We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Kaleigh Robinson. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Kaleigh below.

Kaleigh, appreciate you joining us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

Neither of us came out of vet school thinking we would one day open our own practice. I had previously completed an internship at a big corporate hospital and knew that wasn’t for me. I met Dr. Shannon Kafer in 2018 when we both worked as emergency department associates at a practice that was privately owned. For a time, it was great; we had a lot of great staff who provided good patient care and the case load was enough to support a multi-doctor emergency department.

Then our owner decided to join basically a ponzi scheme, disguised as an employee stock ownership program. The structure of the organization changed and began promoting the idea that competition between employees encourages production, which is supposed to increase profit sharing. However, the program was designed for a manufacturing company. While I believe some one could challenge their colleague to make more engine parts in one week than them, the theory does not translate well to medicine, and especially not emergency medicine. We cannot make sick or injured patients walk through the door and cannot predict how many diagnostics we need to run that week. Also, each patient is different and might need different amounts of supplies; we are not building the same engine part over and over. So when our employer was encouraging us to “sell” additional services that a patient did not necessarily need on an emergency basis, we felt good medicine and patient care was no longer the priority. Also, we felt pitting teams of employees against each other, giving staff more work counting COGS and a dramatic increase in unnecessary meetings showed us that he had no concept of employee care.

When covid hit it was a strain on all practices, but emergency seemed to feel the strain much more than general practice or specialty. The influx of emergency visits sky rocketed and staff shortages caused extreme wait times and overstretched employees. Then our owner and other management staff went to remote work and became even more out of touch with employee and patient needs. They began sending out new rules or changing standard operating procedures without input from those of us actually working on the front lines. The program he had enrolled us in included statistic and profit information sharing at these meetings, so all employees could see that the ER department was creating 70% of the revenue but profits were shared equally over the three departments. This sowed discontent among the ER employees, who were working to the point of tears while the specialty or GP employees were leaving work early everyday, yet sharing equally in bonuses. When the owner sent out offending emails about doctors being the only priority, another doctor and I were written up for responding to the email and sticking up for the technician staff. We only wanted to acknowledge that technician staff were the essential personnel that the practice could not function without and that the technicians were the most at risk on the front lines going car side during COVID. I also got written up for suggesting and collecting opinions from the other doctors for a 2 week shut down when we were working with half of our staff and people were coming in with fevers because we were still drowning in patients. The owner of the practice told the staff the ESOP made us “Owners”, but he retained 51% of the company and ignored our suggestions and requests, telling us we were “undermining management”. We felt the owner at that point showed his hand that he cared about profits over the safety and well being of his staff. We felt the ESOP was a way for him to “sell” his company, putting debt on the employees and him getting a large payout/tax benefit while retaining his dictatorship over policies. Meanwhile, our technicians were crying or having panic attacks on the job due to overwork, and clients and patients were suffering due to long wait times and care that was not focused on their well being but on counting sponges and dollars.

It had been discussed for over a year in joking terms, and sometimes angry venting, that we as an ER department could start somewhere else and work on our own terms, taking all the profit with us. Technicians approached unbidden saying they would leave to work with a specific doctor(s) if they left for another practice. It was also clear by then the long wait times of COVID weren’t dissipating completely, so there was plenty of business in the area for another ER practice. In November of 2021, Shannon and I had dinner together to discuss the serious undertaking of opening a practice. We decided if we were going to be “employee owners” then we wanted to really be an employee that was also the owner: be part of the floor team while also being responsible for the management decisions. No longer would an old white man in his home office dictate how we treat patients, nor would a group of suits in a boardroom decide the hospital standard operating procedures. We decided a core tenant of our business would be that all management members would work also on the floor; whether as a doctor, as a technician, or as a receptionist, managers of any level would work at least 4 shifts a month on the floor interacting with clients, patients and other staff. The goal is to keep us grounded in what it is actually like working on the front lines and thus our SOPs and any policy changes have a strong likelihood it will actually work in practice.

Kaleigh, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Kaleigh was a young girl watching Animal Planet and Discovery Channel, and fell in love with the show “Emergency Vets”. She told her mother she was going to be a veterinarian at 9 years old and followed that dream through. After graduating Vet school, she participated in a rotating internship at a large, corporate, multi-department specialty hospital. She quickly discovered she loved emergency medicine the best out of the disciplines because she felt most fulfilled when she could immediately help a patient’s symptoms. She loves being able to solve a mystery (like what the pet ate) or actually resolve an issue with surgery or medication. Preventative care and long term condition management just didn’t hold the same sense of accomplishment for her.

Shannon did not know what she wanted to be when she grew up, just sort of fell into her first job at an emergency animal hospital. But she quickly found that was her passion, put in the work to become a fully Registered Veterinary Technician in California, then decided to take it even further by going to get her Doctorate in Veterinary Medicine. She has worked almost every position in a veterinary hospital but always knew she wanted to stay in the fast paced emergency department.

Dr. Robinson and Dr. Kafer are both very passionate about providing efficient and excellent medical care in the emergency setting. They were drawn to opening their own veterinary hospital because they saw corporations taking over their industry and felt the decisions about medical care should be made by doctors, not board members in a far away office. They feel very strongly the people making decisions about the flow of the hospital should be present to know the daily operations of the hospital. Their goal is to bring the family vet values to an emergency setting by having no corporate overhead.

Here at EVE, the doctor treating your pet may often be the owner of the practice. You might see the hospital manager helping hold your pet for a blood draw. And the dedicated team was hand picked by Dr. Kafer and Dr. Robinson for their skill and compassion, regardless of their tattoos or hair color. So you as a pet owner can be confident that the treatment options presented for your pet are based on medical recommendations, not corporate quotas to fill.

