Creating And Controlling The Veterinary Professions Future

Host: Hello everyone and welcome to the veterinary business podcast, your ultimate resource for developing a successful veterinary practice and career. I'm Dr. Peter Weinstein, one of the co-hosts of the veterinary business podcast. On this podcast, we bring you insights and expertise from 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, much more. Whether you're a practicing veterinarian or a practice owner or a practice manager of veterinary student or just a leader or somebody interested in the veterinary profession, this podcast is tailored to help you navigate the really unique challenges and opportunities in the business of veterinary medicine. Every listener of the podcast is welcome to visit the www veterinarybusinessinstitute.com

Host: for additional resources and tools to support your growth. And remember, you can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, and all the popular podcast platforms.

Guest: With that out of the way, I am excited. No, I don't know what the word is above excited. I'm truly motivated to talk to Dr. Cody Krillman, veterinarian, CEO, a fan vet, disruptor. Our topic today is creating and controlling the veterinary professions, future, so let's jump right in. Cody, thank you so much for finding some time to join me. Thank you. The word that was coming to mind was, was titillating? Oh, we can use that. This is the United States. We could use words like that.

Host: So, I've been a Cody Lerker for a while, and we actually met just for the first time, just over a month ago in San Diego when we were both speaking at a conference together. I don't know as much about your background as I know about your present. So, if you can tell me a little bit about how you went from a little Cody to a doctor Cody, that would be great. Absolutely. So, I grew up on a beef cattle farm about a thousand miles north of the Montana Canada border. Do you know where Montana is being in California? Yeah, I do. It's a suburb of Manitoba, isn't it? Exactly. So, if you drive to the border and then you drive another thousand miles, I did the conversion for you, not kilometers, a thousand miles north. That's where I grew up. So, a very, very remote area in North America. I grew up on a farm. We had commercial beef cattle.

Host: My mom, she was a fifth generation farmer, and my dad was actually a banker who converted his lifestyle into a cattle buyer. So, my whole existence was surrounded by agriculture. When I was 16 years old, I wouldn't say it was a particularly good academic, but I was on the school bus. And this young lady who was in my grade had mentioned that she just finished a work experience program at the local back clinic, and I had helped her rancher father do all kinds of things. I was always there, castrating calves, or helping with their elk farm. So, they actually raised commercial elk. So, she knew I was interested in animals. I grew up around them and said, Cody, I think you would really like some time at the vet clinic. So, I applied, had never been in a vet clinic before, and from the second that I walked in when the smell of dog piss and iodine permeated my sinuses. I was forever hooked just instantly and forever hooked. I reflect back, and I

Host: think what I loved the most was that absolute chaos. You know, this was a two veterinarian, one exam room, traditional rural mixed animal practice, and you could literally see anything. It would be, you know, the dog that was constipated for meeting too much moose meat, or the fatatami on the cow, or uterine prolapse, or the dog that had been porcupine, like on and on, and I just loved how when I walked into that clinic every day, it was going to be something new and exciting and chaotic, and that's still my favorite part of the profession. So, I did with all young aspiring veterinary student, hopefuls do. I got an undergraduate degree at the University of Alberta in animal science, and then went to the Western College of Veterinary Medicine in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, so like man, I'm pretty Canadian. At that point, I was pretty sure I was going to be a horse vet. I essentially grew up on the back of a horse, had dreams of the rolling green hills of Kentucky and working on

Host: thoroughbreds, but as I worked through my, my vet's pool, I realized that kind of loved everything. I loved small animal surgery, loved small animal medicine, I loved cattle, I loved everything, and thought I was going to be a mixed animal veterinarian until graduation where this unique opportunity came about, where it was actually a beef cattle practice, and that was part of my background, and I thought I was going to be a mixed animal vet, so I thought this was a great experience for me to go to this beef cattle specific practice, learn a lot over a couple of years, and then I'd probably end up in mixed animal practice in some rural place in Alberta, and that, you know, that was the really start and genesis of my career, so I spent a decade as a cow vet before Fennvet was ever a glint in my eye. Well, I'll tell you what, I got to follow up on something. I wasn't aware that moose meat caused constipation. Well, it's mostly the hide, so if you took moose hide,

Host: then that, yeah, that'll really bug you up. And the fact that you love chaos and I love control, we probably could write a book together because I do actually do a talk from chaos to control because I hated chaos. I'm a, I'm a systems and process person as you know, so I like to have everything, you know, in a straight line, not that I go around and turn all the bottles, so their labels are facing out, but yeah, I actually do used to go into the pharmacy and turn all the bottles in the drug and the pharmacy, so you could read them, so yeah, I was a little bit of a control freak. So 10 years doing rectals, going out in the middle of the night freezing for DAs and for sea sections and feetotomies, and then you had some sort of entrepreneurial seizure that took you from the cold outside to where you are today. So what, what came about to what happened in the middle of the night or the shower or whatever? So, um, you know, that entrepreneurial

Host: heart came while I was in the cattle practice, so I graduated and joined the cattle practice and put my head down and worked so hard for two years. I just wanted to be the best possible Calvet I could be. I wanted to be the best one at doing post-mortems. I wanted to be the, the one that could do the most seamen tests in a day. I wanted to be able to do the most prep tests in an hour. I wanted to be a great consultant, so I just put my head down and worked and loved it. And I got the tap on the shoulder at two years into practice from the practice owners that they were offering me a 25% interest into this practice, you know, the very traditional path, right? You graduate vet school, you've got a couple of old white guys who have been, you know, in practice for 35 years and they're looking for their succession. And now this kid looks like he's nice and hardworking, so like, what more could you want in a business partner? And, uh, and got that

Host: offer, um, those veterinarians were amazing mentors in terms of the clinical practice. I could not even imagine how bad of a Calvet I would have been without their guidance. But in terms of mentorship towards business management, I would say that that just wasn't within their skill set. And that's not saying that that's a bad thing. It's just we've got different skill sets, right? So joining as a partner was like this incredibly steep learning curve for me. It was, you know, on two years out of the practice, I'm a brand new dad. And now I'm a, I'm a practice owner as well. So an unbelievably difficult learning curve. But I, I loved it. And I think reflecting back on that, the reason that I love veterinary business is because it's just part of the veterinary industry. I love everything about that mad. I don't really like anything else. Like, I don't like sports. I don't like collecting baseball cards. I don't like anything else, but veterinary medicine. This is my thing. This is like,

Host: like, I got the bug when I was 16. And there's nothing else that I enjoy. So I love veterinary history. I love, you know, the business of veterinary medicine. I love the medicine. I love the surgery. I love the people. I love the students. I love talking about the future, right? Um, so, so I think that's why I love the business part so much. And remember, my dad was a banker turned cattle buyer. So obviously, there's some sort of like genetic predisposition in me to be somewhat business-minded. And from there, it just, you know, it just kept going. I, you know, in the time that I was in that practice, we grew from $3 to $10 million. So, you know, saw this incredible growth. So this incredible optimization was very proud of that. During that time, I had also convinced the partners in several other veterinarians that we needed to diversify. And we started purchasing rural mixed animal practices. Actually, the first practice

