Hello everybody and welcome to this week's episode of Vet Chat brought to you by the webinarett. On today's podcast, I'm delighted to be joined by the CEO of VET Partners, Joe Malone. Before we get started, let me tell you a little bit about our guest today.
Jo qualified as a vet at Glasgow University in 1998 and began her working life at a mixed practise in Market harbour before returning to her home city of York to work at Minster Bets, where she became a partner in 2009. Joe established vet partners in October 2015, starting with just three practises, including Minster vets, and under her inspirational leadership, it has grown into one of Europe's leading veterinary and animal healthcare groups. For those of you who may not be aware, Vett Partners is a veterinary group made up of some of the most respected and trusted small animals, equine, farm, and mixed practises, and animal healthcare companies with 11,000 employees working in more than 700 sites across Europe and from its headquarters in Europe.
Joe has developed a culture of warmth and belonging that partners. With her passion for caring for animals and clients while developing the people she works alongside. BET Partners aims to be a great place to work, focusing on the development and well-being of its people.
And last year, BET Partners was ranked the UK's number one company for senior leadership by Glassdoor. So welcome to Vet Chat, Joe. Thank you so much for joining me today.
That's great. Thank you for having me. So where should we start?
I have so many questions from your introduction alone. Should we start just by hearing a little bit about you, Joe, in your own words, please? Yeah, so I'm a vet, first and foremost, even though I'm the CEO of Vet Partners now, if people ask me what I do, I still say I am a vet, cos that, it's very much what defines me and it's defined.
Really the the start of that partners. I'm also a mom of two, so I can identify with a lot of our team members who suffer m guilt, as well as work guilt and balancing them both, . And that's probably me in a nutshell, really.
I am a CEO by accident. I never, set out with this being a career target. I loved being a vet, and I did clinical work, at least in part right up to the point that vet partners started, and when Vett Parts started, I hadn't really intended to give up clinical work, so I, I, I really did enjoy it.
OK, brilliant. Sounds good. So, what inspired you or what kind of, how did you kind of end up in your little vet partners?
Well, what sort of major league practise and and growing. Yeah, so my, my home practise minster vets, I saw practise there from being about 14. And the school I went to wasn't the best of schools, and they all said, you know, you'd never be a vet, you couldn't do it, and a, a lot of the people at Me to vets further inspired me to absolutely want to do it, and I, I really believe helped me sort of get into vet school and things, .
My some of my best friends are still my friends that I met, you know, 30 or more years ago at Minster Vet, so I have a real emotional attachment to that practise. I was an owner alongside others and half white to sell, halfway to grow the business. We couldn't do it all.
Some of the groups at the time, we really didn't want to join, so really that partner started from me wanting to look after my home practise and all the people in it, . And I strongly believe that we could do it better than some of the groups that were there at the time, if we just focused on looking after our teams, focusing on patient care and client care, and that all of, all of the other things that you need to worry about in your business will follow if you really focus on those things. And I think the old adage of if you can't beat them, join them and, so we decided, well, we can create a group and do it ourselves, but.
Working title, when I pitched the idea was, the Northern Powerhouse, because we were gonna be a, a group in the north of the UK, and I remember now I, I bought one of those shiny maps from Dera Smiths of the UK and I used my daughter's nail varnish and like put dots on the of the practises that I thought would be really good to create a really strong team. . And for the 1st 3 years, the shareholder that I was working with used to wind me up about my DIY map and my very, very plain black and white word document presentation that I, I did for them at the time, .
And they gave me the chance to start it, but it, but it really came from looking after my home practise and keeping the essence of what is special about the veterinary profession, because it's a profession that I love, . And, and that's still what drives me today. Brilliant.
So that was right at the sort of very start of it, or was it in sort of 2015? Yeah. And then did it grow quite quickly from that point?
