OK. Good evening everybody and welcome to tonight's webinar with the webinar vet. My name's Sophie McMurra and I have the pleasure of chairing tonight's webinar on our baby boomer vets at fault for selling out to corporates.

OK, so tonight we have the wonderful Pete Weatherburn, and he would like this webinar to be as interactive as possible. So if you do have any questions throughout, pop them through to Pete, and he'll answer them as he goes through. In order to ask a question, just hover over your toolbar, should be at the bottom of your screen, click the Q&A box and send that question straight through to Pete.

OK, so Pete qualified from Edinburgh in 1985 and has run his own five vet companion animal practise in County Wicklow, Ireland since 1991. Pete is well known as a media veterinarian with regular TV, radio, and newspaper slots, including a weekly column in the Daily Telegraph since 2007. Pete's known as Pete the vet on his busy Facebook, Instagram and Twitter pages, and he also writes a regular blog at www.petheett.com.

OK, Pete, I will hand over to you. Thank you very much and good evening everybody. I have to say I've, I've, I've done quite a lot of broadcasting in my time and quite a lot of work online too, but this is actually the first webinar I've done, so I'm intrigued by it.

It's. It's an interesting experience and I hope it goes well for you guys and what I I I think like lectures I think are often best if they're interactive and I think the same thing probably applies to webinars and what that means is that if anybody's got anything to say, I'd like them to speak up. On my screen I've got a little tab which says questions and so if you ask a question, it should pop up for me and I should be able then to respond to it verbally.

And so that's what my intention is as we go through this, and, let's see how, how we get on with that. So don't hold back, because I'm also very aware that this is a topic which is somewhat controversial and opinionated and, so, you know, for that reason in particular, it's useful if people tell me what they're thinking and what they feel. OK.

So let's get started. You can see from the screen there that I qualified as a vet in 1985. Well.

Unbelievably to me, that's 35 years ago this year. And so let's say I was 23 when I qualified, which I was, that means that this year I'm gonna be 58, so I'm absolutely one of those baby boomers who is who indeed is faced with the opportunity of selling to a corporate. And should I do that or what should I do?

And so to some extent I'm speaking from my own experience of of of of a lot of my friends who have sold to corporates in the last number of years, and myself, I've had options for doing that too. And the other thing I'd say as we get started here is that. You know, when I say the current trend is for vets in their 50s to sell their practise to corporate buyers.

It might be more appropriate to say the current trend was or the pre-COVID-19 trend was because, you know, today I'm talking about that trend and I'm talking about issues that you know, include the impact this may have on the vein profession, but to some extent all of that is, is almost historical now because. If you, if you think that, yes, valuation of practises is done based on turnover, I'm sure all you guys are in practises at the moment whose turnover has dipped like it has never dipped before. And what is that going to do to evaluations of practises in the coming 12 months or or 2 years or 3 years, and that's a really big question and probably that deserves a seminar all of its own.

But anyway, so. We're gonna, mentally we're gonna be thinking, well, actually this was, this, this, the idea of the seminar was conceived a month ago, and so we're talking about the situation as it was a month ago and that will, the principles of this will absolutely apply to the future, just as before, but there will be a lot of extra stuff that will come into it in in view of the the the change to the structure following the coronavirus pandemic. So the background to what we're talking about is this, that.

When I grew up as a vet, so I qualified in the mid 80s, and so, you know, my, my, my early years in the in in the profession were 85 to 95. So at that time, a, a very old fashioned traditional situation was in place and I knew what was going to happen. It was just like what happened to James Herriot.

Essentially what happened as a young vet, I worked in a few different practises. And a lot of my friends did as well, what most of us did is you eventually soon enough we found a practise that we really, really liked. And, and, and after we've been there for a few years, it was very obvious that we were getting on well and it was a good situation for, for, for our, our bosses and for ourselves.

And we sort of contemplated the landscape and said, yeah, we'd like to stay here, we'd like to make a life here with our family. And what happened then was you came to an agreement. With the existing partners to become a partner in the ownership of the practise, and basically that's what's changed dramatically over the years.

Now, the 2020 way, so, you know, 30 years later, it started really around 1999 when the, the Royal College rules and they changed, and from that point onwards, non-vets were allowed to own the practises. And what that, what what happened then is since then, older vets have stopped selling their practises to younger vets in that traditional old fashioned way, and instead they've been selling to corporate entities. Corporate entities mean limited companies that are funded by investors.

And as a result of this, the entire structure of the. Of the vetting profession has changed. and basically, Evidence of how that's changed would be that in 1992, which is when I bought my existing practise from two older partners.

At that stage there was only a handful of small UK corporates that represented about 3% of the total vetting market, whereas in 2020, the current percentage of corporatization is estimated around 60% or, or, or, and it's expected to go up to 75% and even now some people are saying it's already 80%. You see, it's quite difficult to know how to define that. You talk about the number of.

