The Standing Ovation Practice With Dr Joel Parker

Host: Hello everyone, welcome to the veterinary business podcast. Your ultimate resource for developing a successful veterinary practice and career. I am Narayana Roll Rajah, the founder of the veterinary business podcast and one of the co-vosts. On this podcast, we bring you insights and expertise from industry-leading doctors, experts, and taught leaders. We cover a wide range of topics including practice management, marketing strategies, leadership development, HR best practices and much more. Whether you are a practicing veterinarian, a practice owner, a practice manager, or a student studying to be a veterinarian, this podcast is tailored to help you navigate the challenges and opportunities in the business of veterinary medicine. Every lesson of this podcast is to welcome to visit the website veterinarybusinessinstitute.com.

Host: For additional resources, tools, and support to support your growth. And remember, you can also subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, and other popular podcast platforms. Today, I have an amazing guest, Dr. Joel Parker. He's a veterinarian and co-founder of veterinary practice solutions. Plus, he's one of our co-hosts. So he is a partner in crime sort of speak. We had doing this together. So Dr. Parker, welcome. Before we jump into today's topic, which is the standing ovation practice, I just want you to kind of tell us a little bit about yourself. I know you are a veterinarian. I know you ran a practice and I know you help other practice owners. So tell us a little bit about yourself, your story, and why you are passionate about veterinary medicine. I'll try and be as brief as I can, Nareen. Thanks so much. Great to be on here. Great to be

Host: interviewed by you. This is super fun. Listen, I grew up as a kid that lived in kind of a rural area I had flying squirrels and chipmunks and crows, living in the house, all that kind of crazy stuff. And so a really, really big love of animals and went into veterinary medicine. I wouldn't say, I was like an A student. I wasn't. I didn't find study naturally, really easy, but I had a really big burning desire to be a veterinarian. And graduated one and went to work in a practice on graduation and within a couple of years was quite disappointed. I think with the quality of medicine, I think I expected certain things to be up here. And then, you know, as you engage in life, some things are down here. And that caused me to start looking for what was a great practice, which by the way is my advice to you is new graduates out there is that, you know, find a good mentor. They don't even have to be in your practice. They can be somewhere else. Nareen,

Host: I found a good mentor who was running this smallest on-home practice in North America. And so I started doing a relief work for him and also doing a really for it at a local emergency practice to try and get my surgical chops up and so forth. And after a couple of months of doing that, the owner of this practice said, Joel used to buy the practice. The clients really like you. And I'm burnt out, you know, I could do this for 14 years. So, like a 200-meter in the rain, you rustle up the money. You, in fact, that's another topic. At some point in time, isn't it? It's how to get finance to start your veterinary practice dream. And I'd love to, I can give you guys some some people to talk to on that. Because, you know, initially, we went into a local bank and they said, oh, Sonny saved up some money and come back. I think was the bank I had my checking account with. They were not a business bank. But eventually,

Host: being a good entrepreneur. And that's for everybody looking at starting your own practice. You know, don't give up. You know, you know, have some tenacity in your vision. And so, I ended up finding a business bank. The guy said, yeah, let's do it. So, I put together some money, big borrowed some money from a relative, and got finance, kind of a hybrid finance, of both the owner finance, me and the bank, plus my money. And I was into practice on share. Nureen, I lasted about three years until I hit the wall. I would say three years of fake in it. You know, kind of dabbling in it as management wise. I figured all I had to do is have an all-hospital in the window, and I'd be super busy. And the practice I bought was in the highest per capita income community of the country. Right. And so I thought, oh, this is easy. I don't need to worry about money. All I got to do is practice that tree medicine and then everybody will pay

