Practice Profile: River Veterinary Care

Staff: full-time vets 1 • registered veterinary nurses 3 • practice administrators 1
Fees: initial consult £45.95 • follow-up £39.95

Setting up a business from scratch can be a lot like climbing a mountain in a pair of flip flops – it’s slow going and all a bit precarious.

If that business happens to be a veterinary practice and you have zero experience of running one, no time and next to no money, it can quickly start to feel like an impossible task.

But at just 31 years old and despite having only been qualified for less than five years, Alex Hirst has conquered that mountain in record time.

And while it has taken a huge amount of work to get River Veterinary Care up and running, Alex is clearly enjoying the view from the top.

He said: “This is something I have always wanted to do; be my own boss and run my own practice, where we can do things the right way and provide an exemplary level of clinical care and customer service.

“Yes, it has been the hardest thing I have ever done and yes, there have been plenty of speed bumps along the way.

“We nearly ran out of money at one point and we very nearly ran out of time to get the work done in time, but we got there in the end and while it has been exhausting, I couldn’t be happier.”

After graduating from the University of Bristol in 2019, Alex spent the first three years of his career working in a small animal practice in the north-east, where he studied for his surgical certificate in soft tissue and orthopaedics.

And it was that surgical certificate that ultimately unlocked the door to practice ownership. With next to no cash and no wealthy relatives to bankroll his ambitious plans, Alex needed seed money, and striking out on his own as a locum surgeon seemed the best way to get it.

With keyhole surgery skills to sit alongside his certificate, Alex hit the road and – by living frugally and working all hours under the sun – he was able to save a remarkable amount of £55,000 in just 18 months.

Man with a plan

The plan had been to work for four years to build the necessary war chest, but when the perfect site came up in a former children’s nursery in Ponteland on the edge of Newcastle, Alex took his business plan and his hard-earned cash and headed straight to the bank.

“I had intended to locum for longer and save up more money, but when we saw this place, we just knew it was perfect for what we wanted as it was in a good location and had plenty of parking,” Alex added.

At around 260 sq m over two floors, the building was a bit bigger than planned, but the price was right and the extra space meant it had room for future expansion.

He continued: “Once I knew it was right for what I needed, I went to the bank with my business plan and the bank was happy to lend the money, even though the plan was just based on my own projections. It maybe wasn’t the ideal time to borrow with interest rates being so high, but I couldn’t just sit around and hope interest rates were going to come down anytime soon.

“I borrowed £135,000 from the bank – which was as much as they were prepared to lend me – and I had my own money and that was it. I didn’t have a lot of backing and there wasn’t a big money pot anywhere, which has probably been a good thing really as it has not been an option to fail and that has pushed me on.

“There is not really an option for me to call in sick or have a day off either, as having so much of my own money on the line means I am the one who needs to put the work in at the start to make it all work.”

Pressed for time

Following the opening of River Veterinary Care, Alex – the sole vet – is putting in some “mad hours” to keep pace with the rapid growth of the practice.

But the mad hours began from the moment he took the keys to the building, on the main road through Ponteland, five miles north of Newcastle.

With such a tight budget and with a business plan that relied on him opening the practice less than three months after getting the keys, Alex enlisted help from family and friends for some of the work.

The rest he did himself. “When we got the keys, it was just a blank canvas with three huge rooms on the bottom floor, so we refurbed the whole of the downstairs,” he said.

“We got building contractors in for some bits and some stuff we got help from family and friends who we knew in the various trades. But the majority of it, things like the painting and ripping up the carpets and knocking walls down, was just me and my girlfriend doing it in our spare time.

“Because we didn’t have a lot of backing money-wise, it was a massive rush to get this all sorted, so from getting the keys, doing the refurb and opening for business was 10 weeks.

“It was too quick really, but it had to be done that way.”

Beating the budget

While Alex and his small army of volunteers did as much as they could to keep costs down, there were unavoidable expenses for professional tradespeople.

The services of an electrician to rewire the building was the biggest cost, while the joiner required to install the doors and bespoke cabinetry proved another big expense. Alex also wanted to fit high-end flooring – Floors for Paws – a relatively expensive product designed to assist mobility for patients suffering with arthritis.

This all added to the cost and in the final few weeks of the project, cash was running dangerously low as Alex found himself down to his last few hundred pounds.

But the results of all that hard work and stress are truly impressive, with the large open space previously occupied by two playrooms and an office transformed into a modern, well-appointed veterinary practice.

