Practice Profile: Little Rock Equine Vets

Mixed animal and equine practice can be an unforgiving environment, especially for a mother of two young children looking to change her stars.

Despite numerous attempts to buy into a partnership, Shelley Cook was still working up to 80 hours a week (including on call) for a salary of £36,000, which meant she was “working for next to nothing” when childcare costs were taken into account.

With a husband working full time and faced with so many barriers to any meaningful career development, Shelley realised that if she wanted to combine a happy home life with a fulfilling and financially rewarding career, she would have to go out and do it herself.

And so on 19 October 2020 Little Rock Equine Vets was born – with just Shelley and a van full of equipment “on tick”. Six months later and there is another van – and with it another vet – a buzzing office, and a growing sense that Shelley’s gamble could pay off big time.

She said: “My second child was born at the end of 2019, which meant my maternity leave coincided with a lot of the pandemic, so, in some respects, not much changed for me at that time – I was just wrestling two small children and two dogs.

“But I used that time to really start thinking about what I wanted to do and if I was to work for any other practice, what would I want out of it as a career?

“Since I graduated I have known five or six female equine vets who have become so frustrated with their lack of a decent pay cheque or a way to buy in, they just left the industry. What a waste, and I didn’t want to go the same way and realised the only way I could have that is to open my own practice.

“It was scary to begin with, but I had a good reputation in the area and the business is going great, and I am already looking for my third vet.”

Varied career

She may have found the process of opening her own practice daunting at times, but she is not the kind of woman to be daunted for long. The name Shelley means “little rock” and this particular little rock has certainly had to show granite-firm resolve to get to where she is today.

After graduating with a 2:1 honours in agriculture, she worked in human resources, as well as in the poultry sector and for Coolmore Stud to save enough money to study for a veterinary degree.

And despite having to return home to Ireland to help care for her sick grandmother, Shelley saved the cash, gained a place at Edinburgh and in 2011 qualified as a vet.

Shelley said: “Becoming a vet is not something you fall into. However you come to the profession, you still have to work for it. I would say my unconventional path to becoming a vet has helped me massively.

“If you haven’t had different challenges in your life previously, you are less likely to be able to take the personal pressures that the job puts on you.

“Folk who only see it as a job won’t thrive, as customer facing at this level can’t just be a job. In that respect we don’t always select the right people for the industry. We also suffer from mansplaining, patronisation or, at worst, misogyny. Many equine practices are owned by men of a certain generation, who don’t understand the benefits of hiring folk with flexible working schedules. This mindset informs the climate at those practices and acts as a barrier for many women who want to progress professionally.

“There are more and more women in the veterinary profession, and if we don’t put our heads above the parapet, we won’t be able to help those coming up behind us.

“It is a confidence thing; I am a confident female, I know what I want and I know how I am going to get it. My father taught me ‘if you can’t find the door then make one’. That’s what I did with this practice. There was no way for me through the ceiling, so I made one.”

Profit share

With all four members of staff at Little Rock being working mums, Shelley ensures there is the right kind of personal and professional support her team needs.

But it is not just about the support, it’s also about providing the right financial rewards and incentives – something Shelley believes is a crucial factor.

“We pay them a decent wage and their monthly wage includes an out-of-hours stipend for the hours that they do,” she added.

“They get a basic salary and the stipend on top of that, but most practices don’t do that; usually if you are doing OOH, you get the impression that you are working for free because it is an inclusive low wage – when I left I was on £36,000 a year and yet I was working up to 80 hours a week, including on call. My turnover at that practice was £300,000-plus a year. Those income generation to wage ratios are far too common for young vets. I wanted to be sure that my staff got a better deal.”

Staff at Little Rock are also offered the chance to buy into the practice after six months’ service. This means everyone can enjoy the benefits of the growth of the practice without having to find the kind of eye-watering sums required to buy into most practice partnership situations.

