Harbor GO: What is Harbor GO?

Hi, I’m Courtney Post, president of Suveto and I’m thrilled to be here today to speak with you about Harbor GO, the Industry-first Business Fellowship. Before we get into the details of Harbor GO, I’d first like to chat with you about Suveto, which stands for supporting veterinary Ownership. Suveto is a family of offerings that all have the same mission to empower veterinarians to take ownership of their profession.

It all started with Calico, which is a lending platform that supports hundreds of veterinarians to be independent practice owners. From Calico, we developed Harbor, which you may be familiar with, and Harbor is our community that is committed to educational learning opportunities and really a whole ecosystem that is focused on bringing those learnings to life, to having them have experiences, real-life application. And we have a variety of programs that those come to life within. And Harbor GO is one of those, but we’ll go back to that.

And then of course there’s our family of Suveto Hospitals. We have 65 hospitals across the country that are all committed to giving back ownership opportunities to the veterinarians, to you. All of our 65 hospitals offer a veterinary stock ownership plan as well as tracks to becoming your own owner, whether it be in a De Novo location that you can go into a partnership with or as a sole practice owner within the Calico family.

So before we move into Harbor GO, I want you to really look at this map and visualize where is it that you want to be in life? Where do you want your travels to take you? Any of the states in orange all have a Suveto Hospital that you could join post-graduation and work at through your entire fellowship for the two years of this program.

So Harbor is a really exciting place. Some of you may have experienced some of the Harbor programming so far. The Harbor business experience meets monthly and you get to really dive into business fundamentals with your classmates as well as create community as meeting up together and sharing some of the experiences that you have maybe had and whether working in a practice in the summer or maybe it’s in your fourth-year rotations, and you start to see these business fundamentals come to life.

This past summer, we were so excited to launch our SHIP Program, our Student Hospital Immersion Program. Maybe some of you participated in that. That is a 10-week long immersive learning program that you follow business curriculum, but you’re also working inside of a hospital. All at the same time, you’re coming together to learn and connect with your SHIP classmates on a regular cadence and also doing some business planning and programming. This program was wildly successful this summer, and to be honest with you, that was the catalyst for GO.

What we realized is that there’s so much energy and excitement from you from our third, fourth-year veterinary students to continue exploring business opportunities to potentially becoming an owner someday, to maybe being just a really well-informed associate that wants to take on a leadership role within a hospital. We had a moment this summer that we realized this SHIP learning shouldn’t stop just because you are graduating.

So we are so proud to formally announce Harbor GO, which stands for Graduation to Ownership. This is a two-year long business fellowship, unlike anything else the industry has. You’ll graduate in hopefully May or coming up sometime soon, and you’ll go out and get a full-time job and really get excited about getting into clinics and becoming a proficient doctor. But we don’t want your excitement and passion and the knowledge that you have for business ownership or business fundamentals to stop just because you’ve graduated.

So we’ve created a program that you work as a full-time veterinarian, but also have dedicated hours for a week to still attend classes, to talk to your fellow Harbor GO colleagues and continue to explore maybe some of the aspirations that you have, but learning the key fundamentals of business ownership or again, really proficient leadership or really great production as a veterinary associate.

This program is not asking you to take a discount, unlike some other further education programs. This Harbor GO Program offers full salary, full production, full benefits, while giving you time to explore and continue to learn. We will focus on the medical. We know that you want to become a really proficient doctor and in order to become a great owner or a great leader in your hospital, you have to have the medicine. So our Harbor GO Program offers fantastic medical and mentorship application, but it also keeps the business in mind and you’ll continue to explore and learn with some of the best in the industry.