Welcome to the Vet Vault business and leadership series with veterinary practice owner and business coach Dr Shibly Mustapha. In this series we’ll explore ways to make veterinary practice sustainable and profitable. Shibly is an owner of a multi-practice group in Australia. He is actively growing his business, and shares with us the same up-to-date lessons and a no-excuses approach that inspires his own coaching clients. In our first episode of this new series we start with the elephant in the room: Covid-19 is disrupting businesses everywhere, including veterinary practices. But is it as bad as it seems? Will it affect your business? How do we respond to it, and are there potentially things to be gained from all of this? 

One message that we hear time and time again from our guests here at the VetVault is that success, or happiness, or fulfilment or performance or whatever you want to call it, starts in your head. In this episode we explore what’s happening inside that head of yours, and how we can influence it for the better. Veterinarian, public speaker and coach Dr Katie Ford graduated from the University of Liverpool in the UK in 2012 and gained her certificate in medicine in 2016. Externally she was very successful: she had a great career, she was a successful clinician who was loved by clients, she was one of the youngest vets ever to pass the certificate synoptic exam. The future looked bright, but internally things were a bit more complicated.

The first time you meet Dr. Charles El-Hage, you’ll think to yourself: “who the heck was that guy?!” There’s something about him that makes me want to speak to him a some more.” And then, when you ask someone about him you’ll see their face light up with a smile, and they’ll say, “oh that’s Charlie, he’s great. Let me go introduce you.” So, let’s introduce you… When he’s being Dr. Charles El-Hage he is a Lecturer in Veterinary Clinical Medicine and Surgery at the University of Melbourne. Travel with us through Charlie’s career as we talk about bad bosses, great clients, creating connections, his charity work, his thoughts on finding the best place to give your gifts to the world, mindset, and much much more.

In this episode we tackle a subject that is not necessarily directly veterinary related, or is at least not limited to our profession, but still a critical topic to discuss because of the impact that it will have on all of us, and more importantly, because of the impact that veterinarians can have on it: climate change. If you’ve ever looked around your workplace and thought to yourself: “ This can’t be good for the environment. I really should do something about it.”, or if you are concerned about climate change, but you’re not sure where to start, then this episode is for you.  We speak to Ben Cox, a founder and a driving force behind an exciting new charity called Veterinarians for Climate Action.