Journey Through Veterinary Medicine Through The Eyes Of A Veterinarian

Host: Hello everyone, welcome to the veterinary business podcast, you are ultimate resource for developing a successful veterinary practice and career. I am Narayan Aruraja, the founder of the veterinary business podcast and one of the cool. On this podcast, we bring you insights and expertise from industry leaders, doctors, experts and photographers. We cover a wide range of topics including practice management, marketing strategies, leadership development, HR best practices and a lot more. Whether you are a practicing veterinary doctor, a practice owner, a practice manager, or a student, starting to be a veterinarian, this podcast is tailored to help you navigate the unique challenges and opportunities in the business of veterinary medicine. Every listener of this podcast is welcome to visit the veterinary businesses to do.com for additional resources and tools to support your growth. Remember to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes who will play Spotify or other

Host: popular podcast platforms. Today I am excited to talk to Dr. Mark Rosen of Veterinary and business advice for many, many, many practices all across the US and the world. We also proud to announce that he is joining hands with us as a co-host. So, thank you, Dr. Rosen. Welcome to the veterinary business podcast. Well, thank you for having me. I sure do appreciate it and I look forward to having deep and meaningful relationships with the listeners and what we talk about. 100% you know, I have had the privilege to get to know you and you have so much of wisdom and knowledge over the last 35 years, both as a veterinary practice owner, but Mary and and of course as a coach consultant who helps other practices you know and have some build their practices. The topic we are going to talk about today is journey through veterinary medicine, through the eyes of a veterinarian, journey through veterinary medicine, through the eyes of a veterinarian.

Host: I think Dr. Rosen, there's nobody better to talk about this than you because of your 35 years of experience. So, I'm really looking forward to our conversation. So, let me start by asking you my first question. Can you share your journey from being a veterinarian to becoming a, you know, now international business advisor and what inspired you to make this transition? So, tell us a little bit about yourself. Well, like most veterinarians out there, my journey started when I was a little kid, almost chokes me up to think of the little cats and dogs we had as a family and when one of those little kittens got sick, I was determined I'm going to fix this in my future and that was to become a veterinarian. So, even though I was a little kid in elementary school, I already had my sights said I'm being a veterinarian. I had really no idea what it didn't tell, how hard it would be. I'm to find out later it was quite detailed and quite difficult, but I learned through

Host: experience working in middle school, working in high school for different veterinarians doing the back-in cleaning cages, scoop and poop as we call it, the super duper poop or scooper. That was me. So, once I get to college, I knew that hard work was going to make the difference and hard work along with the passion of being a veterinarian is what prompted me to go through vetschool. Like every veterinarian out there, we all had to go through vetschool and the vetschool experience is really quite a life-changing experience in many ways, but the success of graduating from vetschool getting my degree, getting my license was all I really want to do. But now it was faced with the next part, what are you going to do with a vet degree, go save lives, or certainly try not to kill anything, so I went into practice. That's where I started my next step in this journey of the veterinarian medicine. That's awesome. And so how long have you been at coach consultant?

Host: Well, the coaching started after I was in practice for about 20 years. I worked for several different practices and then I opened up my own practice. And through that journey of being a practitioner and then being a practice owner, experience is amazing. It's what you grow with. You grow with the failures you grow with the successes. So being a veterinary associate, then being a veterinary practice owner, that gave me the insight and the knowledge and what I found was other veterinarians could use that insight and knowledge. So when I sold my practice, I decided to try to take my knowledge of my experience and help other veterinarians in their journey as well through the vet medicine pathway, either as an associate, which is what I do with by coaching, health veterinarians, well established in their associate area of expertise to do even better. And then more importantly, the ones that decide to go from being an associate to being an employee as a veterinarian,

Host: to be a practice owner. That's a very difficult transition to make. And all the different places that I've worked and all the different businesses that I've owned. It's not easy. It's not easy to be a business owner. It's certainly not easy to be a successful as a business owner while you're being a veterinarian. That's a very difficult combination. Thank you Dr. What are some of the key lessons that you took out of your ownership and you managing your own veterinary clinic and talking and how did those lessons influence your approach as a business advisor? One of the things that makes a good veterinarian is empathy. They're passionate, they're empathetic, and all of us that went through vascular realize that hard work comes with that empathy to be able to do what we want to do, which is to make sure pets are healthy, try to save lives where we can. And so that empathy is a certain part of the brain, which doesn't always fit well with the other side of the brain,

