Dr. Andy Roark and guest Ryan Leech have an insightful discussion about corporate consolidation in the veterinary industry. They dive into the significant changes that have occurred since the end of 2023, and how this has shaped the business landscape. The conversation covers aspects like the impact of interest rates, the shift in executive teams in veterinary groups, and the emerging trends in the sector. They also highlight the importance of adaptability and originality in the face of these market changes. The episode is teeming with valuable insights for those interested in the business behind veterinary medicine.
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LINKS
Article Referenced: https://todaysveterinarybusiness.com/veterinary-consolidation-112723/
Ryan Leech: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leechryan
The Bird Bath Podcast: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/the-bird-bath-podcast/
Uncharted Leadership Essentials: https://www.vetfolio.com/learning-paths/uncharted-leadership-essentials-certificate
Uncharted Veterinary Conference 2023: https://unchartedvet.com/uvc-april-2024/
Dr. Andy Roark Exam Room Communication Tool Box Team Training Course: https://drandyroark.com/on-demand-staff-training/
Dr. Andy Roark Charming the Angry Client Team Training Course: https://drandyroark.com/charming-the-angry-client/
Dr. Andy Roark Swag: https://drandyroark.com/store/
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Ryan Leech is an experienced leader with a history of growing businesses through highly scalable sales models. With a background that spans multiple industries, Ryan led sales for startups that raised over $100MM in funding and ran his own sales consulting firm. In his role at Digitail, he is responsible for overseeing collaborations and integrations with industry leaders and innovators to drive digital transformation in veterinary medicine. In addition to his professional experience as Director of Business Development at Galaxy Vets and Hippo Manager Software, Ryan is also the host of “The Bird Bath” podcast.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Dr. Andy Roark: Welcome everybody to the Cone of Shame veterinary podcast. I am your host, Dr. Andy Roark. I have Ryan Leech on today from the Birdbath and we are talking about bidness (business). We are talking about the vet bidness (business). I’m talking with Ryan about corporate consolidation and the story of corporate consolidation and how it has radically changed since the end of 2023. There’s a story here about how money used to flow in and practices got bought and that money’s not flowing in anymore. And so the world is changing to adapt to that. And we talk about kind of what that means and what that looks like on the ground.
As Ryan’s laying down what he’s seeing, I go, “Oh, you know, I see that too. That makes sense.” It’s really a neat way of tying a number of industry trends together and I got a lot out of it. So anyway if you’re interested in the meaning of it all in overall patterns of what’s happening across our industry in understanding the business behind the business, this is a really good episode.
So anyway, I hope you enjoy it. Let’s get into it.
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, Ryan Leech. Thanks for being here.
Ryan Leech: Thanks for having me, Andy. It’s exciting.
Dr. Andy Roark: It’s my, it’s my pleasure. I became aware of you from your podcast, The Birdbath. So you want to take a second and talk about The Birdbath at a high level and kind of what you set out to do there?
Ryan Leech: Yeah, definitely. So what I found was that there’s a mountain of information within the veterinary landscape and not everyone can be expected to read every single newsletter and listen to every single podcast and try and keep their finger on the pulse of what’s happening. And so I wanted to find a way to be able to bring all of the new sources together, to be able to partner with The Fountain Report and Intelligence, who has been a partner for me. And take all of the top stories in veterinary medicine and make it so that a technician, a doctor driving into the clinic on their way to work within that 10 to 15 minutes every single Tuesday morning that they can get a good understanding of what’s happening in the industry that they work within.
Dr. Andy Roark: Talk about the Fountain Report for a second. So I get the Fountain Report and I’m a big fan of it, but I think probably a lot of people still don’t, aren’t familiar, don’t really know what it is.
Ryan Leech: Yeah, so the Fountain Report, it’s spectacular.
Dr. Andy Roark: It is spectacular. I agree.
Ryan Leech: They do a really great job, and the team over at Intelligence, which puts it together, they do a wonderful job of pulling together news stories from across a lot of the different sources, but then not just sort of regurgitating them to you. I think there’s a lot of newsletters that people subscribe to that just have a list of stories, or a list of links to click on.
But the fountain report has brought a different editorial and opinion related element to it that they take stories about what’s happening in our industry and bring together top industry leaders to be able to add commentary and color to those stories. So you’re not just reading about Chewy’s most recent quarterly summary and going, “Okay, they’re up 8 percent but the stock is down.”
