9 Mar 2021
Anyone intent on opening their own veterinary practice usually does so with at least a 5-year, or even a 10-year, plan. Some people go into the enterprise with a longer view, however, as VBJ discovered when we spoke to Aidan Borrill prior to the launch of his practice, Ferndown Family Vets in Dorset…
James Westgate
Job Title
Staff: full-time vets 1 • registered veterinary nurses 3 • practice administrator 1
Fees: initial consult £45 • follow-up £45
When VBJ spoke to Aidan Borrill it was the day before he was due to realise a dream that’s been many years in the making.
Since qualifying from Cambridge in 2009, Aidan’s career has taken in small animal practice in his home county of Yorkshire before stints in Essex and Dorset, where he spent five years as a clinical director at IVC-owned practice, Forest Lodge.
During those 11 years – which included a spell working up to 100 hours a week as a locum to help finance his new practice – Aidan picked up plenty of experience about how he wanted to do things when the time came for him to branch out on his own.
So now he has achieved his dream and that time has finally arrived, it’s perhaps understandable that Aidan has no plans to go anywhere anytime soon.
He said: “I am feeling a weird combination of nerves and excitement, but it is all a bit overwhelming, as it has been in the making for almost three years now, so to actually be there is incredible.
“Everyone thinks we are a little bit crazy when they ask us about our business plan and we tell them that we have built a practice; we are not moving; we are not building any other branches or anything – this is it, for the rest of my career.
“If we get to the point where we are reaching the capacity that we want then we will close our books and we will have a waiting list.
“We did do some forecasts and our hope is to get to three full-time equivalent vets over the next three years, and that is where I want to call it a day and just maintain at that. For me, this is not about taking over the world, it is about the three things I feel a veterinary practice should be built upon – happy staff, happy pets and happy clients.”
Before all those things could come together, Aidan needed to find and finance his practice – not always an easy thing to do in the current business climate.
But thanks to parents willing to back their son with their pension investments, a loan from the bank, and years of hard work and saving by Aidan and wife Natalie, the finance came together for the £750,000 project.
He added: “We bought the site in February last year using my parents’ investment and we also put money in, too. We also got a mortgage from Lloyds of £165,000, which is basically half the value of the investment pension. Natalie and I also put our pensions in, which was about £40,000. Also, since I left IVC in September 2019, I have been locuming as much as I can – some weeks I was doing 100 hours, but it made sense financially as we also used our own pension pots to invest.
“We will be paying rent, but that provides the return on my parents’ investment and will also contribute to our pension going forward. It is quite an efficient way of doing things.”
With finance in place, Aidan found an old house on Wimbourne Road – a prominent site on one of the main routes into Ferndown. “It stuck out a bit as it was near an industrial estate, but the house itself was a cottage that was more than 100 years old,” he added.
“It was in a lovely area of town, but by the time we noticed it, it had already been sold at auction, or so we thought. However, a few months later I noticed it had come back up for auction, so I went to take a look around and, to cut a long story short, our offer was accepted and we bought the site for £275,000.”
Planning permission took roughly seven months; change of use was not a big issue for a site now surrounded by industrial units. However, the local council was keen to preserve a number of mature trees at the site. This was also a priority for Aidan, despite plans to use some of the cottage garden as car parking for his practice.
He added: “We managed to come up with something that preserved the oak trees that surround the site and give it such a good feel. We loved the appearance the cottage had and we didn’t want to lose that, as it is always nice to go somewhere where the building has a lot of character. We had been looking at industrial units as they are easy to get, but they don’t tend to have much kerb appeal, which is the thing that first entices clients through the door.
“We really focused on keeping the cottage as it was and the council was also keen for any extension to be subservient to the existing structure, which meant it could only be one storey and that was clearly an extension of the building and not something that has been tagged on.”
Building work then began last summer to gut the inside of the cottage and add a single-storey, 110-metre extension to house separate cat and dog waiting areas, two species-specific consult rooms and a treatment room.
The main body of the cottage now houses the cattery, kennels (both with new kennelling), a utility room, an isolation ward, a prep area, an imaging room and a surgical theatre – all kitted out to the best standard Aidan’s budget could allow.
