Leading with Your Head and Your Heart
Following the announcement of her upcoming departure this fall, Amy Mills, CEO of Emancipet, joins Michael to reflect on the veterinary care non-profit’s mission and growth over the past 17 years. Amy shares her personal origin story of finding Emancipet, her experiences navigating significant cultural change as a new leader, her vision for the organization, and her favorite part of the job.
Introduction
Michael Daehne: Hey y'all, welcome to Inflect. I'm Michael Daehne, and on today's show, I'm joined by Amy Mills, President and CEO of Emancipet. Emancipet is an Austin-based non-profit organization on a mission to make veterinary care affordable and accessible to everyone. Since joining Emancipet in 2006, Amy and her team have transformed the organization from a small, grassroots spay and neuter clinic into one of the largest and most impactful non-profit veterinary care providers in the country.
Earlier this week, Amy announced that she will be transitioning out of her role in late 2024, concluding an incredible 18-year run at Emancipet. I'm so excited to have her on the podcast today to talk more about the amazing work Emancipet does every day and to share some of her reflections from her time leading the organization.
I'm sure you will enjoy my conversation with Amy, one of the most talented, creative, empathic, and mission-driven leaders I know.
Opening
Michael Daehne: Hey, Amy, how are you?
Amy Mills: Hey, I'm doing great. How are you today?
MD: I'm good. Thank you so much for joining the podcast. I'm so excited to talk to you today. It's been a big week with lots of news about your transition from Emancipet. I feel like I got like the exclusive first interview in the wake of your announcement. So, I'm excited to talk to you about Emancipet and your journey and some of the transformations the organization has been through over the last 17 or 18 years.
AM: I'm excited to talk to you about all those things.
Emancipet Overview
Michael Daehne: Why don't we start, for our listeners who may not know about Emancipet, can you tell us more about Emancipet and its mission and kind of the cause or the why behind it?
Amy Mills: I would love to. So, the, the mission statement of Emancipet is that we're on a mission to make veterinary care affordable and accessible for everyone. And, when people who have never heard of Emancipet hear that for the first time, it kind of begs this question about like, well, you know, why do we need that?
Because not everybody is aware that in the United States, we have something that we call an access to veterinary care gap. There are about 60 million pets, dogs and cats, beloved members of families, who have families, who love them and are not getting the veterinary care that they need at least some of the time. The reason for that is because their families cannot afford veterinary care.
When we get a little bit deeper and say, why is that happening? Structurally, that's because, in the United States, we have so far relied entirely on the market sector to provide all veterinary services. It's not like in the human healthcare sector, where we know that we need a safety net for lower-income families, unhoused people, and other people who are marginalized and don't have access to private healthcare.
We have that safety net - we have non-profit hospitals, we have federally qualified health centers, we have Medicaid and Medicare. But in veterinary medicine, that safety net, that infrastructure does not exist. It hasn't existed yet. And the market sector cannot provide, care at an affordable rate for everyone in the country who has a pet and who needs that care. Because we've been relying only on that market sector, that's what's created this gap, where 60 million animals are not getting the care that they need.
Emancipet exists to help close that gap. We see that that gap is causing a lot of suffering, both for animals and the families who love them, who really want to take the best possible care they can. Emancipet opens low-cost veterinary hospitals inside communities that have historically been underserved or not served at all by market sector veterinary providers. When we open one of these hospitals, we provide a limited range of services at a very low cost and often for free. We never turn anyone away for an inability to pay. That is our primary strategy for how we are tackling the work of closing the access to care gap in the United States.
MD: Thank you for that excellent overview. No one's better at describing the problem and some of the solutions that Emancipet is leading the way with than you are. I was thinking about this this morning; we've known each other for five years, and it feels like it's not been that long.
We started working together on a technology modernization project for Emancipet. And I admittedly showed up to that project not knowing anything about this problem or having any expertise or knowledge of the broader veterinary industry. I was just immediately consumed by this idea and fascinated by the model that Emancipet has created and the work that you and your team are doing to address this major problem.