Host: which is success in business. Business ownership and being empathetic as a veterinarian sometimes have a clash. And that's what I learn through being a business owner is that sometimes these things are opposing forces. You want to be empathetic. You want to save every animal. Almost every veterinarian that I've coached you consulted with will tell you, they would do it for free if they could, but you can't. You have to make some money. You have to be able to survive. You have to pay your bills. And that conflict is what I try to get people to learn through this bridge of being an empathetic veterinarian to be in a successful business person. And those are the experiences that are bring to the table as a consultant to try to get them to understand how that bridge can be crossed without really compromising your empathetic passion. And at the same time being successful enough to have a lifetime career in veterinary medicine. That makes sense. So you have to mix empathy

Host: with business savvy or business knowledge. And then of course, like you said, make profit at the same time, take care of your pets like they were your own. That's pretty much the root of it. You have this conflict. And being a business is insightful as far as you need to have excellent communication skills. You have to be able to talk to not only the pet parents, but as the business owner, you have to be able to talk to your employees, your associates. So these emotional and intelligent communication skills are critical for both sides. So that truly is the bridge between being an empathetic veterinarian and a successful business person is the ability to communicate successfully to try to establish some line of lack of a better term just simply communication to get things done. Because not everybody has the same goals that you have as a business owner. So when you're at a practice and you have let's say anywhere from one employee to 100 employees,

Host: you have to be the expert as far as guiding these these people that are part of your success. In order to do that, you have to learn as we know in veterinary medicine, education is key. Once you become a veterinarian, your education doesn't stop. It continues through your whole career. And so hopefully, as a coach and a consultant, I can help you with the other side, to try to get you to understand the business practices that are efficient, effective, the things that can help you get through the day without all the extra headaches of the unknown. Absolutely. Can you highlight some common challenges that young, that many doctors face when they stop that clinic for the first time? And what tips or advice would you have for them to overcome those questions? Once again, come back to the basic ideology of a veterinarian to be empathetic and passionate. The idea that veterinarians would

Host: do what they do probably for free just because they love what they do. Now switch that over to the business side, and for the new veterinarian that opens your own practice, the independent veterinarian, the biggest first hurdle is profit. What is profit? At a make profit and a profit bed. In order for you to open the doors and order for you to turn the lights on, there has to be money. You can be independently wealthy and open up your own practice and not charge it for a vaccination or surgery, but that doesn't happen very often if at all. So the conflict with veterinarians have is, it's okay to be profitable. It's okay to make money. It's okay to charge for what we do. And sometimes that conflict is the first step in owning your own practice. How do you charge for what you do? What is your time worth? Can you spend all day for a $5 nail trim? It's happened. A lot of veterinarians do. They spend a lot of time and don't get paid for it. Do you love what

Host: you do? Sure. Well, it keeps the doors open probably not. So that's really the first step is that level of profitability. And then the next thing is trust. Veterinarians tend to trust a lot of people when they're coming out of vet school. They trust the world. But in business, not everybody has the same idea of what is good and what is bad. I've had clients in the past when I was a veterinarian. They would let me do anything I wanted, no one that they weren't going to pay me a single dime. And you can't survive that way. You might want to fix an animal from free, but in the client will let you do it, but you can. Your employees don't work for free. You don't work for free. And so being able to establish that cash flow, that's a new term for most independent veterinarians. What is cash flow? And how does cash flow affect your business insight and affect your efficiency? So these are the things that new veterinarians that venture into

Host: independent ownership need to be aware of. That's that's brilliant. So these are skills they have to develop. They have to get used to and you know, master if they want to be successful. Now you also have work with established practices. What are some of the common growth opportunities or strategies that you see when you work with these types of established practices? Well, let's go back and just look at the journey that veterinarians take. They work real hard and college to get into vet school. That's their goal. Get into vet school. So once you get into vet school, you work real hard and then you get out of vet school. Then once you get out of vet school, you want to use what you've learned. So typically when you get out of vet school, you get a job as an associate. Then you start practicing what you've learned in vet school. Then the next stage is, well, maybe I should own a business. So you open up your own independent practice,

Host: you own a business now, you've learned the insights and outsides of business. But what's the next stage in that journey? The next stage is, well, where do I go from here? What happens when my business is successful? What happens when I want to retire? So this is just another stage of that journey. These well-established veterinarians, when you talk to some of them, they already have it clear in their mind, they're just going to work for the rest of their lives. And that's not necessarily a journey strategy for most young independent veterinary practice. So these established veterinarians have to figure out, how do they get out of the practice? How do they leave the independence of business ownership? These exit strategies are what we talk about. We try to define, how are you going to show your practice, how are you going to retire? And what would you do when you retire? One of the first things that I go through when I

