Veterinary Business Podcast Vision And Podcast Strategy

Host: Well, everyone. Welcome to veterinary business podcast, an ultimate resource for developing a successful veterinary practice in career. I'm Dr. Joel Parker, one of the co-hosts of veterinary business podcast. On this podcast, we bring you insights and expertise on industry leading doctors, experts, and thought leaders. We cover a wide range of topics, including practice management, marketing strategies, leadership development, HR best practices, and much more. Whether you're a practicing veterinarian, a practice owner, a practice manager, or a student studying to be a veterinarian, this podcast is scheduled to help you navigate the unique challenges

Host: and opportunities in the business of veterinary medicine. Every list are on this podcast as welcome to visit www.betronarybusinessinstitute.com for additional resources and tools to support your growth. And remember, you can subscribe to our podcasts on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, and other popular podcast platforms. Today, I'm excited to talk to Narayne O'Rajah, the founder of veterinary business podcast and CEO of Equal Marketing about veterinary business podcast vision and podcast strategy. Let's jump in. Before we get started, Narayne, why don't you take a minute to tell us about yourself?

Host: Who are you? How did you get into the veterinary space? Tell us your story. Thank you, Joel. I personally really appreciate you joining forces with me on this project. Really excited. Of course, you and I have known each other for a dozen plus years, so our relationship goes way back, and you have done amazing things, and I'm super glad that you, me, and a few others doing this. So my story, I'm Narayne O'Rajah, I'm the founder and CEO of Equal Marketing. I guess two points I want to highlight, we started working with our first veterinary clients. Again, pretty much the same time I met you, maybe a dozen years ago.

Host: Our focus, as you know, Joel, is marketing, digital marketing. That's where I come from. Today, I'm the CEO of a company and a bunch of other projects that we are working on with 250 plus people. I guess you can call me unemployable. I got five, four times in a row, which kind of forced me to go on my own and start my own business. That's where I started. I'm really, really excited about the veterinary business podcast, the veterinary business institute. We have big plans, so I'm really, really glad. We are now executing on it. That's excellent. That's great to hear. And it's funny you mentioned, you know, you got fired four times, and I think that's the problem many entrepreneurs is that we don't do well in day jobs. We do well with

Host: wonderful creative projects, right? 100%. I think we speak our mind, and I know sometimes in day jobs, you know, you're often some feders, and that's not healthy. Yeah, and I think that's awesome, you know, that's kind of like the wins of change. You bring in something new. You can rock all some feathers, and obviously in a business there are times for change and times not, but this is certainly exciting what you're doing. What's your vision for veterinary business podcast? You know, this is four. Yeah, thank you for that question. I think that's a great question and a great place to start. And yeah, today's episode is really about kind of setting the division, helping people understand, oh, we are what we are trying to do. So veterinary business podcast is part of the veterinary business institute, but we are starting with the podcast, because we feel podcast is kind of the broader end of our vision. What I mean by that is

Host: anyone in the world can listen to it, right? You just have most of us have podcasts, you know, software on our smartphones, but it's iTunes, I mean Apple, Google Android, and we just go and listen to our favorite podcast. So we want this podcast, the veterinary business podcast to become the go-to resource for everybody in veterinary medicines, specifically practice owners, doctors who are practice owners or aspiring to be practice owners, and practice managers. So if you are interested in the business side of veterinary medicine, then this is the place for you. So we want to bring an amazing information that you can act on, perhaps the next day, and the cost is zero. So this is going to be probably the most valuable information you're going to consume on a weekly basis, whatever you're driving to your office, so that you're just, you know, working out of the gym. So we want to make this amazing, and that's really our vision. I think it's great, and I think what's

Host: interesting is that we're finding more and more as the corporateists moved into this veterinary space, there is still this very much alive, which I love, the private practice owner mentality of independent practice ownership. And there is a whole new generation that you mentioned at part of your audience there of these are like associate doctors or managers and surface states and proposes where they can own practices that are looking at practice ownership. And I love this space, I'm so happy you're doing something like this, through that space. That's where we live like you do in the private practice ownership space. That's very exciting. You know, in, you know, looking at it like 10 years out, let's launch a hit 10 years out, you know, everything works out. So, you know, what would you like to see the veterinary business podcast be at that point in time, what you kind of vision on that? That's a great question Dr. Joel. I think if everything works

