Join us in Greenville, SC from April 25-28th.
UVC, APRIL 25-28, 2019
Uncharted Veterinary Conference 2019 (UVC) in Greenville, South Carolina is like nothing you’ve experienced before. It’s an immersive, workshop and discussion-driven marketing and strategy smorgasbord for anyone obsessed with growing a business or brand in veterinary medicine. This conference is all about growth!
ADVANCED EDUCATION
One test every workshop must pass before being added to the Uncharted program is whether it would be done at another veterinary conference. If the topic is something that’s commonly being covered elsewhere, or if it is feels remedial, then it won’t be at UVC. This program is for people who already have a basic understanding of marketing and want to push themselves to learn new and advanced marketing and strategy skills.
Join us in Greenville, SC from April 25-28th.
INTIMATE SETTING
Uncharted limits attendance to ensure you have access to the instructors and conversations that will help you grow your career or business. Workshops average less than 25 individuals per session, and each attendee has multiple opportunities to attend most workshops. Previous attendees have priority in claiming registration spots, and this event will sell out quickly.
2018 WORLD CLASS INSTRUCTORS
2019 Conference Speakers Will Be Announced Soon!
Dr. Addie Reinhard is the Founder and CEO of MentorVet, a rapidly growing entity that leverages evidence-based approaches to empower individuals to thrive within veterinary medicine. She is a veterinary wellbeing researcher, and her research focuses on developing and evaluating innovative interventions to support mental health and wellbeing within the veterinary profession and is on the research team for the Merck Animal Health Veterinary Wellbeing Study. In 2021, she completed a master’s degree in Community and Leadership Development and a Graduate Certificate in College Teaching and Learning from the University of Kentucky and holds a certificate in Veterinary Human Support from the University of Tennessee. Medical Director Summit 2024 | Hiring & Retaining Veterinary Professionals Through Mentorship In a demanding profession with many inherent stressors and challenges, quality mentorship is vital. Many veterinary professionals are seeking mentorship in the workplace, yet, as a leader, finding the time, resources, and energy to effectively mentor others becomes challenging. In this workshop, we will discuss how mentorship is evolving in the veterinary industry and consider how to craft more intentional structures for mentorship within your practice to recruit and retain individuals. Leave with a plan to continue crafting your unique mentorship structures for individuals you support. Medical Director Summit Tami Lind is currently ICU at Purdue University and has been working at the university for the last 13 years. She attended veterinary technology school at Purdue and graduated in 2010 with a bachelor’s degree in Veterinary technology. Two years later Tami assumed the ICU and ER supervisor role at Purdue University. She received her VTS in Emergency/Critical Care in 2016. Her passion is teaching veterinary nurses and veterinary students in preparing them for their career ahead. Practice Manager Summit 2024 – Peer to Manager – I’m the Manager…Now What? In 13 years of managing teams, Tami Lind has learned what it takes to move from a technician role to a manager role. Most of the time, team members are moved up into management without much formal training, and likely have been part of the team for some time. This can create some major challenges as dynamics shift from peer to manager! In this workshop, Tami will share how you can move up in your company (minus the drama) and the skills you need to know to manage people who may be your friends (and some who are not). PMS Speaker Stacy Pursell is an executive search consultant or executive recruiter serving the Animal Health industry and Veterinary profession for 25+ years. She is a workplace/workforce expert and a Certified Employee Retention Specialist. She is hired by the world’s leading Animal Health and Veterinary employers to find top talent while at the same time helping Animal Health and Veterinary professional take the next strategic move in their career. Stacy is also the host of The People of Animal Health Podcast. Uncharted Veterinary Conference 2024 – Recruiting Using Your Vision and Brand to Cut Through the Noise More details to come! Originally hailing from Michigan, Victoria Hammond has been proud to call South Carolina home for the past 20 years. A graduate of Central Michigan University and Clemson University MBA Program, she has spent her career in the marketing field – both client and agency side across a