Endure, Adapt, Advance: The Mindset That Built Energy Equine

The moment the ground disappears beneath you is the moment you find out what you're actually made of. 

Dr. Chad Hewlett strips away the polished version of success and tells the story that built him: the February morning in 2004 when he was fired, left without a visa, without a practice, without a phone number, and with a pregnant wife and $15,000 borrowed from friends. 

What followed was not a rescue,  it was a reckoning. Dr. Hewlett walks through the raw decisions of that winter: the border crossing to restart his immigration, the new phone number that declared he was open for business, the mentor who showed up with belief and a $10,000 loan, and the eight months of working every single day that turned a reputation question mark into the foundation of Energy Equine. 

This is the episode about what pressure actually does, not to your circumstances, but to the person you are forced to become.

Listen For:

1:08 What happens when your visa, your reputation, and your income disappear on the same morning?

5:08 Does pressure break you or does it expose something you didn't know was fragile?

8:00 Who showed up with a $10,000 check and a piece of advice that changed everything?

10:01 What does it actually feel like to decide there are no more days off?

14:03 What does becoming a Canadian citizen during the Calgary Stampede teach you about what stability is really worth?

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Chad Hewlett: in the end, the people who thrive are not the ones who avoid winter. They're the ones that train for it. And when it arrives, they endure, they adapt, and eventually they advance.

[00:00:22] Chad Hewlett: It was Monday morning of February 24th my wife was pregnant. We had just bought a piece of land and stretched ourselves a [00:00:30] little thin doing it on top of the mortgage. We had borrowed $15,000 , , from some friends to finish the place the way we wanted it to do some upgrades on the house

[00:00:43] and in equine veterinary medicine. There's a cadence to the year. Especially in the north, right? Winter is lean summer's when you make it all back. The plan was simple, survive the winter, grind through the summer, and then pay back our [00:01:00] friends. But that Monday morning, my employer called me in and I was fired just like that.

[00:01:08] My visa depended on that job. I had one of those visas through the NAFTA in 1994 and meant that the only way I could have this ability to work in Canada, 'cause I was a, an American citizen, was that I needed to work for them. My reputation depended on that practice. My income depended on that [00:01:30] position, and suddenly all three of those things were gone.

[00:01:34] I literally wasn't legal to dig ditches in Canada without that visa. I remember walking out that day thinking one very clear thought, I may have just ruined everything. What I didn't know at the time was that the winner wasn't the end of my career. It was actually the beginning of it. Welcome back to Unbridled and Legendary.

[00:01:57] This podcast is about excellence, [00:02:00] but not the polished version, not the version where you see when everything is working, the version that's forged kind of under pressure. Most of the time on this show, I'll interview people who have built something remarkable in the horse world or beyond it, but today I wanna tell you a story.

[00:02:20] Because sometimes the most important lessons in excellence don't come from success. They come from survival. This is a story of the winter I [00:02:30] got fired and how it forced me to become something I didn't even realize. I needed to be a entrepreneur, a builder, a much more resilient veterinarian.

[00:02:42] In 2004, I was working in a prominent multi-doctor equine practice. From the outside, it looked like I a good place to be, but personally, my life was not in a good place. My marriage was struggling. I wasn't handling the stress well. And when you're [00:03:00] dealing with large animals, high stakes medicine and emotional clients, distraction and stress and stresses, they have consequences.

[00:03:07] Gradually the crack started to show. Looking back now, I can clearly see I wasn't operating at the level I needed to be at the time. I probably told myself different stories. We all do that when things are slipping, but eventually the practice made their decision and that Monday morning in February, they let me [00:03:30] go.

[00:03:32] Now losing a job is difficult for anyone. But the stakes for me were a little more complicated. First, my reputation as a horse doctor in the community, in a specialized industry like equine veterinary medicine, were travels fast. When you leave a practice under circumstances like that, people notice.

[00:03:53] Second was my immigration status. I was a US citizen working [00:04:00] in Canada. My visa was tied to the practice and the kind of work that I was doing, it wasn't an open visa, it was closed. Without that job, my legal ability work there was suddenly uncertain. Third part of this. It was my family. My wife was pregnant with our son.

[00:04:23] He was due in May and this was February, and we had just taken on some new financial [00:04:30] obligations. We bought a piece of property and had a house on it that needed some restoration. That $15,000 we borrowed from our friends wasn't theoretical. It was real. It was personal and I had fully expected to pay it back during the upcoming summer season.

[00:04:48] I didn't even have a practice to work in. I didn't have a clinic. I didn't even have a phone number connected to the veterinary business anymore. What I had was a reputation question mark, [00:05:00] a looming baby, and a winter season where equine work has historically very slow.