Percentage of vets working for corporates, or you talk about the, the, the percentage of of vetinary practises that are corporate or you talk about the individual premises that are owned by corporate entities. So actual definitions are difficult to be clear about, but the main thing is that yes, definitely, now a a a large majority of veterinary practises in the UK are owned by corporate entities rather than by individual independent veterinary partners. And, and this consolidation because what's also happened is these corporate entities have bought multiple practises, so you have one owner as such will own.

May own hundreds of veterinary clinics. So, it's, it's been a really major consolidation of, of, of how the veterinary profession works. And it's not just in the UK by the way, large and really far flung networks of corporately owned veterinary practises have been established right across Europe, across Australia, New Zealand, North America and China as well now.

So it's, it's a global, a global thing which has happened. And, so the, and as these groups get bigger and bigger, they get more and more power. And the contrast with the traditional.

Market of lots of small practises, owned by private individuals. The contrast is immense. So what does it mean for young vets?

Well, it means it's a completely new playing field. And Like for me as a new graduate, one of my One of my life ambitions was to own my own practise. Indeed, to go back to James Harriot's stories, he would talk about how the priety he he felt when he put his name up on the brass plate outside the door.

And so this is, this is a deep part of of the the young vet psyche which is gone now, really. And so the the the typical career path for a young vet now means being an employee, which is a very, very different, goal, I suppose. And there's, there's, it means that there's lots of changes in, in different ways and your expectations certainly in your job security, cause you're no longer the boss, you're somebody has to choose to employ you.

You're no longer in charge of your day. Your identity is different. You can't say, yes, I have a veterinary practise anymore.

You say, yes, I work in a veterinary practise, so your identity has changed. And and the way you see yourself has changed as well. So it's it's quite a, quite a deep difference.

So, What does it mean for older vets? Well, there's no doubt that there's a significant financial benefit to sell to a corporate structure. Rather than to private individuals, and it means that people's route to retirement has been.

Be made much easier for for this current generation for vets of my age and a bit older. And all the vets have discovered that the . The the lucrative way to go is to work our clinics hard to to to maximise the profit.

And once they've done that for a number of years, increase the turnover and profitability, they can then sell for a relatively large sum to a corporate entity. And you know, I've talked to many older vets along the way and people have different ideas, and what I talked to just recently was saying that his, he didn't want to do that, he didn't want to sell out as you would see it, because he, he liked the idea of that practise as being small businesses that serve the community. And so he, he didn't want to sell to corporate.

At the same time, there was nobody he want, nobody around who wanted to buy his practise, so his idea was to, as he described it, to ride into the sunset. In other words, just to work until he didn't want to work anymore and then to gradually wind down and then just to close the doors and that would be all finished. And that was, that was what his plan was, and that's indeed a very noble plan.

However, when it came to it and he got to his early 60s and he was getting tired of working, when he looked at what he had left for his retirement, what he'd saved, and he looked at what he could do if he worked his practise hard for a couple more years and sold a corporate. There's no doubt about it, it was economically sensible to do that, and so that's what he did. And So that's typical, I suppose, of the type of mixed attitudes that there are.

People feel ambivalent about this. Some people feel it's selling out if you like, and other people feel, well, look, it's just it's the way the world is now, and it makes practical good financial sense to do that. And obviously the fact that so many vets have have sold in this way means that that's the majority opinion.

So Oh what, that that's basically the background to it and what I want to talk a bit about now is how how practise valuation works. Now listen, I'm really aware that I'm talking to an audience of people who are experienced in practise management and I think it's quite likely that I'm teaching a bunch of grannies out there to suck eggs, like you guys probably know this stuff anyway. But perhaps some of you don't, and I think there's no harm in going over this again to some extent anyway, OK.

So essentially what it comes down to is that a vet practise has got 33 bits that are valued, OK. The first bit is the buildings. So where the practise is housed, if you like.

The second part is the tangible assets. What I mean by that is things that things inside the buildings that have a real value, so that could be all the, all the equipment, all the stock, anything at all that's owned by the practise, other than the buildings. So those are the the tangible assets.

And then there's the intangible asset which is the goodwill. And this is the sort of slightly controversial bit, and it's, it's. It's, it has to be given a value because it's not something which hasn't, has a, has a a price tag that you can just look at and say well that's what that's worth.

You have to calculate the goodwill and it's subjective. There's objective ways of analysing it, but essentially it is an objective evaluation, and it's the fact that client, it basically is the fact that clients are already visiting the practise. So, so what that means is that If somebody sets up a practise from scratch on day one, there's zero income.

And let's say at the, at the end of month 11 there might be 10% of income. At the end of month two there might be 20% of income, and so after 10 months, whatever, you've got to a substantial amount of monthly income. So that's if you start to practise from scratch, however, if you buy an existing practise from day one.

So let's say at the end of month one you have a 100% income, end of month two, you still got a 100% income, end of month 3 you've got a 100% income. And so every month you've got a high level of income coming in. And so the goodwill is the difference between.

0. So when you have a 100% and having 100% every day from the start. So if you can imagine on a graph, one of them is an ascending line across the page.

The other one is a line that starts at the top and goes straight across the top because you already have the income. And the goodwill value is the money that that involves. That's what it is in theory.