Host: or buying group ever bought was my hometown practice. That was the start of it all. And I was really proud to be able to, you know, offer an exit to my veterinarian, my childhood veterinarian. And ran that for several years. But then things literally overnight fell apart for me. I got to a point where I had offered my partners to, for me, to buy them out, both of them agreed. And they re-naked on that deal two days later. And it forced me into, you know, into making a decision. Do I, do I stay in this now toxic partnership? Um, that was not going in a direction that I was, that I was looking for. Or do I enact a shotgun clause and an offer to purchase offer to sell? And 30 days later, I'm sitting there with, you know, with nothing but a future in front of me. It was the hardest thing of my life, right? I thought I was going to be at this practice for 30 years, 40 years. And all of a sudden, my entire life's work up until that point

Host: just evaporated in a second. So you had an entrepreneurial seizure because you were in such great discomfort at that point in time. You had no choice. So I had to start. Um, so this is the genesis of fenvet, right? As I literally had nothing time me to anything in the whole world, right? I didn't have a job. I didn't have a business. I had a family. And I had a passion. And, you know, we can delve into that in a little bit. But like that was the start of right there. Me deciding what am I going to do with the next 35 years of my career? What is the one singular thing that I want to do above all else within this realm, this passion of veterinary medicine? So you had a blank sheet of paper in front of you. And you had the opportunity to take that box of crayons that was your kids and draw on it. And over a period of time, whether it was beer, whiskey, wine, or legal or illegal drugs, something came to four on this blank piece of paper. And that's

Host: now fenvet. That's right. So two part question. Part one, what, what did you learn in your first 10 years? That was good that you brought into this new blank sheet of paper. And maybe you want to start with the second part first, which is, what did you learn not to do so that you won't replicate others mistakes? So maybe you start with the, okay, I'm not going to make the same mistakes they did first. And then you can go on to hear the good things that came out. If any, I mean, you might just tell me that there was nothing in that 10 years of experience that came out of it. And this was just a total epiphany. So I'm, I'm interested to hear what, what's your history gave you to help you draw out your, your fenvet? Absolutely. No, it was um, there's so much on either side in terms of the things that I learned, absolutely the fundamentals of business, right? The fundamentals of running a business, all of those different things coming together. But I think the

Host: most important thing is just like the awareness of the industry, of the industry as a whole, right? As you begin, as you start operating and thinking more and more deeply, you start expanding your horizons, talking to different people and on and on and that general awareness of what is the industry that is veterinary medicine, right? All of the meetings that I had with pharmaceutical executives and other veterinarians and insurance providers and on and on and on, that's what really really started to percolate in my mind. Now uniquely, and I don't know why, I wrote a a link to an article about this recently about this TED talk that I listened to. Guy Kawasaki had this TED talk, it was like 2015 or something like that. So I'm a few years into practice talking about paradigm shifts and talking about different industries and that a paradigm shift is inevitable in every industry. Doesn't matter if we're talking about windshields or transportation

Host: or food production, like it doesn't matter, there's always going to be a paradigm shift and there's going to be some people that are standing on the old side of the paradigm shift and some people that are the early doctors and that they're going to be part of the new industry. And I would lay in bed at night with Insomnia thinking about this singular thought of like, what am I going to do to be the one to spark that paradigm shift? Because I thought that that was going to be the best chance that I had to make sure I was on the good side and not on the bad side. And it's probably super unhealthy, right? Like that's a that's a pretty specific anxiety for a human being to have, but it existed and it was cultivated during that time. So I was trying to do things and apply things that I was learning to that. This is the start of why I took the leap into social media, which has literally given me everything that I have, not directly, but in terms of my connections,

Host: my opportunities, people who were following the story. My first team at Fennvet was 100% of a result of the 400 videos I had edited and put together on YouTube over the seven years prior because they, you know, that that started the narrative. That started the showcasing of me as this human being. That started this, you know, showcasing of my passion. It started the storytelling. So when I started talking about Fenn, people were listening and I had no idea. To me, Fenn was so incredibly radical that I was pretty sure that nobody was going to apply to work at a Fennvet clinic. It seems so incredibly different in my mind. So I think that the biggest thing that I've learned since the transition and the thing that I appreciate the most is I understand the benefits of good partnership, right? I think I can understand that, but for me specifically the ability for me to dream and do and not feel frustrated that the bulk of my time is spent trying to convince partners,

Host: that this is a good idea. That's really frustrating and the other thing is I am my best self. I'm my most focused, my most clear, my most hardworking when the responsibility is solely on my shoulders. And I thank my partnership for teaching me that. When we're done, I'll get to the name of a therapist. You're the veterinary Walt Disney or Steve Jobs in many ways from that standpoint. So here you are in nowhere asville, Canada. Looking at a world with a blank slate and you've created this monumental success, but that's not what we're here to talk about to a degree. We're here to talk about some of the other issues that might be speed bumps in your future success or maybe the future success of the veterinary profession, because I know that you're still or up at night thinking and dream. Because when we spoke in recently, you were telling me about some some other shower video of visions that you've had. Not a shower video. You can make a lot of money doing those.

Host: So I funded my fan vet expansion. Absolutely. Yeah, if you have an alliglass hospital. But I do know that you would like to make a model for other practices around the country. But I think it would be good to take a minute to give. Maybe your vision and mission for fan vet. So maybe you can describe to the listeners what you are, what you created. And why you think this is a model that others could and should emulate. Yeah. So when I was given that blank slate, I actually went stateside. So I went on a reconnaissance mission. One part was to take this opportunity to just be with my family, just travel around. So we hooked up my one ton pickup truck with a travel trailer and on November 2nd of 2019, my three kids wife and schnauser pointed our truck south and we just kept driving. You know, we spent time in the red woods and in Napa and in the desert and we did all these

Host: incredible things just spending time together. And on the side, I had also started traveling to different U.S. cities with my friend and mentor, Dr. Dan Mark Walder, and Dr. Adam Conroy, and Danielle Lambert of this now group. Before my life exploded, we had actually hatched this plan, this fever dream that Dr. Dan had had to just tell our four stories to entrepreneurial veterinary professionals because he and we are incredibly passionate about telling our story to the next generation because we think that there is nothing but incredible opportunity for the profession. And if people heard our story and our enthusiasm, then maybe it would encourage a few of them. And that's solely what it was based off of. It was just we love the professions so much we wanted to be able to share that with the world. So we were traveling around as well, so I'd fly into Chicago or to Atlanta or to Charlotte and we started this journey where we were talking

Host: to these young veterinary professionals and these hotel ballrooms. And I got so excited listening to Dr. Dan and Dr. Adam and Danielle about all the incredible things, but Peter I also equally frustrated because I saw a profession stuck. I saw a profession given the road map and still not executing on it. And I kind of just said, if nobody else is going to do this, then I'll do it myself. And that's where it came from. And like I have no right starting a companion animal brand. I had never even walked into a small animal clinic before I opened Fenbet. The first time I stepped foot into a small animal clinic was when I walked into my own. I'm not supposed to be the person doing this, but it was born out of literal frustration and enthusiasm trying to figure out why the hell is nobody else doing this. And that was the start, right? In terms of the mission, which I think is the most important thing of any business,

