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Andy Roark DVM MS

The Choice We Make Every Day

December 2, 2022 by Andy Roark DVM MS

Every day we choose how we look at the world. We decide to focus on what we have or what we don’t have. We choose to engage with what’s actually happening or worry about what might happen in the future. We assume the best about people or we assume the worst. We lift others up, or “put them in line.” The choices are (almost) always ours to make.

Unfortunately, we live in a world where our media (and especially social media) is powered by fear and anger. Some people continually internalize these emotions, they live in a dark and fearful headspace, and they seek validation by drawing others into their worldview. We need to compassionately recognize these people and be mindful of how we let them affect us.

Let’s never forget, we go through this life only one time. We often can’t control what happens to us, but we can control the way we respond. We can be a force for good without being afraid and angry. We can be grateful for all that we have and still take action to make this world a better place. Every single day, we get to choose how we want to live.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: Perspective, Wellness

Modern Marketing for Veterinary Practices

November 26, 2022 by Andy Roark DVM MS

Dr. Caitlin DeWilde joins the podcast to discuss modern veterinary marketing, how we communicate with pet owners when our caseloads are overflowing, and what the future of pet owner communications may look like.

Cone Of Shame Veterinary Podcast · COS – 172 – Modern Marketing For Veterinary Practices

You can also listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, Soundcloud, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts!

LINKS

Links to Amazon.com are affiliate links and help support the show. (They’re also much smaller than normal links and easier to copy when typing up show notes!)

Caitlin DeWilde: @thesocialdvm

Social Media and Marketing for Veterinary Professionals:

https://amzn.to/3DgGrMA

Dr. Andy Roark Exam Room Communication Tool Box Course: https://drandyroark.com/on-demand-staff-training/

Dr. Andy Roark Swag: drandyroark.com/shop

All Links: linktr.ee/DrAndyRoark

ABOUT OUR GUEST

Dr. Caitlin DeWilde is the founder of The Social DVM, a consulting firm devoted to helping veterinary professionals learn how to manage and grow their social media, online reputation and marketing strategies. Working with large industry groups and individual practices alike, Caitlin and her team are passionate about translating the “geek speak” to “veterinary speak,” and helping vets reach more clients and pets.

Caitlin is a graduate of the University of Illinois College of Veterinary Medicine and a recipient of their Outstanding Young Alumni Award, and also an alum of the AVMA’s Future Leaders Program. She served as medical director for a large AAHA/Fear Free/Cat-Friendly certified hospital in St. Louis before stepping back to focus on her marketing passion. Today, she divides her time between practice, consulting, and writing. She is the author of a new book, “Social Media and Marketing for Veterinary Professionals,” and a columnist for Today’s Veterinary Business.


EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

This podcast transcript is made possible thanks to a generous gift from Banfield Pet Hospital, which is striving to increase accessibility and inclusivity across the veterinary profession. Click here to learn more about Equity, Inclusion & Diversity at Banfield.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Welcome, everybody, to the Cone of Shame Veterinary Podcast. I am your host, Dr. Andy Roark. Guys, I am here today with the one and only, the social deviant, Caitlin DeWilde. We are talking about her brand new book on Social Media and Marketing for Veterinary Professionals. We talk about the value of marketing today. What’s it look like when we’re completely overwhelmed? I asked some big eye level questions of, what’s the point, and how does this work, and how do we make it simple, and how do we make it work for most practices today? Caitlin has got great answers, and I really enjoyed it. I love marketing, I love talking marketing. But I like to think about it honestly and say, “Where’s the return on investment here? What this does this mean for pet owners and how we communicate with them?” I think this is a really good conversation around those things and about how to make marketing viable and useful for vet professionals.
Anyway, guys, I love this episode. Caitlin DeWilde is amazing, she’s a dear friend of mine, as you’ll tell in the episode, and I love spending time with her. So anyway, without further ado, let’s get into this episode.

Kelsey Beth Carpenter:
(singing) This is your show. We’re glad you’re here. We want to help you in your veterinary career. Welcome to The Cone of Shame with Dr. Andy Roark.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Caitlin DeWilde, thanks for being here.

Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
Hey, thanks for having me.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Oh, it is my pleasure. I am here, I am holding your book, Social Media and Marketing for Veterinary Professionals. How’s it feel to have this out in the world where people can pick it up?

Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
Oh, I’m thrilled that it’s out there. I hope it’s helpful to anyone other than me or anything that’s not being used as a door stop, I’m pretty excited about it. I am really, really glad it’s out there and I hope it can help someone.

Dr. Andy Roark:
It’s an excellent book to write on. I use it as a lap desk and so if people are looking for alternate uses on a door stop, lap desk, things like that, it is an excellent book. I really, really like it. I really, really like it. We’re going to talk about it, we’re going to talk about marketing and vet medicine in a moment. I met you, I usually start the podcast by, if I know people, I start with how I met them. It’s just kind of a good refresher for me. I met you, you picked me up at the airport many years ago. Do you have any idea what year it was? I don’t even remember. It was a long time ago.

Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
Probably like 2012, 2013.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, it was 10 years ago.

Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
It’s been many [inaudible 00:02:33].

Dr. Andy Roark:
There’s been many minutes. You know, you were such a genius. I want to pause here for a second and just say, I talk about mentorship, okay. So, I don’t know if this comes off the right way. So you picked me up and you were like, “I’ll pick Andy up at the airport,” and I didn’t know you and you picked me up and you were like, “Can we get dinner?” And I said, “Sure.” And we went to dinner and you were planning on launching your consultancy and you were practicing full time and you were thinking about making the switch over and doing some speaking and some consulting and things like that. And we went to dinner. And one of the things I always tell people when we talk about mentorship, I said, “You know, the way mentorship really happens is tell somebody what you’re working on and then ask them specific questions.”
Because I think a lot of people are like, I want to mentor. And they look at me and I’m like, “I don’t know how to help you.” Or they look at anybody else. But you came and you were like, “This is the plan that I have and these are the things that I have questions about or that I wonder about or that I’m struggling with. And I would, will you answer my questions?” And the answer, of course, is yes, best I can. But I remember that being a wildly productive dinner and we just banged out a bunch of the logistics of getting your business up and going, and you were hugely successful. Now, you were going to be hugely successful no matter what. But boy, when I think about people who took advantage of a situation in a really great way and said, “I had this opportunity, I’m going to get the most out of this time,” when you and I went to dinner and you were just like, “This is my business play.” And I was like, “This is great. This is the most interesting dinner I’ve had in a long time.”

Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
I think we should point out that I didn’t just pick you randomly at the airport.

Dr. Andy Roark:
I thought you were fine to me. Yeah, no, I didn’t get into a car for a stranger.

Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
Because that could be perceived as a different way to get a new mentor.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, that’s exactly right.

Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
Maybe not as…

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah…

Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
No, yeah, for sure. No, you were very helpful to me and others. That’s what I needed was somebody to just be like, “That’s a terrible idea.”

Dr. Andy Roark:
I didn’t…

Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
“That’s like you, you’re fine.”

Dr. Andy Roark:
You were fine. You were more than fine from the very beginning. I did not say it was a terrible idea. All right, let’s talk. So since that fateful evening of us having dinner, you have, you’ve done a lot, you run your consultancy, you are an international speaker, you write magazine articles all over the place. You write for today’s veterinary business. I see you in there every other month when it comes out. You’ve written for DVM 360, you’ve come to Unchartered and lectured for us a number of times. I hired you recently when I needed help in my business. I’m just being honest, I needed some help with a significant marketing project that we were running and we just didn’t have the bandwidth inside the team. And somebody said we should bring Caitlin in. She’s amazing and you know she’s incredible. And I did. And I sent you a thank you note because that’s how good you were.
You were amazing. And so anyway, she is, she’s that good. So anyway, you are that good. Let’s talk a bit about your book. I just want to point the elephant in the room. Whenever I start to talk about marketing, I love to talk about marketing and one of the biggest pushbacks to just talking about marketing that I get, is that people say, “Hey look, we are slammed. We are so busy, we can’t do all of this work. Why do we need to be talking about marketing right now?” And so I want to just open up with a question of what’s the point of marketing when we’re completely kind of overwhelmed? How do you look at that?

Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
So it’s a loaded question, I’ll be honest. I look at it differently a little bit every day, right? ‘Cause it changes, unfortunately a lot of times, which makes it harder to answer. And I’m going to be kind of a jerk and answer with a not real answer, which is that it totally depends. And I think that’s what a lot of people are looking for. They want one very clear, obviously you do it because of this one statistic or this fact or this obvious answer. And that’s not the case. So the reason I do marketing for my practice is totally different from why you do marketing as your business, why my best friends practice down the road does marketing, it’s totally different and what it is right now, it’s unlikely to be the reason you’re doing it 3, 6, 9 months, 12 months from now. Which when you answer that, people are like, blah.

Dr. Andy Roark:
No, I think that’s true. I think that’s a great answer. And I think it brings us to the next obvious question, which is, well we need to define terms then. What is marketing? I think a lot of people still think marketing and advertising are synonyms. And they were for a long time, marketing and advertising were the same. And then 10 years ago, 15 years ago, they really started to diverge. And I would say they’re very different things. So when we say marketing for veterinary professionals, what does that mean? What are we talking about?

Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
The way I like to frame it, and I’ve found myself using this term a lot lately, and I don’t know if I made it up or if it’s a real term or what, but I really like to think of it as multi-modal marketing because I think so many people, like you said, are just like, “Oh, marketing, it’s your social media or it’s your website or it’s your, God forbid yellow pages ad or something like that,” but really it’s just like we would handle complex disease. It’s the same thing for our practices. So marketing to me is anything that goes out from your clinic and touches a client and not in a creepy way.

Dr. Andy Roark:
But that’s also marketing. That’s probably not good marketing. But…

Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
Yeah, probably wouldn’t recommend it, put it lower on the list. But I think a lot of people don’t think about, I think reminders are marketing and a lot of people are like, “What are you talking about?” I think it goes so far beyond social media. It’s social, it’s your website, it’s your app, it’s your signage, it’s your client education handouts, it’s your reminders and emails that are going out. So to me, that’s why I say kind of multi-modal to make that transition to our normal way of thinking in that med.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. Well I think that’s the answer to the first question. When I say, “Well, what’s the point?” It sounds like, to me, to summarize and I’ve thought about this for a long time, I would say that marketing is just, it’s talking to pet owners outside your practice. And you might even say it’s talking to pet owners inside your practice, but just to make it simple, I would say any communication you do with pet owners who are your clients outside of your practice, that’s marketing. And so absolutely, reminders, to me, fall into marketing and I’ll put it forward. I’ve worked with a number of practices and something happens and the reminder system gets shut down and buddy, you’ll see your appointment schedule open wide up really fast. And if that’s not the [inaudible 00:09:51] of effective marketing is when you stop and business stops coming through the door, you know that you were doing something important before you stopped.
And I’ve just seen that with the reminders and stuff. So I think of it a lot as just it’s how we talk to pet owners and you can say, “I know you’re totally slammed.” Communication with pet owners is still vital. And I would say honestly, I think probably effective communication, smart communication is more effect… Is more important when we are really busy than it is when we’re not really busy. I think that if we take it back to communication, you say, what’s your email newsletter? What do your reminders look like? Are you making it possible to book appointments online? I think all those things for me absolutely fall under marketing, text space, communication, anything like that. I go, these things can be efficiencies inside your practice. And I would still put them under the category of marketing or they’re through marketing pathways. Do you agree?

Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
Yeah, 100%. I think, again, a lot of people now are like, “Oh, I’m not accepting new clients or our schedules booked so I can’t want to think about marketing.” But the reality is you could instead be using that marketing to help save your team time or you could be using it, get clients to take more efficient ways, have them book online instead of calling or have them use your refill service instead of showing up at 4:55 wanting their 360 [inaudible 00:11:19] in quarters. There’s other things you can do with those channels.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, that makes sense to me too. So let’s unpack this a little bit more. Talk to me about marketing for the sake of efficiency. So if we’re talking about pushing this communications outside, I love the refills for medications, that is when I still see people taking phone calls and writing these things down and it’s just adding to the load on the front desk and people are calling multiple times and asking about their stuff and you go, this could all be automated, it could all be moved to a different pathway that would make everything run a lot more smoothly. What are some other sort of communication strategies that you see that make businesses run more efficiently?

Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
Yeah, I think the refills has been a huge one. Online booking, the average appointment takes eight minutes to make on a phone and zero minutes to make online. And even if you don’t have real-time booking, even an appointment request form. So directing people to that URL using app chat or telemedicine at all, if your practice does that, any of the texting based services, those or anything that you can take it to be asynchronous, meaning somebody can batch process these things instead of waiting until they get off the phone I think is really, really important.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Do you think that that marketing is growing as far as how much effort it sort of takes? It used to feel like marketing was this little thing we kind of did on the side, we did some flyers, we got the value pack. And then social media started…

Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Andy Roark:
We’re like, we’re going to have a Facebook page and now it feels like this sprawling thing. I love that you used the word multi-modal. I had actually in prep for the interview, which I’m going to mention because I actually prepped for this interview. And so I’m going to throw that out that prep actually happened. In prep for this interview, as I do, I actually wrote down the word multi-modal because that’s what it seems like. It’s my impression that marketing has gotten more complicated and more, sort of, intertwined across platforms and things like that. And it seems like a much bigger effort than it used to be. Do you think that that’s true? And do you see practices that sort of struggle to be like, “I don’t even know where to get started.” How do I make, what’s the minimum viable product here? What is the most elegant little thing I can do to start to be effective in my marketing?

Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
Yeah, I think, I’ll be honest, I think that it is something that honestly, most practices are getting to a point where they need someone to be their marketing person. And I hate to say marketing, exclusively, because really at what I would call it is our communications person. Because the minimum viable product to me, is making sure that whatever the channels you use, they all say the same thing and they’re all effective. Because that’s what happens, you’re outsourcing your social media to the new kennel assistant because they’re under the age of 40 and that person has no idea what the reminders say and that person doesn’t know what the tech’s are saying in the exam room because your handout says something totally different. So I mean, realistically to me, if you’re more than a one doctor practice, you need somebody doing this and it’s almost becoming a full time position, which is a hard pill for a lot of practices to swallow that idea.
But I think that’s where it’s going and where it’s headed. Now that does not mean you need to be on every stinking platform, and I think that’s the societal pressure that’s happening now. I probably get the question, “Do I need to be on TikTok every week?” And it’s, the answer is, maybe. But I don’t think that, right now, until we get to where practices do have someone or do work with companies or do have a plan in place to handle all of that, it’s impossible to do a good job on every one of them. So I think to me, the one thing that you could do that would make a difference and would give you that minimum product is to talk to your top people and ask them, where do they want to communicate with you?

Dr. Andy Roark:
By top people you mean your A clients?

Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
Yeah, A clients. The people that you see the schedule and you’re like, “Yay.” Instead of like, “Oh God.”

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, I agree. I feel that. I completely agree with that. Okay, talk to me about interconnectedness of services. So we’re talking about, do we need to be everywhere and I’m going to do this and I’m going to do that. And we talk about marketing, we’re talking about website, we’re talking about, there’s a lot of people encouraging blog content, there is social media, there’s email reminders, there’s newsletters, which is sort of regular ongoing email communication and content. There’s text reminders, all of these sorts of things. It’s been my impression that as things have gotten more complicated, you can’t really pick up one thing and just do it exclusively anymore. And you can push back on that if you want to. But I think that we’re at a place where you need to have a couple of things and they need to be aligned and sort of interconnected so that they support each other.
Can you talk to me a little bit about that? First of all, do you agree with that? And then can start to, let’s paint a picture about what this interconnectedness of different services looks like. Because I want people to not be overwhelmed by all the things out there. ‘Cause I agree with you, I think trying to be everywhere is lunacy. I struggle to get my head around a return on investment for TikTok and there’s a lot of people who give me a hard time about that and they point out that I am not in my 30s anymore or my 20s or in my teens, very much. So anyway, let’s talk about how these things kind of work together, how they should work together, and what sort of an interconnected marketing plan looks like that’s not completely overwhelming, knowing that it’s going to be different for every practice.

Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
So I think the good news is there’s a lot of, I want to say hacks or software that can help you do some of the things and push it out to multiple places. And I think it’s really important to start by knowing why are you doing marketing to begin with and what are our key points of messaging that support that. If you do that, if you have very clear about what those two things are, then it’s much easier to make sure they all say the same. I think when you figure out, with your eight clients and with the things that help your practice that you know have made a difference, I would start there and look at them because I think that’s the mistake that a lot of practices make is that they don’t think about updating. I just worked with someone that still had curbside stuff on their automatic responses because they just hadn’t reevaluated.
And the good news is a lot of the services that we’re talking about, working with your app, working with social media, working with email, a lot of these things you can invest 30 minutes or less and update them, but if you haven’t looked at them in two years, then they’re unlikely to jive. So, I think the first thing you have to do is know your why, know your key messaging. The next thing you have to do is look at what you’re already sending and you might get overwhelmed there because if you’re using Facebook and Instagram and email and app and website, it might get overwhelming. So pick one every month, update it and go through the line. I think that’s a more doable response for a lot of practices.

Dr. Andy Roark:
What is the most important platform for… What’s your most important marketing asset? Let me just give it to you like that. We talk a lot about where we invest in, for you number one, and we talk about what is your objectives, but where do you, Caitlin DeWilde, when you walk in, it’s first day, day one, you’re like, this is the thing we’re going to fix first.

Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
I want to get email addresses.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. Tell me about that.

Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
And that’s probably a bit of a surprise…

Dr. Andy Roark:
I love it.

Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
To some people, but realistically we don’t own anything. Facebook and it’s… Instagram today is down totally down. We don’t own anything that’s on Facebook. It could get hacked or deleted and we could lose it all in a second and we would have no backup. Email, if they’re actually a good email address, is emails like a gateway drug. You can get into all kinds of different platforms if you have someone’s email and if it’s the right email. So I think when I see practices that don’t ask, that’s a huge missed opportunity because you can build audiences and target people based on their email address in all of the social media platforms. You could yourself email them natively or through an email marketing app, there’s a lot of opportunities there and it’s the one thing that we can own and we can take with us no matter what platform you’re losing or you’re using, not losing.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Guys, I just want to jump in here real quick with one quick announcement. If you’re a practice owner, the Uncharted Practice Owner Summit is coming. It is me and my friend Stephanie Goss, the practice management guru. We are going to be leading that, heading that up. It is in person in Greenville, South Carolina. If you are a practice owner and you’re like, “Man, I want to go to a thing that’s only practice owners and work with other practice owners,” head over to unchartedvet.dot com and check out what we’re doing. Guys, that’s it from me. Let’s get back into the episode.
I’ll tell you a story. I don’t know if I told you this. I lost 40% of my Facebook traffic in one week one time. And so to set the stage, we built this, my team had built up the Dr. Andy Roark Facebook page, which was, it’s got 300 and some thousand followers. But boy, I tell you, we were reaching a million people a week through Facebook just again and again and again. Just count it every week. And then the 2016 election happened and then there were outcries about fake news and then all of a sudden we were not reaching a million people a week. We were nowhere close to it and we never ever got back. And it was just absolutely hammered. It was like us, they turned off the spigot and that was that and I’ve always been, I still am angry about that, it’s been six years, still angry.
How dare you. But I, who cares, the world moves on for sure, but just as an example. But it’ll happen with any other social media platform. Always just remember that you don’t own anything and no one’s there to hear you scream when you have to switch and you can no longer reach your people. Just, and the lesson for me was just count on it. Just count on it happening. Do social media with the full knowledge that they are going to, you are going to get screwed and they’re not going to care. It’s a question of when, as long as you go in with eyes wide open and say this is what I’m doing. There is a return on investment right now and the whole time I am using this to generate clients that I will actually see in my practice that I can build loyalty with and can actually turn into repeat loyal customers who are still going to come if social media just disappears.
I think that that’s really the thing for me. I still think probably the biggest one for me, Caitlin, is the website. And I think a lot of the website maybe doesn’t feel as important as it used to. In the heyday of social media, it really didn’t feel very important to me because you could just be on social and you were so easy to find. But going back today, the way we set up our website, the way it presents our staff, our doctors, the way it humanizes us, presents a face, so the way it gets, hopefully it collect, I’d love for it, collect email addresses, the way it sets up text messaging with my clients, the way it helps book reminders or appointments, things like that. To me it kind of is the bedrock for all of our outreach and I feel like it’s smart to try to continue to keep that up as the face of our practice. But social media can come and go, but you own your website and you own the story that it tells.

Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
Yeah, I think it’s a solid foundation. You can’t… All the other things kind of build the house on top of it? But I think you’re right, that there’s a good solid reason to invest some serious time in that and to make sure, again, that it’s a piece of the puzzle that not just serves as a hub of information but shows your people and what makes you different.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Well, I love that you said emails. I just think that that’s really smart. People respond to emails in a way that they do not respond on social media. And I say this as a guy who’s had a lot of experience with social media and getting people to take action on social media and a pretty good amount of experience with emails. And I can tell you there’s no comparison between the two of them. They really are. And I think that for a lot of small businesses, I think the move to texting has been pretty profound since the pandemic. But I found that the price of texting has gone up since the pandemic hit. And people, I think people are suddenly like, “Oh this is super popular.” The price of being able to text has gone up a lot from what it used to be. But I still think going forward, text messages actually appear on people’s phones and they actually read them. I think a lot of us have really full inboxes and so there could very much be a good return on investment.

Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
And clinics are not great at asking clients. And I’ve noticed that several of the new software programs, practice management softwares will ask, not only can you put this information in, but which is their preference, right? ‘Cause there’s nothing worse than that calling someone for blood work results and they never answer their phone, right? So, to me, it’s still email because I can use that information to target on social media and I can use it as a communication, but if a client only wants to text, that’s totally fine. I just want to know that so I’m not wasting my time. Or to your point, cost, if you’re paying per text message, which a lot of the services are, if the client doesn’t want a text and they prefer an email or they prefer a phone call, then why are we spending our money in time and effort doing it? So I think that’s a second point for that.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Talk to me about paid advertising. So we talk about using email addresses to do targeted advertising. It’s been my impression that social media has very much gone pay to play and I think paid advertising is probably the best use of social media as far as getting a return on investment. How does that sound when you hear me say it? Do you agree? Am I close to right or am I way off the reservation?

Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
No, you’re right. I definitely agree. If you’re not spending any money, you, no matter what you’re doing, it could be the best content in the world. If you’ve not spent money on your page in the past few months, I hope your mom enjoys it, because that’s the only person who’s going to like it, right? Like, it’s just like…

Dr. Andy Roark:
So brutal.

Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
I’m just going to call it…

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, no, I love it. You’re right. I agree.

Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
It’s frustrating to me because I see some really creative and really emotional effort and heartfelt effort…

Dr. Andy Roark:
Thank you.

Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
Putting out great content, and no one sees it [inaudible 00:27:01]. Oh, it’s so sad, right? But that’s the reality. There are some people that will not spend a single dollar on Facebook or Instagram and I’m like, “What are you doing?” So I think that if you’re not doing that, it’s a mistake. And it’s really the only way, and this is another soapbox of mine, it’s the only way to get targeted. I don’t care if somebody in Arizona or in Germany sees a great, awesome video I made for my practice in St. Louis. If you’re not going to bring your pet in and spend some money and be nice to my team, then I don’t really care about you.

Dr. Andy Roark:
I had…

Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
So again, brutal.

Dr. Andy Roark:
I had this…

Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
I just feel that way.

Dr. Andy Roark:
I had this practice email me years ago and they emailed me and they said, “Hey, we have a problem. Every time we put up an educational picture like radiographs or something, we lose 20 social media subscribers.” And I went and I looked and there’s this little practice and they have 40,000 social medias on Facebook, they had 40,000 Facebook followers. And that one, I think it was one, the owners of the practice was like a photographer. And she was amazing. And she painted these amazing pictures of pets, and I was like, “You, you’re entertaining the world with your beautiful photography, but these people are not here for your veterinary services at all.” And so whenever she put a bot fly, people were like, “Oh my god.” And they’re just fleeing. So I sound down on social media, the truth is, I think social media for your bang buck is still pretty flipping fantastic.
But you have to be smarter about it and it’s a 100% pay to play. I look at social media a lot like the radio, I think. Meaning, it’s pay to play. You better plan on paying money for your promotions to get out into the world. And so I don’t expect my local radio stations to play whatever I have to say to the pet owners. I’m not going to plan for social media to show whatever I made to pet owners in my area. They’ve just made it clear that’s their game is they want to be the radio. They want you to pay to run your content. And if you just accept that, then what you can do with targeting is really amazing. And the truth is, when we’re up against other businesses that are trying to run ads, guys, we have the potential to crush because we’re a vet clinic, everybody wants to see what we’re doing. Can you imagine trying to get your auto mechanic ads to show up or “Hey, I’m Dale from Comcast, look at my YouTube show.” No, Dale.

Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
Yeah. Sweet muffler. Yeah, I like to think about it. I really have had to reframe it with myself and several of my clients. To me, the paying on social media is, it unlocks targeting. So you’re not just paying to boost it, you’re unlocking the ability to make sure your post is seen by the people you care about and that you actually want. And so if you think, I think that reframing has helped a lot of people. So hopefully it helps somebody that’s listening to this now.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, I want to give people, a lot of people, myself included, the biggest pain point for me was that I used to do social media and never paid anything and it was great and everybody saw it. And it’s just the acceptance of those days are over. It’s almost like if I came into marketing right now, I would look around and go, this is pretty good deal. But I didn’t, I came into it when it was free and I’m like, this is a terrible deal. This is horrible compared to what it used to be and…

Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
How come I didn’t get 400 likes on this post for free?

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, I know. It’s soul crushing. So, yeah…

Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
You got to let it go, man.

Dr. Andy Roark:
I know.

Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
We already had a Frozen reference. You got to let it go.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Let it go. Yeah. I think that was before, I think it was before we started recording, but yeah.

Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
Oh, sorry.

Dr. Andy Roark:
No, it’s okay. Now people know what we talk about before we record. It’s Frozen.

Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
It’s Frozen.

Dr. Andy Roark:
So let’s talk about return on investment, right? ‘Cause that’s the other question is you go, “Well now they’re talking about paying to target ads and things and how do we know that this makes sense?” I think for a lot of people this is absolutely crucial is that we say, “Hey, you’ve got to look at your return on investment here.” And I think that that can make a lot of sense for people. But I’ve found that this is wildly frustrating to actually do. And so let me stop there and just of say, talk to me a little bit about return on investment. You’ve got a whole chapter in your book on ROI, I love it. I think it’s great. But lay, lay out how you look at this for me please.

Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
It is, it’s a tricky and frustrating topic like you said and it’s a very common question, right? And so I think that some key points to know are, you can track some of it, but you have to put some measures in place. And we could talk about that a little bit more. I think it’s important that when people are spending money and time, the key thing I see a lot of veterinary professionals missing is that they don’t go back to look at it. So I think right now there’s a big, just like with social media in general, I have clients that all the time I’ll say, “Why are you doing social?” And they’ll say, “Because you’re supposed to.” And I don’t want that to be true for spending money. I don’t want you just boosting and spending ads because you’re supposed to. That’s not going to work and that’s going to make it impossible for you to track.
So I think key things are, think about looking at those booths or those posts or those ads that you make. Did it work? If so, spend more money. If not, you can turn it off which is also a good, wonderful thing. But I think we really need to get a handle on what does it cost? What are you comfortable spending to get a new client or to get a booked appointment? In general, I think my third point that I’ll say is I think a lot of people think about this only from a time standpoint. And to me it’s valuable or essential even that you also consider the time and energy you’re putting into this content. So, there’s a labor cost, right? To create content to deploy it, things like that. So those are kind of my soapboxes. And I know we’re don’t have eight hours because I could talk about it for eight hours.
But think about if you just want to track money, that’s fine, that’s easy to do in the software. But that’s only on your Facebook ads and your Facebook boost and Instagram promoted posts, that’s not the whole picture, right? So that’s where it gets tricky. You need to think about, “Well how much time went into that? How many hours did I pay that staff member to do this stuff?” So, that’s number one. Number two, you got to have somebody looking at this stuff and knowing, did it pay off or not? And then you have to be willing to invest that time in tracking. You can do all kinds of nerdy stuff, you can put a pixel on your website, you can have whole other softwares that track your exact down to the cent, how much did this new client cost me? But if you don’t know why you’re doing it, then it’s not going to work out, right? It’s not going to be worth your effort. In even trying to track it. I was a little bit all over the place, but hopefully that gave you a few nuggets.

Dr. Andy Roark:
No, I like it. I like it. Yes, it’s generally, I found this to be very frustrating. I’ll tell you. Well, I’ll tell you a story. So let’s just imagine for a second that we run a vet clinic and Mrs. Jenkins is out with her dog at the dog park and she’s with her best friend. And she says to her best friend, where do you take your pet? And the woman says, Andy and Caitlin’s practice. And then she goes home and she Googles Andy and Caitlin’s practice and she sees all the reviews and she looks around all of our website and she goes, “Oh, next time I need to go to the vet, I might go there.” And then she leaves and she goes somewhere else and she talks to someone else who also says that we’re great. And then she goes home and she logs onto social media and there’s an ad for Andy and Caitlin’s practice.
She’s like, “You know what, let’s go ahead and talk to them.” And she clicks the button and then Facebook is like, we made a sale. Look at we, that’s a Facebook sale. And you’re like, “That is not a Facebook sale, that was six other people that was,” honestly, Mrs. Jenkins’ friend of the dog park is probably the driver there. It just happened to be that there was an ad that says, click here to make an appointment in front of her face. And so then you see this inflated value and this, now it works the other way too, where people see social media content all day long and then they go to your website directly and then make an appointment.
And there’s no obvious tracked return on investment. But you definitely made an impact. I look back at my own career and say, my wife used to be like, “Why are you spending so much time on Facebook for God’s sakes?” And I don’t know how I, you could never track a thing that says, I spent this amount of time and energy on Facebook and as a result, this is what I got to do later in my career. But I’m confident that they are absolutely related, there’s no way they’re not. But I can’t prove that correlation at all.

Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
Right. And most people can’t. Even me, I do a lot of ROI tracking for my practice alone, just for purely experimental reasons, and I won’t say it’s perfect. But I do think a lot of clinics are not even trying, they’ve just assumed that it’s not. And I think the easiest thing is if you’re using marketing to get new clients, then the easiest thing is to ask them when they come in for their first appointment, that’s the one thing that’s like the baby ROI tracking is to say, “Okay, add that to your client referral source tracking and actually run that.” If you do nothing else, that’s the first thing. So you could say, “Oh, this quarter I got seven new clients from Facebook.” And then you know that you spent this much time and this much money on Facebook that costs this much for clients.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah.

Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
Was it worth it?

Dr. Andy Roark:
That is the simple hack that I highly recommend. ‘Cause Facebook will be like, “Look at these insights. It’s a spreadsheet that goes on for miles,” and none of it’s really useful. And the truth is just ask people, “Hey, what would you say the number one reason you came in here was?” And they’re like, “Oh, Facebook.” “Great, thanks bud.” And that’s the actual rubber meeting the road of the person coming into your practice, I think old school af, but still works really, really well.

Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
Agree, agree.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Awesome. Talk to me a little bit about outsourcing for marketing, because I agree with you. I think that in a lot of ways the complexity of, in a lot of ways the complexity of marketing and communication has continued to grow. And I think that you’re right about a position in larger practices, for sure, of someone who just oversees this. I can see in a lot of smaller practices, people saying, “We don’t have that capacity here. I need to get some help.” Can you kind of lay out the landscape a little bit of what does outsourcing marketing look like today when it’s so tied into our PIM system, into our reminders, into how we communicate, give me some advice on how a practice might go about engaging in that.

Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
Yeah, totally. Totally a common, again, common question, common concern. And the reality is that for many, many years, and I think you and I’ve spoken about this before, I have been the hugest proponent of, “No, you should do it in house.” And that’s what I love to do is train people to do it. You have someone that has the interest and has the time. It’s always going to be best done by somebody that’s on the ground, knows the clinic, knows the practice, knows the clients. That is a reality most practices cannot now justify, right?

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, it’s hard if you, that’s a hard pill to swallow, but it’s true.

Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
But you got to be on the floor. You got to be seeing appointments, right? I need you in surgery. I don’t have time for this. So I think what makes sense for many practices is to do an audit of what it is that they really want to do, what amount of time they can realistically contribute. And from there maybe that person who actually was interested and actually wanted to do it, they work with someone to make sure that it gets done. Because a lot of times the ideas and the why’s and the passion can still come from the practice, but maybe there’s someone else that can take care of actually deploying it. The biggest example I’ll give the for this is video. So everyone knows video is key, video does great on social media. Sometimes we like creating video or capturing it. Let’s not say creating. How many million videos do you have from your practice on your phone that have never left your phone because they need editing?
They need branded with a clinic name. They need a call to action and a caption. And I think you should still get credit for capturing the video because you have that relationship that you were able to capture the video and you knew and recognized that this could be valuable marketing material, but outsourcing it to someone on any number of companies to actually edit it and get it done and posted is a beautiful thing. And you should still get credit for doing that. And I think that’s kind of the hybrid model that a lot of practices need to adopt.
They need to figure out what can they do very easily and still get their mission and their passion and their why accomplished, but how can they hand it off to someone who actually gets it done? I think that hybrid model needs to be promoted a little bit more because realistically, even for us, I outsource all of our video editing, I hate video editing. I’m terrible at it. So it’s totally worth it to me to pay someone on a service to edit it and then it’s done and it can be actually used. So I think the hybrid is where a lot of practices are headed.

Dr. Andy Roark:
I love it. That makes a ton of sense. Caitlin DeWilde, you are the author of the new book, Social Media and Marketing for Veterinary Professionals. I’ll put a link in the show notes for people to pick it up. If you’re a practice manager and your practice is doing a fair amount of marketing or if an area you’re interested in growing in, you should grab a copy and have it on your shelf. Caitlin, where can people find you online? Where can they learn more?

Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
I would love to connect with anyone that is nerdy about this stuff or wants to be nerdy about it. And you can find me at the social DBM on all the social channels, of course, or at thesocialdbm.com or heywhatsup@thesocialdvm.com if you want to send me an email.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Perfect. Awesome. Well, thanks so much for being here. Guys, take care of yourselves.

Dr. Caitlin DeWilde:
Bye everyone.

Dr. Andy Roark:
And that’s it, guys. That’s what I got for you. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope it was a fun conversation for you guys. It certainly was for me. Anyway, if this is helpful, if you love it, one, get Caitlin’s book and number two, write me an artist review wherever you get your podcast. Apple, the Apple Podcast app is a huge place where most people find their podcasts, and honestly, if you could leave me a quick review there, it really means the world to me. But anyway, guys, take care of yourselves. Be well. I’ll talk to you later on. All right, bye.

Filed Under: Podcast Tagged With: Life With Clients

Embezzlement in Veterinary Medicine

November 26, 2022 by Andy Roark DVM MS

Mira Johnson CPA, CVPM joins Dr. Andy Roark to discuss embezzlement in veterinary medicine. In an AAHA survey, 86% of respondents said employees had stolen from their clinic. Why does this happen so commonly in our industry? Who is responsible and what motivates the behavior? What can practices do about it?

Cone Of Shame Veterinary Podcast · COS – 171 – Embezzlement In Veterinary Medicine

You can also listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, Soundcloud, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts!

LINKS

JF Bell Group: https://cpasforveterinarians.com/

Practice Owner Summit: https://unchartedvet.com/practice-owner-summit-2022/

Dr. Andy Roark Exam Room Communication Tool Box Course: https://drandyroark.com/on-demand-staff-training/

Dr. Andy Roark Swag: drandyroark.com/shop

All Links: linktr.ee/DrAndyRoark

ABOUT OUR GUEST

Mira Johnson holds a Masters’ Degree in Financial Management and Accounting is a CPA, and is a Certified Veterinary Practice Manager. She is a managing partner in the JF Bell Group, CPAs for Veterinarians. Mira’s passion is helping veterinarians to start, manage and grow the practice of their dreams. She embraces the use of apps to help automate the business side of their practice. Her articles about financial automation and employee motivation have been published in Today’s Veterinary Business and dvm360.


EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

This podcast transcript is made possible thanks to a generous gift from Banfield Pet Hospital, which is striving to increase accessibility and inclusivity across the veterinary profession. Click here to learn more about Equity, Inclusion & Diversity at Banfield.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Welcome everybody to the Cone of Shame Veterinary Podcast. I am your host, Dr. Andy Roark. Guys, I got a great one for you today. It’s going to be eye-opening. It’s going to freak some people out. Mira Johnson is with me. She is a CPA and a CVPM. You can hang on, and we’ll talk to you about what all those letters mean, if you’re not familiar. She’s an accountant who works with veterinary practices, and she is talking about embezzlement.
We get in and we talk a little bit about embezzlement, and what it looks like. Boy, the back half of this episode is just her telling stories. It’s amazing. It’ll freak you out. But, I think we come out at a really good place of, “Hey, there’s some things that you can do to set up your practice, and to protect yourself, and just to be aware of.” Yeah, I think it’s a really good, interesting episode. It’s going to breeze by. She is wonderful. Gang, let’s get into this episode.

