Practice Profile: VetSmiths

If Carlsberg did veterinary practices then they might look a lot like VetSmiths, a new independent practice in the heart of Wimborne, Dorset.

At least that’s the opinion of Chris Devlin, an experienced first opinion vet who – along with wife and business partner Sam – opened VetsSmiths last November in a Grade II-listed building in the centre of the pretty market town.

It’s certainly an idyllic location in an area not short of affluent pet owners; owners the couple are confident will buy into their view on the “art and craft” of veterinary medicine.

VetSmiths offers “gold standard care” and the name of the practice was chosen to embody this approach, as Chris explained: “When we were first talking about what we wanted to do and to be, I kept going back to the art and the craft of veterinary medicine.

“This idea that it is a traditional profession going back hundreds of years in one form or another, and Sam came up with VetSmiths – it just seemed to fit with our ethos of taking pride in what we do and going that extra mile to produce an excellent end product. In our case, it is a veterinary medicine service.

“It is VetSmiths – it is about the whole thing. If I am not there then we want people to feel just as comfortable coming to see someone else, because our brand and ethos means something more than just one person. We expect everyone to go that extra mile for our clients and their pets.”

High standards

And the couple has not stinted with its £600,000 investment, ensuring the building has been kitted out to the highest possible standards the budget would allow.

But opening their doors at the height of a pandemic was certainly not part of the plan for Chris, who had been joint owner of Hillside Veterinary Centre in Corfe Mullen before its sale to VetPartners two years ago.

Following the sale, Chris worked as a locum before using his capital from Hillside and a loan from the bank to start his own practice, which should have begun trading in April last year.

The couple had identified the perfect building and were about to sign the lease when COVID-19 struck and their plans were temporarily derailed.

Sam said: “When the pandemic hit we had to sit down and ask ourselves if it was the right thing to be doing, and at that stage we negotiated three months’ rent free, followed by a rent reduction with the landlords.

“We decided this was the time to launch our social media – Facebook, Instagram and Twitter – to create an interest and awareness of what we were doing.

“During the heat of the first lockdown, we wanted to support other vets, who at the time were only seeing emergencies, so Chris was vlogging (doing daily advice videos) on a wide variety of veterinary topics. The positive response we received from this was overwhelming.

“A local firm of builders – Banyard Construction – finally started our fit-out in August, leaving them a fairly tight time frame to get the work done by the end of October, but they did a great job.

“We then had three weeks to get everything ready to open, including a week set aside for our team training and bonding (as no-one knew anyone else). It was an intense few weeks.”

Solid start

Business has started well for Chris and Sam, with the practice boasting more than 400 active clients from a standing start just four months ago.

Extended half-hour consults aren’t ideal from a financial point of view, but from a bonding perspective, COVID-19 has presented the practice with a rare opportunity for deeper engagement with their newly acquired clients.

Chris said: “All our clients are new clients, many with new pets, and they are coming in with lots of questions, which inevitably means spending more time with them. As we have been doing longer COVID consults, like most other practices, it has given us a real opportunity to bond our new clients to VetSmiths, which we see as invaluable.”

And with stacks of good reviews already, the clients are clearly enjoying interacting with Chris, Sam and the team. As well as Chris, VetSmiths has one other full-time vet, two full-time RVNs, an animal care assistant and four part-time receptionists (one being son Barnaby, the Saturday receptionist) and Sam, who is the “people and PR person”.

The project has not come cheap and Chris admits the lease to the town centre property is expensive – even by the standards of the area – while the Peter Goolden design does not scrimp on the budget, and the practice is full of nice touches and finishes.

As well as a big reception area Sam says clients have described as “like a five-star hotel”, the practice boasts similarly roomy cat and dog waiting areas and kennelling – all of which are top-end CASCO units complete with mood lighting and music. Outside there is private, off-street parking for eight clients, plus disabled access.

Numbers game

It is a big investment and not an inconsiderable risk, but Chris has run a veterinary practice before and knows that if he gets his numbers right, everything else should take care of itself.

He said: “We did a workshop with Vet Dynamics – I was a graduate from its Platinum Academy – and that very much influenced me on this.

“It was all about starting it all again with a blank piece of paper and asking how you might do things differently given the chance, and now we have that opportunity.

“But of course you do need to know the figures to have all that, so we did a lot of planning before we even sorted the finance.

“You need to know how much it costs to put a vet in a consulting room for a 15-minute slot and if you don’t know that number, how can you run a business? You are just making it up.

“We put a huge personal investment in this, plus our time and passion, and it has got to work – we don’t want it to be something that might work by chance; there is a structure. We know how our cost structure works and have detailed budgets, all of which we needed to approach the bank for part of the finance.

“So having the discipline to do that stuff – the stuff a lot of vets don’t like – you earn yourself the freedom to do the clinical stuff you want to do.”

For example, Chris knows that for every 100 consults he does, benchmarked figures show that at least 25 of those should require some kind of investigative procedure; for every 100 booster vaccinations, 65 to 75% will be buying their preventive medicines from him. It might not be what every vet enjoys focusing on, but for Chris these are vital statistics.

He said: “The important thing is we are ahead of target in terms of numbers of clients, and in terms of turnover and profitability, which is just so important to be on top of. So far, so good. It’s been tough as the restrictions have made all practices so inefficient.”

Cats and rabbits

The practice has three consult rooms and a large preparation area, as well as separate rooms for x-rays and dentals, while there is a generously sized staff room and separate office for practice administration.

A focus on being cat friendly has already been rewarded by a silver accreditation from the International Society of Feline Medicine’s Cat Friendly Clinic scheme, while Chris and the team are also making serious in-roads with local rabbit owners.

Their gold-standard approach means VetSmiths will tackle more than some first opinion practices, too.

Chris added: “I have been doing this for a long time and all the first opinion stuff we are comfortable with, and obviously we are big on cats and also rabbits – we are seeing loads of puppies, too, of course. Lorna, our other vet, is a very good medic and we are very keen to do what we can in-house within reason; there is no reason why you can’t do these things in practice if you have a decent set-up, and you have the time and the expertise to do it.

“I would say we would be doing everything to the level of a high-end first opinion practice and very proudly so; we are very happy to refer when we need to, but you don’t need to refer everything.”

 

Sustainable future

To get the right sort of return on their investment, Chris and Sam would like to get their practice to the level of three to four full-time vets, but further growth is certainly not being ruled out at this stage.

Sam said: “We want to be doing this for at least 15 years and from the numbers point of view, three to four vets is the level that will provide us with the return we need to have. It’s very hard to get that return being a one or one-and-a-half-vet practice; that’s tough.

“It would also be nice to think that we could replicate this on a couple of other sites we have looked at in the future, so you never know.”

All out-of-hours is handled by Vets Now, which has a branch in the town – something that should help in the recruitment of vets and nurses as the practice expands. The practice also charges for vet nurse consults, not just because it is a potential extra revenue stream, but also to recognise and develop the skills of the nursing team.

Sam added: “It is important to us to charge for nurse time in that way as we know how hard they work to get their qualifications and so we charge appropriately for that. It’s been difficult during COVID to get all our nurse clinics up and running, but we are committed to that.

“We are also committed to sustainability and have partnered with Ecologi, a company that is growing our own VetSmiths forest where we can offset each of our employees’ carbon footprint by planting trees and we are very proud of that, too.

“But most of all we are proud of what we are achieving as a team and – despite a tough few months – we are all very excited about the future.”