Deciding About Partnership With Livewell? Read This.
Deciding About Partnership With Livewell? Read This.
Dr. Abi Maynard, Livewell Animal Hospital of St. Anthony
When I first stood at the crossroads of “Do I take the leap?” versus “Do I stay where I am?”, I felt like I was staring at two parallel universes. One was familiar, but heavy. The other was unknown, but humming with possibility. What I didn’t know then is that choosing Livewell would feel less like stepping into a new job and more like stepping into the version of veterinary medicine I’d always hoped existed.
This is the blog I wish someone had written for me when I was making my decision.
Your past experiences don’t define what your future can feel like.
Coming from a workplace where my love for medicine was tangled in burnout, fractured culture, and the feeling of being chronically underutilized, I assumed all corporate veterinary structures were shades of the same storm cloud. I thought the price of being “part of something larger” was swallowing frustration and calling it normal.
It isn’t.
Livewell is not a replica of wherever you came from. The culture isn’t inherited. It’s created by the people who show up to build it. As an FLDVM, you help write the operating system, not merely run it. I didn’t realize how healing a supportive environment could be until I stepped into one.
If you’re reading this and quietly worrying that partnership means repeating a painful chapter, hear this: it truly can be different.
You get to be a doctor again.
I wish I had known how freeing it would feel to practice medicine without wrestling operations every hour of the day. Yes, founding a hospital means you carry responsibility. But, it’s a different kind of responsibility. It’s intentional, chosen, directed.
At Livewell St. Anthony, I’m allowed to be a full doctor. I do the medicine I love: complex surgeries, urgent-care triage, contextualized care, relationship-based primary medicine. And I get to focus on excellence, not just survival.
You’re not drowning in red tape. You’re not fighting to get basic tools. You’re not explaining the value of quality medicine to people who don’t understand it. When I need something, my team wants to help me get it because they understand why it matters. That alone restored parts of my identity I thought were permanently dulled.
The support is real, not performative.
Before joining, I underestimated what the Livewell support ecosystem actually meant. “ROD support,” “marketing support,” “HR support” all sounded like buzzwords. In previous environments, those words meant “good luck, figure it out.”
Here, support is a verb.
When I needed help, I got it. When I needed guidance, someone answered. When I needed autonomy, I was trusted with it. And when I needed space to innovate, nobody clipped my wings.
It’s the first time I’ve felt like a partner instead of a passenger.
Your voice matters. And it changes things.
If you are someone with opinions, ideas, standards, or a vision for how medicine should feel, partnership is where you get to stop apologizing for it. I wish I had known how liberating that would be.
The Livewell model doesn’t ask you to shrink to fit a template. Instead, it expands around the kind of doctor you are. The culture isn’t top-down; it’s co-authored. My hospital looks and feels the way it does because I was given space to build it that way.
And the most rewarding part? My team feels like they’re building something with me, not for me.
You will work hard. And it will still feel worth it.
Let me be honest: founding a hospital is not a soft, gentle walk. You will sweat. You will stretch. You will make ten decisions before 10 AM. But the difference is that the work feeds you, instead of draining you.
When a client hugs you after a life-saving surgery, or your team rallies without being asked, or a new pet parent says “This place feels different,” you feel it in your ribs. It’s the kind of fulfillment I forgot was possible in this profession.
The leap is scary. But the landing was incredible.
If you are standing on the edge right now, sorting your excitement from your fear, that’s normal. I was there too.
What I wish I had known is that choosing Livewell wasn’t a gamble. It was an alignment. The version of me on the other side of that decision is healthier, happier, more inspired, more creative, and more connected to my purpose than I have been in years.
If you’re the kind of veterinarian who wants autonomy, impact, community, and a place to practice medicine in a way that feels human again, this path is absolutely worth exploring.
Not because it’s easy.
Because it’s yours.
