Every week, Cherri Trusheim fields calls from corporations and private equity firms that want to chat about “supporting the backend” of her veterinary practice, Urban Animal. Translation: They want to buy it, because if the pandemic taught us anything, it’s how much people love their pets.

“The human-animal bond has been targeted as a recession-proof industry,” Trusheim says. “Most people will prioritize their pets over pretty much anything.”

While the backing of a company flush with resources sounds helpful on the surface, it doesn’t align with her values, or the values of her practice. There’s a mismatch in priorities between trying to make investors as much money as possible and trying to provide quality, compassionate care to pets and their owners.

Trusheim believes this corporatization contributes to employees being less satisfied with their jobs and diminishes the standard of care by tying the pay for vet workers to the amount of products and services they sell. And this, in turn, is just one of the reasons why vets seem to be in short supply these days. So she decided on another way to shake up her practice.

Instead of handing the reins to a corporation, she’s turning Urban Animal into the first veterinary worker cooperative in Washington (and one of the first in the country).

“Whether you’re a veterinarian or an assistant, you don’t choose that job because you’re thinking about how much money you can make,” she says. “When you look at private equity groups, that’s all they’re thinking about.”

Although Trusheim started considering a co-op model more than a decade ago, the structure she opted for—a limited cooperative association, or LCA—only became a viable legal entity in the state in 2019. She believes this model could be the answer to not only vet dissatisfaction but also income inequality. “I really think it could be a way for us to have some economic change in this country,” she says.

Worker co-ops help keep profits in the local community, create quality jobs that tend to be longer-term and better paid than similar positions elsewhere, and spread the wealth (and risk) of business ownership, according to the Democracy at Work Institute, an organization that works to support worker co-ops.

In Trusheim’s industry, the burnout is real. About 47 percent of vets have considered leaving the profession before retirement, according to the 2023 Census of Veterinarians from the American Veterinary Medical Association. The 9 percent who are actively thinking about a career change cite bettering their mental health and improving their work-life balance as the main reasons. In 2021, more than 40 percent of those who graduated within the past 10 years were contemplating exiting the profession.

“Our industry is broken in a lot of ways,” Trusheim says. “Veterinary students graduate with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. How do you balance all that out and charge appropriately so folks can afford care?”

For her own part, Trusheim never really wanted to start her own vet practice. “It just seemed like owning a lot of trouble,” she says. “I wanted to do everything but be a vet.” After veterinary school, she went to school for bartending and carpentry, and she took a real estate course. Finally, she decided to open Urban Animal in 2012, but on the condition that she did things her way. “My approach to business is to give people what they want,” she says. “I thought clients wanted candid conversations, no upselling, and zero judgment.”

To eliminate barriers to care, Urban Animal offers two different models at its three locations. Downtown is appointment-only, while the Capitol Hill and White Center practices provide walk-in services for more-affordable care.

Instead of paying vets based on production, the way it’s done at most clinics, Trusheim offers a straight salary. That way, no one’s wages are dependent on getting pet owners in distress to spring for something extra.

The logistics of the transition begin with a group of 17 employees, who are currently undergoing training by a group called the Cooperative Way, which specializes in helping people understand how to become worker-owners. Trusheim is gifting a portion of the company to these employees, with the goal for it to become 100 percent employee-owned over time. Day-to-day operations look very similar to how they always have, but now the workers will get two seats atop the board alongside Trusheim, who will remain the CEO. “People will want to work where they have a voice and they can have some input on what their jobs look like,” she says.

(As a side note, there are other forms of employee ownership, like an employee stock ownership plan, known as an ESOP. This offers shares of the company to workers but doesn’t give direct governance. Another local business in the pet space, Mud Bay, is one example.)

Trusheim could have taken one of those plentiful private equity offers, sold her practice, and retired—but that would’ve meant missing out on an opportunity to be a changemaker.

“I need hope and optimism right now,” she says. “I really think if everyone just did what they could where they were to make things around them better, we’d be in better situations. I can do that. I can roll my sleeves up and get involved for another 10 years and help turn something out into the world that really could make a big difference in my industry—and a big difference in our current economy. Maybe we could shrink the wealth gap. The U.S. is so far behind in the worker cooperative movement. It’s amazing what we could do if we moved in that direction.”

Trusheim is confident that Seattle, her home of 20-plus years, is the ideal breeding ground for this kind of business. After all, as the saying goes, it’s a place that has more dogs than children, and more cats than dogs. “Seattle cares about radical transparency,” she says. “We definitely have some skeptics, but a large number of people are excited about what this change can bring.”