Host: and it's so underrated. And we just put these mission statements together and we don't actually utilize them on every question we have every single day. We just put them on a website and we forget about them. But my mission was to reimagine the veterinary care experience. And what I mean by that is create a platform within our clinic system that allows permission for reimagine. That it's a that I don't have this figured out. I didn't reimagine anything. What I wanted to do was create a platform. So my team members could feel safe in order to do that. Think of it as like a scientists laboratory, a a test kitchen, or Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. This is what I wanted to create. To bring veterinary professionals together who saw that there is a better way. So in that, we had three core strategies. In these core strategies, they were born from Coor's banquet beer. Me drinking one in the Mojave Desert. I still remember fondly

Host: just sitting out there with my kids and my shnawzer, and I had just read the blue ocean book, right? The blue ocean strategy. And there was a part in the book where you were supposed to do the blue ocean strategy exercise for your own industry. You make an XY axis along the Y axis. It's just the top is very good and the bottom is very bad. And along the X, you write out everything your industry does, right? So I started writing out veterinary medicine, right? So I wrote out medicine and I ranked it really high. I think across the board we do really great job as an industry with medicine, right? That's what we're trying to do. You give us the tools. You give us the hospital. You give us the support staff. We're pretty good at medicine. I said the same thing for surgery, right? I ranked us pretty high. And so the point of it is, like, if you're going to create a brand and you want to find your your blue ocean, or you're going to open a back clinic with a mission statement that says

Host: or core strategies that says we're the best at medicine and we're the best at surgery. Some like, I'm not going to do it. Who's going to do it? Somebody's got the best one out there, but that's not a blue ocean. That's what we're all striving to do. That's the red ocean. That's the where the blood is and the water is, right? That's where the sharks live. So then I wrote costs and I kind of marked it in the middle. And I wrote grooming and boarding and dog food sales. And they just kind of all like floated around in the middle as well. And then I wrote the word customer experience. And I just ranked it at the bottom. I just thought about everything that I've experienced that I know. And I'm not saying there isn't clinics that do this. This is an industry average. And I've got different expectations for what customer experience is. I don't think it's, I don't think it's good enough to have a, you know, just a genuinely pleasant experience walking

Host: into a vec clinic. The vet says hi, your dog has an ear infection. You should be happy because I prescribe ear meds and you walk out. Like that's not good enough for me. That's not exceptional. That's that's that's not even acceptable. We're we're in the customer service industry. We should be blowing people's socks out every day, not just diagnosing the ear infection. So I ranked it low. I don't think our professions doing a great job. And then I wrote the word culture. And I ranked that right beside it because I got ears. I know what's going on out there. And I circled those two amazing customer experience and practice culture. And that was my blue ocean. I knew a fan vet was trying to reimagine the vet care experience. And we just triple down on amazing seven star customer experience and amazing practice culture with a hint of innovation. Right. Like we still want that paradigm shift and you need innovation to get there.

Host: There hasn't been, there hasn't been a paradigm shift that wasn't fueled by innovation at some point. And I don't necessarily mean technology. What I mean is innovation of thought. Those were the three things. That was fan vets. A reimagining a platform to reimagine a continual reimagination based on the backbone of seven star customer experience. Amazing practice culture and innovation. Full stop. That's all we do. So no one or I like you. I mean you're you're talking in 2023 about what I've been talking about for over 20 years. Our mission at our practice, which I opened in 1989, let's see, you may have been born then. I don't know. Barely was to provide a male clinic level of care in a Nordstrom-like service environment. Love it. And that's what we strove for. Now when it comes to using terms like that, it gives people a visual of what to expect and a feel of what to expect. And so it really did

Host: mean having great people because it's all about the people. And even up until recently, the veterinary profession has considered itself to be a healthcare provider. Well, as you just so specifically noted, and as I say every time I speak in front of an audience, veterinary medicine is a service industry that provides healthcare. Because if you don't take care of the service, you won't be able to provide the healthcare. That is the gatekeeper is not the medicine. The gatekeeper is the service. And so we have to focus on that client service. And you're so right about culture. Because we haven't, we haven't had a paradigm shift since Noah, the first veterinarian, and James Harriet, the second veterinarian. And when I started working this profession in the 70s, which means I'm probably about the same age as your parents, we did it the same way, even up until now. For 50 years, we've been doing it the same way. Very doctor-centric and very linear.

Host: Very, you know, what, do what I want you to do or don't come back, type approach to things. And so it's been a very doctor-centric, not a client comfortable experience. And we've had huge turnover in most of our businesses because the lack of leadership and lack of leadership is what is toxic to culture. And so we've got all of these different things that you have talked about. And I actually do a talk called rebound, rebuild, or reimagine, which is really about, and I'm actually going to do it on Friday this week, all about where we were, where we can be, and where we need to go. And where you are is where we need to go. But I know you, and you don't want to be limited by where you are now, you have big picture. And I know Dan, I know Adam, I know Danielle, and I give them credit for a lot of the disruption that's going on there. But I think you are the only one who has really taken it and lifted and created it because you can. You're an independent.

Host: You're out there. And hey, let's give a high five to the independent practices because that to me is the next generation. That's where we need to go. We need to keep growing these independent practices. But there's a lot of, there's a lot of bottlenecks to keep us from moving forward. And by the way, if you haven't read Will Guadara, unreasonable hospitality, the remarkable power of giving people more than they expect, I'll send you the great book. It's about the restaurant industry. No, I love it. So I'll get you that information. Unreasonable hospitality. That's what you're talking about when you're talking about seven star. He was making Michelin star restaurants, you're making Michelin star veterinary hospitals. But you want to make more of them. Absolutely. I, you know, I started at 11 star. Maybe let's talk about stars, right? You know, as an experiment, this actually came from the founders of Airbnb when they were

Host: trying to figure out their Airbnb experience division, right? And it was a really useful mind exercise for me because they said, landing on, we can, we can figure out what five star looks like. We know what that looks like. But seven stars is a hard one to land on. So why don't you go to 11 stars first and then work your way backwards? So I literally did a mind exercise where I was like, what went in 11 star experience? Like what would that mean if we picked up your pet in a limo and rolled out the red carpet and there was an orchestra and like we had, you know, towel warmers that were scented in the client care coordinator dropped out on their knees and wiped off your your pets paws. Like what would that look like? And then it's not very hard to scale that back a little bit, right? And there's your seven stars. And we all talk about seven stars. We all know that that's part of it. I think one of the most beautiful things too,

Guest: that crystallized that I had no idea is the team inherently distilled our core strategies in mission to a singular word. Funny, the whole mission, the whole strategy, the whole story, the whole background, the whole thing we do every day and the future is in just a few simple letters, funny. So I'll ask them, oh, what did you think of that working interview? So I don't hire anybody, right? My team hires everybody. I'll present them with somebody that I have a tour in chat with but the answer, yeah, they were funny or the answer, they weren't funny. I can send a team member to a grocery store to get toilet paper and they will bring back funny, toilet paper. We all know what that, we know what funny smells like. We know what funny feels like. We know when we meet a funny person. We know when we give a funny experience. We know what a funny coffee is and a funny water is. All of those things really has distilled down and to, you know, just that's

Guest: our mission. Our mission is now just become be funny. So I know we're recording this and the audio is the only thing that will be playing, but can you show me your funny tattoo?

