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In this week’s episode:
- Change Management Isn’t Optional – It’s a Core Leadership Skill: Great ideas fail when teams don’t understand the why. Without clear communication, realistic timelines, and shared evaluation, even the best initiatives can create resentment and disengagement. Managing change properly protects culture, morale, and results.
- We’re Measuring the Wrong Things: Veterinary practices obsess over clinical metrics – but rarely track non-clinical time. What are vets, nurses and reception teams actually doing all day? Without that visibility, inefficiency hides in plain sight, and burnout follows.
- Efficiency Isn’t Corporate – It’s Compassionate: Operational efficiency isn’t about squeezing more out of people. Done well, it removes low-value tasks, reduces cognitive load, and allows professionals to focus on stimulating, meaningful clinical work. That improves wellbeing and performance.
- “Start With Why” Applies to Veterinary Medicine: Whether introducing new tech, changing systems, or reshaping workflow, leaders must define the benefit clearly. If a change doesn’t create value – for patients, clients, or teams – why are you do
In this episode, Jack Peploe speaks with David McDonald, director of PureVet. This episode is a practical, thought-provoking conversation on how better leadership, smarter measurement, and thoughtful change management can build sustainable veterinary practices where people thrive.
Additional Guest Spotlights
- Next Episode Sneak Peak: Next episode, Jack is joined by Debbie Robinson, founder of Vetnetics and one of the UK’s leading voices in veterinary leadership and culture. Debbie brings a powerful message: busy is normal – broken is not. If you’re leading a team – or hoping to – this is an episode that may challenge you in all the right ways.
- Recommended Resource: This week’s recommendation come from Clary Clarke, and highlights the power of clarity in leadership. The book introduces the “The Golden Circle – Simon Sinek” framework – why, how, what – and challenges leaders to communicate from the inside out. For veterinary practices, the message is simple but powerful: don’t chase the next shiny solution without first defining its purpose. When teams understand why something matters, engagement and alignment follow. It’s a foundational leadership read for anyone shaping strategy in practice.
Show Notes
- Out every other week on your favourite podcast platform.
- Presented by Jack Peploe: Veterinary IT Expert, Certified Ethical Hacker, CEO of Veterinary IT Services and dog Dad to the adorable Puffin.
Transcription
Jack Peploe:
Coming up on Modern Veterinary Practice Podcast
David McDonald:
I think it’s change management, being able to manage change. It sounds really basic. That’s why I’m kind of questioning myself, but I genuinely, I can think of so many examples where I didn’t practice that in practice. And I see it a lot now as well, that we’ve got great ideas and maybe these are ideas that we as a practice owner have been sitting on for years even. And then we implement it because it’s amazing. And we have this massive fallout with our team leaving interiors, whatever. Because they didn’t understand. They didn’t understand the why, why was it going to benefit? How we’re going to evaluate its success. And yeah, I can think of several examples of what I’ve done in the past that I just hadn’t managed that change. Therefore, I hadn’t managed team expectation. Everybody had a slightly different idea of what was going to happen or what it meant for them.
And actually the impact that could have happened maybe wasn’t as great as it should have been.
Jack Peploe:
Welcome to the Modern Veterinary Practice Podcast. I’m your host and veterinary IT expert, Jack Peploe. In this episode, I’ll be welcoming David McDonald, veterinary surgeon and director at PureVet. We’ll be talking about how operational efficiency, leadership, and technology can work together to create more sustainable veterinary practices while measuring the right non-clinical data matters and how smarter systems can improve both team wellbeing and patient care.
David McDonald:
Thanks, Jack. Yeah. So I’m David McDonald. I’m a veterinary surgeon, graduated from Edinburgh in 1999. And like everybody else, went into practice, happily worked away, became a partner at a clinic in Sussex and Kent. And that’s what I thought I’d do until I retired. 2017 came along. One of my fellow directors was retiring and we joined Linas, which was then a private equity owned company. Subsequently acquired by Mars. And as the Linneaus organisation grew, I joined the medical team as a field medical director and then the operations team managing the London clinics. And then two years ago, I had an opportunity to join a company called VetSource, which is a US tech company. And I joined them to help them internationalise their product as the market lead in the UK. And that’s where I’m going to
Jack Peploe:
Move. That’s so exciting. Well, look, David, thanks so much for joining me today. Now you’ve had quite sort of an epic journey from sort of clinical practice through to leadership at Linneaus, as you said, and obviously now to launching VetSource in the UK, which is super exciting. Now, what I love about your story is that it’s not just about scaling systems or boosting metrics. It’s clear your drive is rooted in people. So helping teams enjoy the profession, making work smoother and creating environments where sort of good medicine is sustainable. So today, if it’s all right with you, I want to talk about that interception where leadership meets operations, meets wellbeing, and how we can move beyond the tick boxes to build veterinary businesses that actually work for the people inside them. Does that sound okay? Sounds great.