Yes, so the working hypothesis was the Northern Powerhouse, and I contacted lots of people that I knew and that I would really love to work with. And a lot of them said yes, and I had lots of conversations with them, saying, we'll be no further south than the M62, and no further east than this point. We're not going into Scotland, and literally within the space of 6 months, I was, I was then ringing people going, well, I know I said we weren't going into Scotland, but there's this fantastic practise that has contacted us.
And we never sent letters, asking people, it was really through personal connections and just knowing people that you'd like to work with and it just. We had lots of inbound contact and I spent a lot of time in my Mini, driving around the country, meeting people because I was very keen to meet a lot of those early practises myself, partly because I, I could because I had the time to do it then, and also because we wanted to make sure that they, the people that joined us were of a, of a similar mindset and wanted to help us grow something a bit different. Brilliant.
Yeah, I was gonna ask you around about like culture and because it's so, it can be so difficult, can't it, to, have a, you know, lovely strong company culture, even in small teams. But how do you do that as you're scaling so quickly and you're growing so quickly? How did you sort of approach, you know, ensuring that your company culture was how you wanted it to be?
And. So I'm a little bit of a girly sport, so I researched quite a lot and read an awful lot around what actually, what are the fundamental things. And for example, choosing your company values, they are much more likely to stick if you choose inherent values.
So you choose values that are already present in your organisation. I've spent a lot of time doing workshops, working out what, what values are already there in veterinary practises and trying to make them stick. But then you have to obsess about it every single day and you have to really .
Surround yourself by other people that are obsess about it, and you need to live and breathe it every day. So as an example, I don't have an office. We have an open plan office and early on we were all shoehorned in in together, and if you hear somebody, you know, saying something in, in a way that, you know, you, you don't believe is, is in line with your culture, you have to pull it up, you have to correct it.
So, and then, and there's little things every day, you know, the, the word staff is banned in any sort of literature that we have because I think it's a derogatory term. There's a, a bit of a joke around a phrase of everyone makes the tea here. Because everyone generally does make the tea here, I don't expect anyone to make me a drink if I'm not making them one, and it's, you have to just live and breathe that every day, and then surround yourself by others that live and breathe in that way.
And it's lovely now, because even going over to some of our countries, I will see and hear some of our country leaders speaking. And they say the same thing. We used to have one of our regional regional people who was in a regional meeting and they'd always start a conversation with the problem is or the, the problem with these practises and every time you sort of correct them because we.
And this is a bit naff but actually. It might explain it. We have awesome practises, and then we have also, we have practises that are not awesome yet, because that is our responsibility to help them to be awesome.
. And I knew this is, this is company culture at its heart, when this person who always said, the problem is, came up to me and said. So I've got practise that's not awesome yet. Can I have some help, you know, but you have to work at it, you have to work really, really, really hard at it.
And you have to believe it yourself. Brilliant. No, that's great advice.
And do you, what are your thoughts on like mentors? Did you use a lot of mentors kind of at the start to grow, I think probably it starts, you know, even, even from. Childhood probably, I've been very lucky to have some fantastic bosses, people that I've seen to give you really great examples of what leadership looks like and why they make you feel good by following them.
I have also had some examples where leadership has not been so great, and I actually think I've probably learned more from that. I've learned more about how I definitely don't want to show up as a leader. But equally I'm learning every day.
I want to be a better leader every day, . And I have, you know, a pile of books beside my bed, that if I ever get the chance to read, I'm convinced I'll be a great leader. I, I think it's about.
You know, Trying to do a good job every day, . And you have to work at that. I My natural style of leadership is probably more, directive.
So I have read an inordinate amount of books on coaching, because that's the way I really want to do it. But, but it's not my natural style, so I find that actually harder. But I know I want to be like that, so I've just spent a lot of time focusing on it, and there's lots of, Leadership books that you read, you take some bits from each of them because you know, there are some bits I, I read and think, oh yeah, that, that's a great idea, and then others, bit less so.
Brilliant. Do you think your sort of leadership styles changed over the years? I am much more patient and anyone that works around me would start laughing at this point, but I'm much more patient than I used to be, because you realise that things are more complex, they take longer than you think you're, they're going to, .