All clinical areas are downstairs with a waiting room branching off into two main consult rooms, plus a separate cat waiting room leading into a cat-only consult room.

The engine room of the practice features a large prep area and, not surprisingly considering Alex’s surgical skills, the centrepiece of the clinical area is an extremely well-equipped theatre featuring a wall to ceiling glass frontage.

There is also dental x-ray and a separate digital x-ray suite, cat and dog wards and a utility area, while upstairs – still a work in process – houses office space and staff areas.

Alex said: “Upstairs is just admin office space at the moment with a staff room, but there is scope as we get busier to extend into one side of that space and put an extra theatre in there – that’s the plan.

I would say we got everything we needed within our budget. I would have liked a big fancy ultrasound machine, but we got a second hand one from the NHS; it’s quite big and bulky – not like these laptop fancy things – but it does a great job.

“The rest of the equipment, like the digital x-ray, I leased and we got everything we needed. At some point we might look at getting a CT machine and we currently have no endoscopy, but that will come with time as we develop.”

Doing it differently

While it is still very early days – the practice opened on 30 May – River Veterinary Care has enjoyed a meteoric start to life, with more than 400 clients already on the books.

This is way ahead of the most optimistic projections, despite Alex not bringing any clients with him from his previous practice as he had never worked in the area before.

Due to his surgical skills, he does see a lot of fracture referrals and is also doing a lot of soft tissue work on a similar basis.

One of the other reasons for his success, according to Alex, is the fact that the practice is surrounded by corporates – something he believes clients are switching on to in greater numbers.

He said: “We are independent and we are surrounded by corporates, and I think people are really starting to understand what that means now.

“As an independent, we are able to offer the continuity of care that people don’t always get at the big group practices and we also charge a little less than they do, which obviously appeals to clients.

“But maybe the biggest reason is that we are promoting a better quality of clinical and customer care, the gold standard, and I am confident that we can deliver that.

“In all the practices that I have worked there have always been things that I would like to have seen done differently or improvements in the quality of care, and I have taken that and put it into place here and it seems to really appeal to pet owners in what is a relatively affluent area.

“We also got a lot of help from Will [Stirling] at VetBoost with the creation of our branding and waiting room design. As well as ensuring our website was sorted out, he also worked with us on our social media to build up a following before we opened, and all that helped a lot.”

The gold standard

Offering higher standards of care obviously requires the right kind of people to deliver it. For Alex this has meant paying a little more in salaries to attract the right people to his practice team, which has doubled in size since the end of May.

On opening day there was just Alex, a receptionist and one nurse, but due to the rapid growth, River Veterinary Care now employs a practice manager, three nurses and a veterinary care assistant.

Alex is also looking for a vet but accepts finding the right fit might take time. “We haven’t found another vet and that is going to be the hardest thing, as I know they are in short supply. But I am hoping being independent helps, although doing our own out-of-hours probably doesn’t,” he said.

“Out-of-hours has gone down well with clients, but obviously is not sustainable long term for me, so that is why it is important for me to find another vet. But they have to be happy to do the out-of-hours, as it is such a good USP for this practice.

“I don’t really like the hours, especially if someone rings at 4am, I just really struggle to get back to sleep, but it needs to be done if we want to be the best.”

And as Alex explained, to be the best and attract the ideal candidate, he is prepared to offer a real piece of the action to get the right person.

He explained: “I think we are also able to offer a bit more clinical freedom than some practices and there will also be partnership options here if that is what people want.

“That was always the plan, but obviously it has to be the right person. If we can find the right person now, we will take them now; the sooner the better for us as a business so we can keep growing.

“It would be nice to have someone with either similar skills to me who wants to learn and train, or someone who is completely the opposite who is doing more of the medical things that I don’t do quite so often day-to-day – that would be a good balance.”

Sustainable growth

Over time, Alex plans to grow River Veterinary Care into a multi-site operation, but for now he is focused on growing the business in a sustainable way.

It has been a hard slog and Alex is still working 80-hour weeks, but it is clear he is loving life as his own boss and did not hesitate to offer the following advice to others thinking of heading down the same route.

He said: “If you have any interest in exploring being your own boss and starting your own independent practice, and if you have the right attitude, you can definitely do it.

“You can find the money; it is all about having what you need when you open and nothing more.

“My top lesson is don’t be scared about taking a risk; everything we have done has been a risk and so many people told us not to do it, but it was the best thing we did.”