David McDonald:
Yeah.
Jack Peploe:
Awesome. All right. So I suppose starting with, you sort of said you want people to enjoy the profession as much as you do. What do you think are the biggest reasons so many no longer actually do?
David McDonald:
Yeah, it’s something I think about a lot. I love our profession and I don’t really subscribe to the stress that I see around me a lot of the time. And I’ve kind of come to the conclusion that firstly, I guess there’s maybe a kind of unrealistic expectation that people set out with. There’s a number of factors that that may come from, but I think one of the big ones is that there’s a lack of mentoring. And I think that’s what I had when I was a student and a new graduate, is I had people working alongside me. They’d been in the profession for a long time and reassured me. I definitely had wobbles. And I kind of see that as something that we’re lacking now, maybe because older members of the profession like me who maybe exited clinical practice, and also because I think there’s a lot of people working not really as part of a larger team.
So I think it’s people, again, I think people play a massive part in that expectation.
Jack Peploe:
No, absolutely. And operational efficiency is often sort of talked about like it’s a code or corporate sort of model, but do you think it can actually improve team wellbeing and how?
David McDonald:
Yeah, look, so this is something I’m super focused on. I mean, I guess I’ve forgotten my intro that back in COVID I did an MBA as well, so I had a bit of time on my hands and did an MBA and that kind of really opened my mind to efficiencies or inefficiencies in vet practice. So I’m passionate about that. And I hear what you’re saying, we think efficiency, corporate, people with a whip. I don’t think that at all. I think if I took my practice as it was seven sites, 30 bets, I actually think we could have delivered the same financial results with maybe five less bets because I looked at it now and think we were really inefficient.
I think that veterinary practice is possibly inherently inefficient by the variety of work that we do every day. So we can be vaccinating an animal one minute and then dealing with an RTA the next, and that doesn’t help us with efficiency. But I think the more I’ve done through my MBA and then the work in a corporate environment and now in VetSource, I think there’s a lot we can learn from the human healthcare field. And I believe that we are becoming obsessed with gathering clinical data to make us more efficient. And I challenge that. I think it’s helpful, but there’s a massive lack of non-clinical data. So we don’t actually know what our people are doing. And that’s where I’ve started, trying to understand what are people doing. And if I take VetSource as an example, we’re looking at managing prescriptions, repeat medication, chronic medications.
We know from what we’ve done and from independent work, around about half our veterinary receptionist time is spent managing repeat prescriptions. And that’s just one part of what we do every day in clinical practice. There’s lots of other examples. Work, you take five or six common procedures that RVNs are very capable of doing and maybe arguably better than vets at doing. Most of these procedures, like 60% of them are done by vets. So I think there are inefficiencies in practice. And I think then when you put that out to how does that engage us as a profession, I think that if we could become more efficient, we can … It’s not all about working harder or more complex cases by actually being stimulated in your work. I think if we’re doing work that a lower level qualification could do or even technology could do, actually, is that something that really engages you?
And I think probably not. So it contributes to that.
Jack Peploe:
Well, I’ve kind of got two sort of follow-on questions to that, but I want to go back to your MBA. If more practice owners had access to this kind of business education, what would you expect to change in the industry?
David McDonald:
I 100% would think we would just become more open-minded. And I don’t say that as a good or a bad thing, but I think that I was a fairly typical vet. We’re by and large similar personality types and we’re data-driven and there’s sort of a right and a wrong way of doing things. And I know that my MBA was definitely a kind of tipping point on me being very comfortable with not knowing everything. I don’t need to be the master of everything. I need to be open-minded. I need to challenge myself and others constantly, not just do things because I’ve been told that’s how we do it. Actually, does it create a value? And I think I come back to that every time.
If something doesn’t create value, and to me, that means a benefit. It doesn’t need to be financial value. But if we do something that doesn’t create a benefit for ourselves or our customers or the pets we treat, why are we doing it? And I think that’s really what I took from the MBA, is challenge everything. There’s not necessarily a right or a wrong change. The way we will change, I believe, is through constraints. So I think when we’re faced with challenges, that’s what helps us innovate. I seem to think we’ve been talking about a vet shortage for pretty much as long as I can remember. And I don’t think anything’s changing, so we need to change. And I think that’s where the efficiency comes in. So yeah, I think that’s …
Jack Peploe:
Yeah. No, that’s cool. And kind of going back to the other question I wanted to ask, so you mentioned obviously running teams across multiple sites. What’s one sort of leadership lesson you wish you’d learned earlier?
