Practice Profile: Beehive Vets

Luke and Esther Green were so set firm in their desire to create a warm and welcoming family practice that you’d expect the name Beehive Vets – with its connotations of a busy community working productively to a shared purpose – had been equally as long in the planning.

Considering it’s such a perfect fit for the West Yorkshire clinic, it comes as a surprise to hear the name came about through a combination of local geography and family history.

“We were umm-ing and ahh-ing about the name quite a lot, actually,” said Luke.

“Previously, I had always thought you put the name of where you are in the title, because it is silly not to, and then I went against my own advice.

“So, we did look at ‘Rothwell Vets’ and that would have been an option, but we were chatting back and forth, and we talked to our marketing team, and they were coming up with various suggestions.

“We are in the ‘rhubarb triangle’ here, so one was ‘Rhubarb Vets’, and then we suddenly thought, hang on, can everyone spell rhubarb? We were thinking of people misspelling it into Google, and not finding us, and that sort of thing.

“So in the end, they said there is a type of mining in the area called beehive mining, and that suddenly clicked, because the house I grew up in when I was a kid was called Beehive Cottage.

“It was just the flash of those two together of ‘that’s perfect’. And then you think, people love bees, don’t they?”

With a combined 28 years working as vets – latterly as locums or in corporate groups – the married couple decided they wanted to follow the lead of many contemporaries and set up on their own.

Beehive Vets in Rothwell – a commuter and market town south-east of Leeds – opened its doors on 14 February 2022, giving the couple the perfect Valentine’s Day gift.

Esther said: “We had both locumed for a significant portion of our careers, and we’d worked for various corporates either as a locum or as a PAYE employee, and well, we were just getting a bit tired of building up all these practices for someone else to benefit from.

“We just sat down and chatted, and said we could be doing this for ourselves.”

Luke added: “We had always thought we wanted to do it at some point, and we started to get a bit disillusioned with where we were going in the industry.

“Meanwhile, a friend of ours had set up in 2017, so a few years before us, and was phenomenally successful, and I think that really pushed us to see that if someone else has done it then why can’t we?”

Dream to reality

As is not unusual for many opening their own business, it took time to get from dream to reality.

Initially, the couple looked at renting a practice premises, but quickly opted to take the full leap to premises ownership.

Esther said: “I think one of the things that held us back was the fear of the finances, as well, and thinking, can we actually afford to do this, and then when we were trying to find the property, we thought we can get around this quite easily by renting a premises. So, we started to look for rental properties and I just said, no it just didn’t feel right.

“Luke had done Alison [Lambert’s] course with OnSwitch on how to set up your own veterinary practice, and we had had a chat with her and some other people about the best way. They were all basically sort of saying, if you can afford it, try to buy the building.”

A building with necessary planning permissions honed into view in the shape of a former GP practice, and later aesthetics clinic, in Rothwell – an area 20 minutes from their home that had only peripherally made it on to their radar as a possible business location.

Esther said: “We had seen the building that we purchased, but it was sold subject to contract, so we spoke to the estate agent and said if it ever comes back on the market can we please view it?

“They were going to sell it and do it up as an Indian restaurant. I had just given birth, and was three weeks postpartum, and the estate agent phoned up and said it is back on the market.

“We viewed it and we made an offer as we walked through the door. It was perfect. It was the best we had seen.

“If anything, the rooms were a little large, but we have made it work, and we got a really good builder in who project managed everything..

Luke added: “There were lots of town centre locations with on-street parking, but the problem with a lot of those was the size of the premises – you could squeeze in, but you know you would outgrow it quite quickly.

“So, the building we found was actually quite sizeable – about 2,000 sq ft, had 9 to 10 parking spaces and was just off the town centre. It ticked so many boxes.”

Build

The duo found a bank to provide financial support for their new project, and signed up a builder with previous experience on veterinary projects who fitted other work around them until they had the all-clear on the building purchase.

Once all their ducks were in a row, the time from purchase to opening was an impressively short six weeks.

Esther said: “While the sale was going through, the previous owner was quite happy for us to go in and measure up, so we had done that with the builder.

“We knew what we needed to do and how we needed to do it for completion day.

“We had a couple of scares with the equipment not arriving through customs in time, so we nearly opened without consulting tables, but we managed to get some at the last minute. It was a buzz going through all of that and getting the floor down and everything.