variety of industries. Uncharted Veterinary Conference 2024 – Brand Building and Community Engagement Referral traffic down? Feeling like the word isn't getting out about your practice even though you've been around for years? This general session will urge you to challenge the status quo of sending mail or running a “campaign” by focusing on ways to become part of the community in which you serve. Walk away with methods to find community events, engage with other business in the area, and build your brand through those means to grow referrals and awareness for your veterinary practice. Uncharted Veterinary Conference 2024 – Brand and Service Alignment Across Multi-Site Practices Struggling to create a consistent brand presence and client experience across multiple practices? Afraid that you're practice will lose it's sense of self when folding into a larger brand? You're not alone! This workshop will help you explore ways to maintain consistent experience and service without losing your culture. Take away practical tools and strategies to maintain brand consistency while also maintaining customer and team experience. Dr. Amanda Donnelly, a speaker, consultant, and author with over 30 years’ experience in the veterinary profession. She is a second-generation veterinarian who combines her practice experience and business expertise to help practice leaders communicate better with their teams and clients. Dr. Donnelly is a graduate of the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Missouri. She is the author of Leading and Managing Veterinary Teams and writes the Talk the Talk communication column for Today’s Veterinary Business. Dr. Donnelly has won many accolades including being named the 2023 Practice Management Educator of the Year for WVC. Practice Manager Summit 2024 – How to Create a Culture of Accountability It can be daunting to hold current members of the team accountable when they are struggling to meet expectations, especially when you’re already short-staffed. Inconsistent job performance is one of the most common frustrations managers face, so knowing how to have these conversations is key! This general session will teach you how to identify the real reasons employees lack accountability. You will walk away knowing how to communicate what you need, hear what they need, and get better results. Your team members will feel empowered to develop, and you will have systems and communication skills to tackle each of these unique conversations with confidence! PMS Speaker Dharti has been in the veterinary field for over 15 years and served as a veterinarian for the last 8. Her passion for people and clients led her to leadership that provided support across multiple hospitals and markets. Dharti has been an Area Chief of Staff for Banfield Pet Hospital and now works as a Regional Operations Director for Companion Pet Partners. Dharti earned a BS at Texas A&M University and a Master’s in agriculture at Sul Ross State University. She went back to become a DVM at the Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine. She started practicing in Mesa, Arizona to be closer to her sister and soon thereafter met her husband. She resides in Arizona with her husband, 15-month-old daughter Sameera, and 8-year-old Red Heeler Rani. Capacity for Trust: Developing an Effective Team Using Trust Building Behaviors Communication is crucial in developing a successful team. How can you create communication practices that build trust and drive performance? Trust starts with psychological safety between you and your team. In this workshop, Dharti Patel will highlight how trust builds effective teams that perform better. Dharti will review communication strategies that can build psychological safety in the workplace to develop trust among your teammates. Learn to interpret facts from feelings, the values expressed by our direct reports, and how to utilize this tool to help communicate better with difficult situations or confrontations. Set a stronger foundation for building trust with your teams. Medical Director Summit For over 20 years Amanda has worked as a veterinary technician in various capacities. Her interest in behavior led her to join Dr. Feltes at The Behavior Clinic in 2009. She graduated from the AAHA Distance Education Program (Cedar Valley College) and attended Ashland University majoring in History and Geology, completing an additional degree in business in 2021. As the Practice Manager, Amanda is often behind the scenes handling the day-to-day business of keeping TBC running, supporting our referring veterinarians, and working with the TBC team to assist our clients and their pets. A nationally recognized speaker in veterinary behavior and Fear FreeTM Approved Speaker, Amanda enjoys