In practise, how is it valued? Well, here we go, this is how it's valued. Well, let's start with the buildings actually.

The buildings are generally valued. Most corporates will not actually buy the buildings. The buildings are retained by the original practise owners or maybe sold to a third party, but it doesn't matter because essentially what happens is that traditionally, a young vet would buy into those buildings when they bought into the practise.

So they'd buy a share of the buildings and they buy a share of the goodwill as well. And traditionally what used to happen was . You know, the buildings would be valued by a standard valuer, and the young vet would agree to buy a share of those and they'd have a mortgage for those and they pay them back over the lifetime of their working career, so maybe 25 years.

That's what happened additionally, and it was part of their deal, . In contrast, corporates generally prefer to rent the buildings from existing owners long term, so that's the buildings, so we can get those out of the way quite simply. The tangible assets, well those are things like, like I've said, the equipment, X-ray machines, lab equipment, computers, surgical kit.

The stock, drugs, food, consumers, all of that stuff. So they, they, they do have a real life value and so generally the purchaser has to pay for those, as, as at an agreed amount, although I have to say that often these days this value which anybody would say is a tangible value, is often included as part of the goodwill rather than broken down individually. So when valuations are done, often they'll, it'll be said, look, we'll just put in all those things as well, OK?

So finally now we move to the bit that's controversial, which is the goodwill, and it's the evaluation of the goodwill that is the nub of the issue for why people sell to corporates rather than to individual vets, and I'll explain why, OK? So it's the value placed on the fact that a business is creating turnover, like I said to you, OK? And there's different ways of calculating it.

It's all down to the same thing that there's a, there's a, there's a definite monetary gain by having a business that's working from day one. So it is down to to to to that, but it's calculated in different ways, and, . And The way that seems to be most accepted these days and it has changed over years is done differently in different countries and .

Some countries they would even just take the turnover of a practise and and multiply that by a a factor of some kind. But the the basic principle is this, that you work out how much it costs to run the practise. So you take a whole, take, let's say the last, the average of the last 3 years, how much does it cost to run the practise.

And that includes all the utilities, the building maintenance, all the stock, all the staff salaries, you add all that up, right? That's 1 total. And you, you take all that stuff and you take it off the total practise income, so you've got the money you've made in a year minus all of that stuff.

And once you've done that, what you have is basically the sum of money in the traditional partnership model, that money will be allocated to the vetary partners who own the practise. That's so. You might call that the net profit, OK?

So that's the amount of money that's made for the owners, including their salaries. But that's the nub of it because it includes their salaries, and that that was always done that way because, you know, the, the partners, the owners were working the business as well, so they just, they took that profit and they said, OK, we can share that between us more or less. But if you imagine somebody outside who doesn't work in the business is going to be buying the business, what they want to know is, well, if we employ somebody to do the job that those partners are doing.

Once their salaries have been paid, now we get to the real profit that the business is earning. So that's why you come to. what's called the adjusted net profit, OK?

And so what you do is you Take that net profit. And once, once you've got that net profit, you're removed from the net profit the notional salary for each of the partners who is working in a practise. So you're mimicking situation whereby they'd be.

Salaried employees, which indeed they might well be once this is all done. And that then is called the adjusted net profit, and that's the sum that's left over. So that's the amount of money that the practise is making once, once all the costs have been covered and once all the vets who work in the practise have been paid.

Now So you could say that represents the income, if you like the spare income generated by the practise. Now of course. Partners would say to you, well, it's not quite as simple as that.

And and the the reason I think that it's not quite as simple that is that. That it's not as if that money, the the extra bit of money goes into the pockets or the bank accounts of the of those partners, because there's often other things going on, for example, there will be capital investments have been made and people have bought expensive kits and invested in property or whatever, and so quite a bit of that money tends to be committed to paying off the capital of those kind of long term loans. So yeah, that's just to make that point.

Anyway, The adjusted net profit, which is the annual sum of money generated by the practise. Nonetheless, it's a good way of looking at how profitable a practise is. And so there'd be some practises that would have a very high net profit, just to net profit, if say you had a practise that had, I don't know, 8 branches, all doing reasonably well.

Between them they could have quite a high ad just to net profit. So you take that amount, right? What you do is you multiply it by a factor, and that factor is the key to the difference between private buyers and corporate buyers, and it's open to negotiation.

And it, it depends on a number of different factors. So for example, If you're in an area where there's very few other practises and where there's lots of new houses going in, and maybe if you haven't really been focused very much on. Practise health plans and on, on, on marketing.

You could say there's more potential in that area for the practise to grow, so that could lead to a higher factor to multiply the adjusted net profit by. On the other hand, if you're in an area where there's been a number of new practises opening in recent times and they're all marketing very hard and very high profiles, and your practise has been getting a bit run down and you haven't really been in, you know, you, you've been trying hard, but the the trend is that it's, it's not, it's not getting busier. You would say, well, the the factor might be a lower factor in a case like that.