Host: So I do not have one but I cannot confirm or deny that several of my team members might have some semblance of a funny tattoo. Yeah, you probably shouldn't know that from an HR standpoint. All right, do you know the difference between a rut and a grave? I hope a rut you get out of eventually. Yeah, the depth and how long you're in it. Which is the story of that Nurey Medicine. I actually do a talk where I start with the trailer for the Groundhogs Day movie. Okay? Because that's how most practices live. They make it through the day. Lather rinse repeat. I have the feeling that you have no lane lines and you have the direction is wherever the day brings you as long as it stays funny. Mm-hmm. Absolutely. All right. But let's get past funny and talk about some global issues that I know Urq, for lack of a better way to put it. You know Urq is such a good three-letter word. We never use enough of it. Urq, Urq, Urq.

Host: So I know there's a lot of things that Urq, because you feel that they may be limiting, not just your opportunities, but the opportunities within the profession. And we've talked about things like corporatization. We've talked about things such as the use of technicians and the regulations that the licensing organizations have. We've talked about that schools. We talked about a variety of different things. So as of today at this time, what is your most urgent topic that you want to start talking about? Oh, that's a great question. I'm a little less hot headed yesterday. Or today that I was yesterday about the general state of the union when it comes to

Guest: who owns veterinary medicine. But that's even when you were talking, it's still something that's top of mind. And one of the reasons that it's top of mind and one of the things that you would set is, is I get to be allowed mouth because I'm free. What I've seen so much is people have felt exactly the same things. I'm sure you get the exact same feelings that you have for the industry reflected back to when you're having a beer with a colleague. But they're too afraid to say anything for a lot of different reasons. And I think like one of the things that gives me freedom is I'm not selling. I'm not looking to this. I'm doing this for 35 more years. I'm not selling. Do I care if the venture capital backed veterinary group doesn't like me? I'm not selling to them. Do I care if NVA hates me? Not really because I'm not selling, right? But I don't see anybody acting like that. Because no fence Peter, your generation. If they're still owning

Guest: veterinics, they're keeping their mouth pretty in line. But what the state of the union of veterinary medicine is, because they're worried they're going to wreck a sale. They're worried they're going to wreck their nest egg. And I get it. But like, where's all the loudmouths out there? I know we're pretty loudmouth industry, but nobody's talking about anything. No, I agree. And we, we also, very siloed industry. And there's not a lot of cross communication amongst the silos. But how do you, how do we find more coatings and to a degree Peter's who are willing to just go out there and have this conversation? And just see, in a room of 100 people, how many others are bothered by what's going on? Because unless you have great pain or great pleasure, there's no reason to change. And you know, unfortunately COVID gave us some false feel goods. Revenue was up. Business was chaotic. You probably love that. But we got and we made money. And now salaries are

Guest: up for doctors, salaries are up for staff. And we didn't make money. We printed money, which devalued the money, and as a result, our profitability is down. And not only is our profitability going down, but in recent reports, for the last year or so, transactions are going down. And not only us transactions going down, but the only reason revenue is up is because of fee increases. So why isn't everybody uncomfortable now? Shouldn't everybody be questioning what happened? And what we need to do to fix things going better, because to make things better, because I'm concerned that inflation is not going to slow down for a little while, which means our costs will continue to go up, even in Canada. And cost of people is going up plus, where do you find people? 3D printer? I mean, we can't find people. And so we take all of that and we talk about pet owners who are now challenged financially. I'm concerned about where the

Guest: app, not the codies of the world. I mean, you're, you're an outlier. We need more outliers. Where's the average veterinarian going to be in a year or two years?

Host: I was thinking of writing a little linkedin article on what titled what the grape farmers and wine producers in burdo, France, can teach the veterinary industry about business. So do you like red wine? Well, my wife does. I don't drink. So let's have a glass of water. But go ahead with the red wine. So the burdo region, one of the world's most famous wine producing regions in the world, is currently cultivating down their vines, because there are millions and millions and millions of bottles of wine that nobody can sell. They, the French government is stepping in. They're paying for 10% of the farmland land to go back into forests.

Guest: These farmers are in debt up to their ears that will take hundreds of years for their families to repay. They are insolvent and they have red wine sitting on their shelves that nobody wants. The producers of the high-end red wine, the premium, the branded, the top shelf, they're all fine. They're doing great, actually. But the commodity wine producers are really struggling for all the different reasons that we know about right, inflation, changes in consumer preference and on and on, right?

Host: Well, in veterinary medicine, what's more common? Are we commodity? Is that what we're providing? Because it sure looks like it to me. It looks like we have commoditized the shit out of our industry that we're just this one unique widget. This widget, which is just a veterinary time. That's all that we truly sell. We don't do anything else. There's no magic, right? It's units of veterinarian time. We've really got to look at that, right? What does that all going to mean? I'm worried that we weren't able to make enough units of veterinarian time that we've now overdosed. We've over supply just like the great farmers in burdo, right? When things were good, they planted more vines. When things are bad, they go to weed more vines, right? It's kind of looking that way, isn't it? We went through COVID, things were great, plant more schools, more veterinarians. Now it's like, holy, what's going to happen?

Guest: Our new graduate's going to start taking first-year jobs at $55,000. That's kind of what it looks like to me. Right now, what about the 10-to-12-doctor-dam markholders, favorite demographic in the whole world that 10-to-12-thousand practice owners across the U.S. who are 65 years are older? What's going to happen in that? The one to two, like, let's talk about the things that nobody's talking about. The one to two-doctor practices across the U.S. that are still the majority of practices in terms of total number. Who's going to buy them? Corporal consolidators don't want them. Nobody. There's nobody online that I've ever seen that has talked about the bubble burst in December of 2022 in the corporate consolidation world. All of them slammed on their breaks as hard as they possibly could. The 15 multiples, the 20 multiples, they died literally all overnight. You'd be lucky if you could sell your three or four-doctor-plus hospital if you

Guest: got a one and two-doctor hospital. It's effectively worth $0 at this point because there's no new graduates that are going to buy them. There's no 10-year-out millennial veterinarians that are going to buy them. I'm making generalizations here, but no vast majority of these practices are going to shut down. They're literally going to just close the door and walk away. What about what about the corporate consolidators consolidating? Nobody's talking about that. They're shutting down hospitals. Nobody's talking about that. They didn't actually buy back clinics. They bought market share. You think if they have a hospital that's underperforming, they're going to sell it back to another veterinarian, not even close. They're going to close it down and they're going to put the staff in those other clinics and they're going to hope a percentage of their market share goes to another clinic that they own in the neighborhood or the city or the county. Nobody's talking

Guest: about that. What happens when we have this mass shut down of veterinary clinics across the U.S. and Canada, and we've now increased our supply of veterinarians by what percent. What percent is it? Probably 20-25 percent. Yeah. Wow. We did exactly what the Bordeaux wine makers did. What is that going to mean? The government's going to come and give us, you know, give 10 percent of practices a bailout to close their doors. What does it mean? And then what do you do with those veterinarians? Veterinarians are not great plants. You can't just tell them under the earth and say goodbye, right? You can just burn them in a pile. What are you going to do with them? There's no veterinary shortage. I've got 28 veterinarians that have active resumes with me local here for two clinics. Isn't that a vet shortage? Well, and you are an aberration. You're different. So you have that attraction. It's kind of like people who got all excited about