teaching veterinary team members how to implement and develop behavior care as a team. When not at work, she enjoys hiking, reading, and hanging out with her husband Scott, their 2 German Shorthaired Pointers (Brego & Moose), and the family clowder. Unleashing Team Training Success When it comes to training, timing matters! Animal behavior expert Amanda Schwarzwalder is taking her extensive knowledge of animal behavior and has applied it to create successful training techniques that lead to positive outcomes for her team. She will share how she implements timely feedback, breaks down complex tasks into smaller, manageable ones to support collaborative learning, and creates optimal training environments. This interactive workshop will help you find time for training and make that time as effective as possible. Team Leads Summit Megan Brashear, BS, RVT, VTS (ECC) graduated in 2000 with a BS in Veterinary Technology and obtained her Veterinary Technician Specialty in Emergency/Critical Care in 2004. She has enjoyed working in emergency and critical care since 2000 and is the Senior Manager of Veterinary Nursing at the Purdue University Veterinary Hospital in West Lafayette, Indiana. Here, Megan truly enjoys the opportunity to work with veterinary nursing supervisors as well as teach and train technicians and students in the hospital. She loves to travel and lecture sharing her knowledge with veterinary technicians and nurses around the world. Thriving Not Just Surviving Veterinary Medicine Veterinary medicine is not always a walk in the park. There are days that it is hard! In her general session, Megan Brashear will share her personal story of successfully managing complete professional burnout. The techniques she implemented brought her back to finding fun and fulfillment in veterinary medicine and helped others on the team do the same. Team Leads Summit Dr. Quincy Hawley is a 2013 graduate of NC State's CVM and has been in small animal practice and relief veterinarian since graduating. Most notably, he is an internationally recognized speaker who presents on well-being and burnout preparedness for veterinary professionals. After overcoming his own bout of veterinary burnout, he cofounded Get MotiVETed Veterinary Wellbeing Solutions LLC to help all members of the vet community to enjoy life and vet med instead of enduring through them. Dr. Hawley is also one of the co-creators of Get MotiVETed University – the world’s first school of well-being specifically for veterinary professionals, which houses the Veterinary Burnout P.R.E.P. Certification Training Program. Through the Get MotiVETed platform, Dr. Hawley hopes to make poor well-being and burnout things of the past for the entire global veterinary community! How to Burnout Proof Your Life and Vet Experience as a Team Leader Veterinary professionals in all roles are prone to burnout, and likely will experience it at some point in their careers. It’s time to take a proactive approach! In this workshop session, Quincy Hawley will share his team’s 5-step process that will guide you toward a burnout proof experience in veterinary medicine. Bonus: it requires no permission and no money to implement! This framework can be applied to your own career and shared with your team. Team Leads Summit Fueled by childhood dreams of being a keeper at his own zoo, Dr. Bourquin realized from a young age his path – a career in veterinary work. His journey began with graduation from Cornell University, the No. 1 school in the U.S. for veterinary medicine. After 13 years as a Boston veterinarian, he founded Boston Veterinary Clinic in 2012, placing an emphasis on trust, compassion, and top-level patient care. Embraced by the pet-loving community and with the aid of like-minded veterinary professionals, the practice has grown to 5 locations, each focusing on the best medicine possible with accreditations from AAHA, Fear Free, and Cat-Friendly Practices. Beyond the Stethoscope: Navigating the Diverse Roles of a Chief Medical Officer Building a culture that can embrace change is imperative. Life in veterinary practice is constantly challenging you to adapt. Staff shortages, people leaving the industry, financial woes for our clients and us, corporate competition, on-line pharmacies, keeping up with tech, etc. When faced with change, one has to be able to identify a problem, discuss underlying issues, formulate a plan, and reassess for improvement, just like in any medical workup. In this workshop, Brain Bourquin will pull from his experience as a Chief Medical Officer and delve deeper into how to manage the complexities of being a CMO from medical excellence, leadership, fostering culture, promoting work life balance by example, and still have time to sleep.