“I look back on it now and think, god, if one of those things hadn’t fallen into place we wouldn’t have opened.

“But at some point, you have to just bite the bullet and go, right this is our opening date, let’s start getting people registered and appointments booked. It went really smoothly in the end.”

As the project unfolded, they decided to add medical-grade flooring throughout, and replace 18 windows – neither of which had been in the original budget.

Esther and Luke began putting their new team together in November 2021, just ahead of the build getting started, with feelers going out through Facebook. They found team members who knew each other through work at a nearby practice.

Esther said: “We were very lucky – we interviewed one receptionist and we were like, she is perfect, and then we interviewed three fabulous nurses and we said yes to two, because we knew we only needed two to start with, and they all came from a corporate down the road.

“The team all knew each other anyway – we were just the unknown quantity to them.”

The team dynamic, and the ethos Luke and Esther were committed to, helped a launch teased through Facebook, which quickly led to 500 client sign-ups.

Esther, on maternity leave with the couple’s second child ahead of opening, organised new services while Luke painted the new surgery’s walls, and both handled the one-a-minute email enquiries that began quickly swamping the practice’s inbox.

Luke said: “There was a backlog of cases that couldn’t get into their own vets, which helped us a lot. We had a practice down the road that literally had no vets at all, and was recommending and referring stuff to us, and saying, go to them, they are taking on clients.

“That seems to have calmed down a bit in terms of people closing their books, but as we opened a lot of the local practices had closed their books, and had two to three-week waits. So, that really helped in that initial burst. And then it seemed to go reputationally beyond there – we had really positive reviews and the clients were all lovely.”

Up and running for slightly more than a year, the practice’s website strongly signposts the practice’s family, independent and welcoming feel – and clients’ loyalty.

Clients have gifted bee-related touches visible throughout the building and most rooms benefit from natural light, while the consult rooms feature sofas to make clients and their pets truly at home. The website boasts a 4.9 Google rating and 5 through Facebook.

Luke said: “We very much wanted it to feel like us, almost like an extension of our house. And we talked about that a bit on the website, about you welcoming someone in as a guest into your, perhaps not home as such, but it’s more like that rather than walking into a cold, faceless building and just getting a service. Ethos-wise, I wanted to make sure we had enough time to have a proper conversation with everyone and make sure you are on the same page.

“We always wanted to make sure we did a good level of clinical work. I didn’t want to be just a vaccination and neutering-type clinic. And, of course, we offer that, and that is a cornerstone of a lot of vets anyway, but we wanted to focus more on medical workups and treatments, and preventive medicine.”

Out-of-hours is outsourced to help the practising vet couple try to achieve a healthy work-life balance, and 15-minute consults and a preventive health care scheme – Healthy Hive Club – were brought in from the start.

The practice care plan includes consultations, and it sticks to a simple pricing structure, with a set price for all cats and dogs.

Certificate in advanced veterinary practice holder Esther, and Luke, who has plans for expanding clinical knowledge in new areas, are on the cusp of an RCVS Practice Standards Scheme inspection at the time of VBJ’s visit, and – with the help of feline advocates on the team – they have already landed silver in the International Society of Feline Medicine’s Cat Friendly Practice scheme. They plan to go for gold.

Future

The building lends itself to future expansion, and Luke and Esther show no signs of resting on their laurels, with planning permission for an extension already pending and further expansion of services on the horizon.

Esther said: “The building is like an L-shape at the minute, and it is basically filling it in to be a rectangle. So we would move the office – that would create the one consult room; we would move the cat ward, so that would make us another consult room; we would want a bigger staff room and potentially a second theatre in that area.”

Luke added: “We wanted to focus on good clinical standards, and providing a half step between first opinion and referral, because we are very experienced in terms of what we have done. We do orthopaedic work on site, a lot of ultrasonography, and I am moving more towards cardiology now as well.

“We have x-ray, dental x-ray, endoscopy and multiparameter monitors. The main thing we don’t currently have that we were thinking about one day would be CT. Other than that, compared to most of the practices I’ve worked with, I think we’ve got a better level of equipment.

“Plenty of people out there can’t afford to go the whole hog of going to a referral centre, and they are incredibly well equipped and full of expertise, these centres, but the price is out of reach for a quite a lot of people.

“I think in some ways, a lot of practices are finding that half step; that halfway house to provide a good level of service that works well.”