Practice Profile: Pocket Nook Equine Vets, Cheshire

To say the past year and a half has been an eventful period for new practice owner Emily Westwood would be something of an understatement.

In chronological order, she has:

• graduated from The University of Edinburgh Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies
• given birth to her first child
• started her first job
• left her first job
• launched her own business

A lot of people would be a gibbering wreck after such a run of events, but for Emily – a woman well-used to battling for what she wants in life – it’s all par for the course.

In fact, her career so far has been a lesson in resilience that has forged her into the person she is today: hard-working, resourceful, pragmatic and not afraid of hard work – ideal qualities for the demanding life of an ambulatory equine vet.

But after just eight months in practice, Emily quickly realised those qualities could be put to better use elsewhere.

She said: “I worked so hard to get to vet school, but when I started my first job as an ambulatory vet working for a practice near Manchester, I soon realised it wasn’t for me.

“I was working long days and spending hours sat in traffic criss-crossing the M6, and I just found it hard. I wasn’t getting to see my baby daughter enough and, for the money I was being paid, I just wasn’t getting what I needed from the job.

“It was then that I started to think that I could do that kind of ambulatory work myself, as my own boss with my own business.

“I have always had customer service skills, as I worked as a waitress for years. The only slight concern to start with was just going out and seeing different things that I might not have come across before, as I had only seen eight months’ practice before setting this up.

“But I knew I could get support from Nantwich Equine Vets and Leahurst Equine Hospital if I needed it, and that gave me the confidence I needed. I haven’t looked back – I am so happy, working the hours I want to work and getting paid a lot better, too.”

Hard work pays off

While it is still very early days – Emily only set up Pocket Nook at the start of August – all the signs are the business is going to be a success. The practice has already attracted almost 300 clients to the books and generated a healthy turnover in its first two months.

Not that Emily is getting carried away just yet; she knows there will be challenges ahead – as there are for any business owner – and life has taught her to keep her feet firmly on the ground.

After leaving school with no A-levels, the 34-year-old worked as a waitress for many years before paying her way through Reaseheath College, where she earned an equine science degree.

During her degree course, Emily completed a work placement with Nantwich Equine Vets, where she also began working as yard manager and a part-time equine nurse. And it was with the support of the team at Nantwich that Emily applied for, and was awarded, a place at Edinburgh’s vet school. But securing her place was the “easy” part.

Because it would be a second degree, Emily needed to find £150,000 to cover the five-year course fees, and despite Nantwich sponsoring her to the tune of £15,000, a good friend pledging £10,000 and EquiMed adding another £5,000, paying her own way would require a truly Herculean effort.

But putting in the effort to get what she wants has never been a problem for Emily.

“I was waitressing for 10 years in Bolton, so I know how to graft to get where I want to be,” she said.

“Without the sponsorship I got, I would probably not have been able to do the vet degree, but I still needed another £120,000 and we didn’t have any money, so I set up a little business on my own where I designed a muzzle guard for head-shaking horses.

“That brought in a bit of money and I worked as a waitress while I was at university in Edinburgh as well. I also had a little business doing worm egg counts and I gave riding lessons at weekends to pay for the rest of my degree.

“I was one of only two people that I knew about on my course at Edinburgh that had a part-time job, and when you have got to do a vet degree and work three jobs, it’s hard, but you come out of that very resilient.

“The financial bar to study veterinary medicine is so high, people from my kind of background don’t really stand much of a chance and that is a huge shame, as these are often the kind of people with the life experience to make great vets.

“Some of the people they take on at vet schools can struggle with that side of it – even doing work placements or five lectures in one day, I just thought, ‘wait until you get out into the real world’.”

Going it alone

After graduating in 2021, the first thing Emily did was launch herself into that world and it didn’t take her long to secure her first job.

But despite securing sponsorship for her degree and working three jobs, Emily had inevitably racked up some serious debts to pay her way at Edinburgh, which meant she could only afford a short maternity break before launching head first into her new career.

At the time, she had no idea her career as a salaried vet would prove to be so short lived.

She said: “I could only take two months off to have the baby, as I couldn’t afford to take any more time as I still owed quite a lot of money.