Medical Director Summit Dr. Erica Pounds is the Program Manager for Team-based Care with the Veterinary Affairs Team of Banfield Pet Hospital. Erica began her career with Banfield after graduating from the University of Tennessee College of Veterinary Medicine in 2011. Throughout her career with Banfield, she has held hospital and market leadership positions such as Chief of Staff, Area Chief of Staff, and Interim Director of Veterinary Quality. Erica has a passion for learning and development, particularly in the area of leadership development. Outside of work, Erica thrives in the land of superheroes and soccer, with her husband and their four amazing boys! Medical Director Summit 2024 | Make Your Job Easier: Tackling Team Culture Team culture is the foundation upon which all your plans as a leader are built. A strong, positive team dynamic rooted in safety, well-being, belonging, and inclusion will help you successfully lead any plan or initiative. Get ready to explore what team culture really is! In this workshop, we will walk through strategies to identify a team's current state and areas of opportunity to intentionally build plans to move your team toward its future state. Medical Director Summit Rebecca May is the Business Development and Personnel Manager for Happy Tails Emergency Clinic in Greensboro, NC. She has an undergraduate certificate in Veterinary Practice Management from Penn Foster and is currently preparing to take the Certified Veterinary Practice Manager (CVPM) national exam. She is an active member of the Veterinary Hospital Managers Association (VHMA), the Triad Hospital Managers Group, and the Veterinary Managers Group of the Carolinas. Rebecca is also a member of the Society for Veterinary Medical Ethics, the Human-Animal Bond Association and is a Fear Free Elite Certified Professional. Rebecca has written content for CattleDog Publishing and Aspire Vet. Her interests are emergency and critical care medicine, leadership, staff development, Fear Free and low-stress handling techniques, and canine and feline enrichment. How a No-Blame Culture Approach Can Safeguard Against Medical Errors and Other Mistakes This session will take the guesswork out of identifying causes of medical errors and other mistakes in veterinary practices. Rebecca May is a practice manager at an emergency practice in North Carolina. Her use of an Incident Decision Tree has helped her to follow up on errors that inevitably occur in veterinary medicine with a clear look at the roles of the people involved and the systems they are working within. Building a “No Blame” approach to addressing medical errors will alleviate fear of giving and receiving feedback and improve your team’s overall response when things go wrong. Culture Conference Stephanie Goss started in the veterinary field quite by accident but fell in love with the experience of being able to serve people and their pets. With over 15 years of experience both on the floor and in the office, Stephanie is passionate about staff education, team culture, management and training. Stephanie loves helping managers and owners control their inventory and leverage their profits by maximizing their home delivery using online pharmacies. She is a vet med nerd who loves to geek out about technology, especially Practice Management Software. She has experience as a practice manager in both private and corporate practices, ranging in size from one to seven doctors. She has experience as a consultant and trainer with AVImark software, paperlite/paperless transitions, practice management and staff. Stephanie is the Director of Community Development for the Uncharted Veterinary Conference. More notably she’s the co-host of the Uncharted Veterinary Podcast where her laughter highlights the start of every episode and her knowledge bombs reign down like massive chunks of enlightenment from on high. Medical Director Summit 2024 | MD/PM Partnership: The Partnership You Don't Want To Screw Up How strong is your partnership with your practice manager? The relationship between medical directors and practice managers is pivotal to success in veterinary practices. Yet unclear role responsibilities in the practice or differences in communication and team coaching styles can make developing a strong relationship challenging. This workshop dives into key factors in creating a successful medical director-practice manager relationship and how to develop personalized action plans to enhance current partnerships. Cultivate a culture of accountability and mutual support to help this partnership, and your practice, flourish. Medical Director Summit Jenn Galvin is a spreadsheet-loving Veterinary Practice Manager with over 20 years of experience in the field. Growing her hospital and helping her team succeed through hard work, positive leadership, and humor is what gets her up in the morning. She's an introverted inventory nerd that loves bratty beagles, dungeons and dragons, and the outdoors. She loves sharing the mistakes she's made, and the things she's learned with other hospital owners and managers so they can grow their hospitals, teams, and themselves! Erika is a dedicated small