Kelsey Beth Carpenter:
(Singing) This is your show. We’re glad you’re here. We want to help you in your veterinary career. Welcome to The Cone of Shame with Dr. Andy Roark.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Welcome to the podcast. Mira Johnson, thanks for being here.

Mira Johnson:
Thank you for having me.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Oh, it’s my pleasure. I became aware of you through your writing. You write for dvm360, you write for Today’s Veterinary Practice or Today’s Veterinary Business?

Mira Johnson:
Today’s Veterinary Business.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Wonderful. I became aware of you because of your writing there. I like a lot of your stuff. I was like, “Wow, who is this who’s writing this neat stuff that I don’t see?” You have a really interesting background. You are a CPA and a Certified Vet Practice Manager, a CVPM. How did you come to have a CPA and a CVPM? How did that happen?

Mira Johnson:
The CPA was definitely my passion. I am very organized and I love the numbers. Then I joined JF Bell Group, which is the CPA firm that I work for, and they had passion for veterinarian industry. So, I fall into it. We had a lot of veterinarians, a lot of friends in there. Started going to the national conferences. That’s when I saw actually first time, you talking about management practices and all sorts of things that I was just opening the door to a different world and I wanted to learn more. So I’m really eager to learn, self-driven self-improvement is a big part of me. And when I discover the credentials, a couple years ago I was talking and I said, “Well, how could I improve myself and what can I learn to getting the credentials?” So it wasn’t much of I just want to be a CVPPM, it was more like what can I learn along the journey?

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah.

Mira Johnson:
So that was my drive.

Dr. Andy Roark:
That’s awesome. That’s really cool.

Mira Johnson:
I just got it a couple of years ago. Well, I think it was this year actually.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Oh, well congratulations. That’s wonderful. I love the CVPM. I think it’s such a great program and it’s wonderful to see people working in practices and learning the nuts and the bolts. I have nuts and bolts questions for you today. I want to talk about an article that you wrote on embezzlement, it’s called Sticky Situations. It was in a recent issue of the Today’s Veterinary Business. And you talked about embezzlement and you talked about the frequency with which embezzlement happens in vet practices. Can you start at a high level with that? How common is embezzlement in private practice?

Mira Johnson:
So based on ADMA research, it shows that one in nine practices do experience embezzlement or theft from employees. So that doesn’t even include any other theft outside of your clients or burglaries. This is definitely just employee related theft and I think it’s, a lot of people say, “Wow, really, one in nine? That seems like a huge number.” And for the rest of the businesses the number is still high but it’s 75%. So definitely the vet industry is much bigger. And I think Marsha Heinke, she did a study and in her studies it was based on, because most of the vet practices are family based, they have a lot of close relationships or they’re small. So that’s where I think the higher numbers are coming from potentially.

Dr. Andy Roark:
That’s interesting. I was going to ask you that. Why do you think this stands out? So tell me about, you think because they’re family based, why do you say that? What does that mean?

Mira Johnson:
So I don’t necessarily mean just family, close family, but our firm specializes in small clinics and the small practices. So we do see a lot of, it’s a dad with two sons, it was always their dream and there’s a son that stole from them, so it was crushed dreams. It does happen in the family settings. A lot of my best friend is now my practice manager, so very close relationships, which I think in the big corporations you don’t have those kind of relationships inside of the corporations.

Dr. Andy Roark:
It sounds like maybe there’s a bit more trust and that trust gets exploited a little bit more. I don’t know, I could see that. Just thinking about it, why would vet practices be so common and say, “Well we were trusting a lot.” We tend to see the good in people sometimes who are in detriments perhaps. Tell me when we talk about embezzlement, what are we talking about here? This is a big term, just making it clear examples of investment. Are we talking about people manipulating credit card machines? Are we talking about taking cash out of the cash register? What does embezzlement in a small animal clinical practice look like?

Mira Johnson:
So pretty much all and above, I think the statistics shows one in three are monetary, which means that would be the cash stall and the credit cards, some money related, but the two out three is non-monetary, which means it’s the inventory equipment, pretty much the food that walks out of your back door that the employees take home with them for their pets, payroll paddings.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Gotcha. No, that totally makes sense. So I’m parsing in some of mine. Yeah, so the majority is definitely inventory walking away. Okay. I get that. You talk a little bit in your article about ideas about why this seems to happen and how people rationalize it. So most of us, we look at people that we work with or we look at our family, our best friend who’s the practice manager and we go, “They would never steal from our company.” You have some interesting ideas about how people mentally get their head around that. Talk me through that.

Mira Johnson:
Yeah. And this is the part that I really enjoy talking the most about because I think a lot of people don’t have the mindset that, “Hey, this is going to happen to me eventually.” There’s a good chance it will unfortunately. And the rationalization. There is three things that have to be present for the fraud or embezzlement to occur. One is rationalization and that is that I will tell in my head … I don’t think there’s very many people who go around and it’s like, “I just want to steal from somebody. Let me find somebody who can steal from.”

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah.

Mira Johnson:
That’s a small percentage of people. Most of us will go around and try to do the good in the world, at least that’s what I believe in. And there will be instances when we can rationalize our actions. I can see that you are very successful practice and you have all these resources. Man, if I would have all these money, I would help all those stray cats or something. So you start taking money and putting it into this nonprofit that maybe you founded or maybe you just giving them money so you can help the greater good. In your mind it’s justifiable Or then that can be the malicious, “The inflation is huge. I can’t even not put gas in my car anymore. I should have got a raise last year, so I’m going to take my raise because I deserve it.”

Dr. Andy Roark:
That makes sense.

Mira Johnson:
The rationalization is a big thing.

Dr. Andy Roark:
So rationalization is the first piece, what’s the second piece?

Mira Johnson:
The second piece is, oh there’s opportunity, but let talk about the financial pressure, of course. So there must be a reason why you want the money. And lots of people when they say, “Oh, financial pressure,” I don’t know how many people, they’re gambling or I don’t know how many people that are drag addicts. I don’t need to worry about that. It’s this big thing that people usually tend to think about but it doesn’t have to be. So it can be keeping it with Jones, the coworker got a new car, I want something better.
They want on this fancy vacation, it’s all over the Instagram and Facebook and I want to prove them that I can do the same thing. So there might be a different financial pressures, it might be as simple as that I’m already accustomed to some lifestyle. My spouse lost a job and now I’m kind of left with bills to cover and I can’t afford them because I have all these monthly recurring payments, which is very common for Americans to have all these car payment, mortgage and subscription for anything and everything you can think about. So to keeping up might be hard when there’s a loss of income.
So that’s the financial pressure. And the last one is the opportunity, which I think this is the part that we all need to pay better attention in the clinic because this is the part that we can influence. I cannot change your vision of I need to keep up with Jones different, I can’t really influence that and I can’t influence your rationalization necessarily. But I can influence the opportunity, if you do have the chance to take from me.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Right. Talk to me about how we do that. Yeah.

Mira Johnson:
I think in the family business or where you have long trusted employees, the thing where you’re getting exposed or your clinic gets exposed is where suddenly you trust a lot and then you offload all these tasks, right? Because you trust them. So pretty soon they’re running the payroll for you and they know you don’t review it because you don’t have time. Or maybe that there isn’t a procedure for receiving inventory or purchasing inventory. So those are the little things that they will start noticing. And if there is a financial pressure and if there is the rationalization, they see the opportunity and they can seize on the opportunity. So if you have strong internal controls and protect yourself, you’re minimizing them. And I know there was a lot there.

Dr. Andy Roark:
No, this is good. So I want to start to parse this apart a little bit. So you talk about trusting and delegating. Where are the big opportunities for embezzlement? So what are the things that I need to be careful when I delegate away or places where I want to make sure I have good internal control specifically?

Mira Johnson:
So when it comes to cash handling, that’s one of the things that we see that most of the practices lack their internal control. Where the receptionist, some of them don’t even count the cash in the end of the day. It’s like, “Oh, once a week I’ll just take whatever cash is in there and I deposit in the bank.” Well there should be a daily reconciliation in the end of the day and it shouldn’t be the receptionist who takes the money to the bank. And there should be some checks in the background. So if the receptionist is the one who does the daily closeout and creates the deposit, it should be taken into the safe. And then the owner or somebody else who is not handling the cash should take it to the bank. And then again, somebody else who is not doing either or should do the bookkeeping records and reconciliations and stuff like that in the end of the month or weekly basis.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Okay, cool. And then it seems like inventory would also be on that same path if we’re talking about two-thirds of embezzlement is it sounds like inventory controls are probably more important than a lot of people think.

Mira Johnson:
Yes, the purchasing and accepting. So it shouldn’t be the same person that can purchase the product and receive the product because then there is room for altered records. So I can say, “Well I purchased seven things and we receive seven things,” but we only received six or five and the rest I just took home.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Got you. Yeah. That never would’ve occurred to me. That was definitely a blind spot. It makes total sense when you say it that way. Okay. So any other areas specifically that we want to make sure? The cash handling totally makes sense. Purchasing and receiving totally makes sense. Other areas where we should make sure we have good control systems?

Mira Johnson:
Yeah, I think there’s a lots of new things that surfacing currently, but I get surprised by it. So for example, most of the people probably now use Vetco for their purchasing. And Vetco has a great thing that they reward you with this gift card, gift cards, you can redeem a gift card.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah.

Mira Johnson:
I would encourage every owner …

Dr. Andy Roark:
I see where this is going now, okay.

Mira Johnson:
… to check where the gift cards are going because sometimes you just don’t see that $25 was redeemed and where it went. So if they can intercept the mail and take the gift card. So that’s one. And you know think, “Well that’s $25 bucks Mira, who cares? It’s not a big deal,” but it usually starts small.

Dr. Andy Roark:
It adds up. Yeah.

Mira Johnson:
Yeah. And then it adds up.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah.

Mira Johnson:
And the average is average theft in veterinary medicine is $200,000. And a lot of people are like, “Well I would think I would see the $200,000,” but it takes about 24 months to catch the person that’s stealing. And one of the reasons is because they start small and then they get crazy.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Okay, so what you’re saying is usually by the time that embezzlement of gets caught or reported, the average amount we’re talking about is $200,000. Is that correct?

Mira Johnson:
Yes.

Dr. Andy Roark:
And it usually starts small and then we see larger. I a hundred percent see that as people would say, “I’d never do this,” and then they break the ice and maybe every time it gets a little bit more and comfort levels go up. But wow, $200,000. That’s amazing.
Guys, I just want to jump in here real quick with one quick announcement. If you’re a practice owner, the Uncharted Practice Owner Summit is coming, it is me and my friend Stephanie Goss, the practice management guru. We are going to be leading that, heading that up. It is in person in Greenville, South Carolina. If you are a practice owner and you’re like, “Man, I want to go to a thing that’s only practice owners and work with other practice owners,” head over to unchartedvet.com and check out what we’re doing. Guys, that’s it from me. Let’s get back into the episode.
How do practices tend to catch onto these things? Do you have a sense of that? When these things are brought to light, how does that often happen?

Mira Johnson:
It can come from different sources. So it can be an employee that saw something and came to you and said something. It can come from a third party. So for example, usually when we prepare financial statements or reports, we do discuss it with the business owners and we go through it. So for example, on one of the instances we notice that the anesthesia costs was going up and up and up while the revenue was pretty much flat. So I brought it up to doctor and the doctor said, “Well what are you doing in there? There’s no way I’m spending this much money on anesthesia.” And when he looked into it, he was a bunch of Dolorex and he said, “Well I can’t get use this in a whole year.” So then he went to control substance log and that’s how it got discovered.
So that came from a third party. Also, I know that there was some merchants, like credit card processors that came back and said, “Hey,” this happened actually closed by in Idaho that the receptionist was a very clever one and when the purchases was made, she refunded it or not refunded, she returned it. So she would return product, but the product was physically returned back so you don’t miss anything but the refund, she issued it to a different form of payment. So all these purchases are coming for the business credit card and are being refunded to her personal bank account.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Gotcha. Oh wow. Okay. All right. That makes a lot of sense. What steps do practices usually take if they know or if they suspect that this is going on? So I imagine being a business owner and let’s just say that there’s something and you say, “Oh, this has come to my attention,” where do people go from it? Is it straight to the police? How do people report this? What’s the mechanism for that?