Although any profits this year will be limited, staff are still expecting a dividend based on certain targets. Shelley expects bonuses to run to around 25 to 30% of practice profits in future years.

She added: “I want to pass on a legacy, and my exit plan is to pass on the practice to the following generation and for them to be able to do that at a price they can afford.

“It is not about them buying the business out for hundreds of thousands, it is about doing it sensibly – the whole buy-in thing allows people to buy in in stages as and when they can afford to, which means they won’t have to suddenly find a huge amount of money to get a stake in the business.

“I know this is very unusual from a business perspective, but this was about providing a better quality of life for all of us. It was also about getting the love of my job back, as I had hit that phase where I had just had enough of being undervalued.”

Time is money

But for everyone involved to get anything from their stake in the business, it has to make money; something Shelley has always done throughout her career – the only difference is now she gets to keep more of it for herself.

And she does that by making sure neither her time, nor that of her staff, is undervalued. In the high-maintenance world of equine, Shelley has a solid reputation for going the extra mile for clients and offering gold-standard care. This approach reflects the fact Shelley made a conscious decision when starting Little Rock to focus on charging properly for her time, which means so she doesn’t put big mark-ups on medicines. She added: “We charge on time. We don’t put a massive mark-up on drugs and consumables. So the overall price is not a lot more expensive, but the service is first rate.

“I know, because of medicine regulations and competition ethics in the future, that this industry is going to have to go the way we’re running this business. I have just set up this way from the get-go.

“So I have set myself up as a vet who will look after clients and will be in contact with the clients we are dealing with, probably on a daily basis in terms of seeing how horses are doing.

“To me that is not a massive take up of my time; when I am driving around it is easy to spend some time talking to a client about their horses, who values that experience and is happy to pay for that added value.”

Relationships

It is a carefully considered approach that meant Shelley had to think long and hard when it came to expanding the practice and recruiting her first vet, Lucy Penrose, in March.

Shelley said: “Obviously, I have been careful building the team so far; I spent a lot of time with Lucy talking to her to find out about how she worked and how she wanted to work, and also what her stressors were. We both needed to know it would work for both of us, so the interview process was probably a good three months on and off.

“But that was more about building a relationship. Building relationships is a founding principle of Little Rock Equine Vets, so it was a natural process.”

“Lucy also has a young child. We both want to build a career and be there for our kids. Little Rock is how we can do just that.

“On call is one in four and my plan is to stabilise the business at four vets. Once you start going above that number, clients begin to worry about the changing faces (even if they don’t change) and therefore feel less important.”

Freedom

And for Lucy – mother to a two year old – the move to Little Rock has given her the freedom to work the way she wants to work. She said: “It is very flexible, we help each other out and we have the same approach to client care, which was very important to me.

“If anything happens we will help each other out, and it is good in terms of the clients as well as they are very understanding about us as a team and that we are all working mums.

“That is where that extra client care comes in because if something happens and we have to rush away for kids, most of our clients will be very understanding of that.

“It has been really good and getting the chance to buy in is great. With all the corporates taking over it is hard to get a stake in a business. I have a real stake here and that really gives me extra motivation; it is just a really exciting opportunity.”

So, for an outlay of roughly £200,000 so far, Shelley is already making good progress and the practice has low levels of debt due to a policy of immediate payment via remote card machines.

“You don’t get an invoice and 30 days to pay at the supermarket,” added Shelley.

And for her, far more importantly, she is providing a working environment that better reflects the needs of the modern veterinary workforce.

She said: “We have to get over this; I see a lot of benefit in part-time working arrangements. This pandemic has highlighted the fact that women are the ones who are (on the whole) responsible for juggling work and home life. This means that as employees they are, on the whole, more efficient with their time – due to the other responsibilities they have in the background – and that is a massive asset to any company.

“I have to get my two kids up in the morning, get them to nursery, walk the dogs, do my job and run the business. But you know what? I can manage it, and I now get up every morning with a spring in my step and a glint in my eye.”