Cindy Barnes and I met by chance on a flight back from Vegas, after the Western Veterinary Conference. What’s an IT guy doing at a veterinary conference? Learning about vets. My wife Penny noticed Cindy’s necklace, and the two seats next to her were free. Turns out Cindy’s a vet, the founder of Shepherd Vet, a practice management software that clients of mine use at their clinics. Well, that’s a cool coincidence! But Cindy’s no longer involved in the day-to-day operations at Shepherd Vet, she’s now empowering independent veterinarians to own their own practices. Let’s face it, taking care of BUSINESS is not the same as taking care of A BUSINESS. Different skill set, but well worth the effort if you succeed. And even if you don’t.
She grew up around horses, dogs, cats, and animals of all sorts, but Cindy didn’t plan on becoming a vet. She became one “out of necessity.” Working as a vet tech, including a volunteer stint for an organization that ran spay/neuter clinics on the reservations, her boss encouraged her to go to vet school. She was already teaching veterinary students about anesthesia and physical exam skills. It made sense. Her husband at the time was a commission-only car salesman, they had five kids, and Cindy was in her early 30s. By starting out later, she wouldn’t be a vet till she was forty, but she got to be with her kids, and she didn’t miss out on all the important mom stuff along the way.
You need a horse trailer full of cash if you want to go to vet school. Which left Cindy with massive student debt after graduation. Why not go further into debt and open a vet clinic in Kalispell, Montana? Why not, indeed. Cindy was always an entrepreneur, mowing lawns, cleaning houses, and babysitting as a kid. They say the first rule of holes is to stop digging. But the first rule of entrepreneurs is to KEEP DIGGING. You can’t be afraid to fail. Or maybe you are afraid, but you forge ahead anyway.
Things didn’t work out in Montana. Call it the weather. No matter, she bought a nights and weekends emergency animal hospital in Prescott, Arizona. Within three months, she’d turned the hospital into a 24/7 operation. Those first three months? That was all on Cindy.
Inefficient software meant long nights at the clinic. There was no great alternative, either. So Cindy designed her own, going up against billion dollar competitors who couldn’t grasp the concept that vets should get to go home to their families in the evening. She brought in her son, Kirk, a recent art school graduate, as project manager. They hired a software development firm and used Cindy’s clinic as the test site. These days, Shepherd Vet is the fastest growing cloud-based veterinary software on the market.
The kids are all grown, successful on their own, and Cindy’s got TEN grandbabies. She recently relocated to Boise to be with her fiancé, Mike, a team roper in the rodeo. He’s a “steady Eddie” companion to Cindy’s globetrotting ways.
I’m struck by the fact that Cindy Barnes pulled off these entrepreneurial feats with nothing but pure gumption and a house full of kids. She had to believe in herself because there was no one back home cheering her on. But she did it, and continues to do it, because when you’re an entrepreneur, you’ve just got to keep digging.
So if it fails, what would I do? Go back to square one and go from there. What are you going to do next?