We are very proud that since opening June 1st, we have had nothing but 5 start reviews on Google.

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

It was actually quite a long road to funding our business. Being associate veterinarians and still both in debt from school loans, we were comfortable supporting our families but certainly did not have the millions needed for the venture we dreamed of. When we started talking about this seriously in November of 2021, we knew we wanted to open a hospital capable of seeing and hospitalizing a large volume of patients 24/7. This meant we needed a large facility and large staff, from the beginning. A lot of banks did not understand our vision. The banks are used to seeing the one or two doctor general practice start in a strip mall, with 1-2 exam rooms and 4-8 staff total. They kept telling us we needed to start small and build up. What they did not understand was the need for a facility like ours, when the current emergency veterinary facilities in the area all had 6-8 hour wait times. They also did not understand the space and staff it takes to care for emergency patients 24/7 from day one. A 2000 square foot facility was never going to be able to take handle emergency surgeries and oxygen dependent patients. Two doctors and 4 technicians were never going to be able to keep a hospital staffed 24/7/365. And trying to start small was only going to cause more problems for us as we tried to move locations because an emergency department does not take clients with us as a general practice might. People go to the closest facility in an emergency, so we needed to be easy to find for our local community.

We first hired a financial advisor to help us get our personal affairs in order and on budget. Then we hired a CPA/MBA who also happened to be a DVM so she could understand what veterinary medicine was capable of producing and supporting. She was an enormous help to us performing local industry studies and creating financial projections to show the banks what we just DVMs could not adequately explain. We had meetings with over 7 different banks that denied us for dreaming too big, including the ones known to provide funding to veterinarians. It took over a year for a bank to finally understand and realistically provide what we would need to purchase an adequately sized building and supply it with all the necessary equipment: > 3 million dollars of loan.

Then with funding from a bank, we of course needed a 10% down payment. We had to continue working as associates and additionally as relief doctors (think locum nurses or substitute teachers) for over another year, while we searched for a building to purchase. Our families helped out with some of the initial capital but mostly it was keeping our families on a strict budget and putting every extra dollar in the business account. The initial dinner where our partnership was formed was in November of 2021; it took until June of 2024 to actually open our doors to our 6000 sq foot facility with 30 employees.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

After the exhausting last three years, working hard at our normal jobs of being emergency vets in addition to endless bank/construction/personnel meetings, our hardest challenges came all in the first month of being open. We thought we were going to be able to open our doors in May of 2024. Honestly, we should have expected there to be construction delays, but there were still so many problems that we never could have predicted after we eventually opened in June 2024. First of all, the construction delay meant we had crates of materials and equipment needing to be delivered to our personal homes first. Then a back-straining rush of trying to get everything moved in, installed, and ready in just 10 days before the open house we had invited people to months earlier. Even then, not everything being delivered was on schedule. We opened without our oxygen hoses, which were on backorder, and our oxygen cage unit, which delivery was delayed because they could not fit the initial truck in our parking lot. There was a discrepancy in the understanding of our submitted licensing paperwork with the medicine supply companies, which they took weeks to respond to, so we opened with limited supply of controlled substances (the real important ones to stop seizures and provide pain relief). In addition, the electronic cabinet which was supposed to make our record keeping of medicines so much easier was set up by their install person wrong, taking us weeks to reprogram and re-learn how to use it properly. The phone number, which we had been told was reserved for us months prior and which we had printed on all of our promotional materials including a monument sign out front, never worked. We were fielding phone calls off a pay-as-you-go cell phone for the first two weeks we were open. The phone company didn’t fix it, they just changed our phone number and did not even reimburse us for all the marketing materials and the sign we had to get reconstructed. On top of not having an adequate phone system, the marketing company we had been working with for months were dragging their feet and did not even have our website live by the time we opened, even though we opened later than expected.

Despite this considerable lack of accurate marketing and our inability to adequately perform some essential functions of an emergency room, we still had staff that had started their contracts and we needed to pay. Even though the bank had funded us adequately for the building and equipment, leaving a significant amount left over from the beginning amount in the loan, there was not enough working capital allocated to cover our payroll. Our projections had accounted for much more business in the first few weeks open, but due to all the delays in construction, delays in equipment delivery, delays in inventory stocking, then the inability of clients to find us efficiently (wrong phone number and no website) we obviously did not meet our projections. This meant 30 people were counting on us for their livelihood paycheck, and the business had not even made enough to cover our initial inventory bills, let alone payroll. There was still enough in the total loan amount, but the bank was making us jump through hoops and redefine projections on a company that had not even been open three weeks yet, just to move the money from one allocation category to another. This meant that the Kafer and Robinson personal saving accounts were drained and even some in our retirement accounts was liquidated to put in the business account and cover payroll for the first two months.

Now here we are 3 months in, and we have not taken any paycheck ourselves. We are living off our retirement accounts while still working 3-5 shifts (39-65 hours) a week as on the floor doctors and even more hours doing the administrative tasks of owners. Luckily business is picking up and the bank got their ducks lined up for us, so we are able to pay our staff and our bills for now. But we are still not making enough to pay ourselves at all or make any kind of profit yet. We expect our business to continue to increase as our name is now out in the community and even other veterinarians are referring to us. Our google reviews have been nothing but 5 stars, so we know our resilience is paying off.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.evepethospital.com
• Instagram: 17841468040642997
• Facebook: 314170701783677
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaleigh-c-robinson-934504296
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/eve-pet-hospital-mesa
• Other: tiktok: @eve.pet.hospital

Image Credits

All Photos released for media use to EVE Pet Hospital
Photographer credits: Emma Kulkarni, Bernice Rios