animal veterinarian and veterinary hospital owner with a solid connection to both patients and clients. Started From the Bottom Now We’re Here –Management and Owner Relationships We are a team of two practice owners – one of us is the veterinarian and one of us is the practice manager – which gives us an interesting perspective. We see a lot of practice owners struggle with trying to run their practices, manage their people, and be a doctor all at the same time. We are excited to help other practice owners see the value of hiring and working with a practice manager, and finding other leaders in their practice, and then working together as a team to accomplish their shared vision. We will be reviewing how to find leaders, how to delegate, and how to follow up and follow through so that you can all hold each other accountable, stay in your own lanes, and succeed as a management team. Practice Owner Summit Jen Quammen likes to bring fun and light energy into any presentation; she's rarely been accused of being a wallflower. Dr. Jen loves to speak about practice technology and workflow efficiencies. She and her partner have been speaking and coaching in the arena of personal development since 2013. She still practices as a relief doctor and especially enjoys surgery and pain management. Be prepared for some punny jokes and literal humor. Technology That Will Actually Save You Time If you find yourself or your team having to check messages in numerous places (post-it notes, voicemail, email, social media, carrier pigeon, whiteboard, etc) then this session is for you! Get ready to discuss methods to simplify your communications and develop a framework to collect, log and respond to general client questions, patient follow-ups, and medication refill requests. GSD Shorthanded Speaker Dr. Meredith Jones is a practicing veterinarian and the co-founder of Veterinary Financial Summit, a financial conference and online community for veterinary professionals. She is a self-professed “money nerd” who attends financial conferences and courses in her spare time. In 2016, she completed training to become a financial coach and founded the Debt-Free Vets Facebook group. She is also the co-host of the Veterinary Financial Podcast. Triage Your Personal Finances Time is one of the biggest obstacles for Get Sh*t Done Shorthanded attendees. This workshop will give you practical tips you can use to make progress on your financial goals with minimal time investment. It will guide you through a framework to help you determine your next financial goals and break them down into manageable action steps. GSD Shorthanded Speaker Christina Freeman joined the Adobe Animal Hospital family in 2015 and focused her first few years in the Veterinary Marketplace. She was excited to move to the remote team and work with our online chat services and telemedicine and help these new communication tools grow and evolve. Christina is a native of North Carolina where she currently lives with her family and a large collection of animals great and small. Christina has a retail background and degree in Animal Science from North Carolina State University along with a teaching certification in all things science. She spends her spare time chasing children, gardening, doing pottery and oil painting. Virtual Client Service Representatives: How to Staff Your Hospital From Afar You will walk away from this workshop with an understanding of the basic technology needed for a remote person to help you in your hospital…even as early as next week! Learn how to expand this process to cover additional areas of your practices like in-room checkouts, triaging, surgery scheduling, and more. GSD Shorthanded Speaker Summer Burke-Irmiter, MBA, has worked in veterinary hospitals for over 26 years. At the Uncharted Conferences, you will find her proudly wearing her Founding Member button and excitedly talking about her two amazing hospitals with over 22 doctors, the Open Hospital design which allows clients to go wherever their pets go and pitching her latest outlandish ideas to anybody who will listen. She's earned the nickname of “Goddess of Innovation” in some circles (along with other nicknames we won't mention here) by helping to launch remote teams at Adobe over 9 years ago, pushing for video visits a year before the pandemic, and touting the benefits of online chat to her team. The recent development of Video Client Representatives is one of the many creative solutions Summer has to solve common issues in our industry. Summer runs away to the circus every chance she gets and trains in Cirque du Soleil type arts such as lyra, a spinning hoop 6-12 feet in the air. Virtual Client Service Representatives: How to Staff Your Hospital From Afar You will walk away from this workshop with an understanding of the basic technology needed for a remote person to help you in your hospital…even as early as next week! Learn how to expand this process to cover additional areas of your practices like in-room checkouts, triaging, surgery scheduling, and more. GSD Shorthanded Speaker Maria Pirita is currently the Business Development Coordinator at Uncharted Veterinary Community