[00:05:08] It was not a comfortable moment, but here's the thing about pressure. Pressure as a way of exposing the truth, it exposes how dependent you really are. Up until that moment, I thought I was a capable veterinarian. What I realized, that winner is something slightly different. I wasn't independent.

[00:05:29] I was [00:05:30] dependent on a system, a system that could move me at any time. And once that really settles in, you have a choice. Either collapse under it or you start building something new.

[00:05:45] The decision endure and adapt and advance. Once the initial shock wore off, I had a moment of clarity knowing no one was gonna come fix this, there wasn't [00:06:00] gonna be a rescue plan. No practice was going to suddenly appear and solve my financial situation, my visa situation, and my professional situation all at once.

[00:06:11] If anyone was going to change, It was going to have to be me building myself. So the very next day I got in the truck, drove down to the border, what we call going around the flag. I crossed into the United States, turned around and came back [00:06:30] to Canada. I got my passport stomped, stamped properly so I could start the immigration process correctly.

[00:06:38] The interesting thing about that whole time was. Based on the day before, I was a bit nervous and I can even remember when I pulled up to the border on the Canadian side, 'cause it was down at just a little border crossing in southern Alberta. I said to the Canadian, immigration people. I was like, [00:07:00] I kind of told 'em my story.

[00:07:01] I was like, Hey, I got this thing going on. I gotta go down there. But I just wanna know before I go down there and go around the flag. Will you let me come back into Canada after I go into the United States? 'cause I kind of need to come back here. And the guy looked at me and he smiled and he says, yeah, that won't be a problem.

[00:07:18] So I can just remember going down and checking in to the US side and then coming back the other side. And the same guy that I saw on the way out, he walked to the other side and then let me back in and [00:07:30] got that process started. That was a very difficult day just from the standpoint of just like knowing how vulnerable I was.

[00:07:38] But that was step one, get the paperwork moving. Step two was even simpler. I got a new number. That might sound small, but that phone number represented something important. It meant I was no longer waiting for permission to work. I was starting again from ground zero. [00:08:00] Now around this time, someone stepped into the picture who helped change the trajectory of that year.

[00:08:04] To give a little bit of context, I had met through my previous job a veterinarian at the racetrack, and his name was Dr. Kundy Rod Kundy, He was, you know, again, it's a small community and he kind of knew what was going on because obviously when this had happened the day before, it just reverberated through the entire industry.

[00:08:27] If you think about Alberta, [00:08:30] there's only about 35 to 40 horse doctors, that primarily do this in the whole province. Right? So it's a pretty small community. He actually saw this had been a part of this and. He actually called me on this new number because I'd given it to some clients that I was thinking about prospectively working for.

[00:08:50] He saw that I was in a difficult situation and instead of turning away, he offered something incredible value. He offered [00:09:00] belief and a $10,000 check, let's call it a loan, 'cause that's what it was. Now, $10,000 doesn't seem magically to solve all the problems, but in that moment. It did gimme some oxygen.

[00:09:15] More importantly, he gave me a piece of advice. He said, you should go to the racetrack. I think you'll find work there. So that's what I did. I started showing up, talking to trainers, [00:09:30] meeting owners, doing whatever work was available. Also because he saw me around there, he started throwing me some scraps too, to be honest with you, he just needed me to come down and put the time in first to make sure I was gonna show up.

[00:09:45] But once I was there for a couple of weeks, rod really started to help me with customers and just start showing me the ropes even more than I knew. And then something happened that would define the next eight months of my life. [00:10:00] I decided there were no more days off. From March 1st until nearly November, I worked every single day, not most days, every single day.

[00:10:13] Now, when people hear that, they sometimes imagine a heroic grind, but the truth is it didn't feel heroic. It felt necessary. Every day was about survival. Every call mattered. Every client mattered. [00:10:30] Every horse mattered because each one represented another step away from the cliff edge that I found myself standing on in, in late February of 2004.

[00:10:41] There were long days. There were some cold mornings and there was moments. I wasn't sure the math was going to work, but slowly something began to happen. The reputation question Mark started turning into a quiet respect. Clients started calling back. Word [00:11:00] started spreading, and the practice that didn't exist in February, it started to take shape as we moved through the spring and racing began.

[00:11:11] Forged not fragile. That change that year changed me permanently. Before 2004, I was a veterinarian working inside of a system. After 2004, I became something different. I became a builder. When you start a business from [00:11:30] nothing, literally nothing, you learn lessons that are hard to forget. You learn the discipline, you learn the responsibility.

