Within two weeks, the entire state of Minnesota was staying-at-home due to a dangerous pandemic and the pet health business landscape has never been the same.
Dr. Sara Mattson, veterinarian at Aurochs Veterinary Services, in Audubon, doesn’t know when her pet practice will return to normal with in-person clinic visits, but she is staying positive and is ready to celebrate her first year of owning her own business with an online photo contest on the clinic’s Facebook page.
“I’ve wanted to be a vet since I was little,” said Mattson. “I grew up on a farm in North Dakota and I watched our vet, pulled a calf when I was 5 and I knew that that was something I wanted to do. I’ve always had a passion for animals.”
Mattson graduated from the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities in 2017 with a doctorate in veterinary medicine. She began practicing her skills in southern Minnesota, in the small town of Slayton, about 30 miles south of Marshall.
During her time in Slayton, her cousin Dennis Lange kept telling her she needed to move up north and take over his own veterinary practice because he was considering retirement.
“I had interned with him when I was an undergrad and he kind of joked with me that he was going to sell me the business,” said Mattson. “At all my family reunions, he was always telling my parents that I needed to come up, and I kind of contemplated leaving my job because I wasn’t very happy with it in southern Minnesota, and then things just kind of fell into place.
Mattson, and her husband, Ethan, moved to the lakes area in March 2019 and she immediately began taking over the day-to-day appointments at the Audubon clinic.
“I worked the previous year as a vet, but I was still new and learning things too,” she said. “It was a year of figuring out finances and getting everything ready, we also bought a house in that same time, so lots of financial things happened.”
Over the next year, Mattson said she saved money, secured financing and in March 2020, she purchased Lange’s practice.
Then the pandemic hit and changed everything.
The clinic tried limited service during the first couple weeks during the state’s March stay-at-home orders, she said. However, around the end of March, they closed their doors to the public and began their curbside drop-off program for appointments — they haven’t reverted back to normal operations since.
“I think we had two weeks of…
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