Practice Profile: Bury St Edmunds Veterinary Centre

When friends Jenny Reason and Carly Day decided to set up their own practice in 2019, it would be fair to say that the pair were happy to allow their hearts to rule their heads.

There was no detailed business plan, numbers-driven growth strategy or granular revenue predictions – just an overriding desire to build the kind of business they would want to work for.

That meant creating a supportive culture and a working environment that encouraged vets and nurses to push themselves clinically to enhance their skills and progress their careers.

It also meant working in a way that made clients feel like equal partners in their pets’ health care and building trust in the brand in the local community.

Five years on and it’s clear that approach has worked, with the award-winning practice now bursting at the seams with more than 5,500 active clients on the books and a new site due to open soon.

While money has never been a motivational factor for either Jenny or Carly, they are not doing badly on that score either. After turning over a respectable £400,000 in its first year of trading, Bury St Edmunds Veterinary Centre has gone from strength to strength, with the practice making £2.35 million on a 16% profit margin in the past financial year.

Staff turnover is negligible and Carly and Jenny have managed to buck the trend when it comes to recruitment; growing from a team of 8, including 2 vets and 3 nurses, to a team of 36, including 7 (soon to be 8) vets, 12 RVNs and 2 SVNs.

Jenny said: “Neither Carly or I do much planning, and a lot of what has happened here has been based on what we felt was the right way of doing things, and so far, that is working out really well for everyone.

“Our mantra has always been to do great work with great people, for great people, and that has just kind of worked out for us. It is just about really looking after our team and making sure this is somewhere they want to come and work every day, and also to develop their careers, which is something we will always support.

“A lot of what we have achieved has come from an awful lot of gut feeling and we have had to learn a lot of this business leadership stuff as we have gone along.

“Of course, it’s not been smooth – we’ve made mistakes and we’ve messed up – but we’ve always learned our lessons quickly and moved on.”

A growing team

One of the lessons Carly and Jenny have had to learn is how to manage the dynamics of a growing team to ensure the culture remains a positive one, as Carly explained.

She said: “I’ve always worked independently and worked best when I’ve had bosses who are approachable and can actually fix things. They’re working with you and you can see them working hard, and if you have a problem then it can be fixed straight away without every decision having to go through a long chain of approval.”

Jenny added: “In so many places you see the bosses stop doing everything else or coming off the on-call rota, but that is not how we work.

“We put the hours in, too, but most of the time it doesn’t feel like work as we absolutely love working in the veterinary profession and we have gone out of our way to recruit people who feel the same.

“We just like the freedom that doing this allows us; we can go with our gut feeling, we can work off good ethical and clinical parameters, and we can do what needs to be done and should be done.”

Out-of-hours

Both Carly and Jenny are firm believers in the value of a veterinary practice covering its own out-of-hours (OOH). When the practice first opened, a lack of staff meant providing OOH cover was just not practical, but when COVID struck in March 2020, the pair made a slightly off-the-cuff decision to take back their OOH, and it’s been that way ever since.

While not a huge amount of money can be generated from this overnight work, it’s a service that has gone a long way to building such a strong and active client base.

Jenny said: “We don’t have a full 24-hour team because we don’t have enough night work to cover that at the moment. I would describe us as like a halfway house.

“Everyone goes on the rota; the vets do 1 night in 7 and the nurses are 1 in 12, and that seems to work out well for us. Our nurses work shifts that mean someone is on site between the hours of 6am and midnight, and they do the majority of the inpatient care. The vets are on call, and while it can be a pain when the phone rings at 2am, the clients really value the service and because we have large enough team, it is very doable.

“If a patient needs constant monitoring or more involved care overnight, we can manage that, too – we just adapt the next day to make it work when needed.

“We may get to the point where we need a full night team, but we are not there yet – at the moment we get an average of eight OOH calls per week, of which six are before 10pm and two after 10pm, and that is with us picking up the OOH for another practice as well.”