Host: out, I mean, of course, we have done something similar in dentistry, so we have some experience to lean on and learn from. So I hope our podcast, I listen to thousands of times, every single week, all across the globe. Of course, our focuses, US and Canada, but over time, we hope what we're sharing here will help veterinary practice on the UK or Australia or, you know, any other country where there is a private practice. And you made a really good point. We are really focused on private practices, meaning a private practice owned by one or a few people perhaps one location to locations. We are not talking about, you know, the P, funded, corporate machine with 100 locations. That's not where we are trying to help. And so we want this to be a community. So there's a lot of benefits. We hope you get out of this. Number one is you're learning from experts every single week. So you cannot only just get the latest and the greatest on everything from

Host: practice management to marketing to leadership to HR to even, you know, technology, right, anything that is going to help you be more productive, more effective as a doctor. And that's a business owner. So we're going to provide tons of content. So I'm thinking 10 years out. Second, we're going to start having events. So there might be like monthly events where perhaps we have a panel where Dr. Parker sits on and few other people are sitting on. And we're talking about what's keeping doctors awake at night. I'm not saying that's a good topic, but, you know, let's throw that as an example. So of course, we talk about that again, Dr. Parker, you know, you have experience working with tons of practices. So you probably have a good pulse on what people are worried about, what's keeping them up at night. So we can talk about what those issues are and how, you know, perhaps they could go about thinking about those or solving those. So we're going

Host: to have those events. Those events are going to be added. The recordings of those events are going to be added in the member area. So if you're a member, again, we are making the membership free, but we are not launching the member program right now. When we do it will be free, you can listen to all this content, a repository of content, and then you can go back and you know, get, it could be PDFs, it could be guides, it could be, you know, videos, it could be, you know, an entire presentation. So the idea is to make it a knowledge hub. The second part of what we wanted to do is to build a community, right? I mean, at the end of the day, education has changed. How many entrepreneurs do you see who changed the world, starting with an MBA from business school, right? Think of Elon Musk, no MBA, you know, exactly. Right? Mark Zuckerberg, dropout, Bill Gates, dropout, Steve Jobs, dropout. Like the idea of that these great entrepreneurs are going

Host: to business school and becoming entrepreneurs is not true anymore. And I think that's not different in veterinary medicine, right? The greatest business owners are not people with formal MBA. So we want to bring that MBA in bite-sized pieces, and we want to bring it in the form of mentors, meaning you're learning from others just like you. Like I mean, Steve Jobs didn't, you know, hire a professor as his coach. He hired a fellow business person as his coach. Somebody who's in the trenches, playing the same game, learning, and growing together, right? Because, you know, every business is unique and different. So you don't want some, you know, I've already tell a person to tell you what to do. You want somebody who really knows what's going on to tell you what to do or help you navigate the challenge. Yeah, that's been a walk to walk. I think what's most interesting about YouTube is your background at the industry, and now moving at the veterinary

Host: medical, you know, veterinary medical space, that's called it. And there are similarities as you know, but there are differences as well. But I think what you're bringing is your experience of booming in a dental field and moving into the veterinary field. You know, my company as well, we also work in a couple different fields. And they are similar, but they're different as you know, how do you see the differences between veterinary medicine and the dental spaces? Yeah, I do think that there's a lot of similarities. I think where the similarity start is the ownership. Of course, both dentistry and veterinary medicine is invaded by PE. But what the PE is doing is all about, you know, costs. And they're they kind of almost want to make the client and number, right? It's number 451. As opposed to the people who are in private practice, it's a relationship. You love the pet. You love the pet parents. You guys have a relationship.

Host: You become friends. And I think there's a huge group of people who appreciate that. They don't want to go to this practice where they don't know the doctor. They don't have a relationship and just trust them. They're good care of their pet. They would rather go to somebody they trust. So, I do think as corporate medicine invades dentistry in veterinary medicine, there is more and more of a need for private practice on us to focus more on the relationship, be become entrepreneurs who are innovating. Because imagine you're running a 100 location business, you can't innovate. Because everything you do has to be done 100 times with 100 managers and 100 times team members, right? As opposed to you are a solo business owner, you can't innovate. You can try something tomorrow. You learn something from, like you are I Joel today and you can apply it the next day in your practice. So, I do think those are the advantages.

Host: So, how do I put it? You can't play somebody else's game and win. So, if you're going to play the price game and the cheapest in town game and numbers game, you can't compete with the big guys. Because they will always get better prices from the manufacturers. They will always have the scale to cut costs, negotiate better deals with other partners, which you don't have. But, you can innovate. You can really focus on relationships. You can really treat the pet families like it's an extension of your family. So, you really can stand out. I mean, there's a cafe right by our street, like maybe 10 minutes from where I live. It's expensive, but my daughter would rather go there than one of those branded chain cafes. Because they don't have a soul, right? It's just a number, it's the same thing. Here you get to know the people and they really take care of you and they do interesting things. They make you feel special. It's an awesome ambiance.

