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Profit-“Ability”
Why is this important?
Everybody thinks vets are rich. Including me. I qualified 1989 and became an assistant vet in England. Not very well paid but it paid the bills. 10 years later I thought to get better rewards I just had to buy into a partnership and all would be good.
So in 2001 I did just that with no business knowledge. My strategy was just work hard as a vet and the rewards would come.
Little did I know that there is “ability” in profitability. I had 6 years of university training and was very able in veterinary science but was never trained in running a business.
So the first year we got our figures and it was positive so all good. Not much more then my assistant salary but early days right?
When 9/11 hit my partner and I had 2 months of no income. The rest of the team and all the suppliers got paid but not us.
This was not what I signed up for so I started looking into running a veterinary business. What were other vets doing? Decided to get myself education and I got a Certificate of Veterinary Practice Management with the RCVS. I was only the 8th Vet to get this at the time.
The teachings from that was priceless and with some mentorship from Alan Robinson everything started to fall into place.
As the year have gone on I realized that these principles apply worldwide. I experienced it in Europe and now in Australia and If we listen to the AAVA it applies in America too.
What is our profitability?
The average profit in a veterinary business worldwide is 7%.
This means most vets get 7% some get less. (They should consider working for somebody else) and some get over 7% as high as 25% (Or more in a few individual cases up to 35% so far).
Any idea were you fit in this statistic?
Make sure you use normalized figures.
This means:
To help you out we have created a table that will compare your position with what we should at least aim for.