David McDonald:
I hope this is a good answer. I don’t know if it’s a lesson, but I think it’s change management, being able to manage change. It sounds really basic. That’s why I’m kind of questioning myself. But I genuinely, I can think of so many examples where I didn’t practice that in practice, and I see it a lot now as well, that we’ve got great ideas, and maybe these are ideas that we as a practice owner have been sitting on for years even. And then we implement it because it’s amazing. And we have this massive fallout with our team leading interiors, whatever, because they didn’t understand. They didn’t understand the why, why was it going to benefit, how are we going to evaluate its success? And I can think of several examples of what I’ve done in the past that I just hadn’t managed that change. Therefore, hadn’t managed team expectation, everybody had a slightly different idea of what was going to happen or what it meant for them.
And actually the impact that could have happened maybe wasn’t as great as it should have
Jack Peploe:
Been. No, I think to be honest, it’s a really, really strong answer because it is a big problem within the industry at the moment, especially with so much change. Ever since COVID, it seems like there’s been 10 times the change that we are accustomed to and used to. And you see it reflected within practices and how they struggle. And again, if you don’t have that flow of change management, that structure, it all goes probably wrong quite quickly. So how do you coach local leaders to lead beyond say the rotor? So to move from firefighting to truly shaping culture?
David McDonald:
Guess my approach in leadership is a very collaborative one, and that’s what I really want to try and instil in others. And I think it can be quite powerful given examples of where you’ve been in the past. And I would’ve been rather directional in the past, if this is what we’re doing and this is SOP and this is what we’ve got to do. And if you’ve got a problem, come to me because I’m the senior vet here or the practice owner. And it kind of worked a degree for me, but I look back and I think it could have been so much better. So it’s very much, I guess my whole ethos and leadership is to promote a relational business, not just a transactional one.
I want to encourage people to surround themselves with people that know more than they do, and that’s exactly what I do now. I look at me and VetSource is leading the team and helping formulate a strategy, but I’m surrounded by people that are much better at selling things or marketing or finance than I ever will be. And I’m very comfortable with that. Yeah. I think to really keep an open mind is so important. We all ultimately want the same thing, want to deliver the best service. We want pets to be healthy, protect the welfare, our pet owners to be happy with the service we provide. And yet there’s so much conflict within our profession often. And I think ultimately, it’s not that somebody wants to do damage to a pet or the business, but we’ve got to work on keeping an open mind and maybe we’ll come onto that later, but there’s a great book out there that I read and I reread and it’s a very simple book, but it’s good to kind of helping us understand how conflict sometimes happens in the workplace and how we can kind of break that down again.
So yeah, I think real collaboration keeps going back to that value creation. Is it creating a benefit? If you’re going to implement something that just creates challenges, why? Maybe sometimes there’s a regulatory need, but it’s pretty uncommon.
Jack Peploe:
Yeah, no, absolutely. And going back to the change management side of things, how do you approach systems change without overwhelming people? So
David McDonald:
Again, I’m repeating myself, but it’s always a why. Why are we doing this? What is the benefit it’s going to bring? I then want to have a clear plan of how we’re going to do it. So what does that mean? And I think that’s got to be realistic. Well, I can implement a change in a week for it to be successful. I mean, it depends what it is, but I’d call often say, “Oh, we’re going to do this. This is how we’re going to roll it out over three months and we’re going to evaluate this and we’re going to talk about it every month.” And we’re not going to be afraid to say it didn’t work or we need to change something. And I think that’s probably really important as well. We obviously want a change to be successful, but actually recognise that, hey, there might be some challenges there.
I guess the biggest one I can think of is always, everyone talks about practice management systems and I hear every day people say, “Oh, the PIMS doesn’t work or the platform that we’ve adopted doesn’t work.” I’d say the majority of times what I see is people don’t know how to use it. They do work. They’re very effective, but people haven’t taken the time or haven’t been trained to do it. So the change has not been managed. We’ve created an amazing system and then everybody says it doesn’t work.
So I think it’s recognising that and communicating that to people. We recognise this is different for you, but this is a way in which it will create a bigger benefit for you, work through it and it actually will help you in the long run.
Jack Peploe:
Yeah, no, I completely agree. And I mean, the practice management system is a really interesting one being that it is such a beast of a platform. And in comparison to most other industries, they don’t have what we’ve got within our industry. So it’s an overwhelming thing to sort of take on board. And I think the other challenge regarding that PMS tends to be the fact that they’re constantly evolving and changing these solutions, but obviously it’s the practice not sometimes taking the time to understand what those changes are and how it could benefit their business. That’s kind of from my side, probably shot for saying that. The other thing I want to talk about is obviously we often hear you can’t improve what you don’t measure, but what are the right things to measure in a veterinary business?
