Role: Director of Communications
Hours: Full-time
Location: Hybrid - Waltham, MA
Salary: $145,000 - $160,000 annually
Travel: Occasional (conferences, industry events, hospital visits)
Reporting to: Chief Culture Officer
Company Description:
Veterinary Practice Partners (VPP) is a nationwide veterinary community revolutionizing vet practice ownership and support. With an expansive network of doctor partners and co-owned animal hospitals and clinics nationwide, VPP has become an established partner of choice.
Through its co-ownership model, VPP provides operational support across learning and development, HR, recruiting, marketing, technology, and finance, enabling veterinarians to focus on providing high-quality patient care and foster a strong culture at their individual practices.
VPP has over 190 (and counting) partner hospitals with 4,000+ employees and continued growth. VPP is a dynamic, profitable, growth company with strong financial private equity backing. For more information on Veterinary Practice Partners, visit www.vetpracticepartners.com.
Summary:
The Director of Communications tells the story of VPP and its mission, advancing the VPP Way internally and externally and building engagement around it. Internally, that means helping teammates understand who VPP is, connect to the mission, and identify with the community. Externally, it means using VPP’s approach to influence how the veterinary profession evolves.
This role works across the executive team, marketing, and operations to build the communications function VPP needs at this stage of growth, and reports to the Chief Culture Officer.
Essential Duties and Responsibilities:
Internal Communications
- Own the internal communications calendar and structure, including partner calls, all-hands meetings, town halls, and recurring leadership meetings.
- Select, launch, and manage VPP's internal communications platform, ensuring it reaches every teammate, including frontline hospital staff without a desk or company email.
- Curate stories and manage channel strategy across email, the internal platform, an internal podcast, and creative assets (video, written stories, collateral), matching each message to the right channel.
- Serve as the internal communications consultant and air-traffic-control for IT, Operations, Finance, and other functions, coordinating what goes out and when.
- Act as a culture builder with a journalist's eye, gathering stories and images from operators, project managers, and partners across the company, and packaging them to reinforce the VPP Way.
External Communications
- Draft external messaging for marketing and LinkedIn, serving as a primary writer for VPP's external voice and partnering with marketing on campaigns, positioning, and content.
- Position VPP's executive team as industry thought leaders by securing conference speaking engagements, podcast appearances, and op-eds, and developing their thought-leadership platforms.
- Build and maintain relationships with journalists covering veterinary medicine, private-equity-backed healthcare services, and related beats; pitch stories proactively.
- Develop external creative assets, including podcast, video, print, and digital storytelling that carries VPP's story into the profession.
- Partner with marketing to shape industry narrative around partnership, ownership, and what a modern veterinary company looks like.
- Develop and maintain a company-wide crisis and issues-communications protocol, ensuring consistent, timely messaging during sensitive situations.
Qualifications
- 8+ years of professional communications experience, with meaningful work in both internal and external communications.
- Track record of writing for and coaching senior executives.
- Experience building or significantly improving communications programs, systems, or platforms.
- Media relations experience, including active relationships with reporters in a relevant industry.
- Bachelor's degree in Communications, Journalism, English, Marketing, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.
- Preferred: experience in a multi-site, distributed, or healthcare services organization.
- Strong command of AP style and executive/brand voice, with the judgment to adapt tone across audiences and channels.
- Experience developing crisis and issues-communications messaging under time pressure.
Ideal Candidates will Possess:
- A bias toward identifying problems and solving them, rather than waiting to be asked.
- A player-coach mentality: excited to do the work personally while also thinking and operating strategically.
- Excellent writing and storytelling skills, with the ability to find the story inside a strategy and tell it in a way people want to read.
- Tech-forward instincts, comfortable owning platform and process decisions and rolling them out company-wide.
- Independence and comfort operating in a matrix, reporting to the Chief Culture Officer while partnering closely with the CEO, COO, CFO, Chief People Officer, and marketing.
- A producer's mindset: someone who finds and amplifies the story of a company.
- An understanding of what partnership means to VPP, and why it's different from a corporate rollup.
- Genuine curiosity about how things work, why people do what they do, and what makes a place tick.
Physical Requirements
The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job.
- The employee must be able to remain in a stationary position at least 50% of the The employee needs to occasionally move about home office to access office machinery, stationary tools, etc.
- While performing the duties of this Job, the employee is regularly required to use hands to grasp, handle, or feel; reach with hands and arms. Hearing and visual acuity are also
- The employee will constantly be operating a computer and other office productivity.
- The employee may occasionally be required to lift and or move up to 10lbs by themselves.
Notes:
Reasonable accommodation may be made to perform the essential functions.
- This job description describes the ideal candidate for this position and in no way implies any limits to a person’s desire to apply.
- To meet the needs of the company, employees may be assigned other duties, in addition to or in lieu of those described above.
- Any duties are subject to change at any time.
- This document does not create an employment contract, implied or otherwise, other than an “at-will” relationship.
Equal Employment Opportunity:
Veterinary Practice Partners (VPP) provides equal employment opportunities to all applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any legally protected characteristic.
