Turning The Tide: Can Vets Fight Back?

Author: Dave Nicol
Posted: Wednesday 31st August, 2011. 16:21:27

Last week we looked at how cinemas have adapted to remain buoyant in the face of amazing threats. As the Bayer-Brakke study has shown, we are slowly losing our fight to keep clients coming into our clinics. So in the final part of this mini-series let’s see what can be learned from theatres to help us evolve.

Develop Our ‘Experience’

In my opinion, one way to start reversing the trend of shrinking footfall is to stop thinking about our practices simply as medical facilities (just as cinema stopped only being about the film). We have been very good at product development in terms of medical advances. But where we have largely failed is in thinking out the delivery of our service, the packaged end-product.

We must do as the cinema has done in the film industry and become the only place to turn to for a ‘pet health’ experience.

Instead of focussing on the medicine (which has evolved beyond what many of our clients can actually afford, understand or ethically tolerate) we should be thinking about how we can make visits to our clinic a great experience for pets and owners alike.

Out With The Old

The tired seating, the faded signage, the bad smells, the grumpy vet who scruffs the cat (yes cats and cat owners hate that), the receptionist who thinks talking to her colleague is a better way to spend the day than talking to the pets…these are the realities of the experience for our clients.

If you can eliminate them (and all the other small errors that we make everyday) then you’re a step closer to providing a great experience.

In With The New

But this goes so much deeper than that. We have to develop newer ways of engaging our clients so they want to come back. Innovative pricing, affordable healthcare plans, better recall systems (booster reminders are so passé!), the use of social media to connect rather than bore.

And even more fundamentally, I believe we must also go back to the start and relearn how to attract the right kind of vets and nurses into the profession in the first instance. We must recruit those who are a better match for the new realities of our service profession.

Simply choosing more academic types ‘because they are like us’, as an entrance criterion is not serving us well at all.

As business owners ready to hire new staff we must shoulder our fair share of the burden. We simply have to get better at developing the skills that allow us to find those human pieces that fit our own jigsaw perfectly. And we must also then learn (or hire in) the management skills capable of keeping them happy so they stay within our businesses (and profession). We do, after-all, want to be capable of attracting and retaining the best within our professional niche.

This is not pie-in-the-sky stuff, it’s very, very real and I freely share my thoughts because I believe we are in trouble. Like it or not, the numbers are not looking pretty. With the global economic outlook unlikely to improve for sometime to come, this situation is not going to get better on it’s own.

Priced Into Oblivion

For years the answer has been to put prices up, charge more and more of the fewer and fewer. Clearly this is an unsustainable strategy when earnings growth has gone into reverse.

Though many practices charge too little and many vets are slack in charging what they should. The reality is that for all there will come a point where price increases do not work and only serve to push clients away.

Our levels of service have not kept pace with our levels of price inflation and we are now entering the territory where customers are voting with their feet.

All Action Moves

So what can we do? Here’s some tips for starters.

1. Stop and ask what it is that your clients want. Then redesign your service around that.

2. Create a vision as a leader and embed a culture that gives you a fighting chance of achieving it. That means you have to learn how to become a better non-clinical leader. You have to understand what type of personalities you need in your clinic. And you need the skills to go find, develop and reward those people.

3. Create practice environments that are fun to come to for pets and owners.

4. Place service at the heart of what we do, not medicine.

5. Innovate with pricing.

6. Innovate with access to services – times, reminders, health plans, home services…the entire lot can be turned on it’s head.

Resistance Is Not Futile

I’ve talked a great deal about going to the movies in this blog-epic and I’ll leave you with one final reference. From here on, whatever you decide to do let’s make sure we’re actively writing the script for our own movie blockbuster. The alternative is to passively sit in the audience, spellbound and helpless, as events unfold before us. Too long have we been complacent in this way.

These are both worrying and exciting times….but in days like these, organisations daring to take risk and innovate stand to win.

Veterinary practice troubleshooter. Expertise in HR, marketing and all aspects of the vet practice management. Dave can be contacted at info@davenicol.com

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