David McDonald:
Well, I guess the context is in who you’re asking. I mean, okay, so if you’re asking me as a practice owner, I guess what am I looking at? I’m looking at my cost of goods and my salaries. That’s what’s in my mind anyway. That’s what’s going to really make or break my P&L. But actually, if I take my position now and how I believe our profession can thrive, what do I want to measure right now and what I would love to encourage people to measure, it is that non-clinical data. What are people doing with the time? So we’ve got increasingly lots of data. I’m not saying we’re very good at collecting it. It’s pretty dirty data, I’d suggest a lot of the time. It’s difficult to compare apples with apples, but we really have a lack of a lack/almost no non-clinical data. So we don’t know what our vets are actually doing every day, and the same for our nurses and for our reception teams.
And I believe that is a real key in unlocking efficiencies, which then go back to engagement of our team because there’s a lot of fear out there just now with the CMA activity. And I speak to a lot of vets that are saying, “God, this is difficult. The only way we can survive is to put prices up so much we worry we’re going to lose our customers.” Well, no, I don’t believe that. I actually think you can have lunch and go home on time and make more money by being more efficient. But I think the key to that is identifying what are vets doing that they don’t need to do every day. And that encompasses, okay, dispensing drugs that VetSource can help with, but it’s so much more than that. It’s writing reports. It’s how we communicate with our pet owners. There’s so many tools out there, how we capture our clinical notes.
There are just so many factors out there that I believe can really make a difference. And there’s so much we can learn from human healthcare. They’ve done it, it’s out there and they’ve done it because they’ve been forced to do it. They’ve been forced. They need to make money, and that has been the driver in a lot of these cases in the US. But I believe we’re in that situation in the UK now where whether it’s lack of vets or pressures from what’s happening in CMA, who knows what outcome will be there. But I believe that it is through these worries and pressures that we will adopt innovation and will change and it’ll be for the better. We’re going to survive. The vet industry’s growing. It will be fine, but it won’t be fine just to keep doing what we did 20 years ago.
Jack Peploe:
No, absolutely. And what did I say to you at the start, David? I said to you, we’re going to run out of time in no time, and that is exactly what’s happened. But thank you so much. It’s been such a valuable conversation. It’s clear you care deeply about how practices feel to work in, not just how they perform on paper. And I really think holistic will appreciate that lens, especially a time when pressure on Teams has never been greater. Now, for anyone that wants us to connect with you or follow the VetSource journey in the UK, where is the best place for them to find you?
David McDonald:
So they can find us on our LinkedIn page, which kind of regular updates there, our website is vetsource.co.uk. Or I’m super happy to engage with anybody personally.
Jack Peploe:
Cool. Amazing. And they will be in the show notes, but David, thank you so much. It’s been a really fun episode. Thanks,
Jack Peploe:
Every episode, we ask professionals and experts to suggest a best business resource for our listeners. This week’s recommendation is from Carly Clark.
Carly Clarke:
There’s a book that I have read, I read many years ago, and it’s something I go back to every now and then, and I recommend it to all of my product team at Covetrus or anybody who’s wanting to get into product. It’s called Start With Why by Simon Sinek. And it really is a great book. It’s a great insight into how businesses really can help transform what they’re doing by defining your why clearly and communicating it consistently. It talks a lot about the Golden Circle framework where a lot of companies, and this can be absolutely true to the veterinary industry as well. They really focus on communicating from the outside in, so what, how, and then why, rather than really thinking from an inspired leader, an organisation perspective where you’re communicating inside out. Why are you wanting to do what you’re doing? How are you going to do it?
And then what is it that you’re actually doing? And for me, I embed that into everything that we’re looking at from a delivery roadmap strategic perspective, but it is absolutely something that can be true to the veterinary industry as well. Think about why. Don’t just jump to the new shiny gadget. What is it? Think back to why it is that something might be of benefit to help drive that strategy. So it’s a great resource. Start with why by Simon Sinek.
Jack Peploe:
Coming up next week, we welcome Debbie Robinson, founder of Vetnetics and a leading voice in veterinary leadership and culture. Debbie shares her journey from a career in IT to coaching over 80 veterinary practices across the UK, helping leaders move beyond survival mode and build workplaces where people genuinely thrive. We dive into what real leadership looks like in a modern vet practice, why culture is a daily behaviour rather than a poster on the wall, and how energy, communication, and trust shape everything from team wellbeing to patient care. Debbie also challenges some uncomfortable truths around gossip, burnout, and broken systems, and offers practical ways to lead with intention and humanity.
Debbie Robinson:
Some days are going to be crazy loony tune days. It’s just that in veterinary, but if it’s like that more often than not, it’s broken. And what we can’t afford to do is break people because people will become ill and they will potentially leave. And this is where leaders, sometimes we think there is such a demand that we stack it so high that the team can’t possibly get through it all without burning out, without overwhelm.
Jack Peploe:
That’s it for this episode. All links and recommendations we talked about are in the show notes. Don’t forget to subscribe and share the podcast if you found it useful. In the meantime, thanks for listening and see you next time.