I'm a little bit of a workaholic, and I always have been when I was a vet as well. I, I love to be busy, but you realise more and more as you get older the impact you have on others. So I think I'm more patient and aware of that than I than I used to be.
And I try because I've read lots of books on it now, so I must be a little bit better. I do try and coach more than I ever have before. Brilliant.
Do you think having kids as well has changed that, because I definitely do. I think since having children, I'm much more patient than I was. Yeah, I think, I think definitely my kids have helped that.
I also think, cause my kids are 20 and 18 now, so I'm coming out the other side thinking, jeez, oh, I don't want them to go and work somewhere where they're, you know, expected to work 24/7 and you know, you see it through a totally different lens than. Than you perhaps do as an employee or an employer, but yeah, definitely patience and the art of negotiation. I think it's something that that parenthood absolutely teaches you.
Absolutely. So let's touch upon communication a little bit. How is, how would you say the communication is within your organisation?
I would say it is an area we need to improve on, but I would say that's probably true of a lot of organisations, and I would say even in a practise setting, . I think the, you know, when we were partners there, our communication probably wasn't good enough then, you always need to do more. And it's because people need communicating in different ways, you know, email, we know that a lot of a large portion of our emails aren't read and that's because people are not accessing emails because they're busy working, you know, something as archaic as a notice board in a, in a tea room actually, probably.
Is a is a form of communication that people can digest. Face to face is always the best way, but as your company gets bigger and bigger, making sure that communication message is consistent when you're trying to multiply that through face to face communication can be challenging. So we've done, and, and COVID helped us actually massively create different forms of communication because we did quite a lot of like town hall meetings where people could just dial in .
And, and it made you more connected to people and you realise you could do a bit of virtual communication. So I think it's trying to use as many different forms as possible and making sure that message is succinct, but I think it's an area that every single business needs to work hard at because our, our, our employees are changing all the time as well, how they access information is changing, so you have to adapt to how you are communicating with them. Yeah.
OK, brilliant. Sounds good. So back to your, career, would, are there any standout moments that come to mind that you feel shaped your career so far?
So I think, and this is, this is, this is a defining thing that a a recurring theme in my life. The one that that sticks in my mind when you ask me that is, I was about 12. And I was at secondary school, and it was a it was a careers session, so you're being asked, you know, what you want to do.
And the teacher, I didn't go to a brilliant school at all. It's quite a, a rough comprehensive school. And, they'd never had a vet, a doctor, a lawyer, they'd never had anyone like that.
And the, the, the person leading the careers they said, So, does anyone want to be a pilot or an air stewardess or doctor or a vet? And of course, you know, I put my hand up. I want to be a vet.
And she sort of just laughed at me and said, Come on, do you really think you're gonna be able to be a vet? And all my friends around me went, Yes, she will, yes, she will. And I think that moment, made me work harder to get it and to do it, partly cos I wanted to do it, but partly cos I didn't want to let my friends down who had faith in me as well.
. And, and that's a bit of a recurring thing. So when, when sort of we announced that partners, you know, I had suppliers, I had other people in the industry say, you know, why are you bothering? There's already 5 other groups in the UK, you know, and it.
So you know, it just makes me more determined, I think, to to be able to do it. So I think those, those two moments probably. And then the thing that makes me smile looking back, was the, the investor that gave us a chance to start up Bet Partners, I had a great relationship with.
And After my little pitch and he gave me the chance, and then when actually the day that Vett Parts launched, I, I took a picture of two books. One was being a CEO for Dummies, and leadership from the beginning, and I took a picture of them and I sent it to him and I just went, don't worry, I've got this covered, and love it. And that, .
You know, I take my role very, very, very seriously, but a bit like being in practise, trying to weave fun through that, is, is, you know, one of my coping mechanisms, I think I suppose. Brilliant. No fun is one of our value words at the webinar that we think it's very important, very important, yeah, very important, what would be your proudest moment so far as the ?