Guest: working for Starbucks and becoming a barrista when they first opened. So let's use this wine metaphor a little bit more. And in the sense that maybe what the corporates did is they went out and bought all the small wineries or the middle size wineries. Do you have trader Joe's in kind of? No, I wish. Oh, I love those little Swedish fish things. Yes, I would have to get you some Swedish fish. Probably take three months to get across the board. But, you know, trader Joe's has its own brand of wine. It's cost about $40 for a case of 12. And then they also have other wines that cost $450 for a case of 12. And then there's all those ones in the middle. And so that's what veterinary medicine is in many ways as well. They seem to sell out of the $40 bottles and the $450 bottles. But there are shelves are stacked with the middle bottles. Veterinary medicine, I live in Orange County, not far from Disneyland. There's probably 50 veterinarians within five miles

Guest: of where I live. There's probably not 50 veterinarians in all of Alberta, but that's okay. And as you noted, we all do the same commodities, space, neuters, ears, skin, vomiting, diarrhea, limping, vaccinations, et cetera. So because I'm not a cattle person, I like to think of all of these veterinarians is hosting cows. Okay. Which when you go out and feel the whole stains, they all look the same. All right, you decided to make Fenvet to quote Seth Goden, a purple cow. We need more purple cows to stand out amongst the whole stains and give clients whatever experience it may be. It may be the Fenne experience, and it may be the penny experience, which means it's more affordable. But we know the great future book title, Peter, the Fenne or the Fenne. There you go. You write the Fenne, I'll write the penny. But that's what we have to do is we have to stop being cookie cutters. And I think that's what you're saying as well. Yeah, that's all that I've done is just the

Guest: only secret, the only secret that exists is you just think about every little thing that we do and you just think, well, I understand how the industry does it, but like is that actually the way that's best for it to be done right now today in this moment. I think about Fenne's for example, right? I fundamentally understand why 1988 a veterinary clinic needed to have a receptionist sitting at the front with a landline, with a red book that had dates in it to write down appointments for the veterinarian. I understand that, but what I don't understand is why nobody has rethought that again in 2023. Do we actually functionally need somebody holding a phone, connected to a landline sitting at the front of a vet clinic, and filling appointments. When they could be off-site, focused, responsive with a voice over internet protocol and a cloud-based practice management software. And instead of having somebody who's balancing reception duties with

Guest: a customer care journey, you just separate them so they each do a better job. So what's the result? People call my vet clinic, and they get to talk to a human being immediately. They don't get is this an emergency or can you please hold? The average in my city is three and a half minutes on hold. Why do I know that? Because I called every vet clinic, and I timed to see how long people got hold up put on hold for. I don't know about you. I get pretty antsy about 45 seconds into being on hold. I get pretty antsy if the phone tree has a decision that's going to take me seven different down seven different forks. I don't have a phone tree. You get to just talk to a human being. Then what's the customer journey when you walk into the clinic? There's somebody who's just smiling ready to talk to you and start your appointment. They're not on the phone. You're not waiting for that. This is not that revolutionary to just think about how do we answer,

Guest: is there a better way to answer phones of 2023? This is what I've done in every single phase of like what should a vet clinic smell like? Is it acceptable that we let's vet clinics smell like iodine and dump his? Just because it's always been the way for the last 40 years doesn't mean that it has to be that way today. And then just on and on and like it's not, there's no one revolutionary idea. It's just thinking of oh, like is there a way to actually do this in the year we actually live? Well, it's not one revolutionary idea. It's a whole bunch of small ideas that come together that make it look smell, sound, feel differently. And again, it goes back to the experience. It's all about the experience. So, you were talking about the corporate experience and the corporate experience impacts the sellers. It impacts the team and it impacts the clients. But is there really a corporate experience? Or is it just really sent us your bills,

Guest: will pay your bills, and you have to meet certain guidelines and create a budget? Because, you know, as much as the corporates have accumulated a lot of hospitals, I really haven't seen them in many cases. There are that have. I haven't seen them change the paradigm themselves. All they did was buy a whole bunch of wineries, put a new label on the bottle, and continue to sell the same wine. And like, I've gotten argument back. Like, I'm not, I'm very, very empathetic to all that in our professionals. And I'm very supportive. And I know not all corporates are bad. That's not what this conversation is about, right? And then has been great. Things where practices have been going through undo hardship, where they've really been struggling, where they've had poor management, poor leadership, or corporate has improved things. There's no question or put a new equipment, or, you know, modernize the practice to that extent. That has happened for sure.

Host: But there's, there's, there's been no change, right? There's been no great moving the needle forward. And then now we can all kind of argue, what is the business of veterinary? Like, what is the actual business? Because what I'm seeing now, one of the things that kind of gets my go to a little bit is, is not just the consolidators, but it's also the, like, the Lenovo VC backed clinics, right? So they just, they spend literally all their money on veterinarian signing bonuses and customer acquisition budgets. And they're proud. And a new hospital that looks like mine that's venture capital backed will have a budget for that specific hospital of $80,000 a month to run on Facebook ads and Google ads. It's fake business, right? It is literally fake business. It is how they do business, right? This is what venture capital is. They, they put together this, this group of something and they spend a lot of

Host: money on making it look like it's working and bringing customers into the door and they sell it to the next group and the next group and the next group and then, and then it's over. And like, yes, a few of them got rich doing it, right? The founders get rich doing it, but that's like all they do. They go on to do the next one. Go look at the founders at all these véclinics, right? Go look at the founders of small door. Go look at them. Where do you come from, soft bank? What do you expect it to look like? Well, and we've created a whole generation of legacy sellers who don't know what to do themselves with themselves either. And so what do they do? They go start another hospital. So we've got an interesting dilemma from that standpoint because we will see an interesting shake out in the next 18 months with the consolidators. I mean, with the pack manning of consolidators, the big guys eating the little guys and money is going to be really tight.

Host: I think this is going to be an interesting period of time if you are a, I was listening to a webinar last week that basically said multipliers are somewhere between 8 to 12 maybe 13 on the corporate sales, but you really have to be attractive. You probably have to be a solid 3 to 4 million dollar practice. You're going to get 65% of it in cash. Remember when it used to be all cash, which means now you're locked in and they're going to have really strong contracts to lock in your associates and if your associates aren't going to stay, you're not going to get a deal. So what used to be the golden goose is now a cooked goose for many people. It'll be interesting to watch I do love this concept that you've created and being an employer of choice for doctors, being an employer of choice for staff. So I want to talk about staff and staff utilization because you couldn't be talking to me for an hour right now, unless you had a team that was

Host: empowered and leveraged both on the client's service site, but also on the clinical site. So to talk to me about your thoughts on staff utilization and I will use the term credential technicians. I know in Canada you frequently use the term nurse. So if you're going to use the term nurse, it's to mean the credential technicians and when it comes to the non credential technicians, I'm going to call them assistance just because we have to be titled protective and safe from that standpoint. But talk to me about how you use your credential technicians slash nurses in your practice to optimize your delivery. It would probably be too bad for the audio, but I want nothing more than to unplug this laptop and go on the other side of this wall and show you what's going on right now. It is exactly what you would ever dream it to be, right? It is a group of 20 veterinary professionals just literally blowing through the day. Just it's

