Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Susan Miller. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Susan, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. If you had a defining moment that you feel really changed the trajectory of your career, we’d love to hear the story and details.

One of the most beautiful aspects of Veterinary medicine is that your career can take you down any one of numerous pathways. I could never have imagined, fifteen years ago, that today I would be an executive director of a nonprofit veterinary hospital. Right out of veterinary school I started working at very busy general practice and loved every aspect of being veterinarian. I had wonderful clients and wonderful patients. What I quickly discovered is that no matter how many pets I helped or lives I saved, it was the ones I couldn’t help and the lives I wasn’t able to save that stayed with me. If you ask many veterinarians about the cases they remember I know that many will also describe a similar experience. As a profession, we strive to help and save and when we can’t, we are haunted. Many of these cases would be described as clients with financial barriers – clients that had pets needing care, but unable to access that care due to limited financial barriers. In these frequent situations, both the pets and the owners were greatly suffering.
As my career matured, I was presented with an opportunity to work at small practice that specialized in serving low income pet owners. It was called Mission Animal Hospital and was a for-profit practice at that time (2014). This was a practice that owners came to after other veterinarians had either refused to care for their pets or that veterinarians had directly referred them. This was a practice that was literally the last stop available for many pet owners. We were busy, we were challenged and the demand for our services was relentless day after day. Mission’s model at that time was high volume to make up for lower pricing and the offering of payment plans to defer cost for clients over time.
A few months into working at Mission, I was presented with the option to buy the practice. I didn’t hesitate and jumped at what I believed would be an incredible opportunity to grow and expand the much needed services we were offering. This was the moment that changed everything for me. The purchase of the practice afforded me the opportunity to change the business model. My Epiphany was “why not be a nonprofit for clear transparency to our clients and include philanthropy (subsidy) from our community to support a much needed resource for pet owners”? I never looked back.
Nine years later, we are one of the largest and busiest hospitals in the state of Minnesota and poised for national expansion to help other cities open up a Mission for their community. The demand and need for accessible veterinary services continues to rise and financial challenges are still the number one reason people will surrender a pet.
I built Mission Animal Hospital based on my belief that everyone who wants a relationship with a pet should have one regardless of their financial situation. Pets add so much to our quality of life in the way of love and dimension, it’s one of life’s more cherished relationships we can have a human beings. We all should have the opportunity to have a pet and to care for that pet.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Mission Animal Hospital is a full service veterinary hospital. We offer: wellness care, surgery, urgent care, specialty surgery.
We are open seven days a week, offer payment plans, and two-tied pricing with a subsidized tier for those who self select as qualifying.

The problem: Assess to veterinary care

Our Mission: To make veterinary care accessible so that all families can live their best life with their pet.

Our Vision: A world where every family has a pet and every pet has a vet.

Other than training/knowledge, what do you think is most helpful for succeeding in your field?

At Mission, we strive to meet the relentless demand from pet owners seeking care. This requires constant evaluation of efficiencies and service models. We tweak and pivot models to be better on a regular basis to be more efficient and to meet demand better. We try things boldly and sometimes they don’t work, but we don’t give up trying to be better. This requires nimbleness and a culture that embraces change – both challenging aspects with a large staff.

Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?

The most effective strategy we have for our clients and for growing our practice is to exist and be dependable. That may sound obvious, but in the veterinary field we are facing serious challenges to staffing across all positions. We can’t run Mission Animal Hospital without our staff. We have made a concerted effort to invest in our staff and we do the best we can to demonstrate that by offering: market comparable salaries and benefits along with the tools they need to their jobs well. Our people are our most valuable resource and the veterinary industry needs to do better than we have in the past with compensation, reducing compassion fatigue for our employees and finding better work-life balance.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.missionah.org
• Instagram: missionanimalhospital
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/missionah
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mission-animal-hospital-eden-prairie-minnesota/mycompany/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljvWre-kZJU
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/mission-animal-hospital-eden-prairie-2