Amy’s Transition into Veterinary Care
Michael Daehne: That leads to my question: when you showed up, how much did you know about the veterinary space? What was your background before that? And what brought you to Emancipet in 2006?
Amy Mills: Oh yeah, that's a great question. So, I'm a non-profit lifer. You know, 501(c)(3) for life. I have never worked, for a for-profit company. I went to college at St. Edwards University, here in Austin and, knew that I really wanted to go down the non-profit/ community service path. Before Emancipet, I did pretty much every job in the non-profit sector. I've been a fundraiser, I've been a communications person, I did program development and program evaluation - non-profit leadership. At the time I was really focused on kids and youth.
Animals have been so important to me in my life. I've had a deep pull towards helping animals since I was really little. My mom says my first word was bird and my second word was wolf. We can see where that trend is going. I didn't work professionally with animals, and I was not aware at all of an access to veterinary care gap.
I was very active volunteering with the local Austin humane society. I walked dogs there every Saturday morning, 8 AM until 12, and got really deep into service in that particular way and started teaching dog manners and puppy kindergarten classes and really leaning into like the dog behavior side of that volunteer work. That actually gave me my first exposure to this issue in a way that I had not experienced before. Despite working with lower-income families through my professional work and working with animals through my volunteer work, the thing that actually brought them all together was Hurricane Katrina.
When Hurricane Katrina happened, the Humane Society, where I was a volunteer, ended up housing some pets that had been evacuated from the hurricane area in New Orleans. I was one of the volunteers working with those animals, and what I saw was a bunch of animals, and no one was spayed or neutered. They were not healthy, and many had chronic diseases. In that moment, before I really understood what was going on, I felt like, ‘Oh my gosh, these poor animals.’ I was almost judgmental of, like, ‘Who would allow their animal to be this sick?’
Several days later, a bus from the convention center came over, and all the families of these pets came in to visit their pets. I get emotional telling the story because my whole life changed in that moment. Because these animals had been so shut down, I had just seen them, honestly, like victims. They just lit up when they saw their families walk through the door, and it's like tail wags, joy, so much happiness, and was just this incredible moment.
I saw this overpouring of love, and I started talking to some of these families. They told me their stories about how they were in this situation because they wouldn't evacuate without these pets. They stayed when the National Guard was like, ‘Come get in this boat, we'll take you, but you can't bring your dog.’ And they were like, ‘Absolutely not.’ So, they were the last to evacuate because of how much they loved their pets. It was in those conversations and that moment that I realized that the amount of veterinary care your pet gets has nothing to do with the amount of love that pet gets and how vital that connection is between people and our pets. It was in that moment that I was like, ‘we have to do something about that.’
Coincidentally, a few months later, I started getting emails from friends with this job posting that was the job of the CEO of Emancipet. I'd never heard of Emancipet. My friends said, ‘This is, this is your job, you should go apply for this job.’ I was not even looking for a job, I was working at a youth service organization that was really great. I applied on a whim and ended up getting the job. Those coincidental moments of being in those particular pathways led me to a situation where I actually had the opportunity to create something special out of the foundation of what Emancipet was to fix something in the world that I realized was broken in that Hurricane Katrina moment.
MD: Wow. That is such an amazing story. I think you hit on something that I have found to be really unique and important in the work Emancipet does - it's not just about the animals, but it's about this unique intersection of the humans and their animals and the families they have together. Emancipet is serving both and enabling them to remain a family, which has incredible mental health benefits and joy and love, and all of those things that you mentioned. I think it's really cool to hear the origin story of your interest and the stars aligning for your entry into Emancipet.
AM: Yeah. You're absolutely right about all those things. It is all the stuff that makes life worth living that can be found in the relationship between people and their pets.
Emancipet’s Growth During Amy’s Leadership
Michael Daehne: I think we've, we've covered a lot of the mission and the vision and the why. But something that can get lost in this is that Emancipet is a large organization. It is operationally intense. There is a lot, and a lot that has to happen for this model to work and to be able to serve pets and their families.
