If you work in a veterinary practice or in the pet industry or in a business that supplies goods or services to the industry and you have something to say - why not become a 'Guest Blogger'?
For more information click here to read our: Guidelines for Guest Bloggers
In the previous post I told you about my recent experience of being better paid than I’ve ever been as a vet to do non-clinical work. Work that relied on, as my friend Chad said, my ‘ ‘…unique expertise and experience across multiple domains, and it’s expertise that they need and are more than happy to pay for.’ (Read that first post if you haven’t already, and this one will make more sense.)
So why is it that I’m more valuable, in simple dollar terms, outside of the thing I am specifically trained for, and that I love doing. To help us think through this earnings ceiling in the vet profession, it’s worth unpacking Chad’s statement.
Unique skills – Check.
…across multiple domains – You might not always realise this, but you know much more than facts about sick animals – Definite check.
…skills that they need – As long as anyone cares about animal health – check.
…that…they are happy to pay for. Well this is where things get sticky.
Because first of all – who exactly is the ‘they’ who need your unique expertise and experience? Are we talking about our clients, or our bosses? Both of these need you. Neither of them are particularly happy to pay you.
To our clients, we are often a valuable service that they’d rather not use if they can help it – like paying for a flat tyre repair or hiring a plumber to unblock your toilet – you’re happy that the house no longer smells like a public toilet, but you’d have preferred to go out for a nice meal, or an overseas holiday. And even if they are happy to pay for your expertise, sometimes they simply can’t. Unlike the large multinational architectural firm that paid me to review the hospital plan, most of the people who need us do not have Swiss bank accounts and long lines of credit.
To the business owners who pay our wages, we are their biggest expense – the thing that stands between them and their yacht, or sometimes just a decent wage. Now, before the practice owners among us get upset with me – let me state that I know many bosses who care deeply about their teams and would love very much to pay everyone more, if the business could carry it. But from a pure business/profit and loss perspective – vets are an expense that needs to be minimised. Or if not minimised, then offset by higher earnings. In other words, if we want to be paid more, we need to generate more.
Which is where it gets tricky. For the architecture firm who needed my expertise, it’s fairly simple: there’s a client who wants a top-notch hospital. The firm calculates their costs, including what they need to pay consultants, sends an estimate, and the client can take it or leave it. If it’s more than they can afford, they lower the design specs, or realise that their business idea is not viable and scrap the project. Nobody suffers, nobody dies. Nobody feels guilty.
Contrast that to your world. I don’t need to spell it out.
So we cut costs where we can so we can keep fixing animals. And what did we just say the number 1 cost is? Which is exactly why I earned 3 times as much for looking over some design drawings in an air conditioned office than I can for doing a life saving surgery, or ending a life with dignity.
If I had THE ANSWER I’d be earning much more than just three times my vet wage as the world’s best veterinary business consultant. But I do have some things for us to think about:
I don’t know any homeless vets with starving children. We have a cool job. For the most part we are well respected, despite the fact that many people already make snide comments about how much we charge. So maybe the answer is to stop comparing ourselves to higher-margin, low-guilt professions and accept the fact that the beach house isn’t happening on a vet wage.
Here’s something that sucks: the conversation at your performance review that goes – ‘if you want to earn more you need to bill more.’
It sucks because it can interfere with your integrity as a clinician: am I suggesting bloods because I believe it’s best for my patient, or because I need to pay for my kids’ school fees?
It sucks because it’s also a bit insulting in that it completely ignores the value you can bring to a business that is not directly measurable by what you invoice. The architecture firm didn’t want to see a dollar value for my insights into the flow of the vet hospital – they see value in how it will affect patient safety and comfort, and the benefits of a nice work environment for the team. Just like the many non-billable things you bring to your workday that make the practice work. But the architects account for this, and they charge for it. So somehow we in vet land need to do the same, and in the current veterinary business model, the way to do that is for the vets to bill more. That’s you. Get comfortable with it. (See our last post to help with this.)
Here’s how I thought about this when I owned my emergency clinic. I set out with two core principles around staff remuneration:
So we set our prices with these two things in mind and opened the doors. For the next 7 years, whenever the gap between the wage bill and our revenue in the quarterly financials made me sweat, I’d adjust pricing. It’s a simple formula, but it worked: start with the end in mind.
