Church Hill Equine Clinic: changing large-animal practice in rural areas

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Church Hill Equine Clinic


changing large-animal practice in rural areas






Introduction


The financial end-of-year partners’ meeting of Church Hill Equine Clinic ended with an agreement to review the business’s strategic direction. The partners had discussed trying to further expand the regional market share of the practice over the next year. In short, the business was reasonably successful but not operating optimally. Things had to change, but with a six-vet practice operating from three separate home locations, and a business built on the reputation and charisma of its two founding partners, it was not going to be easy. However, the announcement at the same meeting that Rhys, one of the senior founding partners wanted to go part-time and eventually retire caused Rob Pitt, the most recent senior partner, to start thinking about how he might grow the business into the future.



Background


Prior to joining Church Hill, Rob Pitt had spent some time in a large-animal mixed practice in the northwest of England. This involved miscellaneous practice experience across mainly cattle and horses. However, after 3 years he realized that his daily work had become mundane and routine. It was clear to him that any concentration on bovines would mean his work was focused around herd health planning and production management, with little or no contact with individual animals. It was also clear that economics dictated the owner’s decisions, and in the event of anything being found wrong with an animal, it was a simple matter of ‘shoot and replace’.


As a vet, Rob had always been more interested in working with and treating the individual animal, and realized that with equine his job was more varied, challenging and professionally stretching. Rob had enjoyed the equine part more and more, eventually splitting his time between equine and bovine work. He had a farming background, and was increasingly conscious that when equine customers called the large-animal mixed practice they always wanted ‘the horse vet’. The other vets in the practice preferred to leave the equine work to him and, as a consequence, he received an increasing number of referrals within the practice. All this experience, Rob realized, had stood him in good stead prior to joining Church Hill.


As Rob reflected on the past 12 years of his partnership at the practice, he remembered that when he originally joined there was a period of recession. The practice had been started by Rhys Evans as a large-animal practice. Rhys was a high-profile and locally well-known popular vet who had returned ‘home’ to rural Wales, having spent some time working overseas and then at the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons (RCVS) doing surgery. During this time he had developed an interest in equine medicine, but he continued with large-animal practice as the dictates of the local rural economy demanded. A year later, he was joined by Daffyd, who was an equine enthusiast, a well-known character within the local equine community, and keen on hunting and ‘point to point’. Both Rhys and Daffyd were self-employed and worked from their separate home bases, but decided that they would operate under the banner of Church Hill Equine Vets. As such they formed a two-location practice, Rhys in Llanyfirs and Daffyd just over the English border, close to a county town. Their respective reputations along with their client base grew steadily. Five years from inception, and under their charismatic leadership, they additionally took on another vet partner and, 3 years after that, Rob Pitt. As the number of vets grew, the business continued to grow exponentially, despite the recession; the practice supply of high-quality equine vets remained unable to outstrip demand for them.


Church Hill Equine Clinic was becoming more established, albeit still a ‘loose association’ of self-employed vets operating from two senior partner home bases. This was primarily driven by a combination of the character and reputation and, by extension, the individual ‘brands’ of Rhys and Daffyd, respectively. They had never felt the need to advertise, having operated at a time when competition was virtually non-existent. Most large-animal vets were mixed practice, and equine vets were still something of a novelty.



From fast start to plateau


The number of partners in the practice had increased in the 12 years since Rob had started. Six vets (one of whom was an associate partner) were now operating under the banner of Church Hill, although founder partner Rhys had recently indicated his desire to go part-time and eventually retire. There had also been a number of very discernible changes. In the early days, there had not been many horse-specialist veterinary practices around. Cattle and large-animal mixed-practice vets were disinclined to treat horses, so Church Hill would get plenty of ‘business-to-business’ referrals from other practices. However, Rob had begun to notice that, as time went on, more and more practices wanted to get involved in equine work, and as a consequence the number of equine vets had increased. This trend could be directly related to the farming recession, which saw dairy farmers go out of production while equine businesses were still a growing rural industry. Needless to say, Rob had started to see an increase in competition. In the past, he had suggested taking a half-page advertisement in Yellow Pages, much to the resistance of the older senior partners, who failed to see the need at that time. His observation now was that Church Hill, with the growth in the number of vets operating from the practice, would soon need to do much more marketing. However, by this stage, things had moved well beyond just placing an advertisement in Yellow Pages.


With Rob becoming a senior partner, practice premises still consisted of ‘home-based’ clinics, but based at the homes of the now three senior partners (Rhys, Daffyd and Rob), which were located in rural Wales, the outskirts of a border English county town and a village in rural England. These three locations were serviced by the other self-employed partners and associate, who paid surgery rental to the respective location partners. Rhys’s retirement would mean the loss of one of these surgery bases.


Although the practice was continuing to grow, the client base had started to plateau as local competition increased. Similarly, Rob had noticed a slight change in the demographics of the practice customer base, with more of the clients now coming from England. With the main surgical base still in Llanyfir (Rhys’s home), this was causing logistical difficulties. Partnership vets were contributing to surgery rental dependent on where they saw clients and which rota was in operation, but rentals were not charged at commercial rates due to the home-based nature of the business.


To date, all capital investment was in skills, drugs and equipment rather than in property. The process of travelling was becoming increasingly awkward and, as expertise and clinical provision became more specialized, the need for higher-specification equipment increased. The two portable X-ray machines were not always efficient. They took time to process and read, resulting in considerable delays between X-ray, customer feedback and animal treatment. Similarly, providing more advanced veterinary treatment was curtailed by the fragmented locations. Rob began to see both the opportunity and the need for significant and fundamental changes.

Related posts:

  1. Introduction
  2. De’Ath, Slaughter, Davis & Jones, MsRCVS: time for a rebrand?
  3. Ellie Prior: starting out in practice
  4. Clinical leadership and professionalism in veterinary practice

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Oct 9, 2016 | Posted by in GENERAL | Comments Off on Church Hill Equine Clinic: changing large-animal practice in rural areas

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