[00:11:39] If we take a little story on the responsibility and the discipline, as you remember from earlier in this story that I'm telling my wife was, at the time she was pregnant and we were. I'm gonna welcome a baby into the world in May of that year of 2004. And as luck would [00:12:00] have it, he came a little bit earlier than we thought he was gonna come into this world.

[00:12:04] And at that time,

[00:12:06] I would be off to work every single day and we knew the baby was getting close and. My wife, actually my ex-wife now, but my wife at the time called me and said, Hey, the, I think I'm going into labor. And I was at the racetrack in Calgary and we lived out in Ker. And so the neighbor drove her down, to meet me in Balza.

[00:12:28] And then we went to, Peter La Haid [00:12:30] Hospital, we got a hospital room and they were, have us waiting to, you know, see how things were coming along as far as the birthing.

[00:12:39] And it was going slow, but they thought we would wait till the next morning sort of thing, and she was gonna have a C-section and we knew that ahead of time. So it wasn't, it was something we knew was gonna happen. And they knew that too. And they just kept monitoring her. And I can remember, I didn't hardly sleep at all that night, but I stayed in the room with her, you know?

[00:12:58] And then that was a [00:13:00] Thursday and Friday we had racing. And I had all the morning shots and all the things to go with it. And I can remember, um,

[00:13:08] waking up at, um, early and the doctor came in and he said, um, we're not gonna do that c-section until this afternoon. I can remember being so scared that I. Said to my wife, I wanna go down and [00:13:30] do my work at the racetrack and I'll be back here by noon. So I left and I drove down to the racetrack and I worked that morning.

[00:13:40] And all those people that were down there, they're like, oh, you're having a baby this afternoon? And they were giving me gifts and money and all kinds of things, and I drove away at noon and came back and sure enough. Chet was born at two o'clock in the afternoon. You just learned so much about [00:14:00] responsibility.

[00:14:00] You learn that reputation isn't something that you inherit, something you earn again and again, client by client and horse by horse. That also that year also set something much larger into motion. The immigration process, I started eventually led to something meaningful, and in 2008, four years later, I became a Canadian citizen.

[00:14:25] That, that's a moment I'll never forget. It was during the Calvary [00:14:30] Stampede, July 8th, and I remember working in the morning and then going and picking my kids up and taking them. To the ceremony at the Harry Hayes building downtown in Calgary. And with 400 and I think there was 420 other, new Canadians as we call ourselves, I guess.

[00:14:47] Right? We all, we all walked across the stage and I received my Canadian citizenship that day. And it is a moment that I'll never forget because it represented stability that had [00:15:00] once felt very uncertain back in 2004. Perhaps the biggest change was internal. The winter removed the illusion of security.

[00:15:11] Once you had the ground pulled out from under you, you stop assuming it will always be there. You start preparing differently, operating differently, thinking differently. I stopped relying on stability. Instead, I focused on building capacity, a capacity to work, [00:15:30] a capacity to adapt a capacity to rebuild if necessary, and the mindset that has shaped everything that has followed.

[00:15:39] Looking back now, it's strange to say this. But getting fired may have been one of the most important moments of my life, because if that Monday morning in February had never happened, I might still be comfortable. I might still be dependent on someone else's system. Instead, I was forced into something harder.[00:16:00] 

[00:16:01] I became an entrepreneur, responsibility, resilience. Those were all things that came out of that. I'm not sure I would've taken that on without that incident. You know, in that time, that winter taught me something I still believe deeply today. Pressure doesn't break you. Pressure re reveals where you are are fragile and it then it gives you the opportunity to re rebuild stronger.[00:16:30] 

[00:16:30] Everyone's listening to this, will eventually face in winter a moment where something you depended on disappears. A job, a partnership, a market, a plan. When that moment comes, the question isn't whether the pressure exists. The question is, what will you build under it? What will you wait for stability to return or will you start building capacity?

[00:16:58] Because in the end, [00:17:00] the people who thrive are not the ones who avoid winter. They're the ones that train for it. And when it arrives, they endure, they adapt, and eventually they advance.

[00:17:13] Chad Hewlett: In the equine world, there's no faking it. A horse knows. They know if you put in the work, they know if your mind is somewhere else. , They know if you're operating at the [00:17:30] level you said you were. I'm Dr. Chad Hewlett. Founder of Energy Equine Veterinary Services, I spent my career at the edge of equine performance, and what I've learned is this, the discipline it takes to truly partner with a 1200 pound animal doesn't stay in the barn.

[00:17:50] It shapes everything. This is unbridled and legendary real conversation. Riders, veterinarians, trainers, and [00:18:00] competitors who've made excellence, non-negotiable. If horses are a part of who you are, this show was built for you.

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