But anyway, those variations aside. Both corporates and and individual vets will take those factors into account, but there's a a bigger thing going on than that, and that is this very simple thing, which is that when selling to other vets, the adjusted net profit traditionally was multiplied by a factor of between 1 and 4. So let's say if you're if you're just a net profit was let's say 100,000, then the goodwill would be worth somewhere between 100 and 400,000.

OK, so that would be it, and you, you different, different reasons would be lower or higher. And basically over the years it would have been shown that that that was, that was a a fair deal and you know, it was affordable if you had got loans to pay for that, you could just do it within a reasonable lifespan of time. However, when the corporates came along, they changed things big time and they started that they adjusted net profit as it has been in recent times multiplied by a factor of 5 to 8, and it has been up to 14 in the past.

So now let's say you've got your little practise and your, your adjusted net profit is 100,000, so you're being told, instead of 100 to 400,000, you're being offered 500 to 800,000 indeed you might be offered 1.4 million. And this, this difference is magnified, let's say if you had, if you had that bunch of different branches, and if between them they had an adjusted net profit of 50 million, so you might get 50,000 to 2 million traditionally, but no, wait a minute, you're being told now, no, we're gonna give you between 2 and.

And 4 million, you know, that's, it's a big, big difference, up to 14 times that, up to 14 to up to 7 million, you know. So it's, it's, it's, it's that big difference which has meant that. When it comes to investors faced with a choice between selling to a younger partner or getting, you know, selling to a few younger partners together and getting a sum of money, instead of that being told, well actually you can have twice or even.

3 or even 4 or even 5 times that much money by selling to a corporate and that's really what's happened. It's been vastly more beneficial for vets to sell to older vets to sell to a corporate entity. So you could say why don't private buyers offer more if they really want to get involved.

And the reason is that it's just not affordable, it's just not affordable if you go by the traditional financial model, the banks will say to you, if you have to pay that much for goodwill, forget it, it's just not worth it, it doesn't add up. And You know, it's just an impossible thing to do and and so the the younger vets who want to buy in have been told you just can't compete. And, and, and that's really, that's the nub of it, that's why this big change has happened.

And you could say, well, if it's not worth it, how come corporates can do it? This is why, because corporates have access to large amounts of funding provided by investors, so it's not individuals with a bit of with their savings in their back pocket, it's investor funds, it's people who have got large amounts of money that they want to put somewhere and they've calculated that vets are a safe option. If they had to pay more for it, that's OK.

And they also would take a long term view and that that would include the fact that practise valuations. Have generally held the value or even increased in the market so that, you know, they might buy 50 practises and then they might plan to sell them in in 5 years' time for even more than they paid for them. So there's a few reasons why they've been able to offer more.

And of course as well they get efficiencies of scale. So if if if you're, if you're running 40 practises, you can consolidate. Expensive functions like marketing and human resources and all of those things.

So that's one of the reasons as well is that the practise is saying, well, OK, that's the just the net profit at the moment, but once we get our teeth into this, once we, make economies of scale to, to, to slim down some of the costs, once we improve the marketing of the practise and, and, you know, . Improve the profit margins, we can make this work. So that's why why they're doing it.

And there are other factors involved as well, and this is where it gets a little controversial in in that the changing gender balance has had an impact. And I say changing gender balance is the politically correct way of saying increasing feminization. And there's no doubt like, you know.

In the late 60s, 90% of new vets were male. When I qualified qualified as a vet in the mid 80s, it was 50/50, whereas now it's more like 80% female, 20% male and. In the past, as in 30 years ago, male vets.

We generally expect that they were gonna work full full time and long term without any break at all and that they would be prepared to commit to practise ownership. That was a common ambition at the time. And arguably female vets.

May not definitely, but may be more likely to want to take a career break, and then after their career break, they might want to work part time without the 24/7 responsibility of owning and running a practise. Now, as I say this, I'm obviously generalising because there's many, many female vets who'd be absolutely as desiring to commit full time long term with no break and to commit to practise ownership and indeed. What's wrong with you want to have a break and then come back to part-time work, why can't they still be owners?

So it's, it's a controversial area to talk about really, and I, I think the best, the best that you can say is that . As an older vet looking. As I am, if we're looking around to see who might, which young vets might be interested in in buying the practise from us.

There isn't a queue of people wanting to do that anymore and like. 30, 2030 years ago there was a queue of young vets queuing up to to to to buy practises and that's not the case anymore. So it's partly that it's become less affordable.

With the competition of the corporates, it's difficult for, for young vets to compete, but it's also partly that young vets aren't as keen to commit to, to, to, to being a partner as as they were. And so here's another slightly controversial area which is the ethical concerns about corporate ownership. And I think this is interesting.

Basically, as it stands, vets are individually responsible for sticking to the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons code of Professional conduct. That's, that's the truth that we. We're the ones who get hold before the disciplinary, people, if, if, if we do something wrong.

And when vets owned vetinary practises as in the past, this meant that by default, veterinary practises as entities, they also had to follow the professional code of conduct because. Essentially the vets were the veterinary practises, they were one and the same thing. Whereas nowadays when corporate bodies that own vetinary practises.