Host: two dentals. It's six space and neuters. It's two other vets running appointments. It's an absolute beautiful symphony, right? It's a three client care coordinators upfront just delivering the most exceptional client care experience that you could ever imagine. So I'm yeah, I'm and I'm in here doing nothing, right? Literally doing, I don't do anything. I don't see appointments. I don't know, I mop the floor every once in a while. They're doing their thing. Of course, like I lead, right? I did, I did the thing I needed to do. I reinforced the mission. I reinforced the core strategies and that really is that most important part in terms of putting that team together in terms of that utilization. So what I think that we have uniquely done is is obviously we've been able to put together the right team by letting the team decide, right? Who they who they want is their next fanny as their next fend vet person. We work really hard on just inter-team

Host: communication. We work really hard on not having hierarchies. We are all one team members. I'm wearing gray fig scrubs right now with no name tag and everybody else on the other side of the wall is wearing gray fig scrubs with no name tag. We're all one team. It is just a million things that we do every single day to make sure that we're doing that appropriate team utilization. But pushing the boundaries, there is no question. It is identifying what exactly the role of the veterinarian should be and making sure that they're focused on just doing that and what the exact role of a TAS should be and what the exact role of an RVT should be utilizing. I think that's the biggest thing that we're pushing on currently is just like the importance of the skill set that exists within these registered veterinary technologists and pushing them to the limits. And there's no question and we've had conversations around this before. It frustrates me to know and about how

Host: much more we could be utilizing these registered veterinary technologists that is outside of their scopes and we're pushing it to the boundaries. I got to take running nothing but vaccine appointments right now across that wall. So we push it to the boundaries but still there's so much more that could be done. And you think about the possibilities and all the worry about access to care and rural practices. I don't know how to fix rural veterinary medicine, right? Nobody wants to live there. I'm from there. I'm from a nowhere town and I went to university and I had my first bite of sushi and I didn't want to move back to be a large Alberta. And of story, right? So why are we expecting vets to go live in these remote places? They don't want to live there. But we could do 90%. We could do 80%. It doesn't matter. We could do infinitely more than we're doing now in terms of access to care with appropriate utilization of registered veterinary

Host: technologists. If you're a vet and you've worked in a hospital for more than one hour, you know, the texts know basically the same amount as you do and they don't need a DVM to say this is an ear infection or to suture up this last iteration or to pull a nail off a broken nail off of a dog or treat a diarrhea case. Why? Why do they need that? They're able to mentor a new grad through their first year and save their ass a billion times because they understand medicine. So why would there not be a veterinary clinic three hours away from here that I'm running and managing in some other business venture that is RVT's doing 90% of what a back clinic could do? Are they cutting GDB's known? We don't cut GDB's here, you know, once or twice a year. So like what? In this hospital, we got six veterinarians. So like, why? Yeah, we're not going to catch everything. But like, that's not what we're trying to

Host: solve. We're trying to solve access to care. So there is still so much more. So we do push the limits. There's no questions. And we'll continue to push the limits. If you could change the practice act and let's just limit it to the the province of Alberta, you could change the practice act and clearly define the tasks RVT's could do. What would you add to the list of skills that you would want RVT's to be able to do under the supervision. And I'm not going to define a district or indirect. But under the supervision of a veterinarian, what skills would you, what tasks would you like RVT's to be able to do that they can't do now? For sure. And to like if I had to make it clearly defined within the legislation, I would say whatever I deem appropriate as the supervising veterinarians. Full stop. Okay. And I also have the same sort of thoughts around foreign train veterinarians. I think it's postures the loops that we make them jump through.

Host: And I think it is absolutely insane if that veterinarian is going to come and practice in my practice that I'm not the one that can sign off that they're an appropriate vet or not, right? I have the ultimate liabilities. So why can I say this 15-year-old veterinarian for my ran? This is a real person who's coming to my clinic currently, who's practicing anesthesia, a skill that she's literally never going to use again, and she's practicing horse handling skills, a skill that she's literally never going to use again, so she can pass her CPE. Why can I not just sign off and say, yeah, you're great vet practice with her for a day with for a week, a month, like whatever it would need to be, why is my professional organization telling me that I don't have the authority to sign off on one of my colleagues and say that they're appropriately trained? Because guess what, the ones that are signing off during those CPE exams, those practical exams, they're my friends, they're my professors,

Host: they're not some superhuman gods that have some sort of judgment better than I have. I know all of them, so why are they more qualified than I am to say that this veterinarian should be a veterinarian? That's preposterous. But to go back to the RVT, it's exactly whatever I think is appropriate for that specific RVT, based off of their experience and based off of their skill set, to go even further, though, I think it is preposterous that there isn't a realm of diagnoses and treatments that they should be able to also do. And also based level surgeries, right? We give them so much responsibility already in terms of anesthesia, anesthesia induction, anesthesia monitoring, like they're doing incredibly complex and technical tasks, but I can't allow them to sedate a dog and put a single crocheted stitch at it. Like, I just, I'm not allowed to do that. That seems preposterous, or they can run a full appointment for an ear infection,

Host: including doing the cytology and interpretation of the cytology. But they can't say this dog has cocky. Here's the antibiotic. There's two options for them to pick out on the shelf. Like, what are we, what are we protecting? What are we saying? They can't pick it. If it's momentum acts or sereneline, based off of the interpretation that they did. Like, it's preposterous. So, yeah, a level of diagnosis and a level of prescribing seems very, very practical, and not at all some sort of rate danger to pet health. So, if I'm interpreting correctly, with the right person, with the right training, and with the right oversight, you would let people do what you've just talked about, and then you as the owner veterinarian who assigned off on that person would be the one ultimately accountable, if for some reason, a grave mistake was made. Absolutely. I'm that already with my veterinarians. What's the difference?

Host: No, I'm just saying that a lot of this comes down to organized leadership in associations and state licensing boards. And again, you're talking about a stagnant profession. What about the parents of the stagnant profession? You're even more stagnant from that standpoint. Yeah. I think I know where you're going to go with this, but it's like, so what are you going to do? Right? What are you going to do? And I think the older I get, the more surprised I am at what those organizations actually are, right? Like, I remember being a new graduate, thinking about my professional association, and thinking that they were some sort of omnipotent, all powerful being, you know, a benevolent God with a rod and hand ready to strike me at any moment. You know, the level of fear struck into my heart as a new graduate was was extraordinary. And I thought that they were this, yeah, this deity that to keep me in line and keep my profession and

Host: check. And now, you know, 12 years later, they're they're not that, right? It's not that they're not good people, people, and it's not that there isn't, you know, they're not doing what they've been told to do. You know, uphold the regulations and the veterinary act for the province of Alberta. They are doing that, right? But there can something completely different than what I thought they were. They're, I don't want to say ineffective, but ineffective at times, it makes you think about what somebody could do within the profession, and there would be like no recourse. Like I think about this example, um, in my jurisdiction, you're not allowed to, we have very tight marketing guidelines. I'm not allowed to post pricing or any reference to pricing. I can't say the word complimentary. I can't say, come on down or complimentary nail trim today, um, from 3 PM to 5 PM. That's, that's not allowed for me to say. I can't use the word free. I can't use the word percent

Host: off. I can't use any words whatsoever. Um, so I was inquiring about this, right? I was, I was being a past about this and trying to figure this out. And I was directly told that like, don't, but if you do, our lawyers have said there's nothing that we can do because it's actually, like, against, it's against the law for us to enforce that. Like, so what are we doing here? Like, they're, they're, they're impeding my right as a business owner and a citizen to market my practice and a supposed free market economy. Um, and there's nothing they can do about it, but I'm not, I'm just not supposed to. So when we talk about the RBT thing, like, um, what are you going to do about it? Like, my really going to open a practice? Uh, that's an hour away from me. That's, you know, I wonder my licensure and empower registered veterinary technologists that I've deemed appropriate to practice a level of veterinary medicine and a community that needs that care

Host: and I would do it and be able to compensate them very well to do that level of service. And I'd be able to provide this great community resource and I would be able to grow the profession and be a beacon for other practice owners and RVTs to solve some of the big problems we have in terms of access to care. Maybe, right? What are the consequences? I don't know. Um, but like, seems like a reasonable option. I have a name for it. Yeah. Well, if we want to use the Fen umbrella, that little Fen could be Fenett. I mean, you are in Canada, we might as well use a little bit of the French, right? I love it. I love it. A little Fenett. We're going to have little Fenett's all over the place. Okay. So we've talked about technologists, use of technologists. We talked about organized the benevolent dictators or whatever you call them that run and set the guidelines. I want to get back to veterinary students and I want to get back to the workforce issues.

