherine has also just taken on a business strategist to work alongside the business administrator and clinical manager.

Barossa also employs a separate client care team and, earlier this year, an experienced orthopaedic vet joined the practice, giving it the clinical capacity to handle most things that come through the door.

Catherine said: “We’ll tackle most things, in terms of referral options.

“The university is only half an hour away and there are a couple of referral centres in Adelaide, too, which are an hour away.

“Probably the coolest thing that’s happened in the past 12 months here is that a specialist imaging centre has opened, so we can refer people for CT on an outpatient basis and have the CT come back to us the next day, so we can go through results.

“It’s a bit more cost effective than having to refer to a big referral centre, and it’s great for our vets, as they then get to work up cases and do more of that interesting clinical work that keeps them more engaged.”

Future plans

Despite having two young children aged five and two, Catherine continues to drive forward with her plans for the practice.

And while she’s clearly not trying to take over the world, she does want to create a practice big enough to allow her team members to develop their skills and focus on the things they are good at.

She said: “I think one of the things that GP vets find hard is that we all want to do a really good job of everything we do, but when you’re trying to do everything, it’s hard to do a really good job of everything.

“So, if we can be a big enough practice that we’ve got one vet who just does surgery and imaging and dentistry, and another who just does dentistry and consulting – me, I don’t like stitching anything, I’ll quite happily consult all day.

“So, we’re really trying to facilitate that and give our team the chance to feel like they are mastering something without being pushed to do everything. We’re trying to replicate that through the nursing team, so that we have surgical nurses, we have hospital nurses, we have consulting nurses and they can rotate and do all those things, but if they want to focus on just one area, then we will try to facilitate that and we need to be of a certain scale to do that.”

To accommodate a growing team, Barossa has just had a planning application approved that will double the size of its main site in Nuriootpa from 825sq ft to 1,650sq ft.

The extension will create three new consult rooms, a second theatre, a second dog ward, a cat ward, a dental suite, a new ultrasound room, a rehabilitation space and a new second floor for admin functions.

Catherine also has ambitions to buy two other small practices nearby and transform the soon-to-be-developed site into the central hub clinic for the Barossa region.

“I would like us to be a 10 to 12-vet hub where everyone can do what they are good at and we can offer a comprehensive service to our local community.

“We don’t really want to get too much bigger in the sense of people because I don’t want to lose the connection that we have as a team and that personal feel we can give to clients.

“But I also really see the benefit in being just that bit bigger and getting everyone that real job satisfaction and support, and I guess niching that allows you real mastery of whatever is your bit of veterinary science.”