Veterinary Practice Business Coaching
How a Mastermind Can Transform Your Equine Practice
Most veterinarians spend years learning how to diagnose disease, manage complicated cases and provide the best possible care for their patients.
Very few of us are taught how to run a veterinary business.
We aren’t usually taught how to read a profit and loss statement, calculate whether our fees are actually profitable, manage cash flow, develop a team, create business systems or build a practice that doesn’t depend upon us being available every hour of the day.
I know this personally.
When I first became a practice owner in 2010, there were times when I had to decide whether I was going to pay myself or pay a supplier. I had the clinical training, but I hadn’t yet developed the business skills I needed as a practice owner.
Today, a significant part of my work involves helping equine and mixed veterinary practice owners develop those skills.
Through The Equine Practice Company’s Business Mastermind, I have now worked with more than 50 equine veterinary practices. More recently, over 300 equine veterinarians from around the world completed our Equine Practice Growth Assessment.
The same challenges continue to appear. Different country. Different practice. Different owner. But often, very similar problems.
Watch: The Equine Practice Owner’s Survival Guide
If you own an equine or mixed veterinary practice, I would recommend starting with the presentation below.
In The Equine Practice Owner’s Survival Guide, I take you through what we learned from more than 300 equine veterinarians and explain some of the biggest financial, pricing, systems, leadership and owner-dependence issues I see when working with practice owners.
Most importantly, I’ll give you practical areas to review within your own practice.
Watch the webinar above before making any major changes to your practice. Understanding where the real problem lies is usually far more valuable than simply working harder.
What Is Veterinary Practice Business Coaching?
Veterinary practice business coaching focuses on the part of veterinary medicine that happens behind the consulting room.
It may include:
- Financial performance and profitability
- Veterinary fee setting and pricing strategy
- Business systems and processes
- Leadership and team development
- Owner dependence
- Strategic planning and growth
These aren’t separate from good veterinary medicine.
A financially sustainable practice can invest in its people, equipment and clinical standards. It can pay its veterinarians appropriately, employ support staff and give the owner more choice over how they spend their time.
The problem is that many veterinarians only begin learning these skills after they become owners. Clinical excellence and business capability are two different skill sets.
What Is a Veterinary Business Mastermind?
A veterinary business mastermind takes business coaching further by bringing practice owners together over an extended period.
Rather than attending a seminar, collecting a notebook full of ideas and returning to exactly the same workload on Monday morning, a mastermind creates ongoing education, accountability and implementation.
You learn from the person leading the programme, but you also learn from other veterinary practice owners. Someone else may already have solved the team problem you’re struggling with.
Another owner may have changed their pricing structure, improved their systems or found a better way to deal with accounts receivable.
And sometimes, simply discovering that other practice owners are facing exactly the same challenges can be enormously useful.
Why Equine Veterinary Business Coaching Is Different
The principles of running a good veterinary business apply across the profession. But the economics of an equine veterinary practice can be very different from those of a companion-animal clinic.
Many equine practices are ambulatory.
That means veterinarian time can disappear into travel. Vehicles become an important business expense. Call-out structures matter. After-hours work matters. Geography matters.
There are also missed charges, unpaid accounts, telephone advice, dispensing, travel, sedation, consumables and dozens of other seemingly small areas where money can quietly disappear from the business.
For this reason, veterinary practice business coaching can be particularly valuable when it is tailored to the specific economics and operating model of an equine practice.
This is one of the reasons our Business Mastermind focuses specifically on equine and mixed veterinary practices.
We don’t need to translate generic business principles into equine practice every time we meet. The people around the table already understand the model.
What Are Equine Practice Owners Struggling With?
Our recent assessment of more than 300 equine veterinarians reinforced much of what I had already seen through working directly with practice owners.
Only 1% of respondents felt their practices were truly optimised.
Another 61% described themselves as being on a treadmill, while 9% were effectively hanging on by their fingernails.
Pricing was another significant issue.