Mira Johnson:
Yeah, that’s a great question. It depends. So we try to always advise our clients to definitely not alert the person that you think it’s on it and also don’t alert the rest of your staff because it’s not always just one person. There’s instances when it’s two people or three people. So if you do have the purchasing and receiving separated, maybe those two got together and they’re taking advantage of that. So definitely don’t try to spread the news across or try to figure out. We also try to say don’t change anything yet as far as the records, because you want to build a history.
If you see something, you can look in the history and if there’s already you can pinpoint it, then great, you can move forward. But if there’s just small things, maybe just installing a camera in the practice, if it’s a cash being stolen from the client, fake refunds and stuff like that. So from there you could, so let’s just say you have established a history, then you can contact your insurance, your lawyer, because you’ll have to let that employee go. So you want to make sure that you do it correctly so you don’t violate any other problems along the ways. And then we always encourage to prosecute. So there’s tons of practices who have all the evidence and they just want to be done.

Dr. Andy Roark:
I understand that.

Mira Johnson:
They’re hurt and it’s a terrible feeling because it is your long term employee or it is your family member. And I think in these instances, I’ve seen so many people cry and just be ashamed that that’s what they allowed to happen. And the thing is that there is all these, what we call red flags. So there, there’s the employee complain, the employee did this and that and you usually don’t see it or they’re very subtle until it’s all gone. And when it comes down as a whole group, you can come together and you’re like, “Man, how do we not see it? We’re such an idiots.” People just beat themselves up.

Dr. Andy Roark:
I would. I would be so brutal on myself, I totally can see this. I want to talk about this just because I can see myself as the kindly veterinarian because I tend to trust people and think people are doing things for the best. And I would be embarrassed, I would feel so ashamed that this happened and “Oh, I can’t believe that this happened to me,” or that I was so naive and I came completely see people being beaten up. I want to ask you a couple different questions about this, but I want to step back for a second. Let’s talk about these red flags. So you say people start to see red flags. It sounds like a lot of times they see them in retrospect, but what are some of the red flags, aside from your accountant saying, “Hey, we have a problem.” What are some of those red flags that people reflect back on and say, “I wish I had paid more attention to that?”

Mira Johnson:
Yeah, it depends on a position, but some of the red flags are, for example, that the employee never takes vacation because they’re trying to stay in where they are. Meaning if I’m the one who, let’s just say that I do accounts receivable fraud, which would mean that you come and pay and I say you didn’t, but I have the cash now, then I have to record it, anyway it’s called floating accounts receivables. If somebody else intertwines in that role, it’s easier to discover, but if you are in there, it’s much easier to attain because when the customer calls, you’re like, “Yeah, I know you paid. Yeah, we just didn’t record it yet. It’ll be their next statement,” and then you make a note of it and you record that payment when somebody else comes in. And that’s a complicated case, but other things can be [inaudible 00:20:25]-

Dr. Andy Roark:
No. I get what you’re saying.

Mira Johnson:
Okay, so other red flags can be that the person is always the nagging one, right? They don’t like something, they’re talking about the practices, “I can’t believe how much money the owner has. And we didn’t get any bonuses this year. Did you see how much it’s charging for rabies shot? Did you see how much it actually costs to buy it?” There’s that talk in the background maybe. Also, the obvious that they come to the practice and they have brand new car that’s completely out of their lifestyle. Those are the more obvious ones.
But we had one that at the clinic that the doctor’s like, “I can’t believe I didn’t see this. There was a bloody needle in the ladies bathroom and the employee walked out without a sock on her foot just completely high.” And you were just feeling bad for the person because she had some other problems and you look back, and you were like, “Well, that’s obvious,” but it wasn’t.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah.

Mira Johnson:
Because she had lack of sleep. Her husband kick her out of the house the night before. So it all makes sense to you because you’re this compassionate person, you just go and buy her coffee and pretty soon you’re just like, “Wait, what just happened?”

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, wait a second. Yeah, I can believe it. We tie ourselves up in knots, all that stuff makes sense. Do you have any resources that you recommend? Where can people learn more if they’re a small business owner or they just want to investigate more or try to understand more how they can protect themselves, what out there can be helpful for them?

Mira Johnson:
Yeah, I think the first thing that I would do is to look into the internal controls. And if you have no clue what that means, that’s fine. You at least take the time that you’re trying to understand. So reach out to your CPA or accountant and say, “Hey, how can I improve my process?” And just explain what you do and they will give you some suggestions on what can be done differently. So I would start there. And then one of the things that I always tell people is to start with yourself. So if I as a practice owner comes to the clinic and take the dog food and just walk out in the back door and it doesn’t go through any system, you’re just showing that it’s possible to get out of the clinic with a bag of food with no trace.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. Interesting. Okay. I never would’ve thought that, but it totally makes sense.

Mira Johnson:
Inventory counting, count your inventory, utilize your practice management software. There’s great technologies out there that you can utilize. I know it takes time and effort that there’s just so much that you can do and automate to protect yourself. So to learn more, you can reach out to your practice management software rep and said, “Hey, I would like to start tracking all the inventory in the software. Where do I start? How do I do this? I know there is some restrictions on permissions. How can I do this? So there’s only one person that can receive,” or whatever, how many you want, but certain people that can receive the product and some people who can do the purchase order. So your accountant, practice management software, the vendors have some great ideas too. You would not believe some drug reps, they tell us some crazy stories about how people resell the free samples to the practice and then pocket the money. So there’s also-

Dr. Andy Roark:
Oh wow. That’s crazy.

Mira Johnson:
Since I’ve been talking about fraud, there’s just all these people who come to me. We were just speaking at the Western this year in Vegas, and there was a guy who stood up and said, “I want to share a story. It doesn’t matter how it happens, but he has tears in his eyes and he said, “It was my best friend, we grew up together. I gave him a job, he was paid well. We went having picnics on the weekends.” And it was $150 or whatever. I can’t remember the exact amount. And that’s just so hurtful to me that you have to experience that and then you beat yourself up.
If I can leave you with one thing is to please don’t beat yourself up. I think it happens to the best of us. And another thing is, please don’t panic because there is things that now you would be like, “Oh, my receptionist just said that her utility is going to be shut down because she can make the payment.” So it shouldn’t be like, “Oh my gosh, she’s going to steal for me.” It should be more like a antenna should come up, ding, that’s a red flag. But it doesn’t mean because she’s asking for advance that now she’s going to take from me.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, when you start going down this path, it’s easy to start imagining. You’re like, “Fraud is everywhere.” Yeah. I love this approach. I love just talking about that it’s real. I think most of us just don’t have any idea or we don’t ever want to think that could happen in our practices. And so I really appreciate you coming in and talking about it and you really humanize it and make it go like, “Okay, I get it. I can definitely see how it happened.” I think I really like the phrase keeping honest people honest, and I think that that’s how I like to look at these things is to say, “I don want to live in a world of fear or mistrusting people.” At the same time, it’s just smart to build good systems that first of all, they help you run a better business and a better practice. And then also they just keep honest people honest and you just never have to deal with these things. And so I love your approach as you lay these steps out.

Mira Johnson:
I didn’t mean to be completely a downer, like, “Oh my gosh, you going to have to do all this and don’t trust anyone.”

Dr. Andy Roark:
I know.

Mira Johnson:
I do want to say one more thing and that is there’s a saying in my homeland, I’m from Slovakia originally, that we say, [foreign language 00:26:19] which means trust, but check.

Dr. Andy Roark:
I love that.

Mira Johnson:
Which means you can delegate all these things, but you have to have a system in place that you can just verify that’s happening.

Dr. Andy Roark:
I love it. I love it, I love it.

Mira Johnson:
Because the people are the biggest asset that the veterinary clinic has in my opinion, because they are the ones who will lift you up.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Mira, where can people find you? Tell me about the firm that you’re with. Tell me about the work that you do. Where can people learn more from you?

Mira Johnson:
Yeah. So our firm is called JF Bell Group. We’re a CPA for veterinarians. You can find us on LinkedIn or Facebook or Instagram.

Dr. Andy Roark:
I’ll put a link in the show notes as well. Yeah.

Mira Johnson:
Awesome. Yeah, CPAs for veterinarians and we do help small practices, startups to grow, start their practice of their dreams and help them manage it.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Very nice. Thanks so much for being here. Guys, take care of yourself. Thanks for being here.

Mira Johnson:
Thank you.

Dr. Andy Roark:
And that is our show, guys. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you got something out of it. A big thanks to Mira for being here. Guys, if you enjoy the show, there’s a couple things you can do. If you’re watching on YouTube, hit that subscribe button, that’s wonderful. If you’re not, give me a give me a rating, give me a review wherever you get your podcast. Apple Podcast is a big place. It really is how people find the show. But yeah, I always love your feedback and it’s just a kind thing that you can do if you’re liking what we’re doing. Anyway, gang, take care of yourself, be well. I’ll talk to you soon. Bye.

Stephanie Goss:
I just want to take a quick second and give a big shout out to our friends at Banfield Pet Hospital for making the transcriptions of this podcast possible. The podcast transcripts are brought to you thanks to a generous gift from Banfield Pet Hospital, which is striving to increase accessibility and inclusivity all across the veterinary profession. If you would love to find out more about the DEI initiatives for Banfield, you can head on over to the link in the show notes.

Filed Under: Podcast Tagged With: Team Culture

‘He’s Bad, But He’s Fun.’ A Lesson Of Perception.

November 17, 2022 by Andy Roark DVM MS

My dog Skipper is not a good dog. His rap sheet includes counter surfing, running away when called, stealing socks and eating them, and so on. He is nothing like my previous dog, Phoenix, who seemed to live to please me and my wife. 

Recently, my friend Ron visited. Him and Skipper developed an instant friendship. I’m now confident that Skipper would abandon our family to live with Ron if the chance presented itself. (I may be a little jealous.)

Although Skipper knows he’s not allowed to jump up on people, in fact, he has been forbidden many times from it, he just couldn’t help himself when it came to Ron. It got to the point that I turned to Ron and said “Ron, I’m sorry! He’s…. Bad.” And Ron said “Yes, but he’s fun.”

He’s bad, but he’s fun. 

I have thought about this since Ron’s visit. Skipper is bad in the traditional sense that he is not a well-trained dog with a drive to please his family. Until Ron’s visit, that is the yardstick that I have used to measure Skipper. But it made me think. Why is that the default measurement I go to? 

The truth is, Skipper is fun. He’s up for whatever you want to get into. He bounces around. He plays with toys. He runs wild in the park and desperately wants to meet new people. Shouldn’t these attributes count for him instead of against him?

Is it possible that we too often in life look at and judge people (or pets) in relation to others or to traditional standards?

Negativity and Positivity Effects In Perception of People

People don’t always behave in the way you initially thought they “should.” But, those people often have shining virtues that can only be recognized when you discard preconceived standards and appreciate them for who they are.

In Skipper’s case, I expected him to behave like our previous dog, Phoenix. I expected him to be well-trained. “He should come when I call him.” “He should sit and stay when told to.” Etc. 

While Skipper does not meet those expectations, he truly has exceptional virtues of his own. And when we focus on those qualities, Skipper is a great dog.

You are faced with a great deal of information about a person when shaping an opinion of them. Research shows that those impressions tend to be disproportionately influenced by negative characteristics. In other words, negativity bias or the negativity effect can have a huge impact on how you perceive others. 

If you can reframe the characteristics or standards in which you are defining others, you may be able to find new appreciation for someone. Just like I did with Skipper.

Think about that.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: Perspective

Saying “No” With a Smile & Keeping the Team Motivated – November Mailbag pt. 2

November 16, 2022 by Andy Roark DVM MS

Dr. Andy Roark takes more questions from the mailbag!

Questions in this episode:

How involved should associate veterinarians be with boarding in the clinic?

Phone etiquette when trying to help non-clients on the phone who need assistance but they can’t be seen due to lack of appointment availability

What are the best things to do for your staff on one of those crazy days when everything is on fire to keep them motivated ?

What’s the best thing to do when you’re feeling overwhelmed?

What advice would you give those that have trouble making boundaries at work?

How do you bridge the gap between “front and back”?

How do you coach someone that gives very blunt delivery of feedback and rubs people the wrong way?

Cone Of Shame Veterinary Podcast · COS – 170 – Saying "No" With A Smile & Keeping The Team Motivated – November Mailbag Pt. 2

You can also listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, Soundcloud, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts!