Proudest moment. So the ones that spring to my mind, and again this is a stupid one, I'll call it the toilet door poster moment. So I'd got into one of our practises and they had a toilet door poster on the back of the toilet, basically saying, .
Bit of irony because it said our door is already open, it's always open on the back of the toilet, but but basically come and talk to us and if if you can't talk to us, make sure you talk to somebody or here's some helpline numbers. So, decided to steal that idea and and she said about all our practises, but I, to make sure people did it, I said, right, take a picture of your toilet door with this poster up and send it in to me. And literally, we only had about 40 practises at the time, but I, I swear to God I got 40 emails back in with people's pictures of this toilet door post on their toilet, so the fact that, and then I got lovely comments back, there was a comment from someone who said, who sent me an email saying.
The toilet used to be somewhere I used to go for some quiet time of reflection, and now it's a place I go and I know I'm never on my own. But he meant it in the nicest way that, you know, you realise something as silly as that, that we could all have a bit of a joke about, but actually there's a serious element that actually if you can help people cos you know, we, we know that mental health and and. Isn't great in our profession, so focusing on that and helping our teams know that it is important and it's good to talk about these things, was really.
You know, it was a good thing for me. And then coming, going in, in COVID we started a hardship fund, so people could contact us if they were having financial hardship during COVID and then working with our shareholders we continued that even now. So being able to help our employees who are having difficult times, you know, their partner's been made redundant or, or, you know, whatever, is something that I feel is a responsibility of a big company to be able to do, .
So probably the two that stick in my mind. Yeah, brilliant. No, that sounds good.
That's a great idea and it's brilliant that you've been able to carry that on, so, yeah, yeah. Fab, and then let's have a chat about some of the not too positive times. Are there any times that sort of spring to mind, where you've had to overcome, you know, any really sort of tricky issues?
Yeah. So, I'd say probably every day. So, honestly, during the last 8 years, at some point, me and Tim, who was one of the partners I worked with at Minster Vets and is, is still part of Vet Partners, and we've known each other from vet school.
At some point we will write a book. But we've had a bomb in the car park at one of our practises. We have had a lightning strike, we've had flood, we've had fire.
We've very sadly had quite quite death. We've had suicide we've had a whole range of things, as well as then . You know, People leaving, people coming, constant change having to deal with COVID, interest rate rises now, it's not easy, at all.
We've had, you know, practises join us where you realise very quickly afterwards when you can speak to the employees that culturally that practise needs a lot of help and support, you know, we've, we've gone in and we, we're very careful not to say. Things won't change, because inevitably in life things change, but we will say, you know, we don't want to change how it feels to work here. We've driven out, we've had like 5 calls from the employee base saying, oh my God, no things need to change, you know, please change things so it's, it's all, all manner of things every day just when you think you've seen everything, to get something new, .
But that's, that's the you know, I guess it's the same as being a vet, you never know what's gonna happen in the day. You, you either let it stress you out because uncertainty is one of the main stressors, or you turn it into a bit of a thing in your mind where it's a bit more. Exciting what might happen, .
So I think it's just, I'm a big believer in . To overcome some of the mental health challenges in our profession, resilience is the absolute key to it, and it's how you frame it in your mind. So I was once, getting a flight from the UK over to see our German team.
I landed and all hell had broken out on my phone because I had to be back somewhere else in 2 days and my flight had basically been cancelled and, there literally was chaos had broken out, with, with all sorts of people trying to fix it for me. And literally at one point I was going to be rooted via Majorca and then somewhere else and someone else somewhere else, and I got off the plane and met our German team who were really apologetic, and I said. Forget about it, something will work out and I might end up going to Majorca, get some sunshine, you know, and that's just a a little example, but I think how, how you deal with stuff on a daily basis determines, I think.
How you mentally prepare yourself for things. Brilliant. No, that's great.