A growing business

Opening hours at Bury St Edmunds Veterinary Centre are Monday to Friday from 8am to 7pm, 8am to 4pm on Saturdays and Sunday opening hours are 9am to 12pm.

Up to now the large 4,000 sq ft practice has coped admirably well with the rapidly increasing throughput, but the time has now arrived for Carly and Jenny to execute their expansion plan.

A new property has been found in Needham Market, which is due to open later this year and should ease some of the pressure on the main practice in Bury, and allow the business to continue to grow.

And unlike the main site, this new venture will be exclusively owned by Jenny and Carly. To find the money to get Bury St Edmunds Veterinary Centre off the ground, the pair sought help from friends who invested around £70,000 of the original £250,000 start-up costs.

These investors will continue to receive dividends from the Bury site, but not the new one, as Jenny explained. She said: ”We have set up a second derivative company, which can be a bit confusing, but essentially the new practice will be 50-50 owned by myself and Carly.

“The benefits of that are that we get a clean break from this and, in the long term, it gives us the wriggle room to bring someone or some people in who could take on a partnership at the new practice in the future.”

But businesses often experience growing pains and Bury St Edmunds Veterinary Centre is no exception. Jenny and Carly have discovered that opening a new site can be a frustrating experience as despite having the necessary finance in place, planning approval secured and builders ready to roll, they have only just got a final lease approved after more than eight months’ stagnation.

Carly added: “We have built up a decent number of clients from the mid-Suffolk area, so it made sense to find somewhere out there, but it takes a while to find the right site as there was nothing really coming up for sale.

“In the end we found an old Co-op that came up for rent and we are hopeful of getting that up and running later this year. We had hoped to have it open already, but while we have our planning permission, change of use and signage permissions – the new building is in a conservation area – the builders are yet to start as the final lease is only now being circulated for signing, but we will get there.”

One of the other ways they have coped with increasing demand for services at Bury St Edmunds Veterinary Centre was to buy a van in 2022 and hit the road three days a week with a mobile clinic. The service was introduced in 2022 and has proved a big hit with pet owners in the wider area, who can either book appointments or drop in to see the mobile vet team.

Jenny said: “The van goes out Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and we run an RSPCA clinic on a Wednesday afternoon.

“It has been really popular; you can book appointments or people drop in sometimes for routine stuff like vaccinations or post-op checks. It can get a bit cold in the winter, but everyone enjoys heading out on the road and our clients love the service, too – especially those who don’t drive or have mobility issues.”

Supporting success

While no one single reason exists behind the success of the practice when it comes to attracting clients and keeping staff, a significant factor has been a working culture where people are encouraged to continuously grow their abilities and develop their niche in the practice.

Named Best in County at the BestUKVets awards 2023, the practice does not refer too much and keeps most work in-house where possible, which allows the clinical team to enjoy a full and varied caseload while clients benefit by avoiding paying the often inflated fees of referral practices.

Jenny said: “The clients love the fact that we will take on stuff here that a lot of other practices might refer and our clinicians love it, too, as it gives them the chance to really develop.

“We get the odd referral from other practices, too – orthopaedic stuff and dental stuff – and obviously we are a lot cheaper as we are not specialists, but the only things we would usually refer are neuro things and some of the complex spine stuff.

“This gives our vets and nurses the chance to progress and learn new things, and we have that approach with new graduates, too. Many [new graduates] are scared to do anything other than the very bog standard, and they refer things that should be dealt with in GP practice; it’s absolute madness. Give these people the support they need and it is amazing what can be achieved.”

Carly added: “I see people who are working and getting disillusioned with this profession, which is a profession that I absolutely love working in. People are getting disillusioned with it and often find themselves in situations that just aren’t fulfilling or are not allowing them to be the best vet or the best nurse they can be.

“If practices provide the kind of culture that supports everyone and provide them a working environment they love, everyone thrives and business takes care of itself.”