You guys nailed it with the amazing questions I received as feedback in my Instagram stories. 

“How did you find a location to purchase?” 

You can do this a million different ways. For me, I just kind of weirdly lucked into it. I had looked online for some loan options for purchasing and had gotten hooked up with a banker who does this kind of stuff. I didn’t have a place I was looking at, I was just kind of trying to figure out what the loan situation was. And he just called me about six weeks after our initial conversation and said,, “Hey, there’s this property up in Oceanside. There’s a practice that’s for sale. Do you want to go look at it? Because I know the guy who owns it.”

And I was like, “Oh yeah, I’ll go look at it.” It was the first one. I’m like, “It’s not going to be the one.” 

Well, it was the one. 

It was the only one I looked at, which is kind of weird. But we went up there late one night after closing on a Monday, and the doctor was there by himself and took us around and we chatted with him a little bit. And I remember just walking around going, “Oh, this is good,” and again, didn’t walk in thinking it was going to be anything, just like, “We’ll go, but it’s never the first one.” I also bought the first house I looked at, so I should probably have known going into it that this might be a thing.

So that’s how we did it. It can just be random things like that. 

Before that, I had a map. It had pins in it for veterinary hospitals all over the County of San Diego, because it’s huge. I had done my research and identified the practices with single vets or vets who were older and might be considering retirement soon. What was their succession plan? 

I did send letters. I have a letterhead with my San Diego DVM logo on it, and they basically said, 

“Hey, I saw your practice. I’ve been following you a little bit. And I’m just wondering if you had a succession plan. PS, I am a real person. Here’s where you can find me.” 

And I did not get any hits on that. I’ve heard from a lot of other people that they do. They just kind of find people in town and call them and go, “What’s your plan for when you leave?” And I think it can be that easy. I just didn’t experience that. But I think it goes to show you to get in there and learn a lot about the practices in your community.

A really good way to go about it is your reps. Your drug reps are in the hospitals, or these days, maybe not any of the hospitals, but they know a lot about what’s going on. They know what hospitals are doing really well and maybe which ones aren’t or where so

There you go. Those are really good options. And of course, networking.

It was kind of weird for me. I really didn’t expect that call, but it just goes to show you that you never know where you can find these little bits of information.