Host: the bills. And after three years, I was having clients leaving the practice because I wouldn't bother giving a mess to this. And, you know, this is another practice tip, you know, just charge up bills at your own peril. You know, never bypass the paid the pet owners power of choice, which I was doing. And so I was losing clients. I got to a point. I think it culminated to rain where I was in the middle of surgery. And we weren't busy enough. We weren't making enough money. I was working 60, 80 hours a week. You know, trying to make this single right. And the bank manager was on the phone in the middle of the surgery saying, Dr. Parker, you got to put some money in the account. You know, I'll hold paychecks for 48 hours. I'm going, oh, you know, now my story for all of you listing is very different. You know, we all have our different stories. This is just mine. Yours may be that you have so much work. You don't know what to do with. And you never see your

Host: kids go to sleep, right? You know, you know, to seek tech or kids into bed. We've all gone our different stories. The take home message here is that my concept of veterinary practice management was that payday was every two weeks. Right. That's really the extent of my knowledge and that I was focusing on being a veterinarian. And so I kind of hit the wall like a long distance runner and started looking around for how do I figure this thing out? The first person I went to was my account. And he said, Joel, here's your proper law statement. It's in the red. You don't have to pay taxes this year. And in the rain, I want you, if you look at this here, that's like you bringing your dog to me and saying, Nurene, your dog's a diabetic, but I don't know how to fix diabetics. And that's my account and said, Joel, you're not making any money, but I don't have to run your practice. So it was the, it was the oddest thing as I went to get objective data

Host: like the proper law statement to try and manage the practice, like we manage patients, like a veterinary in the rain. We manage patients off of blood work and radiology. Like objective data. I was trying to do, I had that concept we could do that in a practice, but I couldn't find it. And until there was a practice management company in the late 80s and said, here's his management system that is very, very evident space. And you start tracking numbers and you start managing off the numbers and there's formulas to use that if you're new clients are down, then you would follow the formula to get them go off. And I went, that's what I'm looking for. So I signed on with this group and started studying this management system and my world opened up. This was the other half of my education. This was all the stuff we never got in that school, from marketing, the hiring, to training, to finance, to how to sell treatment plans, how to

Host: communicate. You know, one of the courses I swear I'm going to develop here at veterinary practice solutions is I'm going to call it shitchat 101 effective communication skills for the new associate, the new graduate because we're never really taught on that already. Absolutely. Long, the long story short here is that I went from work in 60 to 80 hours as a single doctor into developing in a highly competitive area, 17 practices within five miles, shortage of DBMs is staff. I went and developed a three-and-a-half doctor practice where as a practice owner, I worked half as a doctor. I worked about 20 hours a week. I did all the endoscopy and specialized surgery and saw the clients I wanted, but I spent the other amount of time being an entrepreneur and developing the practice. So as I got working less and developing more and more of my business management skills, I created what I coined the term, a standing

Host: ovation practice. And within a period of time, I also had a mobile endoscopy company, I'm kind of like a serial entrepreneur like yourself, what I call a veteran winner, right? So you know, it's running the practice. I started a mobile endoscopy company called veterinary endoscopy solutions, you know, fiber optics for unusual places was our tagline. And then I started a manufacturing company of a very high-end line of dog products called economic equipment gear for dogs, and I was importing materials into my hometown of Vancouver British Columbia Canada, where there were a lot of Vietnamese sores there. I was bringing materials in from Germany and South Carolina all over the place of manufacturing that exporting out. And so that was very, very exciting times, right? I learned a lot about, you know, a material planning and cash flow planning and Excel spreadsheets. But the bottom line,

Host: what backed that up was this standing ovation practice, this practice that was extremely run extremely well, not a lot of confusions and mistakes and stress every now and again a little bit with blepop, but it was fun. It was a husband, a white practice, my wife's a devian as well. And so she joined the practice and we became a three-and-a-half doctor practice all credited all the way that became really that special practice in time. Anyways, I could go on more, but yeah, that's kind of who I am. Oh, and then sold everything and then moved into practice consulting and created this company that I run now with my co-owner Jeff Lee, user CEO, I'm kind of the president. I'm on the front lines doing podcasts in our YouTube channel, veterinary practice solutions, what's called quite board Wednesday. That's our YouTube channel. Anyways, that's what I do not. Health practices, I help practice owners develop their skills

