Andrew Bane and the satisfaction of a finished fence

Andrew Bane used a day away from his regular work to help build a fence. The beneficiary was a dog. The organization was Fences For Fido, which creates free fenced spaces for dogs that would otherwise be chained or unable to roam safely in a yard. Bane liked the prospect of doing something with a visible conclusion. There would be ground to dig, a structure to build and, when the work was done, room for an animal to run.

His verdict was pleasingly free of executive vocabulary: “I came home tired, sore, dirty, and glad I went.”

Bane is the chief executive of Vetsource, a Portland business where he was a member of the founding team. He spent years on the operating side before taking the top job in 2025. A fence makes an appealing opening to that story because it provides an unusually legible account of work. You can inspect the result. The customer, being a dog, is unlikely to request a slide deck.

The larger career is harder to take in at a glance. It includes graduate research, entrepreneurial ventures, an apparel company, established corporations and a long association with one growing business. The interesting part is how many different kinds of responsibility fit inside a biography that now begins with three familiar letters: CEO.

A doctorate, then an apparel business

Bane earned a master’s degree and a PhD in physiological psychology at Colorado State University. A postdoctoral fellowship at Bowman-Gray followed. His research background included published scientific work and collaboration across specialist disciplines. Before the operating titles, there was a working life organized around experiments, observation and the task of getting people with different expertise to contribute to the same project.

Then his career moved across several businesses. He cofounded Premier Veterinary Hospitals. He founded Integrated Computer Consulting. At Scott Barber, an apparel company, he served as chief operating officer. Later positions included roles at Bristol-Myers Squibb and Teva. His experience also included Pharmatech and Targacept.

An executive biography can make this sort of movement look tidier than it must have felt at the time. The dates line up obediently. The names sit in a column. The reader is invited to imagine a route with its destination marked from the beginning. Bane’s record is more interesting when the changes remain visible. Research and apparel operations ask different things of a person. A founding role adds ownership of problems that an established organization may already have assigned to somebody else.

There is no need to turn every earlier job into a prophecy. The useful fact is the range itself. Long before Vetsource’s CEO succession, Bane had worked inside different organizational arrangements, carrying different obligations. His background gives the current title a longer, less predictable preface.

The years between the shelves

In a workplace photograph published in December 2015, Bane stands to the left of Kurt Green between rows of shelving. Green holds an open laptop. Products occupy the shelves on either side. It is a compact portrait of a business that exists both on a screen and in a building. The computer is portable; the stock is rather less obliging.

Bane was Vetsource’s chief operating officer. His responsibilities over the years covered operations, logistics, supply chain and customer service. These are words that can disappear into the background of a company description. They become much more noticeable when an order is late, a process confuses a customer or the work at one desk fails to reach the next.

That makes the photograph useful beyond its record of two executives. It puts the company’s physical setting into the frame. An online transaction can look almost weightless to the person completing it. The organization behind it has to account for space, inventory, workers and time. Somebody must take responsibility for the interval between the click and the arrival.

By 2012, Bane’s public biography already described him as a member of the founding team who had held several positions and helped shape Vetsource’s direction. His operating role was part of a longer involvement. He had experience with the early business as well as the growing one, a distinction that would matter when the company eventually changed chief executives.

An invitation beyond the business

In February 2017, Bane’s appointment to the Veterinary Innovation Council board was announced in Orlando. The description accompanying it emphasized the breadth of his background and his work on operational efficiency and compliance. The council brought him into a group looking at questions across the profession, beyond the boundaries of his own company.

A board appointment supplies a date for a timeline, but it also changes the setting in which experience gets used. An operating executive is accustomed to a particular organization’s resources and constraints. A council brings together people whose institutions, priorities and assumptions may differ. The work begins with finding enough common ground to make a useful contribution.

Bane welcomed the opportunity to help develop practical innovations for the profession. That public ambition fits the responsibilities already attached to his name: improving how a business functions and contributing to efforts that involve other organizations. It is a measured aspiration, with plenty of actual work hidden inside it.

An acquisition remembered by the people who stayed

There is another view of Bane’s operating years in the recollections of Martin Traub-Werner, the founder of VetSuccess. Vetsource acquired that analytics business in 2018. In a September 2026 interview, Traub-Werner looked back on the integration and discussed the leadership of Green and Bane together.

He emphasized cultural alignment between the two organizations. His evidence included the former VetSuccess leaders and colleagues who continued to hold leadership positions at Vetsource eight years after the acquisition. The people brought into the business had continued to help run it.

That is one participant’s assessment, rather than a complete account of an acquisition. It is nevertheless a specific and useful memory. Transactions have an announcement date. Integrating people takes place over the years that follow, when teams must settle who decides what, how work moves and which habits deserve to survive.

For a profile of Bane, the recollection adds a dimension that a list of operating responsibilities misses. The work involved relationships with people arriving from another business. Retaining their contribution was part of the story. A company can buy a capability in a transaction; making room for the people who built it is an ongoing management task.

“My long-time friend and partner.”

Kurt Green, announcing Andrew Bane’s move to CEO

A new title for an old partnership

When Green announced his transition from CEO to executive advisor in 2025, he described Bane in personal as well as professional terms. The incoming chief executive was his longstanding friend and partner. Green was beginning a move toward retirement, while remaining involved in an advisory role.

Succession announcements tend to concentrate attention on the person arriving. Here, much of the story was already shared. The two executives had worked together over many years. The operating partner stepping into the CEO role knew the organization from responsibilities he had already carried inside it.

That continuity does not make the positions interchangeable. A chief operating officer’s experience becomes part of a chief executive’s judgment, alongside a wider set of decisions about direction, people and resources. The title changes the scope of responsibility even when the colleagues and the company are familiar.

The 2015 photograph acquires a second meaning in that light. It records an earlier version of a partnership that would eventually produce this handover. Ten years separate the workplace scene and the succession year. A substantial part of Bane’s professional story lives in that interval, inside the running of a business rather than in the announcement of a new job.

The distance still matters

Vetsource’s physical network continued to grow. Northlake, Texas, joined Portland and Harrisburg in 2024. The Texas location was chosen for its access to transport hubs and its ability to reduce routing delays for customers in the state. In September 2026, during Bane’s CEO tenure, the company announced a fourth location, in Atlanta, serving the Southeast.

The geography makes an operating career easier to understand. Convenience has a physical dimension. A business may improve its software and still need to put a building nearer the customer. It may offer an orderly digital experience and still have to organize the people who perform the work.

Bane now leads a company with those responsibilities spread across a larger network. His earlier experience remains relevant because expansion multiplies the number of places where a plan must become a repeatable practice. A new site is an opening announcement for the public and a continuing assignment for the team.

There is a modest pleasure in returning, after all those titles and locations, to the fence. The project had a clear purpose and an observable result. Bane’s account of it was practical and personal. He had worked alongside other volunteers, helped finish something useful and enjoyed seeing what the effort produced.

A dog with room to run has little interest in the builder’s career. It gets the benefit of the work all the same.