Host: So, I mean, I think more and more people are gravitating towards these privately owned that it practices where they know the doctor. They trust it, doctor. And I would agree with that. By the way, everybody else, the listener's PE is an acronym for private equity. It means outside money coming in and buying practices. And there was a podcast, some months back, you know, that talked on that subject of, you know, private equity coming into the referee medicine. What I thought was so great. I think, Noreen, you probably watched that. I think what was so good about that is that at the end, the podcast interviewer had to take a stat in somewhere and the corporate school didn't get a man. So, who does he call? They call it an owner independent practice. And they visquies him in. And that's really what private practices all about. It's like really having relationships with people like you talk about and taking care of them. And so, I think that's why

Host: we've always said in our business is that, you know, if you want to be successful, it's okay to be surrounded by corporates because you'll get a really good flood of really awesome people that want that, you know, what you like the small cafe down the street, they want to get to know the people there. They want to get to know the CSR and the front desk. And so, you can build a practice around that's very, very interesting. You know, in terms of the topics that you're going to be covering with the veterinary business podcast, let's talk about some of those. What do you see? There's there's a whole host of them. I'm sure, but let's talk about a few of them. Yes, going back to this idea, that education has changed, right? You don't need to go and do a two year degree to be a manager practice on it. You can learn from peers. So, for example, we might bring in somebody who is who runs a practice and who's really, really good at making their pet parents feel special. So, what is

Host: he or she doing to make them feel special? We'll have a conversation about literally things you can do tomorrow or today as soon as you finish listening to this. Like, for example, an example, like I recently is, you know, reciprocity, right? So, this particular veterinary practice, they were giving water water. So, they had fridge and this, they had a bunch of water water, and they would tell their parents, hey, you know, help yourself. When you do that, it comes across like an entitlement. Well, everybody here gets fresh water and so forth. They've made a tiny tweak. They put that fridge behind the counter. So, nobody could see it. And the perception is too great. The pet parents say, hey, you know, I would like to give you a refreshment. We have these three drinks. What do you want? You know, you're sparkling water. It's a try, et cetera. Uh, because the customer, the pet parent thinks for a minute and says, oh, I love the sparkling

Host: water. Now, they feel you're giving them a gift. And you know what, when you start the relationship with the gift, those people are much, much, much more likely to spend more with you. Store that sells chocolates, did that. Their sales went up 42%. So, just a tiny tweak. Those kind of tiny practical ideas from real people just like you doing interesting things. And of course, we're going to be interviewing experts like Dr. Parker, you know, like I can talk about marketing. So, we're going to, you know, interview experts who have worked with 10, 20, 30 other practices like you and who have something interesting to say. So, Dr. Parker might talk about, you know, planning for a transition, right? You know, and you he might even talk about, how do you keep your practice without selling it as you wind down? I mean, so that's an interesting topic. So, you might say, hey, this is how you think about it. This is how you do it. So, we're going to bring an experts.

Host: We're going to bring in fellow practitioners like you in terms of the type of topics. You know, everything that keeps any business owner up at night, including veterinary practice owners, hiring great people, keeping it great people, making a profit, building a practice that's relationship driven, you know, making smart business decisions like a lot of people sometimes make wrong decisions. They end up buying the wrong stuff, investing a lot of money in the wrong things. You know, so all those tactical things that any business owner needs to, you know, learn about, even like financing or go sharing a lease. You might bring in a person who is really good at negotiating leases with landlords and share like the three, four, five things you need to pay attention to when you're talking to a landlord. And it's a great idea. And there are people out there. I think that what'll come out of this, too, is the fact that there are experts in very small little

Host: vertical markets of veterinary medicine, for example, negotiating a lease. And many people have tried to do it themselves. And I think they end up in a bit of a compromising position where they could have used somebody, like, I've got an expert in mind for that. I'll have to go and find their their business card that does a lot of leasing in veterinary medicine. And they just know, you know, what to look for and what not to. So I think I think that's exciting. It was some mention, you know, giving gifts to clients and so forth. And that we can talk about that sometime is, you know, how to develop referrals with clients. And I think some practices have tried paying clients for referrals. Like, if you refer somebody to me, Serene, that I'll put, I'll give you $25. You know, we tried that my practice, and it just never caught on. And when you think of it, it's a weird relationship. Less like, Serene, if you're one of your neighbors,