But again, this only works up to a point, until the people who want our help can no longer afford our expertise. Which, to many, is what it feels like in 2026.
So what are our options?
Vets can be a bit allergic to the term ‘productivity’ – it can feel like ‘flog you harder so we make more money.’ But the simple fact is that if we can’t / don’t want to charge more, then we need to DO more. And I don’t mean ‘do more per client’ – that’s a slippery slope towards do you want fries with that? I mean fix more animals. Without burning out the teams.
This requires systems. Have a look at Aravind Eye Hospital, or read this book. It’s the story of an eye hospital in India that found a way to deliver world-class cataract surgery at a massive scale, including free or heavily subsidised care for patients who couldn’t afford to pay, without making the clinical care second-rate.
They did it by treating affordability as a systems problem. This meant:
The lesson isn’t that vet clinics should copy a cataract hospital. It’s that the solution to affordable vet care doesn’t have to come from asking skilled people to work for less. Sometimes it comes from redesigning the work so the same team can safely help more patients, with less waste, less friction, and fewer humans being slowly minced by the machine.
If some of the people who need our help can’t pay, is there somebody else who might want to foot the bill? To some extent this is already happening. It’s kinda what pet insurance does. And in many countries this is how charity low-cost hospitals operate: through fundraising and donors. Think RSPCA, PDSA, Blue Cross, or the shelter care models in the US. And we’ve all heard grumblings of publicly-funded animal care – a Medicare or NHS-type model.
Until that happens, where we don’t have access to low-cost subsidised care, we’ll need to get creative.
I like that last line of the Aravind approach: letting paying patients cross-subsidise those who couldn’t pay. Could we stratify our clients in a way that helps us even things out? Does the Northern Beaches family want a properly-priced 100% markup endoscopic dog spay, where precious (pick your flavour of -oodle) gets an anaesthetist, wakes up in climate-controlled cage with owner-assisted recovery – with some of that profit helping to pay for the GDV later that night? With their consent of course – they might embrace this. Maybe you start charging a ‘Frenchie tax’ – similar to the luxury tax imposed on cigarettes and alcohol that helps to fund public health care? (You can call it a stupidity tax behind closed doors if you want.)
Are there high-value, high-margin services that we can provide that do not involve using animal suffering as a bargaining chip? I know that’s not actually what we do, bit that’s what it can feel like, right?
Could the general practice of the future lean more on profitable services that are desirable, useful, and not built around crisis? Maybe it means rethinking wellness plans – from a lazy ‘bundle of discounted stuff’ to properly designed prevention programmes, longevity clinics, mobility programmes. I’ve often thought that a well-run, effective weight-loss clinic or a high-touch skin plan would be a great business. (Still involves Frenchies though…)
And outside the clinic walls? Could practices sell their expertise to companies or individuals with deep pockets? Could we charge properly for the invisible stuff we give away for free every day: advice, systems, education, risk assessment, animal welfare judgement, and the ability to spot bullshit at 20 paces?
These are just ideas to get us thinking. Some are probably terrible. Some are already being done, but could be done better, or marketed better. Some would create new problems. But it’s worth asking the question: not just ‘how do we charge more for vet care?’ Maybe the better question is: what else do veterinary skills create value for, and how do we use that value to keep essential care within reach?
Which of these would you actually try? Hit me with your best ideas.
Hubert Hiemstra is the friendly voice behind The Vet Vault and Vet Vault Clinical Podcasts. With over two decades of veterinary experience across three continents, he's on a mission to help fellow vets fall back in love with veterinary science. When he's not in the clinic or podcasting, he loves hanging out with his wife and energetic boys, catching some waves, going for a run, or just soaking up nature. Stay current with the Vet Vault’s practical, on-the-go clinical CPD episodes that are anything but boring. Explore the library here https://www.thevetvault.com/p/clinical-content/
Connect with Dr Hubert:
Helping veterinary teams better understand what clients really value. Have you ever walked away from a client interaction thinking, “What do they actually want from us?” You’re not alone, and we want your help to address it. Researchers from Charles Sturt University...
