Celebrating Year One!tral Valve Disease? It’s hard to believe it’s been exactly one year since VETgirl joined the BluePearl/ MARS. While a few of you complained about this, we wanted to reflect back on this year about this collaboration. 1. WORK-LIFE BALANCE my idea of VETgirl. It’s hard to believe that we officially started our LLC at the Minnesota Secretary 10 years ago in 2012. It’s hard to believe that we built VETgirlontherun.com for one year, only to release it on July 1, 2013. To be honest, it’s been a lot of work. It’s been a lot of sleepless nights. It’s been a lot of time taken away from our spouses and children. It’s been a lot of late nights (Justine) or early mornings (Garret) on our laptop, when our household was asleep. It was trying to figure out QuickBooks. It was trying to grow social media without much paid advertising. It was begging our internmates and residentmates to help lecture for us at minimal wage rates. But grow it did. While Garret and I are still up for all the hard work, one of the reasons why we sold to Blue Pearl/Mars was to regain our work-life balance. After a decade of a lot of sweat equity, we needed some help. After all, it was yours truly (Garret and I) as the only W2 employees for the past 10 years, and we needed a lifeline. 2. RESOURCES And, thanks to resources, we were able to grow our team. 3. BUILDING OUR TEAM Through partnership with MARS, we were able to grow our full-time team from two W2 employees to 10. You can see our amazing VETgirl team HERE. We’ve been honored to have Tracy Covert, who was part of the WVC team for the previous 11 years, join us as our Director of Events/Marketing. We were honored to have amazing veterinary technician, Amy Johnson, join us as our Manager of Content. We finally had a full-time social media veterinary colleague, Rachel Feldman join us and long-time, first to help out, Corrie McClusky officially on board as member of the team. Being ECC biased, we grabbed the amazing vet tech (who’s VTS in ECC), Tiffany Gendron to help grow our medical content. We officially built out our IT crew with Stacy Calabretta and sales/marketing team and Melissa Mercado and Debbie Lynch. Why I’m happy? Because I don’t have to spend late nights on my laptop trying to figure out PNL’s, invoices, and QuickBooks, thanks to MARS! 4. ADDING MORE CE As board-certified veterinary specialists in emergency critical care, Garret and I are classic hyper-efficient, go-go-go, workaholics. It’s hard to believe that it was over 10 years ago that I first reached out to Garret (with NDA in hand!) about Which led us to teaming up with a strategic partner with MARS. We wanted to continue to grow VETgirl as we always boasted: clinically relevant, practical, unbiased continuing education (CE) that was going to help save a patient’s life. In 2013, we released VETgirl with 12 hours of CE a year. In 2014, we jumped to 20 hours. Each year since then, we’ve added anywhere between 20-40 additional hours of new, live CE a year. Through amazing resources, we were able to close out 2021 with 165 hours of live CE a year. And that’s not including the thousands of hours of CE on-demand in webinars, videos, Real-Life Rounds, blogs, podcasts and more! Thanks to resources from MARS, we were able to get a CMS to help make the user experience better for you. We were able to expand, after years of trying, to offer a free Spanish certificate track with 20 hours of free CE. 5. ADDING MORE LIVE EVENTS Back in 2018, we decided to go beyond the screen and offer our first ever LIVE event. We created VETgirl U and it was designed to be a boutique conference designed to help you learn clinically relevant, practical CE with TED-like talks. We wanted to reward our amazing VETgirl community – including non-throw away conference bags (e.g., North Face, anyone?) – after all, you guys deserve it after the past 2.5 years of COVID, curbside craziness! Thanks to strategic partnership with BluePearl and generous sponsorship with Royal Canin, we are able to offer our small group “Powerful Minds” women’s leadership retreat in November 2022. We’ve added our first ever wetlab to VETgirl U (eyeballs, anyone?!). And we’ll continue to grow it more in the future. It’s been an amazing ride. Thank you for sticking with us and trusting us with your veterinary learning. Our entire VETgirl team promises to continue to strive to make us the #1 online veterinary CE provider out there; after all, if you can walk away from our CE with 2-3 points to save that patient’s life or improve your quality of medicine, that’s why we’re here. While we always love seeing you “behind the screen,” we hope to see you in person at VETgirl U 2022 in a few weeks in Minneapolis.
CONTENTS JULY 2022
ARTICLES
18 5 Things You Must Have at a Veterinary Clinic Before You Take That Job 21 On Simone Biles, Emotional Agility, and Leading with Mental Health 04 Can Diet Reshape Early Intervention for Dogs with Myxomatous Mitral Valve Disease? 08 Kidney Disease in Horses 10 Creating Sticky Messages: Your Team Superpower
21 TECH TIP 22 UPCOMING WEBINARS WHAT’S NEW 23 PROVIDER SPOTLIGHT
Your truly,
Justine, Garret & the entire VETgirl team
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