Arguably, the business itself doesn't have the same ethical responsibility to adhere to the the professional code of conduct. The, the the the corporate entity itself. Isn't going to get hauled before a disciplinary committee.

So Basically, the ethical responsibility is devolved to the veterinary employees, so the vets who work for the the company, they're the ones who are going to be held accountable, and the veterinary clinical director, the head vet, he, he or she is the individual who takes on the the role formerly held by the veterinary partners, but the difference is that he or she is not the owner of the business, they're an employee. And theoretically at least the corporate owners. They could be argued, it could be argued that they actually have a greater obligations to their shareholders to be profitable than they do.

To the have a have an ethical obligation to adhere to the professional code of conduct. So it's, you could say this is a theoretical argument, but nonetheless, it's it's, it's an argument that's there. So you could have a theoretically have a situation where, where where a company could have.

It could be some, some ethical issue whereby it was more profitable to something which wasn't entirely ethical, but it was highly profitable and so corporate owners could have a, could have a . That there could be a a situation where they had conflicting interests between the profit for their shareholders and the adhering to the professional code of conduct. So I know this is a theoretical concern, but nonetheless, it's there.

And it worries some people more than others. In, of course, in reality, corporate owners have to stick to the, the, the code of professional conduct for many, many reasons, including the obvious one of reputational damage. I mean, no company's gonna break an ethical code.

They're just not going to do it, it's not going to happen. Even if there's a mass. Profit to be made by breaking the ethical code of conduct.

They're just not going to do it because it's so important to, to, to, to, to, to companies as as to any business to have a strong and reliable reputation. So they're not going to do it. But nonetheless, the concern of the theoretical conflict of interest means.

In in some jurisdictions such as Ireland where I live, amongst the amongst the profession, there's debate in their profession and and some feel that it would be, it would make ethical sense at a theoretical level to insist that. That a vet a vet has actually some sort of role. In a in a corporate ownership of of the practise one way or another, whether they're on the board of directors or whether they're shareholders, but there should be at the corporate level, there should be vets there so that if there are any ethical issues at all, then they, the company through the vet who is part of the management of the company, part of the ownership of the company can be held to account and therefore the company can be held to account as well.

So that's, that's the, the ethical issue. And funny, I I like I live in Ireland, I'm from Scotland but I live in Ireland. And, and it's interesting, I I don't hear very much of this when I talk to vets in the UK about this being debated, and perhaps it's only because the corporates have only come to Ireland in the last 2 or 3 years.

And so, and originally the Irish Code of Professional conduct, . Insisted that vets should own only vets could own veterinary practises, and that was. That was, that's been debated hotly in this country for the last couple of years and still is being debated to some extent.

Although corporates are here now, there still is some there's still are questions asked about how how we as a profession should look to our future. Anyway, just to move on from that, I also wanted to mention the JVP model, which some of you may, some of, most of you have heard of. That's joint venture partnerships, they're a bit different, OK, they're used by people like pets at home.

And essentially under that model, the vetting practise is owned jointly by the individual vets and the corporate body. So a vet, the vet, so there's typically be a young vet who wanted to run their own practise and they find perhaps they couldn't buy into the traditional model, so this is offered as a, as an alternative. So they join, they buy the practise, and they have so-called A shares, the company has B shares, and the veterinary co-owner has to pay back the loans you set up the practise and and to run the practise, and they also have to pay back management fees, which are generally a percentage of the practise turnover and they pay those management fees to the company.

And this is to cover things like recruitment, marketing, payroll, IT systems, all sorts of other aspects of commercial support. So, so, so in some ways that's appealing because it allows young vets to get in to own their own practise. And the model does give young vets the option of practise ownership.

Financial security can be a challenge though, because the overheads of new practise can be higher than they expected perhaps, and success certainly isn't guaranteed. And a number of JVP clinics have been forced to close in recent years. And Vets for Pets, the largest JVP group, and they're based at premises beside the Pets at Home pet shop chain.

And in November 2018, fairly recently Pets at Home, they bought. They, they, they bought some joint venture practises and 25 of them became company managed practises, so there was a there was a big, and some of the patches then closed down and it was a big, the whole system was shaken a bit by that happening. So look, I just want to talk a bit now about the pros and cons of independent versus corporate and the impact this has had on our profession and on society.

So. The traditional model definitely gave vets like myself, this sense of, of pride and the sense that we've achieved a long held goal. And you can go to work every day feeling that you're that you're your own boss and you can do what you want to do to some extent.

You can make decisions independently. You can do what you feel is right. And you can create a practise around you which is, which is, which is done in your style.

You can do things the way you feel they ought to be done. And there's a great deal of satisfaction in that. You have control over your life and.

I'd even go so far to say this is it's a deep psychological. Achievement, you have a sense that you're manifesting your own identity in the workplace that you've created around you. It's terribly satisfying.

I love being an owner of my practise. But if I'm asked, if I'm asked, what am I. What are the absolute highlights of my life looking back, and basically would be 5 highlights and you can probably guess.