Guest: The fact that you have 28 veterinarians who are interested in working for you is because, again, you provide a culture and a communication and a cadence that people like. What do we need is to find other veterinarians like you to provide that sort of attractive model? Or we need to talk to this group of 4,000 veterinarians that graduate from AVMA accredited schools each year about the benefits of ownership versus the benefits of associate ship. And my statement is that working for somebody else pays your bills, owning a business pays your kids vet school tuition or your horse or your boat, which you're pretty much the same thing. So we need to look at, do we need more veterinarians, do we need more veterinarians in Beaver Creek, Saskatchewan? What would you say you're from? Beaver large Alberta. Beaver large Alberta. There's probably a Beaver Creek Saskatchewan. Montana Central LA in low-income areas. But do we have workforce issues that are a

Guest: mal-distribution? Or do we have workforce issues that are a result of an inefficient business model because we don't know how to leverage and utilize our staff to the ultimate. And what could the ultimate, and I think you've talked about this, what could the ultimate outcome be, of graduating 25% more veterinarians? And I think you, you know, you were concerned about decreasing salaries, student debts, not going to go anywhere. So we've got a lot of really moving parts that the next 5 to 10 years will be impacted by. But I think a lot of it still goes to the education. There was something somewhere. Now some of it in your case is genetic because your parents have business backgrounds. And especially your dad, you've got that somewhere in your DNA. But to find the next Cody Creelman, or to create the next Cody Creelman with a little bit of nature and nurture, we need to look at the veterinary education model. Do you

Guest: feel that the current students that are coming out have the same Cody Creelman passion in enthusiasm, excitement, and entrepreneurial spirit? And if not, how do we get that? Yeah. So I see a lot of it. There's no question. I'm, you know, somewhat of a beacon where they reach out to me, right? They, these are the externships we do. I don't know, 450 externships a year across the practices. So they, you know, from all over the US and Canada. So they're filtering to me. They exist. There's these amazing success stories. We did a seven S. So this was this group that we're talking about. This Dr. Dan and Adam and Danielle. We did a reunion, you know, several years later, where we got to talk to all of the alumni, these, these entrepreneurial veterinarians that were hopeful that they would one day have the practice of their dreams and like mind blowing, literally mind blowing. The things that they've

Guest: been able to accomplish since then. So they're out there, and they're everywhere, and they do exist, right? They, from an education standpoint, you know, we always talk about that self-selection process, right? Like, are we selecting for this or are we selecting for that, okay? Are we inspiring in the veterinary schools the way that we should be? Absolutely not. There's so much more that we can do and expose. They're, they're, the business clubs are great. I've got to speak. It's amazing incredible veterinary schools. Then I get people reaching out years later saying, like, thank you so much for the inspiration, and this is my practice dreams, and like, they need to just hear more and more and more and more and more of this. I think that's what's necessary. The problem within the veterinary schools themselves is like, it's a, it's a, it's a difficult task of like, where do you fit this all in, right? You've got four years to make a bet. I don't know if you

Guest: realize this Peter, but the anti-biotic section in farm ecology is longer than two pages. Now, I think when you and Dan went to vet school, it was penicillin on one side, and so phonemines on the other, and then you were done farm ecology. Well, I'll tell you the truth, Cody, when I went to vet school, we were just still growing penicillin on track. So it's an incredible task, right? To train a veterinarian and all the things that we need to put into their brains and then you add on like, here's a, you know, here's business, here's, here's inspiration, here's, you know, here's, here's a Dan Markwall, they're telling a story. They're, they're good at reaching out, right? They're good. I'm going down to Tennessee later in the month. I give a talk remotely to Kansas State, like they're, they're trying for sure, but like there is no like fundamental importance, and I get it. Like the most of the academics that are, that are teaching,

Guest: they're, they're not wired this way, because like I could not exist within a university setting. I would, my brain would explode, right? So you don't have the, you know, the ones that look like me are out into practice, because like that's the only place that could even, you know, stand us. I would make so many people mad if I was a professor. Like I would be the most annoying person in the world as a professor in an institution. We could talk about like my, my thoughts, my deep thoughts about how we've failed the entire veterinary education system by prioritizing things like research over actual education of veterinary students, but maybe that's a topic for another time. But yeah, whatever we can do, every little turn you never know who's going to inspire you, right? Like like one guy Kawasaki YouTube video inspired me to strive for the rest of my life to create a paradigm shift within veterinary medicine. Well, I ever

Guest: get there, who knows, right? Probably not. But I'm going to, I'm going to keep going, right? Just have one thing, you never know what that seat is. So we need to just like pepper these students with all of these different opportunities, all these speakers, all of these thoughts, on and on and on. Yeah, my stimulus was reading the e-meth by Michael Gerber, and I had that when I was about three years, two, three years into owning my hospital, and I realized how little I knew. And then, you know, I read the book, I went back and got my business degree, and I started reading Tom Peters, and Jim Collins, and started to look at other business models that were in veterinary. Well, guess what, you just, you've done the same thing. If we continue to model on the past, that's the definition of insanity. Yeah, that's true. And what we need it really need to do, and, and I, and Dan and I talked about this as well, the single doctor practice of the future

Guest: shouldn't be my single doctor practice in Laguna, Nagel, California, 1989. It should be Jane Doe's single doctor practice in MP Arizona in 2026, that looks differently. And it looks at what the clients in the community want, and what Jane Doe is excited about. And so we've got to start to, we've started to start to motivate people to think. And I don't believe that we always do a lot of motivating to think in the veterinary curriculum. I think we motivate to get, we tube feed them and ask them to re-urgitate. But I think motivating to think is where we get the Cody Krillman to the world. And yes, it may take a guy at Kawasaki video, it may take a Michael Gerber book, it may take a Cody Krillman Tik Tok. I don't know if you do Tik Tok yet, but, uh, or YouTube video. Not well. Yeah, it just takes one irritant to get you going. And so the veterinary schools, their job is to produce the next generation of successful veterinarians. And we'll have to hold

Guest: judgment as to whether they're doing that or not for a different conversation. But you and I both know how we feel. We need to look at the impact of more veterinarians as to whether that will give us more associates or whether it will give us more underpaid veterinarians who are underutilized because you may not remember because you graduated 12 years ago, which was 2011. But the recession of 2008 to 2010 that we had, we had under-employed and unemployed veterinarians. And I remember veterinarians practices calling me saying, I've got 50 resumes. What am I supposed to do? We don't need anybody. And I had relief doctors calling me and saying, nobody's calling me because business was slow. I'm not suggesting we will face that in the near future. I am just concerned that we may face that in the near future. The relief doctors are calling Peter. That's happening today to me. The relief doctors are calling.