Only 17% reported having a clear pricing strategy built around value rather than simply looking at competitors. Twenty-seven percent believed they regularly left significant money on the table through missed charges or undercharging.
That doesn’t mean these are poor veterinarians. It means veterinary school generally prepared us to be clinicians rather than business owners. And business skills can be learned.
The Six Areas I Believe Every Equine Practice Owner Should Understand
When I work with equine practice owners, I tend to look at six interconnected areas:
Financial performance. Are you actually making an appropriate profit, or simply generating a lot of revenue?
Pricing strategy. Are your fees based on what it genuinely costs your practice to provide the service, or on what you feel comfortable charging?
Business systems. What happens when you’re not there? Does everything still depend upon information living inside your head?
Leadership. Are you proactively developing the business or simply reacting to whatever happens this week?
Owner dependence. Have you built a business, or have you created an extremely demanding job for yourself?
Growth strategy. Do you know what you want the practice to look like in three or five years, and do you have a plan for getting there?
These were also the six areas we examined with veterinarians during the Survival Guide webinar.
If you’re unsure where your practice currently sits across these areas, watch the webinar replay above. It will give you a useful starting point.
What Do Better-Performing Equine Practices Do Differently?
After working with equine practice owners, I’ve noticed that stronger businesses tend to do a few relatively simple things consistently.
They know their numbers, not just their revenue.
They charge appropriately for their work and review their pricing regularly.
The owner isn’t the answer to every question because systems and responsibilities have been developed across the team.
They deliberately spend time working on the business, rather than giving every available hour to clinical work.
And they operate from a plan rather than instinct.
Those are the same five characteristics I discuss in more detail during the Survival Guide presentation.
None of them require you to become a different veterinarian.
They require you to develop a different set of skills.
Working Harder Usually Isn’t the Answer
This is perhaps the most important point I can make.
Most equine veterinarians I meet do not need to work harder.
They’re already working hard.
The sustainability of equine veterinary practice has become a profession-wide issue, with the AAEP Equine Veterinary Sustainability Initiative developing resources around areas including compensation, emergency coverage and practice culture.
Another dental, another lameness case or another after-hours call may increase revenue, but it doesn’t necessarily fix an unprofitable fee structure, poor systems, excessive owner dependence or money disappearing through missed charges.
Sometimes one hour spent properly reviewing the business can be considerably more valuable than another hour of clinical work.
That’s one of the reasons equine veterinary practice coaching and mastermind programmes exist.
They create space for practice owners to work on the part of veterinary medicine that veterinary school rarely taught us.
Is an Equine Veterinary Business Mastermind Right for You?
Not every practice owner needs a mastermind.
Some veterinarians enjoy building their own systems and learning independently. Others already have experienced mentors, strong financial advisers or management teams around them.
There are also broader veterinary business coaching programmes available for independent practice owners. If you are comparing the different approaches, I have written a separate guide to VetDynamics, including how its Platinum Academy works, current pricing and how a broader veterinary business programme differs from one focused specifically on equine and mixed practice.
But if you repeatedly find yourself facing the same problems, veterinary practice business coaching can provide the outside perspective, accountability and structure that can be difficult to create when you’re immersed in the practice every day.
The current intake of The Equine Practice Company Business Mastermind is currently open, with the next cohort planned for 2028.
Between now and then, we’ll continue sharing business education and resources for equine and mixed veterinary practice owners.
And the best place to begin is with the presentation on this page.
Start With the Survival Guide
Before worrying about joining a veterinary practice business coaching program, changing your fees or rebuilding every system in your practice, understand where you are today.
Watch The Equine Practice Owner’s Survival Guide above.
Take some notes. Identify the two or three areas where your practice has the greatest opportunity for improvement. Then start there. A successful equine veterinary practice isn’t simply one that sees more horses.
It’s one that allows you to provide excellent veterinary care, build a strong team, create a financially sustainable business and still have a life outside the practice.
