Put Me in Front of a Crowd

I like to write. I like it a lot.

But put me in front of a crowd with a microphone in my hand, and there's nowhere I'd rather be.

I speak to professional groups, students, associations, and leadership teams, at conferences, in boardrooms, wherever people gather to actually listen. That includes keynotes, continuing education sessions, and lunch-and-learns, but I'm open to plenty of formats beyond that, and I'm just as happy showing up on a screen as I am walking into a room. Veterinary medicine is certainly part of my world, but it's not the fence line around what I talk about.

Some of the topics I'm most passionate about are career and the individual professional: figuring out what you're actually good at, making a hard turn into something new when the old path stops fitting, starting a side business just to see if it grows, or going out on your own entirely. My own career didn't move in a straight line either, so I'm not talking theory.

I'm just as passionate about leadership, and not just for people who already have the title. I've led people my entire career, in teams ranging from five to three hundred, and I think you can lead long before anyone hands you one. That's a lot of what I talk about when the topic turns to leading teams — how to run one, how to handle conflict before it curdles into something worse, and how to get people through change without losing them.

Whatever the topic, there are usually a lot of stories, plenty of humor, and a healthy dose of Appalachian honesty. You can make people laugh and still say something that matters. Sometimes that's the best way to get it to stick.

I'm not much interested in standing behind a podium and reading bullet points to a room full of grown adults who can read just fine on their own.

My goal is pretty simple: I want people to laugh, learn something, and leave with at least one idea they're ready to put to work.

Why me?

Fair question.

If I’m going to stand in front of a room and talk about careers, starting something of your own, changing directions, figuring out what you’re good at, or leading people without making everybody miserable, I ought to have some mileage on the tires.

I do.

I’ve spent more than 25 years as a veterinarian, hospital administrator, business owner, entrepreneur, educator, professor, program director, and now executive director of a large academic veterinary teaching hospital.

I started out in small animal practice and hospital administration, then decided one job apparently wasn’t enough and built a mobile livestock practice on the side. Later I opened my own veterinary practice, grew it, sold it, and somehow also ran an e-commerce business for more than a decade. At some point I wandered into higher education, built an accredited veterinary technology program from scratch, and eventually ended up leading Purdue University’s veterinary nursing programs.

Today I oversee hospital operations at Iowa State University’s Lloyd Veterinary Medical Center.

None of that was part of some beautifully color-coded career plan I made when I was 25. Mostly I kept finding things that interested me, saying yes before I had everything figured out, and learning fast enough not to get run over.

I’ve also spent a big chunk of my career teaching veterinary students, veterinary technician students, and working professionals. So I’ve had plenty of practice taking complicated ideas and trying to make them useful before everybody starts checking their phones.

That’s really why I feel comfortable talking about this stuff.

I’ve started businesses, sold two, changed careers, built programs from nothing, taught a lot of students, led a lot of people, made some good decisions, made a few that probably deserved adult supervision, and learned something from nearly all of it.

So no, I don’t have every answer.

But I’ve seen some stuff...

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