Host: and you come over and help me fix my tire, and I try and break that or something like that. That'd be weird. But if I, if I leave you, you know, a nice case of beer or something like that, like, right, poor, you might say, thank you for the gift. Same with clients, you know, you can give clients. And it's an interesting topic right there, isn't that? Yeah, 100%. And it's in nuances, right? Like, sometimes we missed in nuances, and I think it really, really works. But I saw it really, you know, backfires. So those nuances are what we're going to get into. And I think that's part of being a lot earlier, too. You know, you mentioned to be, you know, disability to kind of pivot, change, and so forth. And that is really listening to the nuances. You know, what are the things? What are the service points that you're doing that excite clients, like giving them a nice bottle of sparking water, or what are the service points that bring them down,

Host: such as charging a biohazard fee or something like that. You know, that varies by practice. Some people don't care. Some people go, you know, they're, I'm being nickel and dime. So you're right. It's about the nuances. And I think that's where entrepreneurs like you and I can listen, you know, we just watch how people react and start to fine tune. Right? Absolutely. And I think we're going to have so much fun. We might do a part of it. And we'll have amazing conversations with three people sharing the perspective. So this is just getting off a big vision of, you know, bringing this education, this community to every private practice on an innovative medicine. I think it's great. And there's a lot of really interesting people. You and I have been to a lot to the conferences over the last 10 years. You and I met at that very interesting group called Beth Partners, which is that consortium of business experts from marketing people to consultants, to finance people,

Host: to valuation people, to lawyers, and so forth, that are all that behind the kind of scenes of Betray Medicine. There is a plethora of a whole host of extremely interesting people within that group, the Beth Partners group. So what kind of people do you got in mind that you'd be in your view and I think maybe this is a question where you and I can have a conversation. Of course, Peter Weinstein is somebody that comes to mind. You know a ton of people too, like who would you interview? Let's say for HR, let's say HR best practices. Right. Yeah. HR best practices, boy, there's a number of people that come to mind that work in that field. I think that oh gosh, your name escapes you right now, but it's people like that we need help, right? Exactly. Right. Yeah. I think yeah, that's the what it's going to be. So we are going to ask you too. It's just like Dr. Parker and I are brainstorming right now. You're going to ask everyone if you, who do you

Host: recommend? Like he's somebody that you look up on somebody you think is an expert in this topic, and then you can also help us find the best people. So it needs to be organic. Karen Philstedt, by the way. Another vet partner is very, very seasoned consultant. You know, she's not too unseasoned, but it's seasoned consultant, right? I know. She's amazing. She's amazing. Yeah, there's a lot of really amazing people. And I think there's amazing people all the way from HR all the way to, you know, exam room compliance with patient care plans all the way into Treasury, like, you know, we could even get somebody talking about, you know, wellness plans, you know, plus or minus. There's a I ran into a good bit Parker member to talk about that where he brought in wellness plans in one practice that was kind of slow and about that practice. I said, busy and then he tried to do the same thing in a busy practice. And they always

Host: lynched them. The people, you, this staff were so busy that all of a sudden you got this well this plan on all these people are coming in. So there's fine tuning things like that. We can bring with somebody's people. Then all the way to operations. One of the things we've been working on is fine tuning operations and getting the veterinarian to do less, put hog in the ball and the interesting stuff to do and start letting your staff do more and free your time up so you can see where clients grow out. Or maybe, you know, this is kind of going from more of a hobby style good practice to a great practice that you can see a lot of people. The problem that ever he's running into is as short as the DBMs. So we're now getting very, very successful at exam room management and using teams of people to support one veterinarian. That's a very interesting topic and to itself. Another area that I find interesting is quality control as practices

Host: grow big. A lot of practice owners lose control of the quality of the medicine. And there was one extreme example where practice owner ended up, you know, with a client that went home after it was called a carpal pad terror, like a little pot, you know, caught. And the associate doctor in the technician bandage it up and sent them home and the woman drove four hours home and let the dog running around the house bleeding on the carpet because they bandaged their wrong foot. Now, you can imagine. So the thank goodness, the pet owner called the practice owner on his day off. He went and sold it. But it's issues like this that are growth related issues that require really addressing quality control. And what is that? And making sure that you're staff or training, you can keep those things under control. And it was something like that. Now, 100% in a few topics that come to mind is like the way the phone is answered. Like

Host: there's an actual client of ours who's a veterinary practice owner. They get like 130 new patient called, I mean, you client calls every month. But only 45% up booking a point. So what's happening? You know, and they had no idea because they asked the person who's answering the phone, how are we doing? Or I'm doing great, right? That's what it we all say. There's no metric, nobody measures the call conversion rate. So they don't know. So the owner is so busy, busy, busy, busy, you know, trying to grow the practice, hire more people in a spend more money and marketing. Here is this huge hole. Like a half of your, yeah, half of your new patients are not new clients and are coming in. You know, and then you pension, right? Some people are very good at getting people in, but then they never show up again. What's going on? What's going on? I know. So so we got the initial pulse of marketing that goes out. We've got the response with the phone and the conversion.

