When Should You Retire?September 10, 2013 I have been telling myself and others I was never going to retire. I truly believed I would just keep working until I faded into the sunset. I started to work for the veterinarian across the street from my home in Mitchellville, Iowa, when I was 11. My first job was to help a sow in dystocia by delivering four live pigs. It was great fun and I was hooked from that point on. I started to help with farm calls on Saturdays and after school and then full time during the summers. When I was in Veterinary School at Iowa State University the great practical experiences I had in junior and senior high helped me put context to most everything we were taught. The hands-on experience was invaluable during professional school. Early in my career I wanted to practice companion animal surgery in private practice, which I did with my mentor/partner from Iowa, Dr. Don E. Sceli, who had moved from Mitchellville to Phoenix and had started a companion animal practice. We practiced together for six years and started three practices. Eventually we sold the practice and I returned to Iowa State University to …
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Callback Programs Can Generate $404,000 A YearSeptember 10, 2013 At Main Street Veterinary Hospital in Flower Mound, Texas, every technician and client-service representative calls four clients per day with overdue-patient reminders. Employees submit completed call sheets daily to a manager. Main Street Veterinary Hospital pays employees $5 for every overdue preventive care visit that gets completed. "Some staff earn $75 to $80 extra per paycheck, so it’s a big incentive,” says Practice Manager MaryBeth Soto, CVPM. If the hospital paid a $75 bonus, the employee would have booked 15 overdue preventive care exams. According to the 2013 AAHA Veterinary Fee Reference, 8th edition, the total for an adult canine preventive health visit is $208, while cat owners spend an average of $186.1 Based on industry norms that 60 percent of patients are dogs and 40 percent are cats, you’d have nine dog exams at $208 each and six cat exams at $186 each for a total of $2,988—a great return on a $75 investment. Talking to the Clients While callbacks can produce immediate revenue, the primary purpose is to be patient advocates. Remember, dogs and cats can’t answer phones, check email or drive to …
Adding Grooming To Your Practice: What Now?August 22, 2013 You have decided to add grooming to your veterinary practice; smart move! A grooming service can provide additional conveniences for your pet families, while also putting another set of eyes and hands on your patients to detect potential health problems. If you have seen the potential, the decision may have been easy. But integrating the new service may not be as easy without keeping some things in mind. The Groomer It's not easy to find a good groomer. Looking through the "help wanted" ads in veterinary journals and websites, it seems everyone is always looking for groomers. "The hardest part is finding that right person who will work with the veterinary practice team to become an extension of the services it can provide," says Tim Thompson, DVM, partner and Medical Institute Director for VitalPet, a Texas-based group of veterinary hospitals where the mission is, "Quality medicine in a caring family environment." In his practice, the current groomer grew up in that family, previously working as a receptionist, and was sent to grooming school to come back and fulfill that position. She was already part of the team. One way to make sure …
Explaining Finances With ConfidenceAugust 7, 2013 When Tyson, a 14-week-old pit bull puppy, was playing with another dog, he fell off the couch and fractured his leg. The pet owner had funds available on his MasterCard for the $1,000 surgery but didn’t want to max out his card. Maureen Lovett, front desk supervisor at Rutland Veterinary Clinic & Surgical Center in Rutland, Vt., explained financing through CareCredit. The client put $500 on his MasterCard and financed the balance. "About 25 percent of our clients need a little extra help beyond their credit cards,” Lovett says. Having access to financing was a win-win outcome for the client and clinic. In 2012, Rutland Veterinary Clinic’s clients financed $208,550 through CareCredit. The AAHA-accredited general practice with four veterinarians also offers emergency care and orthopedic surgery. Communicating When you communicate with confidence about finances, more clients will accept the level of care that their pets need. Here are the tips I offer when I coach teams on communicating about finances. Choose the right words. Say "treatment plan” instead of "estimate.” "Treatment plan” emphasizes needed medical care, while "estimate” is simply about money. Also update forms in …
Seven Reasons Why I’ll Never Offer Multi-pet Discounts … Or Any Discounts ReallyAugust 7, 2013 Pigs may fly before veterinarians will ever agree on this issue, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth discussing. After all, veterinary medicine is retail fare and discounts are the stuff of retail, so it only makes sense they might merit a mention in a column that relies on the politics of practice for monthly sustenance. But first a broad statement to kick off the festivities: I don’t now, don’t plan on, and probably won’t ever offer discounts to my clients for anything. Not for being my first or favorite clients, not for coming in on Tuesday mornings, not for having dentals done during the winter doldrums, not for bringing me Cuban coffee and guava pastries on a Saturday morning, not for bringing in more than one patient at a time, and especially not in recognition of the simple virtue of owning more than one pet at a time. Nope. Not a chance. Never. Though many of us may rely on discounting to bring clients in the door and I’d never begrudge anyone the right to seek or offer such concessions, I won’t lie and say I wouldn’t prefer that veterinarians who provide such niceties …