Host: do my consulting. I'll do an on-site consultation. I'll be at a practice for three or four days, talk to the staff, talk to the veterinarian. But the very first step is to talk to the business owner and try to figure out how you're going to get out. What do you have in your mind for your exit strategy? So these established veterinarians have done a lot of good things. They had a successful careers in associate. They had a successful career as a business owner, but they're stuck. They don't know what to do. So they tend to just keep working and keep working without really any plan on how to sell their business or how to go shit on the beach. So that's the first step in this consultation process. Let's decide what you want to do. You want to practice until you're 80. That's okay. That's what you decided to do. But most people would like to just kick back a little bit and retire when they want to. And that's really what

Host: our focuses are these established veterinarians. Thank you Dr. Given the competitive nature up with the veterinary industry today, how do you suggest veterinarians kind of differentiate themselves? And how do you suggest they build up strong brand within their communities? Well, unfortunately, I think veterinary medicine is going through a very strange transition. It seems to be these opposing forces. Are we there? We have a shortage of veterinarians or when we have an abundance of veterinarians. So basically economics, it's supply and demand. Right now, veterinarians don't seem to be too focused on arsenal branding or their own style and technique because the demand is so high and the supply of veterinarians is really not keeping up with that demand at this point. So what happens is it's supply of veterinarians increases as more vet school is open, as more young veterinarians enter the market. Then it's even

Host: going to become more important for the individual veterinarian to have their own personal style, their own personal brand to learn where they've come from to basically if they have a failure, learn from it and get better. But what the end result have your own personal comfort level with who you are, why you're here and what do you want to do? And these are the things that when there's a big lack or supply problem with veterinarians and demand is high, then we tend to be a little slack in developing our own style, especially as associates. And then even as a veterinary practice owner, as a vet practice, this supply and demand were, oh we're so busy. Sometimes that's going to come around and not be very friendly on the other side when you've neglected the marketing, you've neglected the website, you've neglected that brand, that business culture, and then you decide what now I have to catch up. And that's a little bit more difficult. Always easier to

Host: start out with an ideas and associate, this is what I want to do when I own my practice. Make a list, start planning ahead. When you decide to open up your own practice, then you already have an idea of what you want to do and how you want to do it. The business stuff we can work on, we can learn the business technique, we can learn the business effectiveness, we can learn the efficiency. But that veterinarian has to establish that culture, that culture of communication, that culture of empathy, and the culture of on the business side, that culture of profit, and those are the things that will endure the supply and demand in balance three times as a business owner. Thank you Dr. So yeah, absolutely. I totally agree with you and that person of ran you talked about and now paying attention to like how do patients buy me and choose me. I think it's really critical and being very thoughtful and like you said, you have to work on it.

Host: You can't ignore it or not work on it and then expect it to do well. If you ignore it, then it's going to decline and you're going to suffer. So let's let me ask a different question. What role does effective clinic management play in the success of veterinary practices? And do you have any suggestions best practices with regards to how to run an efficient practice? One of the things that a privately owned practice faces almost every day, I'm a veterinarian. I just want to practice veterinary medicine. I hear that every day. Well, unfortunately, if you're the business owner, then you also have to be a business person. You have to know the business. You can't always relinquish all your business decisions to the management. You've hired a business, a practice manager. You've hired a bookkeeper. You've hired people to do the function of parts of the business. But you have to set the tone. You have to be the one

Host: that knows what they need to do, what numbers do you need, what data do you need. These are the things that business owners try to push off to the management of the clinic. We see this in the corporate world. The corporations tend to have a practice manager or someone that's in management that runs the clinic. And the veterinarians are getting what they wanted, which I just want to be a veterinarian and just practice veterinary medicine. But the conflict comes up with management versus the veterinarian. And a private practice business and management is the same person. That's that veterinary owner. And so, in order to be successful, you need help. Some practices can do it on their own, but most every successful veterinarian practice has employees. So they'll have a layer of management. Typically, it's somebody who was started out in high school. They worked in the vet practice all through high school. And they

Host: stuck around as a vet tech. And then they graduated up to being the business manager. That's sometimes will work. In many cases, it does work. But it may not be the best path to take. Sometimes you need true management to come in that has an experience with HR, with front-end, whether it's the website, whether it's the reception work. These are all areas that the veterinarian sometimes ignores or sometimes doesn't realize how important they are. And fortunately, or fortunately, depends on how you look at it. Probably the most important person in that clinic is the one that answers the phone and receives the customers that walk in the door. But almost every clinic that I go to, that's also the person that just started Wednesday. They just got there. There are three days into the business. They used to work in a bank and now they're the receptionist. And sometimes that doesn't work out. Because the customer wants that like ability. They want that trust.