Host: And then after they come in for that, you know, first dance on the dance floor in the exam room, do they come back? So you're right. There's a number of different touch points. Just pre-COVID, we finished up a study. You know, yeah, my business, we were going to be, we were going to call a thousand practices and just kind of a mystery call, then say, eight, we've got a little six month old Yorky Terrier that we need to get spade. Well, how much is it going to cost? The rain we gave up at about 40, 54, because the results were so bad. It was so bad. I would say five percent of practices were truly interested in who we were and struck a relationship and you could see my coworker, you could see her just rise up emotionally when they got into conversation. And the other 95 percent, it was a little bit like, you know, selling hamburger by the pound. How much does she have to say? And then they blurt the price out and hang up. So yes, this is, this is a remarkable

Host: area to work in, isn't it? Yeah, it's an amazing area. And I think a lot of people get into back now in medicine, whether it's a doctors or the team members, they go there because they love pets. They love, you know, taking care of animals. I know one of my nieces, you know, they have a dog and, you know, we have a dog and a pet, you know, a melon is like 10 years old. She wants to be a veterinary doctor, right? So she wants to take care of, you know, these animals, she loves. But when you graduate from school, the school doesn't train you on all this business side of things. And so you are kind of on your own and you don't know what you don't know. I mean, a lot of times, it's like the blind spot, right? Most of the time we get into accidents because we don't see that car coming. We don't like nobody like purposefully sees the problem and goes and begs into the other car. You don't see it. It's the blind spot. So hopefully you start noticing these blind spots.

Host: And the way I look at it is, you don't have to pay the price. Let somebody else pay the price and you learn from that mistake. So if we can share a case study about, I mean, this is an awesome case study where, you know, 95% of the call is you called, you know, it's like selling meat by the pound, as opposed to building a relationship with this pet owner and the pet. Get remarkable thing on that to bring that full circle is that we would call up the practice and say, listen, we just can we speak with the owner, we just missed recall the practice. Most people didn't want a job to us. In fact, a couple of managers were offended that we even did that. How dare you call us? We'll give you permission to do that. Well, you know, and we're there to help them and increase their conversion. So it's, I think what can happen, and this is a lot of our premise terrain that if you really don't know what you're doing in terms of managing a practice or anything,

Host: even like flying a plane or driving a car, you can get overwhelmed to the point that somebody can say we're here to help you and you'll push it away, right? Just because you're so overwhelmed, but help is seen as just yet another thing to do. And that's what I'm really really loving about your podcast here. The best way business podcasts is that this is something that practice others can go to on their own time. They can look through, you know, the topics that you'll have set up and so forth and they can start to dive into that. You know, but speaking of that, you know, where are people going to be able to find these topics as they build that? Where's the landing spots? Where is it? Absolutely. So all the podcasts are going to be listed on the veterinary business institute website. So that's where people can go and, you know, grab all this information. Of course, it's going to be on every major podcast platform from my tunes, Google Play,

Host: Spotify, Amazon, music, everywhere you go to listen to podcasts or music, you will find it. And one of the things that I recommend is subscribe to it, right? So automatically it gets downloaded to your device. So without you even having to download, so it just shows up, you just listen to it, it's in your playlist. Now, if you're one of those people who wants to go back and listen to everything, right? So then you can go back to the website where the business institute and literally every single podcast, you can see a page, you will see show notes, you will see any resources that came with it. You can actually watch the video. You can, you know, you can see the podcast and you can have some fun. It sounds great. It sounds like it's going to be very complete. And I'm excited. I think it's going to be great. I really appreciate you being on today. Thanks so much for joining us today and talking about the veterinary business podcast vision and podcast strategy. We really

Host: appreciate it very much. I also want to take a moment to thank our listeners. I'll be appreciate each and every one of you. We cannot do what we do without you. If you like our podcast, kindly share with your colleagues and friends on social media. Also, please don't forget to leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. You reviews will help other doctors and other practice orderers find us. Until next time, keep striving for excellence and making a positive impact in the lives of your patients and pet parents. Wishing you all an amazing week ahead. Thanks for watching. See you next time.