where she is responsible for strategic direction with industry partners and creating educational content for the veterinary community. A seasoned professional with 20 years of leadership experience and nearly a decade of that within veterinary medicine, Maria is well known for driving growth through positive culture, effective marketing strategies, and careful strategic planning. She most recently served as the Executive Director of a veterinary clinic which she directly grew from a single doctor to a multi-million dollar practice in just 3 years. Maria has an Associate's Degree in Business Administration and recently passed her exam to become a Certified Veterinary Practice Manager. She is currently based out of Tampa, Florida where she shares her home with her husband, dog, two rabbits and a quaker parrot. Practice Leaders Summit – Boundary Blueprint: The Secret to Building a Dynamic Duo Practice Managers have to master the art of balancing their own needs with those of their leaders and teams. Setting boundaries with their boss looks different than the boundaries they would set with their team. During this workshop, we’ll go over the different types of boundaries and how they apply to the specific role of Practice Managers. We’ll also dig in deep to what their own personal values and boundaries are in order to communicate them better with their leaders which in turn creates a dynamic duo of a relationship. Uncharted Veterinary Conference 2024 – Setting and Using Your Vision and Values as a Team More details to come! Jason is a fourth-year veterinary student at the University of Illinois. He is the SAVMA Class President for his veterinary class and was the VBMA at Illinois President for two years. He hopes to own his own practice after graduation! What Do New Grads Want? We are working in a world where the need for veterinarians is outgrowing the number of new graduates that are coming out of veterinary school. In this workshop, you will cover trends in new graduate jobs, a survey of 300 students, an in-depth evaluation of the survey results, comments from the survey, and tips and tricks to recruit and retain new grads. GSD Shorthanded SpeakerAddie Reinhard, DVM, MS
Tami Lind, BS, RVT, VTS(ECC)
Amanda Donnelly, DVM, MBA
Dharti Patel, DVM
Amanda Schwarzwalder, RVT, KPA CTP, VTS (Behavior), CVPM
Megan Brashear, BS, RVT, VTS (ECC)
Quincy Hawley, DVM
Brian Bourquin, DVM
Erica Pounds, DVM
Rebecca May
Stephanie Goss
She really enjoys the people part of this profession and the long-standing relationships she develops with clients. Erika understands the strain we are all under within the veterinary profession. As an owner of a privately owned practice, there are unique challenges that we are all facing.ABOUT JENN & ERIKA'S PRACTICE OWNER SUMMIT SESSION
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Jenn Galvin and Erika Cartwright
About Jen's Get Sh*t Done Shorthanded Session
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Jen Quammen, DVM
About Meredith's Get Sh*t Done Shorthanded Session
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Meredith Jones, DVM
About Christina's Get Sh*t Done Shorthanded Session
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Christina Freeman
About Summer's Get Sh*t Done Shorthanded Session
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Summer Burke-Irmiter
About Jason's Get Sh*t Done Shorthanded Session
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Jason Szumski
Amazing Atmosphere & Accommodations
Great food brings people together, and the paramount goal of Uncharted is to grow and maintain our vibrant and supportive community. Socializing and building friendships are thus key components to this conference. If you come to Uncharted, you won’t be lonely (or hungry). The majority of food and drinks are included in registration!
The Westin Poinsett Hotel
The conference venue and hotel is located in the heart of downtown at 120 South Main Street. Greenville is known for it's top restaurants, quaint Main Street, bustling art scene, picturesque parks and southern hospitality.
Book your room by calling 1-800-westin1 and ask for the Uncharted Veterinary Conference rate or book online.
Join us in Greenville, SC from April 25-28th.
UVC Conference Success Stories
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The Program
Workshops are 100 minute sessions where attendees actually work and create resources/skills that they can take back to their practices and put to use immediately. Each workshop is repeated three to four times so that attendees have ample opportunity to attend.
Main Stage Talks are larger group sessions with lecture and round table discussion lasting 50 to 100 minutes each.
MIC DROPS
Mic Drop Sessions are 10-minute TED Talk-style presentations by our members about successes, failures and lessons learned in their own practices.
CONFERENCE LOGISTICS
Travel to Greenville Information
Activities in Greenville for Your First-Mate
PRICE
Uncharted Veterinary Conference is $799 or $75/ month for 12 months.
You must purchase an Uncharted Membership before purchasing a Conference.
FAQ
Still have questions? Find all the answers on our FAQ Page.