He said: “We thought when we were planning it that we might be conservative, see how it goes and build on as we go forward, but we decided to just go for it and back ourselves to be popular – but not too popular.
“We really didn’t want to go through any building work again once we were up and running as it is expensive and just a real pain in the backside, to be honest.
“By the time you have paid out for the work to dig the foundations and things, it really doesn’t cost much more to go from 50 metres squared to 100 metres squared – fortunately I earned enough locuming to pay for any extra and also to kit out the entire practice.”
That means high-end digital x-ray and ultrasound – sourced second hand from the human health sector – as well as the full suite of IDEXX lab equipment, an addition that Aidan admits suited his medical bias.
He said: “I would say we have what we need and the odd thing – like laparoscopy – we can add in later as we go forward, but I kind of have the opinion that you can’t be good at everything. But my thing is medicine rather than surgery, which is why I wanted the full lab kit.
“Of course I do surgery; as GPs we sometimes think we should be able to do absolutely everything, but I feel you should know what you are good at – especially given that there is so much we can do in the veterinary profession now and you should know who you can send people to, or have other colleagues in the practice who have those skills.”
One of the skills Aidan was determined to have in-house was a strong nursing team – something he believes will drive the growth and define the ethos of the practice; happy clients, happy pets and happy staff.
By making sure the nurses he has on board at the start of the project are all highly experienced, everyone benefits, as Aidan explained: “One of the reasons we set up this practice was to create somewhere amazing for me to work for the rest of my career, but I was also getting fed up with the profession talking about improving staff well-being without really doing a lot about it.
“If you are trying to make the practice busier and busier to make more money, you cannot improve well-being – something has to give and that is usually the well-being of the staff.
“I want to do that by controlling the amount of work coming through the door, and also by giving the qualified and experienced nurses loads of responsibility by letting them do as much as they are able to with the qualifications they have.
“I believe nurses need to be fully utilised; it is much more rewarding professionally for them, but it also makes a practice run so much more efficiently as well and provides that extra room to breathe, which enhances everyone’s well-being – staff, pets and clients, to be honest.”
Creating an efficient, harmonious practice environment also makes the experience more comfortable for the patients treated at Ferndown. This is why Aidan has committed to making the practice “Fear Free”, and the main way that will be achieved is by dedicating more of that most precious commodity to each client and patient – time.
He said: “The key to it is just having time and not having a conveyor belt; treating every pet as an individual. We will have five minutes at the start of every consult just to let the animal relax and get used to us, rather than having a backlog of patients in the waiting room that brings with it the pressure to just get the job done and get them out the door again.
“The ‘Fear Free’ stuff is also about getting the right colour choices on walls and staff uniforms, and making sure it all flows so pets are not met with an obstruction when they are coming round a corner – things like that.
“We have come up with some figures about how many consults we will do every day and we will be doing 20-minute consults as standard to allow for that. That makes 14 a day, and we work back from there with things like how many diagnostics on average I run and then how many procedures I run on average per client, and things like that. We will just have to see how it goes, and then we know at which point financially we can think about employing another vet and another nurse just to keep that quality of care up.
“And that brings happy clients – if their pets are happy then they’re happy.”
Speaking to Aidan on the evening before his big opening, he was understandably nervous about his new venture, despite spending the past year promoting the practice and building interest in the business among the local pet-owning community.
Facebook and Instagram have been the big focus for the publicity push, and it appears to have worked – at least for the first week of trading. “We have a full slot of consults booked for our opening and the first week is looking pretty full, too, so it is a decent start,” he added.
“We are not trying to claw clients away from other places – we are just trying to offer something for the long term really and hopefully over time that message will filter through about the high level of care on offer here.
“It is not about pasting the fact you are an independent practice everywhere – it is about sticking to guns and providing a very personal and friendly service, and I think people will come running to us.
“It has been stressful and a lot of work with the locking down on top, but I am hoping the worst of that is behind me – I know I am going to have to work my backside off, but that’s fine. I know how to vet and love doing it, so hopefully that side of things will come naturally.”