Tattoo Wars: Indelible Unprofessionalism Or Unfair Discrimination?July 26, 2013 I recently exceeded my friends’ and family’s expectations by crossing the 40-year mark with no ink on my person. In spite of a prolonged skate-punk phase, I’d somehow escaped this particular depravation of the flesh. But let me be clear: It’s not that I consider tattoos tacky, déclassé or ugly. My reticence is more to do with the assumption that the ink wouldn’t evolve as gracefully as the rest of me. (It’s long been my view that tattoos age less well than the skin it tints.) And what image would I care to live with forever, anyway? Alas, puerile image selection and sagging skin aren’t what most practice managers cite when they grumble over the recent scourge of tattoos within our ranks. "Professionalism” and "client perception” are the buzzwords most often bandied about in response to the budding enthusiasm for ink at all socioeconomic levels. Which can be problematic … and not simply because some people like tattoos and some don’t. Personal Preferences Though it’s true that personal style preferences are typically at the heart of this issue, that this trend’s limits seem strictly generational means those in charge are more likely to …
The Tortoise And The Hare—RevisitedJuly 26, 2013 Remember the classic story of the tortoise and the hare, told by Aesop in ancient Greece around 600 BC, and later by La Fontaine in France? Moral No. 1 The story by itself has many interpretations, but it seems like the most common one is that "slow and steady wins the race,” or perseverance typically leads to success. In other words, relative talent + exclusive focus = success. Focus is how you presumably went through vet school or tech school while your buddies were partying at the bar. The revised version of our fable relates that the hare, as skilled and "born to run” as he may have been, felt rather humiliated. He had failed because of hubris or overconfidence. So he asked the humble tortoise for a rematch. The tortoise, exhilarated and cocky, took him up on it. Of course, the hare learned from his mistake, and instead of "sitting under a tree for some time and relaxing before continuing the race,” he ran like he was chased by a starved wolf until he won the contest. So what’s the moral of this revised fable? Moral No. 2 Undivided talent + …
InterruptionsJuly 26, 2013 May I ask a personal question? Nobody has to know the answer. It will remain our little secret. Do you interrupt your clients? Do you wait until they completely answer question A before asking question B? If you’re not sure, you might want to focus on what happens during your next consultation. You could also pay attention to the way your colleagues and team members interact with clients. You might be surprised. While there is little information, to my knowledge, about what happens during veterinary consultations, physicians have studied that very topic. Three separate human studies show that physicians interrupt patients within 12, 18 or 23 seconds respectively*. It is quite likely that vets do the same thing. Dr. Beckman recorded 74 office visits with physicians in the 1980s. In only 23 percent of the visits was the patient able to finish his or her "opening statement of concerns” before being interrupted by the physician. The average time before the interruption was … 18 seconds! In 69 percent of the consultations, the physician interrupted the patient's statement and directed questions toward a specific problem. Quizzed by the researchers, the physicians believed …
Are we giving enough?July 19, 2013Back on the "other” side of the exam table, I sit with my tabby boy, Mickey (Mickey and Minnie Mouse, siblings, were babies in this picture…the one sitting up is Mickey).
Should You And Your Clinic Have A QR Code?June 25, 2013 I don’t know how and where it first started, but it seems like QR codes are everywhere these days. Not sure what a QR code is? It is the name of those strange little black squares on a white square background, called "Quick Response Codes” (hence QR codes), that you may have noticed on the back of products you buy, magazines you read and packages you receive. They may have appeared recently in our lives, but it turns out that they are nothing new. A subsidiary of Toyota actually created them in 1994 to track cars during the manufacturing process. They have two major benefits: They can contain much more information than a regular bar code, and don’t require a bulky reader; a fancy cell phone often is enough. Indeed, if your smartphone or web cam has the necessary software, scanning the QR code will take you to the company’s web site, where you can learn more about the product in question. That’s how most of us know these fancy bar codes: a way to access a web site. Yet they can be used in a number of more creative ways. After all, they are …
