Tag: Business & Practice Management

There’s something about the final quarter that makes everything feel more urgent, particularly in a veterinary practice. Clients want appointments before Christmas, medication requests increase, boarding vaccinations need to be organised and everyone is trying to coordinate annual leave. Meanwhile, the practice owner is reviewing year-end results, the manager is preparing next year’s budget and there are still projects that were supposed to be completed months ago. None of these demands is particularly unusual. The challenge is that they all arrive at roughly the same time, often when the practice has already had a demanding year. It’s tempting to approach the final quarter as one last opportunity to achieve everything that

You can usually sense when a veterinary team is running low on energy, even before there’s any noticeable change in performance. The work is still getting done, patients are being cared for and clients are being looked after. But the atmosphere feels different. People who would normally help one another without being asked are concentrating on getting through their own responsibilities. Questions that would usually receive a helpful response are met with a sigh or a short answer. Minor inconveniences seem to cause more frustration than they did a few weeks earlier. It’s not necessarily that the team has stopped caring or that their standards have changed. They may simply have

Ask a veterinary practice owner or manager what they’re currently working on, and you’re unlikely to get a short answer. They’re trying to improve profitability, address staffing challenges, strengthen client service, reduce overdue accounts, develop their team, improve workflows and keep on top of the everyday demands of running a busy practice. Somewhere in amongst all of that, they’re also trying to implement the improvements they’ve identified over the past six months. None of these priorities are unreasonable. In fact, most are probably necessary. The problem isn’t always the amount of work that needs to be done. It’s the expectation that everything can be progressed at the same time.  This is