LINKS

Dr. Andy Roark Exam Room Communication Tool Box Course: https://drandyroark.com/on-demand-staff-training/

Dr. Andy Roark Swag: drandyroark.com/shop

All Links: linktr.ee/DrAndyRoark


EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

This podcast transcript is made possible thanks to a generous gift from Banfield Pet Hospital, which is striving to increase accessibility and inclusivity across the veterinary profession. Click here to learn more about Equity, Inclusion & Diversity at Banfield.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Welcome everybody to The Cone of Shame Veterinary Podcast. I am your host, Dr. Andy Roark. Guys, I’m back experimenting. This is Part 2 of my recent experiment of live streaming the podcast into the Uncharted community and so, I got questions from the Uncharted Veterinary community. If you’re not familiar with those guys, you can check them out at unchartedvet.com. It is where I spend a lot of time hanging out talking about leadership and communication and management and stuff like that that I love. But anyway, I’m here with these guys and just going to go through questions that I got from them and that will be it, so let’s see.
Yeah, I’d love to hear your feedback on this podcast. If you like it, you can send me an email at podcast@drandyroark.com. You can also leave me a review wherever you get your podcast. But I really haven’t decided if I’m going to do more episodes like this. I’m really kind of waiting to see if people tell me that they like them and I can tell you, I really enjoyed the first one, so this has been really fun.
If you’re listening and you’re like, “Man, these questions where Andy is just talking through problems that people ask him about, I really, really love them,” I have another podcast, it’s called Uncharted Veterinary Podcast and I do it with my friend, practice management goddess, Stephanie Goss. And that’s all we do there, is breakdown questions about practice that people ask us. So, if you really love this, no matter what, you can have more of me talking about problems at the Uncharted Veterinary Podcast, which is the other podcast that I do. All right, let me go ahead and let’s get into this episode.

Kelsey Beth Carpenter:
(singing) This is your show. We’re glad you’re here. We want to help you in your veterinary career. Welcome to The Cone of Shame with Dr. Andy Roark.