Host: so they can create more time and money and develop these standing evasion practices. And by the way, when they go to sell them, the multiple is extremely high. They do very very well because they're highly organized. That's another topic. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much. I know that's an awesome introduction and awesome story about who you are where you came from, what you have been doing. So thank you for that. Let me just talk about, you know, the standing ovation practice. So I just did a bit of thinking and there's a few things I want to cover. So let me just jump into the very first thing. What is standing ovation practice? The standing ovation practice and like many of us that I'm finding in our vet partners group is so forth. We can be musicians and they've played bands and so forth. But I like an practice that when you start getting the components all working together, we can talk about this components. When you start getting them all working together, there can be a harmony,

Host: a synergy that is greater than some of all parts that creates this business that is well talked about and that people stand up and give you a standing ovation by posting extremely great reviews and importantly, just naturally referring their friends and family into you. They love the medicine. They love the people. The pricing is well in line. Like I don't think we were never the cheapest price practice. But we didn't lose people because people loved us and we charged fairly. Our fees are in what I call the Goldilocks zone of not too hot, not too cold. They were just perfect to be profitable. But in being able to pay our staff extremely well at the same time, not charging too much and excluding people. So we had an all-open door practice that attracted a lot of incredible people that would refer to their friends and family. That's the standing ovation. When you do that, you get a lot of referrals. You get a lot of people talking about you in the community.

Host: Yeah. I think that's a great, great definition of a standing ovation practice. So what you're saying is it's a remarkable practice. You stand out. Yes. I'm not in a bad way, but in a good way. So it's like that it's like that incredible performance that you go and see when people go in there. It's what I call that fifth star of a five-star review that's above and beyond what people back and they go, it's like going to listen to a great realization and you are emotionally moved at the end of it. Nobody says stand up and will give you a t-shirt. Stand up, you know, stand up and will give you twenty five dollars. None of that stuff. You are emotionally stand up and applaud because of that above and beyond expected experience. Yeah. Brian Cheski, who's the founder of Airbnb, talks about this concept about, you know, 10 stars. What does 10 stars look like? You know, beyond, what does 12 stars? Elon Musk comes and picks you up from the airport. He takes you to

Host: your place and then you go to Mars. So you go somewhere on his Facebook, I don't even come back. That is like, like it's a, you know, of course, what is it, 11 star? You have private reservations for our private dining with the best restaurant in town where the chef is personally serving you, you know, like so you can really define it. But I assume a standing ovation practice. You're not just looking at it from a patient experience, stand point. But you are also looking at it from the employees stand point, from the owner's stand point, like work life balance, all these perspectives. Is that, is that not correct? It's very, very true. You know, it might be one work like balance. This is just my own opinion, Nureen, that if you really love what you're doing. And if your personal purpose aligns up, your vector purpose aligns up with the purpose of the practice, then it becomes a really wonderful place to work and that you're not always

Host: thinking about, you know, what time is it so I can go home and start my life. Your life starts when you walk in the door. Now, I'm not saying that 80 hours a week isn't too much. It is. But certainly to work 40, 45 hours a week and love what you're doing. You'll find that you're need for this work like balance lessons because it's so much fun when you're in the practice. And I think that's a key thing. When you find the right people, when you train them, when you align your purposes for what you're doing, you become, you know, that that experience that's greater than some of the parts. And it's a place that you really love going to. You know, you don't feel like driving by the practice in the morning and, you know, we had one client that did that. The practice is so stressful. He'd ride by a couple miles down the road and then if I go, okay, I got a turn and I got to go in. No, we're talking about that you love going into that practice. You don't mind spending those