A few of them, but anyway, I'll just run through them quickly. The first one is the day I qualified as a vet. I still remember looking at my name on the board, because in those days they typed on a bit of paper and stuck it on the notice board, you went up and had a look at it, and if your name was there you passed and you become a vet.

The name wasn't there, you'd failed and you weren't gonna be a vet, you had to do your your exams again. So when I saw my name on that board, I felt ecstatic, it's one of my absolute life highs. And then I got married the day I got married to my wife, that's another absolute high.

I still remember being at the altar looking to her and thinking wow. Here we are, that was one of life's highest, and then when my two children were born on each occasion, literally the newborn baby's handed to you and you think, wow, look at this, a new life, wow. Absolute highs, so that's 4 of them.

The 5th 1 was when I actually became the owner of the practise that I own, and that again was an absolute high where I had achieved this life goal of owning my own practise. So you know, it's a real big deal owning your practise, and that's one of the real pros of, of, of the real positives of having an independent practise. Agains that, and there are plenty of againsts, and that is the financial challenge.

And I said it's great to be independent and to do your own thing, but those are within financial parameters. And the financial challenge has never been so keenly felt as it is right now with this COVID-19 crisis, and I, like many other people have no idea how we're going to come out of this. Our business turnover has dropped.

Dramatically, our our costs still stay high and it's a massive financial challenge and if I was an employee working for a corporate, I wouldn't have that financial worry. You also have a responsibility, you're always on duty. I'm not talking about being on call.

You're on, if there's a, if there's a break into my practise, I'll get the full wall. I have to be down there at 2 or 3 in the morning. If there's a, if there was a fire, if a tree fell down, whatever, you are always on duty.

And you have management responsibilities as well, so you're working in the practise, but also if, if. Two of your vets start to have an emotional argument. You're the person who has to sort this out.

If, if, if half your staff go down with the coronavirus. And now you're down to skeleton staff. You're the person who has to carry that carry that burden and sort it out.

So those are the real challenges. On the other hand, the pros of being a corporate employee is that your role is very clearly defined. You don't have to carry the burden of any management responsibilities, and you have access to a really wide range of, you know, good quality equipment, training and support, and your practise to be managed by a professional manager, so all those worries are taken off your back.

When you look at it like that, that looks very appealing, doesn't it? And, and they're basically things tend to be very systematic, . The, the, the corporate structure insists it's disciplined, it insists that things are done a certain way.

And what that generally means is your, your workplace is, is very well organised. The downside of being a corporate employee is you don't have control of your workplace. So it's all very well if it's all been done in an optimal way, but if it's been done badly, you can't change it cos you're just an employee.

And And you could, you you you don't have the financial worry of things going wrong, but neither do you have the financial remuneration if things go really well. So as a, as an independent owner, if you get everything working really well and the economy is doing well and . Everything is going in the best possible way, then you get a financial benefit and and you you you earn more money.

Whereas if, if you're a corporate employee in that same situation, well, your financial remuneration is, is established, that's the way it is. You don't necessarily benefit. And you don't, the whole thing I talked about the psychology of it, you don't have that.

Bit of euphoria about it being your own practise. I mean, yes, you can be proud of your workplace, but it's, it's not the same thing, it's not yours in that sense. And ultimately, somebody else can tell you what to do.

If you have your own practise, OK, your bank manager can have words with you and your partners can have words with you, but ultimately you're one of the bosses, whereas if you're a corporate employee, you're not the boss, somebody else can tell you what to do. And there are also, there are societal benefits, I think, from corporate ownership in some ways, in that I think that there is a better career structure for young vets. It's it's quite well organised in in in in the best way.

So vets can say, I want to go down that route, I want to become better at this, and they'll be encouraged to do so. And I, as I said, I think often it is a better organised workplace, not necessarily, but often it is, and generally is better at marketing, what you might call optimal clinical care, things like pet health plans, ensuring that animals have the best possible options to have parasite control, dental care, all of those things. They're done very, very well by by corporates.

And I think arguably there's greater availability of high quality clinical postgraduate education has come through, the corporate disciplines. There are also societal downsides, I think, of corporate vet practise. I think there's the risk of too much consolidation of practises which then could lead to a lack of competition in areas, and then you get the market being dominated by by a few big players, and that there's then the possibility that market dominance being abused, and customers lose out then.

And there's a risk not only customers lose out customers lose out, but also vets could lose out because you could have higher prices to pet owners because there's not enough competition in the area, and you could have lower salaries for vets because, for example, in this, in this, in this coming period post COVID-19, when you know, suddenly. The whole picture has changed. There's not as many vets needed in in the short to medium term, and, and for for the first time in a long time, there's not enough vets to meet, sorry, there's not enough jobs for the vets who, who want employment, and then there's a risk then that you could have the, the bigger corporates saying, well, OK, well we're not gonna pay vets as much and that's a risk if if there's not enough competition.