Dr. Andy Roark:
All right, everybody. So, the first question is an anonymous question. This is from a veterinarian. She is a veterinarian that has a boarding facility built onto her practice and she says that, a little backstory, she had a dog that had a medical problem. It was some sort of like a chemical burn or something when it left the boarding facility. She ended up looking at it and then the client ended up bashing the boarding facility and specifically, this vet who’s like, “I didn’t do any… I didn’t have any idea what was happening,” is basically it.
And so her question is, if a dog is being boarded with a vet clinic, how involved are veterinarians in the daily care and monitoring of the pet? If I’m unhappy of the vet with the care that a dog received and don’t think the issue was handled appropriately when I brought it up to the practice manager, how should that be handled? Meaning, if I don’t like how this went and I said so to the management and they ignored me, what do I do about it?
All right, cool. Let’s do the first one first and let’s talk about the boarding, that’s in boarding, okay? How involved should vets be in the boarding that the clinic does? First of all for me, I guess, there’s not a right answer. There’s only clear expectations and so, there are clinics that the vets are very involved. That’s not wrong. And there are clinics where the vets are not involved at all. They’re barely aware that the boarding is happening in the building. That’s not wrong either.
As long as everybody is clear and honest about what is happening and how involved the vet is or how involved the vet is not, the pet owners should not think that their pets are being examined twice a day by the veterinarian if that’s not happening at all. That’s only setting the vets up to get hammered. They aren’t doing anything. And at the same time, if the pet owners think they’re just dropping off for boarding and their pet ends up doing a bunch of medical stuff and then they’re surprised when they come back and find that out, that’s also really bad.
And so, it’s really about what are the expectations here about how involved the vets are with what’s happening ? Ad is the clinic communicating that to the clients and do they communicate that to the vets? Because I will tell you that boarding can burn vets up. I have seen vets that are absolutely ready to mutiny over boarding because they’re like, “This never ends.” And I’ve worked at some of those practices. It’s never real bad, but I can definitely see how it gets bad.
But it’s just there’s times that you’re a vet and just the number of little problems, torn toenails, diarrhea, coughing dogs, kennel cough, people coming back with kennel cough, things like that, it can suck up your time and suck up your time and suck up your time. And if you are the doctor and that’s not accounted for in your schedule if you’re not getting compensated for that, if these are no charge appointments because the pet started coughing on boarding and things like that, if that hasn’t been discussed with the veterinarians, they can get really resentful and it’s not hard to see why.
At the same time, if boarding is part of what your clinic does and you want to be a good team member, you got to support the team. And so, there is a part where you say, “Hey, we should all be supportive of what the practice is doing to pay our paychecks and to serve the community.” And so, it really, it’s a give and take and that’s why I said there’s not a right answer. There’s clear communication. There’s clear expectations. If you are working in a practice and this goes to the second part where she says, “What do I do when this wasn’t heard?” Talk about it.
If you’re a vet and you’re like, “This is eating me up and this is taking so much time and it’s really frustrating, “you need to have that conversation. And not in like an, “I’m angry way,” but in a, “Hey, we’re in a relationship together and part of the relationship is knowing where the other person is. And so, I want to let you know that this is kind of where I am. And I’m not resentful, but I can see resentful from here. It’s just kind of over the hill.” I think you should say that.
And my question is always what is kind? Do the kind thing? It’s not kind to keep your mouth shut until you’re really, really angry and then blow up on the practice that you work at. And if you’re the practice, it’s not kind to keep your mouth shut and go, “Well, maybe she won’t notice how much work she’s doing.” And just hope that it all works out and the other person doesn’t notice that they’re dealing with a lot of cases from the back. So, anyway, there can be some real drama with boarding.
That’s just my thing is clear expectations, clear communication to the client and between the practice and the doctors. If the doctors are expected to contribute to the boarding, you just need to talk that through and everybody needs to be okay. No surprises. And as long as it works for everybody, I think that’s the best thing. I think that’s the best that we can do.
All right. I got a question Kyle Ann. She says, “Do you have tips on phone etiquette when trying to help non-clients on the phone who need assistance, but they can’t be seen due to a lack of appointment availability?”
Okay. I think a lot of us are dealing with this, so we have people on the phone and we can’t get them in and that is a problem. Now, I would say this writer makes this pretty easy for me because she says non-clients. And so, this is not a person that has been coming here, this is not a long-term client. What do you do in helping this person who needs assistance, but we can’t get them in? I just said clear is kind and I go back to it. Clear is kind.
I said, what is kind? Clear is kind. That’s what is kind. Clear is kind. We need to tell people that we don’t have availability and don’t beat around the bush, don’t act like, “I don’t know. Maybe we can do this or maybe we can do that.” And I understand. We don’t like to tell people things that they don’t want to hear. And so, it is hard to say to someone, “I’m sorry. We can’t get you in.” Clear is kind.
Set expectations and the expectation is “I can’t get you in.” The longer you wait to say that, the more you’re going to frustrate this person. And so, the first thing is be honest, be clear, and then be polite and be firm. And I think a lot of us really struggle with this and we end up, we cave. We fold like origami. We’re like, “I don’t have any availability but I don’t want to tell this person they can’t be seated, so I’m just going to through strength of will make this happen.” And I go, “That’s ridiculous.”
I’m talking a lot these days about capacity and teams and if your team is working as hard as they can work every day and they’re burning out, you can’t just want to do more work and make it happen. You’re pushing your team into the red and there’s going to be consequences. And there are going to be possibly your staff leaving and then you’re more shorthanded. And so, by pushing this far, you’ve limited your ability to do work for the foreseeable future because it’s the hard hire. And so, you have pushed this to a point that you have damaged your long-term potential to do good in the world by trying to squeeze in this short-term thing.
The other thing is even if they don’t leave, you burn these people out. You end up with just people who are tired. They’re grumpy, they’re angry, your practice culture suffers. You are running a sprint every day and that’s ridiculous because this is a marathon and so, pace yourself for a marathon. And you just have to be honest about what your team can do. And then here’s the thing, you got to let it go. You’ve got to process your lack of responsibility here.
One of the big things for me is, look, if there’s something and I didn’t want it, I don’t have control over it. I can’t make it stop and I don’t benefit from it, I’ve got to step back and say, “I’m not responsible for this.” And that’s the case with our overwhelm a lot of these practices. “I don’t want this, I didn’t make it happen. I can’t fix it and I don’t benefit from it because my people are burning out. It doesn’t help me to turn people away. That’s not helpful.” And so, at some point I have to say, “Well, if all those things are true then I’m not going to hold myself responsible and beat myself up about it.”
I hear from practices that are like, “Our front desk just apologizes all day long.” I’m like, “You have to stop. That’s not healthy.” It’s not healthy for practices to be on the phone apologizing all day long. It is what it is. I didn’t want this to be the case. The honest truth is we’re not taking new clients. Just say it and be kind and be firm. And then facilitate this person getting seen somewhere else. And that doesn’t mean you have to call and try to get them an appointment, give them a recommendation. If you can’t see them then tell them if you were them, where would you go?
And this idea that we don’t refer to other general practices, that’s ridiculous. That doesn’t make any sense. That is pennywise and dollar foolish. We are trying to do good in the world. We’ve got more business than we can do. Take care of the people who come to your practice and help other people get seen elsewhere. And feel good about yourself and go on with your life and stop burning yourself out and burning other people out.
Hang up the phone. Practice saying no by saying yes. And so, this is the one piece of phone etiquette is be clear. “We cannot do this. We are not doing this. I have some recommended practices you can call who do good work,” and say it. Don’t tell people what you can’t do for them any more than you have to. Tell them what you can do. When they say, “I need to get in,” we’ll say, “I can get you in. It’s going to be in January,” to get in to start a new client relationship here. And that’s not saying, “No, I can’t see you.” It’s saying, “I can see you in January.”
And if they want to do that, they can, that’s fine. If they say, “I can’t do that,” and you say, “Great. Well, I can refer you to another vet practice?” And I’m trying to tell you what I can do for you, but ultimately I’m not going to waiver. These are the boundaries. And so, I know that we struggle a lot with the desire to get people in and help people and I know that it feels awful to send people away. These are things that we have to do right now, guys.
It really is a question of do you want to do a good job today or do you want to do a good job in your career? Because if you “do a good job” by squeezing everybody in today, you’re not going to do a good job in your career because you’re going to be short-staffed, and you’re going to be burned out and you’re going to be angry and you may end up depressed. And so anyway, that’s my thing. Clear is kind. Be honest. Facilitate them as best you can in getting seen and that doesn’t have to be at your practice. And tell them what you can do as opposed to just focusing on what you can’t do.
Jodi asked, “What are the best things to do for your staff on one of those crazy days when everything is on fire to keep them motivated?” I’m getting a lot of questions like this. “How do we keep morale up? How do I keep people motivated? How do I make people feel appreciated?” I love this question. Here’s the answer. I have no idea. I have no idea. Here’s why because I don’t know your staff and every staff is different and that’s not good or bad, it’s just the truth of the matter.
And so, you say, “What are the best things to do for your staff on those crazy days?” My advice to you is ask the staff. Ask them what they want. Ask them what makes them feel good on those crazy days. Now, you have to ask it in a certain way because what I’ve found is if I go to the staff and I say, “Guys, when we are crazy like this, what would make you feel better?” They have no idea.
And of course, they don’t because if I came to you and you had a really bad day and I was like, “What would make you feel better?” You’re like, “I don’t know.” The truth is ask them and ask them when things are not on fire. So, at the end of the day when they’re exhausted, asking them what they wish is just another mental burden to put on them. And most people have a hard time asking those questions.
The questions that I really like are, “Tell me about a time that you were stressed out and someone did something that made you feel better. What was it?” And so ask them questions like that. “Tell me about a time that you felt really appreciated.” I love those questions. “What’s your favorite snack? What’s your favorite candy? What’s your favorite music? What’s your language of appreciation?
And there’s a book, it’s called, The Five Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace. It’s written by the guy, who wrote The 5 Love Languages. They’re the same book. Just so you know, they’re the same book and one of them is just work appropriate, but it’s good stuff. If you want a quick read, there’s five languages that make people feel appreciated. I’m going to try to rattle them off, but it’s words of affirmation, it’s service, it’s quality time, it’s gifts, and it’s physical touch. Bam, nailed it. That’s the five. But anyway, and you can dig into. It’s a good book for anyone in management and motivation to read and you can skim through it and get the gist of it pretty darn fast. But those are the things you say. And what resonates with my people?
I really like the idea of having a sheet that, and you have to update this every now and then. You can’t be like they filled out a sheet when they came to work here and I’m like, “When did they come to work?” And you’re like, “Seven years ago.” I’m like, “How do you know they still Butterfinger?” It’s like, “Who stops liking Butterfinger?” People’s preferences change and so, just update it. But some questions like that, not when things are on fire. Those things are good, but it helps you figure out what motivates people, so that we can do those things.
One of the things you can always do in the moment, always in the moment, is when people are really working hard, go the extra mile to make them feel seen. It doesn’t cost anything. You don’t have to buy anything. It’s just taking a moment to say to somebody, not I appreciate you or thank you because those are just really generic.
It sounds something like, “Hey I want to tell you, I saw earlier today when we took that patient out of its little den and you dove in there and just cleaned it out and wiped it down and you were just on it. And I just want to tell you, I recognize how hard you work around here. And I recognize that you could have been like, ‘That’s not my job,’ and backed away, but you didn’t. And I just, it’s hard for me to express how much I appreciate you and what you do here.” And if that sounds heartfelt, it’s because it is because I’m imagining one of my techs.
And you go, yeah. It’s not buying anything, it’s not having anything, it’s not planning anything, but sometimes people just want to feel seen. And that is something that we can always do, but you got to be present. You got to be on the floor. You got to be paying attention and you have to set out to do it and you can’t do it for the whole team at once. It has to be a thing where you catch people, who are really going to town. But anyway, that is something that even if you’re unprepared, you can make people feel seen, but you have to give it a little bit of thought and you have to get their attention if to talk right to them, look them in the eye, and make them feel seen.
Jen asks, “What’s the best thing to do when you’re feeling overwhelmed?” She has a follow-up question, which is, “What advice would you give to those who are having trouble setting boundaries at work?” I’m going to take the first one first. “What’s the best thing to do when you’re feeling overwhelmed?” I think a lot of us are feeling overwhelmed. I’ll run you through my list.
Number one is make a list. I think of like Dumbledore is pensive. A lot of times, we’ve got this nebulous list in our brain. And I tell you that’s the worst part for me of feeling overwhelmed is the emotional feeling of, “I just have so much to do,” and you’re like, “Andy, what exactly do you have to do?” And I’m like, “I don’t know. Just everything. I just feel like I have to do everything.” I think a lot of us get that place. You got to get out of there and the quickest way to get out of there is you have to crystallize what you’re up against.
You have to turn this nebulous cloud of stress and anxiety into something tangible that you can look at and measure up and make some plans about how you’re going to address it. So, the first thing is just get it down. You can use a to-do list app. You just write it on paper, but you’ve really got to take the floating anxiety in your mind, which is driving that feeling of overwhelmed. You’ve got to translate that into something tangible that you can actually see.
And then you look at this list and you ask yourself what here is actually on fire and what’s just smoking from the things around it? And I think a lot of us struggle with that. We say, “Everything is on fire.” It’s like, “No,. Everything is not on fire.” You got a couple of things that are on fire and you maybe have one significant fire. Everything else is just reefed in smoke from those burning fires, but it is not actually on fire, which means those problems can sit until tomorrow and you should feel okay with them.
I’m a big fan of everyone, people make to-do lists and they’re like, “This is what I have to do today. And if I don’t do this today then I’ve failed.” And I go, “That’s ridiculous.” It can’t be about what you did today. It’s got to be about, “This my to-do list and this is what I’m going to do today. And this is what I’m going to do tomorrow. And this is what I’m going to do next week.” And you’re already lifting that overwhelm off your chest just by saying, “I see this and I’m saying it’s important and I commit to doing it next week.” And you can do that.
And I think we have this horrible tendency as a human being species to wildly over imagine what we can do in a day. And we under imagine what we can do in a year or in five years or in 10 years. And so, the biggest problem is we look… I mean, how many of us have had these to-do lists and we have 10 things on them and we’re like, “Yeah, I’m going to do this today.” No, you’re not. You’re going to do three things on that list or maybe five things on that list and then you’re going to feel defeated because you didn’t do 10 things.
And I would say, “That’s ridiculous. You did five things on your to-do list today.” That’s bonkers. If you do three things on your to-do list and keep a clinic going and keep a family going and feed yourself and wear pants, then you have succeeded in the day and you should be happy about that. That’s what you should do with your to-do list. So, what here is actually on fire? And then what’s just smoky from the things around it? What’s mission critical? What’s causing the most pain? Meaning, what is bothering me the most?
Some of this is mental health stuff, where it’s like, “I understand organizationally what the top priorities are, but this squeaking chair makes me angry every time I sit down in it.” And I would say, “That’s causing you pain.” Yes, there’s other things that are important, but that squeaking chair is bothering you every time you sit on it. And it’s affecting your head space and your enjoyment of being here, and so, for me that is a thing that’s actually bothering me more than anything else. So, fix the chair. Just grease the chair. If it’s causing you pain, then fix it.
And the last thing is what will free up my capacity? And so, I’m looking at my to-do list, what is mission critical? What is bothering me the most? And the last thing is what will free up my capacity? Meaning, I want to prioritize the things that are going to give me more time to deal with the other things.
And so, you might have something on your task list and say, “This is not super important but it takes a ton of time and people keep asking me about it and asking me about it and asking me about it.” And I go, “Well, if you got that off your list then people will stop asking you about it and you would have time to do the other thing.” So, even though it by itself is that important, getting it done will free up your capacity. And so, anyway, those are the ways that I look at being overwhelmed. I hope that that’s something helpful.
The second follow-up question is, “What advice would you give those people have trouble making boundaries at work?” And I kind of touched on this when I talked a little bit earlier about the phone calls and people wanting to get in and us not having space. The big keys for me in setting boundaries at work is you need to make boundary decisions intentionally and when you’re not in the moment. The biggest way that we fail in personal boundaries is we are like, “When it happens, I will say no.”
No, you won’t and that’s okay. It’s because you’re a good person and you want to help people and if you have not clearly committed to what you’re going to do, then it’s a toss up in the air. And if it comes down to looking at this person who’s got tears in their eyes and saying, “No, I’m not going to help you,” and that’s boundary setting, then you’re going to fail every time and you probably should because it means, again, that you’re a good caring person. The only way to make this stuff happen, guys, is to think about the boundary failings that we have.
Where do we fail to set boundaries? How do people set us up, so that we say yes and then we regret it or we’re resentful later on? If you were having those experiences where you say, “I feel I say yes and then I’m angry about it later,” I would say to you, my friend, that’s resentment. You are feeling resentment. And the fact that you did this and you felt resentful of it, to me that means you need to fix the problem for next time. And that is about making decisions when you’re not in the moment. Moral decisions made on the floor are a real problem and they’re one of the big problems in why we don’t have good boundaries in vet medicine.
Because we’ll say things like, “Oh, when the client comes in at the end of the day and if they get in the door before we close it, then it’s up to the doctor whether or not we see them.” And I say, “So, you’re going to see them is what you’re saying?” Because the doctor is almost certainly not going to be able to look at this person who says, “Please don’t make me leave. I drove all the way over here and my dog is sick. And please don’t turn me away into the cold.” They’re going to say yes, because they’re good people.
And make the decision ahead of time. “We close at 6:00. We don’t take walk-ins after 5:30.” And it’s not a question of asking the doctor because the doctor is not empowered to make that decision. Has a policy decision that was made and we will apologize and let them know where the emergency clinic is. That’s it. Maybe one of our techs can look and say, “Yes, this could wait until tomorrow,” or “No, it needs to go to the emergency clinic.” But that’s as much as they get, but that’s a policy decision.
I mean, I know it all comes from a good place. It comes from us saying, “Well, I want the vets to be able to look at this.” And try to take care of our clients. Nobody is bad here, but at some point you got to look and say, “In this world where people are burned out and they’re overwhelmed and they’re working and they’re working and they’re working, if that’s the reality in your practice, you, my friend, you need to set policies that protect your people.”
Now, in 10 years when there is a global pet shortage and you got nothing but free times, you can change that policy and say, “No, when they come in, we’re seeing them. You know why because we only see five appointments a day?” Then that’s a whole different thing.
I’m not saying you have to do that, but you can. Things change. And the fact that you make a policy right now doesn’t mean you’re not going to relax that policy when you hire the three doctors you’ve been trying to hire for the last two years, then you can make that adjustment. But right now, you got to make the decision, make it ahead of time, make it with clear eyes, make it non-emotionally and just make it. In order to do that, because a lot of people go, “But this is painful, Andy. I feel bad turning people away or setting these boundaries or telling people no.” There’s really two mental shifts that have to happen if you want to feel okay with this, in my experience.
The first is you have got to stop thinking in the short term and think in the long term. I alluded to it earlier, but if you look at everything that walks in your door and say, “I’m thinking about this today and the good that I can do in the world today,” then you are going to suck it up and you’re going to see every patient that comes in and you are going to take every phone call that rings through. That’s not healthy because the goal is not to be successful today. The goal is to be successful for 30 years or for the rest of your career and so, you need to look at it long term.
And so, if you say, “I need to do maximum good in the next couple of decades,” then pacing yourself makes sense. And you say, “Well, I’m not going to stay tonight and take extra cases because I need to rest, so that I can continue to keep this up for the next year as it’s hard to hire people. And as we continue to be so darn busy, I’ve got to pace myself.” And so, I’m not thinking about today. I’m thinking about this year or the next five years or the next 10 years or whatever. But if you’re only thinking about today then you, my friend, you are in a sprint mindset of go, go, go, go. Fall into bed, jump up tomorrow, and go, go, go, again. And that’s not sustainable guys. It’s a marathon. It’s not a sprint.
And the other mental shift I think that people need to get comfortable with is switching from fixating on the person in need to thinking about everyone affected. And so, when the pet owner comes in and they say, “Please, don’t turn us away. I know you’re locking the door and the staff is trying to leave, but we need to get seen for this itching,” if you think about the individual affected, which is the pet and the pet owner and you say, “Ah, it’s help them or it’s don’t help them,” that’s a really hard mental place to get out of. And morally, you think, “Oh, I need to help them.” But those are not the only people affected, are they?
Your staff is affected. Your staff wants to go home. They want to go see their families. They want go home and recharge. They have hobbies that they are looking forward to doing. They want to rest. They want to do whatever they want to do. It’s their life, but they want to live their life. So, if you say yes, it’s not just about you and this pet owner, it’s about you and the staff and doctor and payroll if you put people into overtime. And more importantly, it’s about your family at home and the time that you’re not getting to spend with your kids and your spouse or doing your hobbies or relaxing. What does your boyfriend think about you staying late every night? If he has concerns, then he’s being negatively affected by you saying yes.
I’m not saying you say no. I’m not saying you say yes. It changes. But what I’m saying is when you make these decisions, you need to not think just about the person in front of you who’s asking for help. You need to try to balance what is being asked across all stakeholders, which is them, which is the staff, which is the doctors, which is the practice, which is your friends and family who are waiting for you to get home or your pets who need to pee because they haven’t been let out since lunchtime.
All those things matter and it’s a whole lot easier to set boundaries if you look at everyone’s needs and how everyone is affected and go, “Just I can’t do this. This is not in balance. There’s too many ripple effects from this.” And again, this math might change in the future. If you never come home late and somebody shows up and says, “Please squeeze me in,” then maybe you do that and it’s because it’s a rarity, but if it happens every day then it’s okay to say no now. It’s just interesting. There’s no all or none, but it’s about being healthy and being intentional about where you are.
And the last thing that I’ll say about setting professional boundaries, and this is kind of hard to hear, and I just want you to sit with it a little bit. And I hope that neither of these things is true for you, but if you have to make a boundaries decision and the decision comes down to feeling guilty or feeling resentful, choose guilt. Choose it every time.
And what I mean when I say that is if your choices are to set a boundary and say, “No, I can’t do this and I’m going to go home and I’m going to feel guilty about it,” or to say, “I’m going to make this happen. I’m going to stay and do this. I’m going to sacrifice this boundary. I’m going to make this exception and then I’m going to be mad about it. And I’m going to go home and I’m going to be angry at myself and at my staff and at my job.” That anger eats you up. It will.
Go home and feel guilty because that beats the heck out of going home and feeling resentful and angry because that’s a path to a dark place and you don’t want to be there. I hope that you can rationalize in your head. That’s why I talk about thinking in the long term, thinking about everybody infected because I want to help you deal with that guilt. But if it comes down to it, you got to choose guilt or resentment. Choose guilt.
Okay. Jody asked, “How do you bridge the gap between the front and the back?” It’s probably one of the most common management questions I get. There’s a lot of communication issues between the front and the back. And people always ask, “How do you,” when she says, “bridge the gap?” Generally, it’s making these people know and respect each other. It’s making them assume good intent about each other. Meaning, the front assumed that the back is trying their best and the back assumes the front is trying their best. How do we make those things happen? How do we make these people, who are physically separated? Generally, they’re in different parts of the building. They’re having different problems. “How do we get them to bridge the gap,” as Jodi says?
And the first thing is I think is really important is a shared mission. We need to talk about what we’re doing here. What are the core values of our practice, of our clinic? Why do we come into work? It’s not to make money. That’s not why anybody’s here. I mean, maybe some of us, but those people made bad choices, but it’s here. We have a mission that we are pursuing and we are a team. And the front and the back are 100% both pursuing that mission and they are both required mission critical for pursuing our mission.
And so, make sure you’re talking about the mission. Make sure you’re pointing to the North Star that your whole team is rowing towards. And if I believe that they’re working in a different place and they’re doing things differently, but they are committed to our mission and I am committed to our mission, suddenly that commonality that brings us together and it makes it easier for me to assume good intent. And if I have conflict, it’s easier for me to talk it through when I believe that we’re both ultimately working for the same outcome and we both are trying to get the same place. So, the shared mission is important.
Focus on interdependence. I want to continue to emphasize again and again to the team that they need each other. The front needs the back and the back needs the front. I think a lot of times, people just like the… I think it happens more in the back. Maybe it’s just because I’m back there and I’m not up at the front. But in the back, I think there’s this idea that the front is just in the way of getting things done, and that’s nonsense. That’s foolishness.
The truth is they are handling the clients and the communication and the phones and the checking in and checking out and they are completely a 100% in this trench with us. And they are helping us do the things that we need to do, and we need them. We need them and they need us. And I think that that’s language that we should use and remind people of is, “Hey, guys, we need the front desk and we need them to be happy. And we need them to help us take care of these clients because without them, all this communication falls back on us and we cannot keep up. We need them. They have a great impact on how our day goes and we need to support them and we need to try to make their jobs better. And they’re going to work hard to support us and try to make our jobs better.” But it comes down to that focus on interdependence.
And the last thing is knowledge about what the other group is doing. Oftentimes, the people in the back do not know what’s happening at the front desk and they do not know what they’re up against and they don’t know the headaches and they don’t understand what it’s like to sit up there and have a waiting room full of people staring at you and they’ve waited 35 minutes and they’re getting frustrated. But that’s just is an experience.
And so I think talking about those things and pointing out to people and say, “Hey guys, it’s hard up front.” And the same thing at the front, they don’t know what we’re doing in the back. They don’t understand why suddenly there’s a huge log jam and it’s like, “Well, they don’t know that the procedures that they brought in these specific ones take a lot of time. And our regular procedures, they don’t know maybe what goes fast or slow or maybe they just don’t know that one of the doctors got caught on a phone call and couldn’t get off and couldn’t get off and now, we’re behind.” If you don’t have a way to communicate that, then they don’t know it and so, make sure that we’re trying to talk about that.
And a lot of people will say, “Cross-training, cross-training, cross-training.” To me, cross training is knowing what the other group is doing and I think that’s good if you can do it. If you can get some of the technical people back up to help with the front desk and answer phones, that’s great. And if you can get some of your front desk people CSRs trained as assistant, so they can come back and help hold pets and participate in the back just for that experience, that’s great. I think that those things are really good.
The bigger thing is good communication. It’s about these people knowing each other as people. And it’s just about them being able to talk about issues before they become big screaming issues. When there’s mild frustration being able to come together and say, “Hey, let’s talk about what’s happening and why it’s happening and what we’re going to do about it.” And that’s just good ongoing communication in the practice. That stops us from getting to the place where we build walls and where we split into groups. And us versus them is a very powerful, very simple way to divide people.
And in practice, if we start having that type of language where there’s us in the back and them in the front or vice versa that leads to division really fast. It leads to a lack of assumed good intent and that leads to anger. So, anyway, those are my big things on bridging the gap between the front and the back.
And then the last one, Jackie asks, “How do you coach someone that gives very blunt delivery of feedback and rubs people the wrong way?” All right. I like this question. This, I get this a lot. How do you coach someone who gives very blunt feedback? I don’t find this to be particularly hard feedback to give. I really don’t. I like it. And so, the big thing is, let me go ahead and frame this up.
So, the first thing that I want to do there, there’s really two kinds of corrective feedback that you can give. The first is critical and the second is developmental. And so, if you give critical feedback then what happens is that’s me saying, “Hey, you messed this thing up yesterday and I want to talk about how you messed it up. Okay?” And so, that’s critical feedback.
Developmental feedback is me saying, “Hey, I want to talk about where you’re going and what I want to see from you in the next six months. Hey, I want to talk about your developmental pathway and what I see as the next big steps for you to take, to move onward and upwards, to be even more fantastic at your job than you are. I want to talk to you about the things that I’m really looking for you in the next year as far as your own personal leadership development.” And that’s developmental feedback and it feels very different.
It’s not me saying, “Let’s talk about how you screwed these things up.” It’s me saying, “Let’s talk about the future and what we’re going to do in the next year.” And so, this type of blunt feedback, I’m not going to hold it as a trial and be like, “Come back in here. Now, you’re going to sit here. I’m going to bring in the first witness to talk about your bluntness when you said, ‘That’s not what I asked for.'” I’m not going to put him on the spot. We’re not having a trial. We’re not doing any of that.
And so, “Hey, I need to talk to you. I want talk about what I want to see from you in the next year as far as your leadership development and where I see potential for you to really blossom.” And then I talk not about them giving blunt feedback because blunt feedback is very subjective. It’s very subjective. What I consider blunt feedback living in the Southern United States my whole life is very different than what my friend, who lives in New York City considers to be blunt feedback. What he considers to be normal communication. I would like, “Oh, my God. You said that?”
It’s a cultural thing. And yeah, I say that with love, but there are places where very direct communication is just the norm and there’s other places where that’s just not how we talk. And so, this person may fit like a glove in another place. I don’t want to lose this person, but what they’re saying is not wrong. It’s just it’s being received in a way that they do not intend. And I talk a lot about how the person is being perceived. Not what they’re doing and that’s big important point in coaching people.
If I say, “Hey, you are doing this wrong,” that’s very different from saying, “Hey, I understand where you’re coming from and I appreciate you enforcing our policies and giving clear feedback. I do and I do not want that to stop. I want to work on how that feedback is being perceived because some people are hearing it as very blunt or they are taking it in a way that is probably stronger than you intend. And so, I want to work with you in how we can deliver the feedback in a way that’s not going to be perceived as over the top or aggressive. I want you to work on softening your delivery, so that it is as effective as you want it to be.”
And that’s how I put it. And really, I hope you can kind of hear that I’m really trying to take this away from being any sort of criticism of the person because it’s a skill criticism. And just say, “Hey, I want you to work on softening your delivery, so that your feedback is as effective as you want it to be. And we can talk about how to do that.” And if they want specific examples, I hopefully can give them and say, “Here’s some of the things that I heard.”
And it’s just, again, a lot of times, communication doesn’t happen at the mouth, it happens at the ear. And we don’t have a ton of control over what happens at someone else’s ear other than to receive feedback and make adjustments based on how they’re interpreting what we’re saying. That’s just life. It’s not a critique of you as an individual or your skill or your smarts or anything else. “I told you what it is. I gave you the feedback. This is where it is. Let’s just make some adjustments and go on. You’re doing great. I appreciate you.”
And that, I try to keep it low stakes and just give that feedback. If you want to unpack it some more, we teach a DISC in Uncharted. So, DISC is a very simple style of communication profile and so, basically people kind of fall into four categories. D is a dominant direct personality type and that’s often the ones that I get the feedback about, “This person is very blunt.” This person is probably just a D style communicator, which is I think it’s great. I’m very comfortable with these, but they are straight to the point. They don’t want details. They’re just, “Tell me what I need to know and I’m going to tell you what you need to know and let’s go on.”
And you guys probably work with those people. A lot of doctors are that way and they can be seen as uncaring. That’s not true. That’s not remotely true. It’s just that they are no nonsense, “Let’s go. Let’s get going.” And that’s their communication style. And what I love about DISC is it breaks people up.
And you can say, “Oh, I know those people. I know exactly who that is.” And I will say, “Great. Do you know how that person likes to communicate?” And you say, “Yes, they’re very direct.” And I say, “Great. Here’s a little trick. They also like to be communicated that way.” Which mean, and that makes the feedback even a little bit tricky if you don’t do it right, because the person is like, “I’m not blunt. This is how I would want people to talk to me.”
And that’s true. That is how they want them to talk. It’s like, “This is how I communicate. I told you what you need to know. Tell me what I need to know and let’s go our separate ways.” And that’s it. And so, anyways, like Ron Swanson from Parks and Rec, goes like, “Tell me what you want and I’ll tell you what I want.” And that’s it. Anyway, I don’t find it to be super problematic because it’s 100% just, “Hey. This is how it’s being received. We need to adjust so that these specific people are hearing what you’re saying and your feedback is effective. Can you work with me on that? Help me soften it.”
And they’re going to have to struggle because a lot of times they’re like, “I just want to say it and go on.” And I go, “I get that.” The worst case is I kind of have to get them to understand how blunt feedback does not save them time. They’re like, “I just tell them. It saves time.” I was like, “You just tell them, and then they come into my office and now, I’m talking to them and it takes me 30 minutes to talk them down. And now, you and I are having this conversation. And if it keeps happening, we’re going to have another conversation like this. And now, if you want to have a good relationship with this person, you may have to go and apologize and tell them that you didn’t mean to come off direct. And how much time does that waste?”
It’s like, “Just soften your delivery. And ultimately, it takes more time in the moment and saves more time in the long run by far.” And so, I might have to explain that. Usually, I don’t. Usually, I just say, “Hey, I want you to be more effective. This is what I need from you is just soften tone, so that people perceive it differently.”
Guys, that’s it. That’s what I got. Those are my questions that I got from the Uncharted community. Thanks to everybody there who dropped those questions for me. Gang, I hope you enjoyed it. It’s been a fun experiment. I’m going to go back to the lab and tinker around on this and maybe we’ll do some more of these. Maybe we’ll switch it up a little bit. I don’t know. We’re going to see what happens.
But anyway, gang, thank you guys so much for being here. If you enjoy the podcast, lead me an honest review wherever you get your podcast. If you’re watching on YouTube, click that Like and Subscribe button. Gang, I hope you all are well. Take care of yourselves. All right, talk to you soon. Bye.