“So, I went to work for that practice in Manchester, which I really enjoyed and the team were great, but I just found it really hard. I was paying off all the debt I had built up and having a baby as well, and I found myself working a lot of hours for not a lot of money.

“I know I needed to do something, so I decided to go for it and set up my own business. That meant during the last two months I was working, I set up a limited company, got a wholesaler, sorted out my insurance and then just took it from there.

“There were quite a few things that I didn’t know, but it really wasn’t that hard to do. It was difficult because when I was leaving my other job, I was leaving to set up quite close and  felt bad asking for advice, so I went to the VDS.

“They helped me with the insurance and then told me about having a premises licence to store drugs; they told me a lot of things that I didn’t know. The reps also helped with things like microchipping, as I didn’t know where to go with that, and Covetrus pointed me in the right direction for a few things; it all just came together quite quickly really.

“I also had support for referrals and advice from Campbell at Nantwich, and Dave Stack, who is an orthopaedic specialist at Leahurst. He has been really helpful and said if I ever want to do any standing surgery, he would come up and do it with me – Alison Talbot has been great recently, too, so I’m lucky in that I had all these contacts.

“I started the practice in August and by the end of the first week, I had 134 horses on my books, so I had to stop registering new clients for a while as I couldn’t manage it all.”

Not that Emily has been poaching clients from her previous practice; she hasn’t had to. For the past 12 months, she has been running an equine rehabilitation service at her partner Matt’s breaking yard, which provided her with a wealth of contacts and plenty of clients.

Good news spreads fast

News has clearly spread fast among local horse owners, with the practice more than doubling the number of clients on its books in its first month.

But the intention for Emily was never to work all hours, which means appointment numbers are kept manageable and new clients are only accepted from within a 20-mile radius of home in Lowton, near Warrington. To help develop that local client base, call-out fees for clients based within five miles are just £25, with those 20 miles or less paying £45.

Emily said: “I book my own appointments in so it doesn’t get too hectic. I will start at 10am and have my last appointment at 3pm, and I can work Saturdays if I have to.

“I don’t spend my working life driving around all the time and I don’t have to drive to calls a considerable distance away at 5pm, it is all under my control.

“I am doing three call-outs a day – obviously, that doesn’t include emergencies – but I have a real flexibility and balance now that I never had before.

“When I started this business, I made a list of the things I wanted to get out of it and I could customise the way I worked to that because I didn’t have to answer to anybody, and so far, that is working really well and I didn’t have to borrow a load more money to do it, either.”

Funding the dream

Emily managed to save £11,000 from her first year in practice and by doing rehab work, which covered most of her early costs and meant she has been able to use a subsequent Government loan of £15,000 as capital.

An x-ray machine and ultrasound came in at roughly £44,000 – a considerable expense, but one that has been deferred via a repayment scheme that sees Emily pay back £100 a month for the first six months and £770 thereafter.

Drugs and first aid meds, such as antibiotics and pain killers, came in at around £3,500, while a dental kit (£3,400) was paid for from savings.

It doesn’t sound like much – especially when compared to the inventory required for a bricks-and-mortar start up – but it’s all Emily needs to do the job.

She said: “I had done a lot of lameness work at Nantwich and that is what I am really interested in. I love the orthopaedic side and we really didn’t see a lot of that.

“I can send referrals to Nantwich, and go up and work them up there – it really is the best of both worlds.

“Otherwise, I am comfortable seeing pretty much anything you would see at a first opinion equine practice: the routine stuff like vaccines, dentals, blood tests and lameness workups.

“I saw a lot of the equine emergency work in my first practice, so was confident with that kind of thing, and anything that comes up I have not seen before I can just ask, and that is working out just fine at the moment.”

While Emily admits running your own business is not for everyone, she believes far more people in the equine sector should give serious thought to striking out on their own.

She said: “I managed to set this up while I was working as a vet for someone else and being a mother to a young daughter – it’s really doable, it just takes a lot of hard work, but it is absolutely the perfect thing for me.

“To anyone reading this who thinks they might like to set up their own thing: if I did it then anyone can do it.”