And the lack of choice of pet owners as well, and I think also very importantly. They would Vets, independent vets tended to be, have a great deal of discretion about what they do and they tended to be nice to people and kind, and they might complain about the level of bad debts, but nonetheless, they were seen as valuable parts of our community, and that would tend to be lost a little bit by bigger corporates running things. So can young vets still dream of running their own practise?

Well, I think it's still possible for an individual vet to to structure the purchase of practise. They do it through a corporate structure, working with their accountants, it may be that the finances can make it more affordable than it used to be, and I think that's something that Young Bet should look at. And as well as that.

You know, there are ways that, independent veteran practises, I think they kind of elements of flexibility that big corporates can't, don't have, so they can give much, they might be better at getting personal attention to clients and they might be better at working through the the the 1 to 1 relationship with individual pet owners in a way which bigger, bigger companies find hard to do. And just as there are many boutiques, small, locally produced types of pet food out there. As well as the big brands like Pedigree and Hills and Purina and so on, you have things like Lily's Kitchen and actually it's just bought over by Purina, but you have lots of smaller brands of pet food that are really successful.

So I think the same thing will be there'll be smaller independent vet practises that some pet owners will say, I want to go to somewhere where I know that I know the vet for the last 1020, 30 years, where I know the practise and they know me, and so they may choose these independent owned practises. So that's really the gist of what I've been talking, I was gonna talk about today. I want to just very briefly in the last 5 minutes talk a bit about, OK, well if, if young vets aren't going to go and buy practises and be involved in that way, what else can they do?

And I'll just summary summarise this fairly quickly. I've always felt that as a vet you're qualified to be an animal expert. That's what you're qualified to be.

You don't have to be a vet in practise. There's lots of things you can do, . And young vets tend to forget that.

And my view, a really strong view is that as a vet your goal should be to create a career that reflects and embraces your own individual talents, personality, and values. That sounds a bit waffly to say that. But I really mean it, we're all good at different things and what we should be doing is trying to find a way of filling our work time.

That we love doing that we that we that we're really good at doing and that we find relatively easy. And that might be that you're a GP vet perhaps or might be something else. And so I'm just going to say some of the options.

So clinical GP is the first and the most obvious one, and you know, that's just. In these days it would generally be the as an employee, as I said, for a corporate, and you know, you you know you're gonna get a reasonable salary and reasonable working hours, and reasonable working conditions, and you also know that it will vary a lot from place to place cos it does. Some, some places are great to work, some aren't.

The one thing I'd say about that particular job is that I do think it's difficult to maintain, maintain, to to carry on loving it year after year because one of the issues is that job does tend to stay essentially the same forever, you know. So you could become a clinical specialist, that means doing things like surgery, diagnostic imaging, cardio dermatology, oncology, lots of other things you can do. And if you do that, you're more specialised, you put time and money into training, so yes, you do earn a higher salary, and it can be more challenging as well.

Disadvantage, you don't have the same sort of 1 to 1 relationship with clients. One of the things I love my job as a GP is I know I've known people from the age of 13 and now they're in their mid-40s and I've known them all the way through and I like that kind of continuity that we get. So as a clinical specialist, you have a different role in your local community to, to being a GP vet.

Of course you can go into academia, there's lots of possibilities there, very different strain strains and stresses involved in that and different achievements as well. But if it's right for you, you can make a difference. The world, you can, you can have diseases named after you for goodness sake.

There's lots of stuff you can do that's very different to being a general vet and it suits some people well. You can work in an industry, whether you want to work in a pet food company or pharmaceuticals or in new internet based jobs, and salaries are very variable on that one. You can work for government, and that's, you might say, quite a predictable job, established salary scales and predictable working hours, .

I've always think it's how many people in those kind of jobs sort of set out as teenagers with that in mind. And to me, for me it wouldn't work, but for some people, yes, it's a good option. If you have that sort of the right kind of personality and and it can, it can be a very fulfilling job.

You can work for charities and and again there's lots of possibilities there from working for Brooke, international horse charities to PDSA to the Blue Cross, lots of possible ways of working for charities, and you can be clinical or you can be in the background. And for people who want to have a, have a strong commitment to making a difference in the in the world, I think it can be working for charities can be very, very rewarding. You can work in the media, which is what I do, and I would say that this particular role is it's a small niche, and it's, I think it's best combined with other roles.

I think to be a to be successful in the media, you need to be a clinical vet. You have to understand about treating animals day to day, you have to know what's involved. It's not, it's not a profitable business to be involved with, it's an unpredictable salary, especially these days they expect you to need your work for nothing.

And there's zero job security. You're, you're, I've had a column every week in the telegraph for the last 12 years or something, most weeks. And like, you know, sometimes you just, you might just get a call from an editor saying to you, actually, we decided to drop the column, and that's the end of it then.

So you're really at the whim of an editor, and, and so there isn't any sort of job security there. But again, you do have the sense you're making a difference in the world and I always think that. It probably takes a particular strange kind of personality to really enjoy this, and I happen to have that strange personality.

I think I summarised it there. Yeah, I love having my ego boosted. I love being on telly and it's cool.