I was looking at some numbers from when you started in 2006 until now. I may not have these exactly right, but annual pet visits were around 22,000 when you started, and they're at 230,000 the last I saw. You've led a merger, growth across the country from just being in Austin, and major partnerships with PetSmart Charities; I mean just massive amounts of growth. What are the biggest changes you've seen in the organization through the course of that time? And maybe reflect on some changes you've seen in your own leadership style, too.
Amy Mills: I feel like change has just been a constant. Since I showed up, it's just been change after change. What's interesting is there are almost different kinds of changes. When I got to Emancipet, it was a solely spay/ neuter organization. The focus was very much on spay/ neuter as a means to an end. That end was reducing the number of unwanted litters that would end up in a shelter and be at risk. It was a very noble end, but it was not about making sure that families could stay together and making sure that animals had veterinary care because they needed and deserved medical care. It was a different mindset at that time, it was about maximizing how many animals we could get spayed and neutered.
My first big shift was wanting to have that change in mindset from just spay/ neuter as a means to an end but veterinary care more broadly because animals need way more than just spay/ neuter. Although spay/ neuter is essential, we wanted to center people as beneficiaries of this work, too. That shift was really hard. When I look back at all of the changes at Emancipet, the growth, getting new clinics open, the technology transformation work that you alluded to, all of those things are hard to do in the sense that it requires a lot of people to change the way they work. But those early changes were getting people to change the way they think and feel about the mission. Those changes, I think, were foundational and essential and took more time.
It sounds so wild now, but looking back, the first big operational change that I remember leading was to start offering preventive care. Just basic vaccines, you know, flea and tick prevention. We were going to start offering these things, but to the organization that had been so focused only on spay/ neuter because that was what would reduce shelter intake. That felt like a totally different mission to them and the amount of angst about that shift was huge.
Once we did it, it started to unlock a lot more compassion and understanding for people and their experience, but that shift was really hard and really slow and actually took several years to achieve. And I think once those mindset shifts and culture shifts started happening, all the other changes that we've had to make, the big transformations, were less difficult. They were all hard, but they were less difficult because we were all on the same page culturally and philosophically about why we were there.
MD: It's the, changing hearts and minds or culture, eat strategy for breakfast or whatever cliche you want to use, but that's the really hard part. Not to say that the operational initiatives like opening new clinics, building partnerships, and new technology are not, of course, it is hard, but it's a different kind of hard than ‘what's our North Star’ and getting everyone aligned around that.
AM: Yeah.
Amy’s Leadership Style
Michael Daehne: What about in your leadership style? How has that evolved over the course of your tenure at Emancipet?
Amy Mills: That's a wild question because I was a child when I started. I was in my 20s, and the highest level of leadership position I had before Emancipet was the Deputy Executive Director of a small non-profit. I had some leadership experience for sure, but the Deputy Executive Director is very different from the CEO. And I think we had maybe eight or nine employees at that whole non-profit, so really, really different. When I showed up at Emancipet in my twenties in my first leadership role, in a pretty new industry to me, the imposter syndrome was profound, and I really leaned into data and logic.
‘Let me show you the spreadsheet for why this is the right thing to do.’ Surely everyone will just be like, ‘Oh, now that I see the data, I'm going to do that.’ It turns out that that isn't how things work. It's not how people change. I had to relax into being more comfortable with a relational and emotional way of connecting, in order to get the big shifts made. And I didn't know that because I think when I was really new in leadership, I was like, ‘Well, it's just about what is the most logical, efficient, cost-effective thing to do. And, of course, everyone will just see it.’ That led to a lot of frustration for myself and other people. So, I think leaning into that, especially in mission-driven organizations. We're all here for a mission, and giving space to lead with heart and not just head, I think, was a big early transformation for me.
Later, I think a lot of my leadership style has shifted in the sense of just being more comfortable moving forward and taking action when you don't know. I used to want, you know, 100 percent or 90 percent of the information before making a decision, and now I'm really comfortable being like, ‘yeah, we don't know. Here's what we're going to do. Here's what we're going to document about our assumptions, and we're going to move forward.’ So, being a little bit looser about the amount of information I need and the amount of certainty that I need before making decisions has helped me a lot.
