My story
I have lived both sides of the corporate story.
In 2019 I sold my practice to a corporate group. On paper it was the rational choice. It protected my family's finances, it reduced my personal risk, and it looked like it secured the future.
What followed taught me the limits of a purely rational decision. Centralised systems and efficiency-driven change pulled the practice away from the people it was meant to serve. The team felt it, the clients noticed, and the performance that was supposed to improve started to slide. I was not happy, and the numbers were not better. I learned the hard way that when a practice trades away what it stands for, it trades away the only advantage that cannot be bought back: trust.
The turning point was a conversation with my wife, Ange. She was clear that if we built anything again, it had to be built for something other than money. So we did. We started Taylor Vets as an independent practice with its values written down before we had treated a single patient: trust, care, community, quality and integrity. Two and a half years later we have grown from nothing to fifty-five people.
Values are decoration unless you use them, so we use them. Every new member of the team gets a booklet called the Taylor Way on day one, and it becomes our shared language when decisions get hard. Care means advice that puts the animal and the owner's circumstances first, and a team that is never asked to bend clinical judgment to commercial pressure. Community means employing locally, buying locally, and turning up for the places we work in. We once campaigned against parking charges in Brackley town centre. We have our own car park. That is rather the point.
There is one part of our mission I hold closest. Early in my career, people in this profession helped me when they had nothing to gain from it, and I have never forgotten it. Taylor Vets is built to pass that on to the next generation. Younger members of our team can earn a real stake in the business through share options, because the people who build something should be able to own a piece of it. Beyond our own walls, I write for practice owners in NVS's The Cube and speak on ownership at SPVS Congress, BVA Live and the London Vet Show, because the leap into ownership once felt impossible to me, and I want to make it feel possible for the vets coming next. If enough of us take that leap, this profession stays in the hands of the people who practise it.
Quality is the value you have to prove rather than claim, so here is the evidence. The practice grew 40 per cent in the last year. Our Net Promoter Score is 97. Staff turnover has fallen from 35 per cent to 5. And the number I am proudest of is a personal one. I spend more than twice as much of my week being a vet as I did before, because the business no longer needs me to hold it up. Build for the right things and the results follow.
I do not tell this story to be the hero of it. I tell it because almost nobody else in the profession can speak from both sides, and because integrity demands the whole truth: I criticise the structures that pull practices away from their communities, and I never criticise the vets working inside them. Say what you mean, do what you said, and prefer an honest disagreement to a comfortable silence.
If any of that is useful, the talks and articles are on this site. And if you are a pet owner rather than a vet, the practice we built is Taylor Vets. Come and see what we mean.
John