Filed Under: Podcast Tagged With: Life With Clients, Perspective, Team Culture, Wellness

My Open Mic Night: Discovering Growth in the Uncomfortable

November 11, 2022 by Andy Roark DVM MS

When was the last time you did something that scared you? For me, it was this past weekend.

Six weeks ago, I signed up for a standup comedy class. While I have done improv comedy for about 10 years now, I’ve never done standup. I thought this class would be an opportunity to pick up some new skills and meet some interesting people. It turns out, standup is not like improv at all. 

Standup is more like telling scripted stories while juggling. During a routine, you are attempting to communicate a narrative while inserting punchlines in about every 30 seconds. It’s a lot harder than I thought it would be. 

Trying something new can be challenging and uncomfortable. But there is a lot that can be gained when you push outside of your comfort zone.

The Open Mic

As part of the standup class, I have to go to and participate in “Open Mics.” An Open Mic is where people are given a set amount of time to perform their standup routines. As someone who talks for a living, I didn’t think this would be all that intimidating. But, it absolutely was. 

Heading into my Open Mic night, I didn’t think my jokes were as funny as they could be. I was certain I could improve my set if I only had more time to work on it. And the fact that people paid to hear comedians tell jokes (not some vet telling stories about a pomeranian with one eye) weighed heavy on my mind. It was genuinely nerve-wracking.

I’d like to tell you that the standup set went fantastic… but it didn’t. It went fine. I got some laughs and at least one awkward silence after a joke that would have killed with cattle vets. But that’s life, isn’t it? We don’t try new things and find immediate perfection.

As much as I dislike being uncomfortable, I am absolutely certain that being in that state is a good thing.

Finding Growth in the Uncomfortable

It is very easy to live within our comfort zone. To simply be “good enough,” and to rely on what we know and have done before to make our way in this world. The problem is that in comfort, there is no growth. 

One of my favorite quotes is from French surgeon and biologist, Alexis Carrel, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1912:

“Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor.” 

I think this is completely true. We try new things, get mixed results, and then try again. That’s how we grow and get better. That’s how we keep life interesting.
Over the years, there have been a number of studies, including research on the concept of “toughening” conducted by Mark Seery, a psychologist at the University of Buffalo, that found that dealing with adversity can increase our tolerance for it and improve our perspective on it.

Final Thought

What was the last scary thing you did? When did you last try something new that made you nervous? Is it time to pick up a new challenge? Open yourself up to the uncomfortable for the sake of growth, self-improvement, and the chance to experience a piece of the world that has thus far been foreign to you. Yes, it’s going to be scary… and yes, it will be totally worth it.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: Just For Fun, Perspective

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