MD: I want to build on something you said about balancing the head and the heart. Because as I mentioned earlier, Emancipet is an operationally intense non-profit. You are facilitating this high-volume clinic model. You have a large staff. You have scheduling and appointments and technology. And of course, the healthcare aspect of it and all that you're balancing all that running a business with this mission and this bold goal and trying to solve this broader problem.
I think there's lessons in that for not only other non-profit leaders, but even in the for-profit space, balancing: Who do we want to be as a business? What, what do we want to be in the future with? How do we meet payroll? How do, how do we kind of hit our targets this quarter, this year? Tell me a little bit more about how you as a leader have balanced that mission alignment with operations, financial efficiency, that kind of thing.
AM: Yeah. You know, what's interesting about that question with Emancipet specifically is, if you think about the operating environment in which we find ourselves, we are one organization. And as I mentioned earlier, the size of the access to veterinary care gap is 60 million animals. Right off the bat, are you going to be able to serve 60 million animals? No, you're not. So, you already know that the need is greater than what you're ever going to be able to meet. Then, the question becomes, how many animals can we serve? The mission of Emancipet is to make veterinary care affordable and accessible to everybody in an operating environment where there are 60 million animals who need your services across the country, and in each of the cities where we operate, we have hundreds of thousands of animals that need the services.
In a way, operational efficiency is baked into the delivery of the mission. What I mean by that is, every single day, we don't want to waste anything. We don't want to waste staff time. We don't want to waste client time. We need to serve as many animals as we possibly can in a very high-quality way every single day that we're there. Because our mission demands that of us, because when we do less than that we're missing the opportunity to close that gap for one more animal, two more animals, three more animals, three more families. What's nice is that our staff is so mission-aligned that operational intensity doesn't feel like it's for some ulterior purpose. It's not for profit. It's not for making anybody wealthier. It's to deliver on this mission. I think that's a benefit that our mission and our business needs actually align really well.
What's hard, though, is in that operating environment where you can't serve everybody, you do have to make hard choices about what kinds of services we are going to provide. We can't provide all services either, right? We run a modularized model, where we select the highest need for medical services in a community, and we deliver only a small number of those. So, we have clinics that are only providing spay/ neuter services, preventive care services, or heartworm treatments. Our patients may need more, and we can't provide those additional things because it won't work with the financial model. And keeping that really, really tight requires a lot of discipline. I often tell people a lot of what my job is to hold the line, constantly saying, ‘This is what we can do, and we can't go beyond that.’ It's less about operational efficiency and more about being really disciplined about the things we can do and then maximizing those things to serve as many animals as possible.
MD: Yeah. Love that. I mean, that's a masterclass in strategy and organizational leadership. It's about choices, which is the really hard thing. I even feel this is a small business owner. What kind of projects are we going to do? What kind of industries are we going to work in? What locations can our clients be in?
The temptation in any business or non-profit is to grow - I want to serve more people or grow the business. Often, that leads to the trap of trying to be everything to everyone or do too many things. I love that you hit on that as core to your role in the work you've been doing at Emancipet.
Favorite Part as CEO
Michael Daehne: I just have a few more questions. You still have like nine or ten months to go as CEO of Emancipet, I don't know if you've had a chance to reflect on this, but I'm going to put you on the spot and ask, what's your favorite part of being the CEO at Emancipet, and what do you think you're going to miss the most when you make that transition?
Amy Mills: Oh, it's such a hard question. I love this job very, very deeply. Going back to our head and the heart thing we were talking about earlier, I have a head and a heart reason here.
I think like a social innovator in the sense that my mind is just constantly looking and finding unmet needs. Emancipet has given me the opportunity to create, innovate, and develop strategies for meeting unmet needs for something that I feel deeply passionate about, which is just such a gift. My mind loves it. It is fun to try to think about ‘How are we going to meet this unmet need?’ There's no blueprint for it; we're not working in a space that has 50 years of social innovation behind it. We're working in a pretty new space for social innovation - this access-to-care gap is still pretty newly understood. And not a lot of organizations are working on that gap yet.