Host: couple extra minutes. I think so that's my concept of work like balance is that for me, it all blends together. Now, that thing said, when I was working 80 hours a week, I was, I was so exhausted that I would be in the grocery store hiding behind the Cheerios, you know, to avoid a client because I was just so exhausted and overwhelmed. But when you get to the point where you have that balance in your life and you love going to work and you're not working, you know, 80 hours a week, you actually love to see people. There's a calmness and a wonderful kind of energy that begins to happen. And I think the key thing around is we had a lot of fun and we attracted fun people. We started attracting, you know, this is where a lot of my hiring, you know, advices, you know, stop looking to find good veterinarians and start creating a great practice, not a good practice, but a great practice that veterinarians will find you. And I know that to be true because in the end with our

Host: standing evasion practice, we have no trouble hiring. We did it the beginning because it wasn't an environment that was conducive to great people being there. They just, they would come in and they would last a month and then leave. So yeah, it's like the opposite of a vicious cycle. This creates this momentum that builds and builds and builds. You get better people who are happier, who do great work. And that makes it even more of an experience and amazing outcomes for patients. It's a positive cycle. For those listening, there are great people that would love to join the practice. Many of them are working at corporate. And most of us with that, most graduates, myself included within one to four years of change practices. So little, little shot-out action tip, that's your hunting ground, this local corporate practices with veterinarians that have been out one to four years. They were out there and they would love to join your private

Host: practice. My tenure in practice was before corporates got really going. So they were starting, I did not sell the corporate, I sold the private one I did. But nowadays, that is a good source to find good veterinarians. I think there's corporates like Banfield that are actually a good place to start for a graduate veterinarian, give them a couple of years and then they can come work for you. It's a great place to start. But there are good veterinarians looking for your practice out there. Thank you so much. I know we only have like 10 out 12 moments to go. So let me get to the meat of this. What are the main components of this tending location practice? Perhaps you can just list them and maybe let's go. Number one, you've got a full-time 24-7 hiring division that's always looking for good people, not always hiring, but always looking. You've got somebody on that. So you're attracting good people. Number two, the exam room communication skills are superb.

Host: We're not, we're talking about that the clients don't leave the exam room and going up to the CSR and saying, what did he say? They come out of there fully knowing. So with that, you get extremely good client compliance. By the way, secret of good client compliance is communication. Number three, your fees are in that goly lock zone. They're high enough to be able to pay your staff well and not lose staff, high enough to give yourself a paycheck and high enough that you're profitable but not so high that they're turning people off. Number four, your veterinary medicine is extremely high quality medicine. You've got great equipment. It's really, really fun to work in out there. You really love working out of there. You know, you are getting rate outcomes and there's a great mentoring program for young veterinarians coming in there. I love mentoring young veterinarians. It's a blast. It's great, right? Remember, you've got to talk them off

Host: alleged. You've got to push them to do that extra little bit in surgery. You know, don't just give them a big surgical case and then walk away. Be right there to help them. Number five, that the next kind of pillar in there is believe it or not having some great quality control in your medicine and if there are mistakes that get made, which can happen, that the mistakes are corrected. And importantly, the person or people that made the mistakes are corrected. That's a, that's a close door activity. You know, prison, public, correct and private. People are soft and gooey on the inside, but they can make mistakes. Either they're not trained or the ratitudes not correct. They need to be corrected. Correction. So in my practice, if somebody made a mistake, they wouldn't get fired. We would sit down and talk about it and work towards getting them corrected and on-track for support, you know, so supportive veterinary medicine.

Host: And then, so a lot of that is continuing education, but importantly, you know, correcting their communication skills. If a client was upset, then that's a communication skills. Not always technical things. And then the final one is, you know, having extremely good PR in the community, and I would do a lot of radio shows and television shows every year, we would have a Christmas party, and we would do goofy stuff like having bobbing for turkey winters in the back, we'd have a bucket of water there and dogs would come back, and it was a complete oath. It was super, super fun. So we got known for being a very, very happy, very high end practice. We get a little of this. We never charge for a new patient. Even so a new client with a new patient, we charge for an existing client with a new patient, we wouldn't charge for. And some people say, well, isn't that devaluating your value? No, not at all. Clients understand the value