And obviously the veterinary profession has changed so much, especially, you know, since 2015 when you were kind of starting out with vet partners. How can you kind of stay on top of, industry changes and advancements in the vet space? Yeah, probably relying on others more than anything else, I do try and go to.
BSAVA London Vet Show, not necessarily to sit in some of the lectures, although I will go to them if, if that, you know, some of the stuff is more current and related to my role, but speaking to others a lot, speaking to others, who are at the cutting edge of what they're doing in the profession, going to some of the healthcare innovation sessions, actually human healthcare and veterinary healthcare, you know, really opens your mind as to. What's out there, and I think although we've seen lots of change in the last 10 to 15 years, you know, I think we're gonna see even more in the next 10 to 15, and you have to be, try and be sort of open minded to that. I'm a very traditional vet.
I practise in medicine in a very traditional way, and I love it. I, I love the client bond and being part of their life, I enjoyed it. You know, but you look at the newer pet owners and what's important to them, digitalization, all of those things, and You know, it will evolve, it, it in some ways has to evolve.
It's finding a good way to marry the two, the traditional, veterinary medicine and what clients I think are still looking for in their vet, to how we make it, you know, more convenient, look at all the innovation from a digital point of view, AI ultimately, and how that's going to help us. But talking to others and being open minded is probably the key, I would say. Brilliant, yeah, and it's so essential, isn't it?
It's staying competitive and, you know, staying, yeah, OK, brilliant. We are coming towards the end of, our chatter, but just a few final things I really wanted to ask you. Is there anything that you wish you know earlier on in your career?
I would say. This probably won't shed me in a very good light, but I, I should have learned the lesson earlier that a delegation does not mean you are giving up control. Probably a lot of people can relate to that, yes, yes, and it's a hard one when you are, you know, type A personality perfectionist, learning that it is, is really difficult, but seeing how.
People around you thrive when you, when you give them responsibility and delegate is. And again, to your point, I think being a parent and and learning all of that put bring some balance into your into your world and you learn to be able to delegate more brilliant. And is there any advice you'd give to your younger self, if you could go back in time?
Yes, I would say it's to be able to accept feedback more graciously and don't take it personally, take it for the learning gift it is. And I was told that, and I read it in lots of books. But I still struggle to take feedback that I'm much I'm much better at it now, and I'm able to not have an emotional response when you get that feedback and just take it for what it is.
It's that person's perception of what they've heard or think has happened. So what you need to do is twist it around in your mind and think, OK, so that's their perception of what's happened. What, what have I done or how could I do it differently in order that their perception could be what I intended.
And so it's reframing your mind as to how to think about it, because I used to be very poor at. Listening and properly listening to feedback, but I, I'm much better now, so yes, learning that earlier again would have been, would have been good. Brilliant.
Thank you, Joe. And finally, obviously there's so much going on at the moment with vet partners. Do you have any sort of future aspirations as CEO?
I Probably just to try and keep our profession a special place and make a great place for people to work and to keep what is important at the heart of what we do, which is looking after our people, and ultimately our patients as well as we possibly can, and our customers. And to be the best CEO CEO I can because I think our business is fantastic and it deserves a really good CEO. So to keep learning and be the best CEO I can be for that partners.
Brilliant. That's great, Joe. Thank you so much.
Is there anything else you wanted to share that we've not gone over and I'll chat today to our listeners? No, I don't think so. I don't think so.
I think we've covered covered lots of things, but I'll just reiterate that our profession is a fantastic one and . It's a very special place and I just hope that . People keep the intent.
Alive to that, . Cos I think we're in a very, very special environment, not just the vets, the nurses, the reception teams, everyone that helps us, and I, I, we, we shouldn't forget that actually even in our darkest of days, we shouldn't forget that. We have a fantastic profession.
Lovely, thank you, Joe. Thanks so much. I really enjoyed, meeting you today and chatting.
Thank you. And I think your journey, you know, from a partner at Min Vets all the way to where you are now is, is really inspiring. So really appreciate your time and thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you. Bye.