But you also have to, you also have to suffer public criticism sometimes where, where people, you know, don't like what you say, what you do, because you're doing it very much in the public, it's quite. Open in that way, so it doesn't suit everybody. And there's many other options, and especially I think one of the things I really want to let people know about if they don't know, and I suspect you probably do know about this already, there's two really, really good Facebook groups for our profession these days.

One of them is Veterinary Voices UK, a closed discussion group with 11,000 members, and I think all vets should be a part of that and should engage with their colleagues through Vetinary Voices. It's a really useful way to talk about all sorts of aspects of our professional life. And the people who are perhaps are a little bit looking outwards towards different things they can do with their, with their professional qualification.

This other group of vets Stay, go, diversify, it's another close discussion group and it's it's over 13,000 members. It's very, very active and it's full of really good ideas and to finish with, this is a a mind map that was written by. Paula Vaniek, who is a member of Vettego Diversify, and it summarises very clearly what you can do with your vet and qualification.

You can see from clinical work over here, the various different types of clinical work. I've been more or less focused on on companion practise, but of course there's all these other options, to working with animal charities, governments, industry over here. Perhaps working with human health, some, some vets do work with human health and aspects like food safety and so on, slaughterhouses, fisheries, all sorts of things, disease prevention, vets are way up there involved in that too.

So there's lots of other things you can do as well in academia over here. So that that's that that mind map is a really useful way of, I think for young people who are thinking of becoming vets, they should look at a a a mind map like that and say to themselves, OK, like I know I want to work with animals, I'm not quite sure how. Well this mind map gives you a really good demonstration of of the the the breadth of of what's possible with our profession.

So look, that's me done. I've done the 150 minutes allotted to this and I hope it was reasonably engaging and interesting. I'm sure there's other aspects that people might be intrigued to know about.

So if you have any questions, then just get them, get them on to us and I, and I can do my best to answer them for you. Other than that, thank you very much for listening and perhaps we'll talk again sometime. Brilliant, thank you very much, Pete.

It's really, really interesting webinar, some really interesting topics you've discussed. We, we don't have any questions just yet, just to remind the listeners, just hover over your toolbar at the bottom of the screen and click the Q&A box if you do have any, and I'll read them out to Pete. It's quite interesting you mentioned that being in the media, you're then open to a lot of public criticism, so that must be quite difficult to, to hear some of that criticism because there's so many different opinions on everything and, I, I think, do you know what, I think like everything in life you get.

You get used to dealing with it and you actually, you learn how to deal with it. It's become much more visible these days through social media because obviously things are discussed in in in comments after posts and so on and you know I've learned that if somebody comes at you being very, very critical, I've learned to engage with them once and being reasonable with them. And and if they come back being extremely unreasonable and critical again, I've learned.

That you just disengage with them. And the great thing about social media is that it's very easy to To do that, just to walk away from it. And if it's, if your, if it's your platform like your Twitter account or Facebook account or whatever, you can just block them and delete them and then they're gone and that's the end of it.

And. Originally when when all this started probably 10 years ago, I used to get very, very upset by it and I used to go to bed worrying about it and wake up in the morning with new ideas to get back at them and so on. And I used to get involved in long, long and frustrating debates, but I learned that that's just not worthwhile and that there's, you know, you, you never win if somebody's got that.

Aggressive negative attitude, then really, they talk about feeding the trolls. So if you engage with them, you're feeding the trolls, you're just giving them stuff to, it's what they, it's what they like doing. So you're encouraging them by coming back at them.

So you know, if somebody's reasonable, then they will listen to your reasonable response and and and you'll reach an agreement and I like it when that happens and it does happen sometimes. I also have learned that by the way, if something. Has more than 10,000 views.

Then you're gonna get negativity always guaranteed. So I had one recently, I put one poster up recently they got 200,000 views and part of me went, Well, that's fantastic. Another party went, oh no, because I knew there was going to be loads of trolls out there, and indeed there were and so it's a challenge, the challenge comes with that level of publicity.

I feel really sorry for people who are proper celebs in the media because it must be very difficult to cope with the negativity that they get. They must just switch off completely and just not even look because it could be soul destroying. Yeah, do you tend to find that you do limit your exposure to any negative comments, or are you happy to read them and now you're used to just kind of switching off and getting, getting over it.

No, I, I, I, I like reading them. I like reading them because I, I, I just, I reckon I see them for what they are these days. I see them for being people who they've got issues and sometimes they have good points too, and I, I, and I, when they have good points, I like to address their points.

And if, if they're just completely, completely negative bollockses, well then that's fine. I've learned not to engage and, and I've learned not to be offended or, or hurt by them. It's just, you know, fine.

It's just what it is what it is, you know. Yeah. OK.

Brill, well, it doesn't seem to, doesn't look like we have any questions so far, so I'd like to say a massive thank you to you, Pete, for your time this evening and for delivering such a brilliant webinar. And thank you very much to all of our listeners for logging on tonight. Stay safe and I hope you stay well.

Thanks a lot, and we'll talk to you again sometime. Thank you, bye bye. Bye bye now.