The only thing worse than training up and pouring your heart and soul into a team member and having them leave, is not training and pouring your heart and soul into them and having them stay. At AMC, we bring in new team members through a much more rigorous hiring process than ever, and we like to go after rock stars. Over the years we have brought on over 5 young go-getter veterinarians. And each time we start the hiring process, I can my buddy Dr. Dan Thomson and tell him, we are looking, and we want to visit with your “Top 5 Best Ya Got” veterinary students. We then begin the process of working to bring who we feel is the best one to our practice. As a young business owner, I began th

For me, the purpose of being in business is to take care of the ones you love. And that isn’t just your family. We must love and take care of the family’s of the people that spend every day giving their all for you and the business. If we have tunnel vision and are only looking out for our own greedy interests, we aren’t taking care of our team. But there is one key to any leadership role that must occur for any leader to be maximally effective. Every leader is limited by the effectiveness of their marriage. Nothing will undermine the effectiveness of a leader more than a bad marriage. And so as we talk about taking care of those we love, it is both at home and at work. At home, for a

We are in the midst of graduation seasons across America, celebrating graduations from 6th grade, 8th grade, high school, college, grad schools, and professional schools. There is this whole new crop of kids and young adults moving forward to the next adventure and chapter in their life with many unknowns, yet most with a full beacon of optimism looking to succeed at the next level. We take a day or two, celebrate those monumental achievements, have a little fun with friends and family, give thanks to those a part of the comforting support systems, and then keep looking forward. For some, and even most, that next step makes us a little nervous, anxious, and maybe even scared. The two main

In today's world, there is routinely a lot of talk about the millennial generation, which happens for several reasons. Mostly we like to do the easy thing, which is to point out the negative aspects of the generation and the insufficiencies they bring as a stereotype. But also, many employers face challenges with millennials on their teams. More than 33% of our current workforce is made up by millennials, and by 2025 that number will increase to more than 75% of our workforce. So we must be able to understand how to find the rockstars among their generation, as well as how to hire them, retain them, and capitalize off them in our operations. The great news about this is that the rockstar mil

We routinely talk about conflict, the challenges with it, and at the same time having the intentional ability to embrace conflict. Embracing conflict in not natural for any one, and takes an extreme level of self awareness, and steady focus on commonalities of solutions not the conflict. But our biggest challenge in any conflict tends to be the natural human weakness to react rather than to blow off the steam, count to 1,000, wait until the next morning, to formulate wise words versus poisonous words. There are 4 things in any conflict we all have to work very hard to avoid, and they are criticism, defensiveness, contempt, and stonewalling. A Not-So-Funny Story I recently had an experience