Host: what they're doing. That's not an issue. What clients really loved about that was this just come on in and let's meet them. You know, that friendliness, all part of that, you know, creating that extremely high, above and beyond expected experience, that standing avation practice. Okay. On top of that, there's the seventh one. Finally, the practice is profitable. It's reaching that 20% you know, even that 20% profitability. And that's a lot of the work I do now is help practices get there. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So you went through the seven components of a standing ovation practice. You're saying, this is what makes over a standing ovation practice. Now, let me ask you a practical question. You probably have seen a lot of practices that are not standing ovation practices. So what do you think is topping these practice owners from creating a

Host: standing ovation practice? The biggest thing in the region you're right, I've actually seen thousands over the years now. I started this company in 2004, you know, we're a 20 year overnight success. And over there, I've seen a lot of people. And I've had my own experiences and we're actively working with 200 clients on a weekly basis now. You know, as they move through our programs, going towards that standingvation practice, the biggest barriers are not time or money. It's the attitude of the owners and the staff. It really is. And, you know, we've all met them. Sometimes we're running owners that are running on mediocre practice, but they think they know how to do it. We call that that can be kind of a no best attitude. Nobody can tell me how to do it. They're very tough to work with. You'll say, this is what this is what I suggest you do. And they come up now that will never work, right? So, so we'll find that. I'm sure you run in about as well.

Host: Yes, you have a marketing company. We need to do this on. I try that. It'll never work. So, you know, surely as human beings, we do drag our disappointments and failures forward into time. We can do that. But at some point in time, they're really successful. People leave all that stuff behind or they're saying, what do I need to do to be more successful? So, a lot of work we do on the front end of rain is working with people and their fixed ideas. Sometimes they're surrounded by people that are really emotionally low. They can be angry and grumpy and so forth. They're very emotionally down. And they've stopped and self surrounded by people like that. And I'll tell you right now, one of the best things you can do is hire a really what will up-toe, very positive and enthusiastic team. So, all the way from that, sometimes, you know, some major people have to be let go out of the practice. Their attitudes are not

Host: high enough and positive enough for that to really hit you onto that owner's dream, you know, on where they want to go. So, yeah, I would say it's the practice owners and a lot of the staff that are in the way of reaching that standing-of-ation practice. And so, it all starts with them. And all starts with you, nine of rain, is that decision we make to pursue greatness and, you know, and reject mediocrity. Now, absolutely, absolutely. Thank you so much. I think these are, I think the mindsets, I agree, even in my experience, it's those mindsets. Like, like, for example, that is a school that is the best school in the country. There's a school that has drugs and in a crime and everything else, right? What's different? A lot of, if you probably talk to the people in the really bad school, they say, oh, that is the way it is. We can't do anything about it. I mean, they just really believe in it. They feed into it as opposed to the best people, typically,

Host: like, well, how can we get better? How can we go to the next step? So, it's just the way they think, the way they look at it. And that are these mindsets that I think make all break black, because I assume. Yeah, we call that the dimmer switch syndrome. You know, the lights have been turned down. So every day they go a little lower, they think that's normal. Nothing can be done about it. And then I walk in there and go, hey, you need to turn the lights up in here. Yeah. Yeah, I like the frog in a voiling part. I don't realize, like, you know, it's just over time, there that way out there, but they can reverse it. Right. Thank you for that. Let's let me ask you, this is going to be my last question to you. Can you give me some action items? We talked about the starting ovation practice. So in the context of a starting ovation practice, what are some action items? Take on simple things that pretty much, everyone listening,

Host: any practice on a listening can perhaps try the next day. Just give us like a few simple ideas. Okay. Good idea. First off is look within yourself and see whether you want to run a great innovation practice. It all starts with you. Okay? And if you've got a lot of considerations, why that can happen, then just start to shove those aside. It can happen. Number two, define your purpose for why your practice is there. Like write it out in paper and have a staff meeting that week, gather everybody around say, guys, you know, I've decided, I have decided. I've made that decision. Can tell you staff that we're going to create a standing avation practice. And this is my vision. This is my purpose for what we're doing here. And you give everybody a copy and you go through it line by line. Number three, start hiring great people. And some of the best people in the rain that I hired were clients,