I have loved the opportunity to create with the incredible people who work at Emancipet and who have worked at Emancipet in the past. I've been able to create with amazing colleagues and coworkers. We've had incredible board members and funders who want to get in, roll up their sleeves, and get creative about strategies and clinic models. Our ability to think through everything from what would make a clinic in Philadelphia work with a completely different demographic and completely different needs versus a clinic in Houston, Texas? That's really fun for me on the head side.
On the heart side, there is just nothing better than sitting in an Emancipet lobby. It's just a joyful place because people who have been excluded, who have never felt welcome in a veterinary, practice before, have never felt comfortable enough to show up because they didn't think they could afford it are very comfortable in our lobby. And their animals are adorable, so I love that part, too. Just talking to people about their pets, how they got them, and why they love them.
Just to share one little story: I was in one of our clinics a couple of weeks ago, it was right before Christmas, and this older gentleman was holding this tiny little puppy. He could see me looking at the puppy, and he was like, ‘Do you want to hold her?’ And I was like, ‘Yes, I do!’ So, I came over and sat with him, and I was holding his puppy, and I was like, ‘Tell me the story, is this going to be a Christmas present for a grandkid? What's going on here?’
And he goes, ‘No, no, no. I don't know how it happened, but I've been praying for more patience in my life. I've been really struggling with patience; I prayed one night for patience, and the next morning, this puppy was on my doorstep, and we don't know how she got there. I live out in a rural community, there are no neighbors, this tiny little puppy was just there, and we were laughing.’ I was like, ‘Oh, that puppy is going to bring you patience. That's what puppies do.’ And I asked, ‘Well, did you name her Patience?’ And he goes, ‘No, I named her Love.’
That story sounds made up, and that story or some version of it happens every single time I sit down in a lobby and start a conversation with somebody. It's like these profound moments that people have with animals. Oh, I will miss that. I will miss that so much.
MD:Yeah. Oh my gosh. I can confirm that there's nothing better than sitting in an Emancipet lobby.
Amy’s Positive Outlook
Michael Daehne: Let me end with this question: What gives you hope and optimism about the future of Emancipet? Obviously, there's a big access-to-care gap and a lot of challenges, but what gives you hope?
Amy Mills: Well, I'm very hopeful about Emancipet because we've built a really strong foundation. What makes Emancipet unique is the people who work at Emancipet. Our people are really strong and we've built and are going to continue to build Emancipet into the kind of employer that is a place where people want to work forever. We need people to come to Emancipet and stay for years to really get that innovation and quality down. So, I feel very hopeful about our ability to keep doing that.
I feel very excited about the fact that this year we're going to open a dental center. We're going to relocate East Austin, which is our oldest, most rundown clinic, into a new permanent space for Killeen. These foundational facilities are setting us up for the future.
On a bigger scale, I feel optimistic about the field of access to veterinary care because It's suddenly everywhere. Everybody's talking about it inside the veterinary and traditional animal welfare space now, which was much more sheltering-focused before. I think people are starting to wake up to the fact that if you care about the well-being of animals, access to veterinary care is the number one most important priority that we should have. The fact that it's not just Emancipet saying that anymore gives me a tremendous amount of hope for the future.
Closing
Michael Daehne: Yeah, awesome. Well, let me say thank you for taking the time to talk today, I so enjoyed our discussion. Also and more importantly, as a supporter of Emancipet and someone who cares deeply about the mission and the work the organization is doing, thank you for everything you've done over the last 17, almost 18 years. And everything you're going to do for the next nine months to lead this organization and position it, for the future you mentioned, you're not off the hook just yet! I think the organization is so much better off because of you and your leadership. So, thank you.
Amy Mills: Thank you so much. It's been truly a gift and an honor and just a joy every day. I love it. And talking to you has been the same.
MD: Likewise, thanks, Amy.
AM: Thank you.