Host: And they want you to be the expert. And at the receptionist doesn't give that impression like you've pointed out like a ability. That's important, trust, absolutely. But the expert, that's a little bit tricky. And if they can't seem to get the computer to work, then you may not be the expert that they think you are. Even though it has nothing to do with how you do surgery or how you fix stations. It's tough out there. 100% and I think the famous court, right? It's all about perceptions more than reality. So what people perceive is sometimes more important than how good you are because they don't realize it than doesn't make any difference to anybody. And I do agree the person answering the phone is such a critical part of this, you know, this team. Because I have listened to hundreds of calls and many times like many practices don't even convert 30% of the new patient calls that are coming in. Because they're not trained. They don't know how to build trust,

Host: how to get the patient to like them. And nobody's monitoring it because nobody's monitoring it. What are you trying to improve it? So it's like, you know, imagine having a kid in a school, but he never he or she never gets great. It's like, can he do better? No, probably not because there's no idea where he even stands. So some basic things that many many practices unfortunately don't do that hurts them a lot. With your background in both medicine and business, how do you strike that balance between providing top-notch remedy cat versus, you know, maintaining a profitable practice? Most of that's about awareness. We learn as veterinarians to pay attention to the physical exam. You look at the animal. You feel the animal. You touch the animal. You take that outward knowledge and you put it to what you know inside. What did I learn in that school? The leg, the leg is sore. The dog is limping. The cat is crying. These are things that

Host: give you an indication that maybe things are just not right. Well, the same thing applies to veterinary business. In the MBA program that I went through, a lot of it's not learning the language. You learn the language of business. But we learn the language of veterinary medicine through vet school. Learning the language of business allows you to talk to other business owners on a common level. So that we know what are you talking about? Is your profitability high? Is your margin low? These are things that inherently is a business owner. You just have to know. It's awareness. Not any different to doing the physical exam on the dog. It is a physical exam on your business. As an associate, you have the joy of not worrying about how the business is run. As a practice owner, whether the floors are clean and the windows are clean and whether or not you're charging enough for a vaccine all happen on the same day. So you have to be aware of where you stand.

Host: Using those data points like you described, knowing what you did yesterday compared to what you were doing today, these are all critical to the things that make you successful. Thank you, Dr. Appreciate it. Last question. Finally, could you tell us about any rewarding or challenging experience you've had as a business advisor and how it impacted the veterinarians you're working with? One of the things in my practice, I had a mixed animal practice, large animals and small animals. And if you ever really want to know about the economy of business, then be a veterinarian on a cattle farm because it all comes down to the money. Is that cow worth saving or is it worth treating? So you have to make these decisions as a business owner and as a veterinarian. I can save this cow but it's going to cost this amount of money. And so if you don't match the money versus the treatment, then you can't make it. I mean,

Host: if you spend $1,000 on a $200 cow, well that's not profitable. And that happened in my practice. I'd go out to the farm, look at the cow, and be honest with the farmer. Say, I can fix this cow but it's going to cost $1,000. And the cattle farmer would say, well, if you fix it for $1,000, and I can only sell it for $200, then that's not going to make any sense. So typically, then you have to put the animal to sleep. And so in business, that's what you have to do. You take these business decisions and you have to do I need five employees and three employees can do it. I had a practice with just one technician, quite successful, then I grew and added more technicians. And these are the things that you take forward when you open your own practice. Do I need one tech, five techs? Do I need an associate? And those are the things that I learned through a small practice and a small town. If I could make it in a small town that has 400 people, then I can

Host: give you some insight on how things work. Thank you. If someone is interested in getting to know you doctor, or even like contacting you, how can they go by doing that? Probably the easiest way is on my LinkedIn account, Dr. Rosen, Dr. Mark Rosen, on LinkedIn. And that way we can message each other and talk about how I can help you be successful. Absolutely. We'll include your LinkedIn on the show notes so people can find you doctor. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for your insights. Definitely you have so much experience in this term. And I think unfortunately, there's two ways to learn. One is to make mistakes. And sometimes they can be very, very, very costly. And like I know people made $100,000 mistakes. The other way is to find someone who has the experience, I guess, the power of experience and wisdom. Like you who has health practices but 35 years, of course, with your own practice and then practices on by others. So I think

Host: someone like you would really make a big difference in the lives of practice on this. So thank you for your wisdom today. Thank you for your insights today. I also want to take a minute to thank all of our listeners. We appreciate each and every one of you. We cannot do what we do without you. If you like the podcast, please share it with your colleagues and friends on social media. Also, don't forget to leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. You are reviews will help other doctors and practice on as violence. Until we meet next time, keep striving for excellence and making a positive impact in the lives of your patients and of course their parents. Wishing all of you an amazing week ahead.