Host: believe or not. And was I a little nervous about hiring clients? That makes some mistakes. Yes, I did. But in the end, every single one of my friend and staff were clients at some point in time. So don't hire the ones that have come into you a lot that are friendly. And whenever they come in, they kind of bring you up to own and they can be sitting up front and they're talking clients up there. When I started hiring these upbeat upton clients overnight, the practice lifted up. You know, I guess a fourth one would be, is that when you run into, you know, staff objections and so forth, then use communication skills to get everybody on the same page, to align your realities. And you'll find that there's a lot of good people out there, but they may have objections that they just kind of need your ticket triggered and so forth. You've got to be able to get past that. The other, the final thing I would say just here is like

Host: make sure, because we talked about this earlier, make sure that 90, you know, I said earlier, that 95% of the people that we surveyed on fees and so forth, their front end fees and their back end fees are too low. I should maybe didn't mention that. You know, we, I teach you of course, on finance, on profitability that's been extremely successful and growing and growing and one of the key things I'll find terrain is that 95% of practices are too low in your fees. So you want to get your fees, you, you can't make up and volume when you're charging below costs. These practices are struggling with profitability, with attracting good staff, retaining good staff. And one of the key things that you need to do is make sure that your fees are correct to your area where you're practicing and we develop some proprietary formulas to work out what the fee should be and we felt a lot of practices. We had one practice owner that came back and after, you know, going over

Host: the formulas increases fees by 40% a kid, you know, that is not uncommon. For 0% he raised them and two or three weeks later he had an extra $20,000 in his bank account and nobody said anything. That's a funny fun. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He thought he was afraid of like, oh, I can't do this. I can't do this. No, that's right back where you question number one, the question before that. You know, it's it's practice owners' fears that are holding its back and you've got to look at that is that fear rational, right? And so that's what that's what our practice owner client did. He overcame his fears. He went and bit the bullet, raised those fees and nobody said a word. Anyway, so much. I really, really had so much fun here. I mean, literally you give so many ideas. Now, let's say if somebody wants to follow you, you know, watch those videos, perhaps even get a hold of you. Is that a way they can do that? Can you give us a website, resources, some of you to get a

Host: hold of you? I always work and make people go to our YouTube channel, Whiteboard Wednesdays and subscribe and there are hundreds of little four to five minutes video deaths on there that I've shot over the years. I've got a whole bunch more. I've got to get shooting this week that are here, that are there to help people. And there's been managers and owners that have loved those. Secondly, come on to one of our webinars. And if you go under our website, veterinarypracticeolutions.com, there are free webinars there. There's free webinars on exactly what I mentioned really, how to set your fees correctly. You'll get that overall concept there. There's fees on how to build a practice and attract you the veterinarians. And there's free webinars on just shot when yesterday on efficiency, how to run a more efficient and effective practice. So there's more time and money left over. So go to our Whiteboard Wednesdays on YouTube channel and like that

Host: through veterinarypracticeolutions. And go to our website, veterinarypracticeolutions.com and find those webinars and sign up for a free webinar and come and meet us. And in the rain, we're like you, we give a lot of free stuff away at the front end. At some point in time, we do have to charge clients like you. I do have staff that show up every week. They need a paycheck. But at the same time, there's a lot of resources out front there that we're really happy to help people with it. It's super fun. And long live the private practice ownership. All everything we do, we are championing private practice ownership and building that standing of Asian practice. I also want to take a minute to thank our listeners. We appreciate each and every one of you. We cannot do what we do without you. If you like our podcast, please share it with your colleagues and friends on social media. Also, please don't forget to

Host: leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. Your reviews will help other doctors and practice owners. Find us until next time, keep striving for excellence and making a positive impact in the lives of your patients and of course, better parents. Wishing you all an amazing week ahead. Till we meet again, you are co-host Narayan Arunrajah. Have a wonderful week.