Guest: And I didn't know that story. I didn't realize how important it was when the relief doctors start calling you because for the most of my career, the complete opposite story. You got to send out 12 different emails to see if you can get one to bite on one day. We saw the relief wages two years ago. I could hire a relief doctor for 75. And then it was 95. And then it was 105. And now it's 125. And now I guess what I can do. I can send out an email with a day. I can send out an email with a wage. And that wage is a lot less than 125. Right? So that's literally happening right now. We have NVA laying off all its 1099s. Right? What do you think that happened? You don't think that was the catalyst of this whole thing starting to get a little bit wild? Yeah, it is wild right now. It's like where you grew up in Alberta. It's wild. You know? But it's going to be interesting. And here's a great chance you to climb on your horse and

Guest: hope you can tame it. Now I just want to go back to send it and I want to wrap it up, wrap up things around send it. If your model is branchizable for lack of a better way to put it. If you can take all your systems processes and pick them up and move them from Alberta to Victoria to Vancouver to Toronto. And then across the Canadian Wall border to Seattle, Portland, Sacramento. It's that the model is great. But how do we find the people to deliver the model? Because you are unique. There's not a lot of Cody Creelman's out there. Now you've got three kids that in the future could be little Creelman's. But at the moment, they're a little young to send out to veterinary field. How do we find the leadership skills that you have, the visionary skills that you have for somebody to run this business with the same dream or mission that you have? Yeah, they're already there. To me, this thing is a foregone conclusion. They already exist.

Guest: The models there, the plan is there, the passion, the intrinsic motivation that my team has to want another event. To replicate the culture. How do we do that? We did it. It can happen. It's not just me, the leaves in there's like a 35 people on the other side of the wall or across two practices that are the same level of leadership, the same level of buy-in to that mission. They're everywhere. Is it going to be easy to find veterinarians in the Seattle or the St. Peter'sburg? Absolutely, because it's preposterous, how much of a following it has, right, in the veterinary community. Like it sounds audacious, but I could pick any city in the US and find an incredible group of veterinarians that will leave their associate jobs now to join event. They exist everywhere. Everywhere I go. Every time I mention a city, I just mention a city or I travel somewhere, there's veterinarians and technologists. Like that's not the replication of

Guest: this is not or finding the people who believe in it or the leadership team to do that is not difficult. They're literally everywhere. They're the majority of us. Okay, so one of the couple of wrap-up questions was, where do you see yourself in five years, but really you've already said that you'll be continuing to do this for the next 35 years. Let me say, where do you see the veterinary profession in five years? Okay, so I do think that we're going to see a consolidation of the consolidators. We're going to see one or two IPO. If the IPO is successful, we'll see a slight resurgence in investment across the corporate landscape. We're going to see the majority of venture capital back to Nova Brands crash and burn. We're going to see 10,000 hospitals owned by 65-year-old white guys across the nation close their door and walk away permanently and forever. And they'll be lucky if they can get an entrepreneurial veterinarian to walk into that practice and

Guest: give them rent. We're going to see a relief for the rural communities across across America. We're going to see veterinarians taking jobs in these underserved traditionally underserved areas over the last decade because there's still good wages, but that's not necessarily going to last forever. There's a reason that they're not there in the first place. It's because they're not from there. They're not from the lifestyle. It's not going to be sustainable. So that will hurt. But for the short term, it's going to be great for some rural communities to give veterinary care again. And maybe from there we'll see a new way of doing things and there will be some great innovator that helps cover that off for sure. We're going to see a continuation of the veterinary education landscape and the same old grave slash rut that it's in. There's going to have to be a remarkable disruption in order for us to kind of wait through that one. And I think that it is still has never been a

Guest: better time to be a veterinarian. I could not imagine doing anything else. I think my doctorate is literally a golden ticket in the world. I could not imagine another piece of paper that gives a human being so much potential, so much, so many options. You could literally do whatever you wanted in the world with your DVM degree. It's like having a superpower. You could go to any country. You could get a job anywhere. You could be well paid. You could have any lifestyle you ever could choose just by having a piece of paper. How incredible is that? And there's going to be people that are going to do incredible things. And we're going to have amazing entrepreneurial veterinarians that are going to, you know, that are there's um, we we talking about the ones that have sold already, right? They sold their corporate. They made their buck. But we didn't talk about golden handcuffs, right? We didn't talk about what's going to happen when these, like we're

Guest: starting, we're just at the precipice of these golden handcuffs starting to fall off, right? The people who signed three years ago during the boom of practice sales, most of them had to stay on before they got all their money for two or three years. Sometimes out to five. I know lots of veterinarians that also side in five-year contracts that that they're sitting there in their practice is literally miserable. The phone calls I get all across North America from veterinarians who sold their practices, who have these golden handcuffs, who are snarling, who are chopping at the bed. And the second that those handcuffs fall off, they're going to explode into the world with pent-up rage. And they're going to build 40 hospitals overnight because they just had all of this pent-up entrepreneurial frustration. They're coming in and it's going to be really fun and it's going to be really great for the industry and they're really great leaders and they truly believe in culture and

Guest: and a lot of them sold not because they, you know, because they were selling out of their profession, they sold for a lot of different reasons. They sold because they had partners that, you know, that wanted to cash out. They sold because they were making a decision that was important to their family at the time. They sold because they were stressed or they sold because it was just a good business decision. It wasn't any bad thing that they did, but holy is there a lot of them coming. Like, and all of them have like non-disclosure agreements, all of them have like non- disparaging agreements. So they can't say anything bad about what they just experienced, but that's like fueling the fire. They're going to come out and do even more and show the world how great they are. That's what it's going to look like in five years. It's going to be spectacular. Well, I'd like to offend that T-shirt because I have drank the cool aid. So thank you for sharing

Guest: that with me. God, we can go on forever. But I think you probably have some income to generate. Thank you. Thank you so much, Dr. Cody Creelman. Before we go, if you are a veterinary student, if you are a professional association, if you are an organizer or anything where you would like somebody to come in and talk about the profession who is passionate and optimistic, reach out to Dr. Cody Creelman. And you can reach Dr. Creelman at Cody at fennvette.com. Super Saiyan. That was Cody at fennvette.com. All now, but he can't offer discount and he can't offer freebies, but he can be Cody at fennvette.com. That is so much Dr. Cody Creelman for joining us today and talking to us about creating and controlling the veterinary professions future. We appreciate it so much, so much of your insights were so spot on. I'm still reeling from the pages of notes that I took.

Guest: I want to take a moment to thank the listeners. We appreciate each and every one of you. We can't do what we do without you and we hopefully motivated you to think differently and get uncomfortable. If you like the podcast, share it with your colleagues and friends on your social medias. Don't forget to let us delete review on your favorite podcast platform. Your reviews will help others and practice on our find us. Until next time, keep striving for excellence and making a positive impact in the lives of your patients and pet parents wishing all of you an amazing week ahead. Thank you.