Why do those two things connect? But you’ll actually see the understanding of, Okay, pharmaceutical sales are trending upwards, but macroeconomic climates are trending downwards, so projections for Q1 are what are driving the stock price. So, getting a little more of that context is, is the big thing there.
Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah I said, I think you’re spot on. I’ve always enjoyed that. I very much enjoy the business of vet medicine. And it’s a lot to keep up with. And so both the Fountain Report and the Birdbath have been excellent ways, that I like to just get little bite sized nuggets.
And then also I enjoy the podcast. I, I enjoy the fact that you take a lot of these nuggets, like earning reports, for example. And I find earning reports rather bland, quite honestly, but, but you do a good job of saying, and then also you see these earning reports that are in the same segment and we can start to see what this trend looks like across the industry.
And I go, “Oh, that’s really useful synthesis of information.”
Ryan Leech: Appreciate it. Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s fun and it’s kind of, hopefully people listen to it and then it gives me people that I can talk to about it more without them just looking at me with glazed over looks at cocktail parties. So, they don’t just think I’m a crazy guy.
Dr. Andy Roark: I enjoy that stuff, too. And there’s not a lot of people that talk that language, you know, out out and about. And it’s just like you said, it’s just a lot to keep up with. So I think I’m hoping that the Fountain Report Birdbath will both be. I hope that their their signposts that we’re going to be have deeper, sort of more educated conversations about the industry and the business and kind of where it’s going in the future.
And again, not not as a criticism of the past, but I just enjoy thinking like that. I wanted to bring you on today, because, you know, you, so, I’ve heard you on the podcast, and then I saw an article that you wrote in Today’s Veterinary Business not long ago, and you were sort of talking about, you were talking about corporate consolidation and sort of the overall trends of what is going on there.
And I, I always think that that’s really interesting, and It falls perfectly into the category of things that I struggle to keep up with because a lot of it is not public information, a lot of it is released as little snippets in a lot of different places in a lot of different ways, and it takes someone to actually go along, collect the information, roll it together, synthesize it, and sort of say, here’s the story of corporate consolidation in vet medicine, and so that’s really what I would hope to get from you today. Is I was hoping, Ryan, that you would tell me the story of corporate consolidation end of 2023 going into 2024 kind of how did we get here and where does it look like we’re going?
Ryan Leech: Definitely. Yeah. And it is, it’s definitely something that, I think inspire vet partners their IPO that they did this year. They’re a smaller group. They, the most recent one to do an IPO. And it’s been interesting [00:06:00] because now we’re starting to see a publicly traded company that’s having to release some of the books and the financials and, and all of that.
Unfortunately, their performance this year hasn’t been great. Their stock prices is pretty low. But, I think that it’s been neat to be able to see. How the market is reacting, the general public is reacting to veterinary consolidation, but what we’ve seen over the past 12 months and before that, as everyone knows, if you’re in the veterinary space, you saw an absolute boom of private equity flooding into the veterinary industry.
So we saw large private equity groups that were pumping tens of millions to billions of dollars into acquisitions of independently owned veterinary practices. And around mid 2022, late 2022, as the interest rates began to increase, the availability of capital started to shrink and the free flow of money that people were using to be able to buy these veterinary practices [00:07:00] started to dry up.
And so as that money began to dry up, the multiples, which to sort of bring it to a really ground level, the way that people that are buying veterinary practices previously, as well as they still do look at them now, is they look at a multiple on the EBITDA, so the earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortization, just a business metric that any practice, you can find the majority of those things on your tax report, and then there’s some, as someone told me one day, it’s as much magic as it is math, to be able to determine a true EBITDA for a practice and they Yeah, well, there’s, yeah. Okay, what salary should we account for? What salary is going forward? What numbers here? It’s, it’s a, it’s a massaged number,
Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah, but I mean would you so basically we throw EBITDA around a lot. It’s basically earnings, right? I mean just if someone was just walking into the conversation and they didn’t want to be intimidated.
Ryan Leech: It’s earnings. And the nice thing about it is the reason why people use an EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA is it allows you to take a metric that will allow you to look at a [00:08:00] practice in Boise, Idaho, and a practice in Miami, And be able to look at the two of them and understand where both of their EBITDAs are, and you’re not looking at top line revenue or profit or bottom line revenue or those sort of things because there’s so many other things within the mix that adjust where the business is, but for consolidation and for the acquisition of practices, people take that number, say it’s, you know, $100,000 or $200,000 and they apply the multiple onto it.
So as you hear everyone talk about multiples are up, multiples are down. It’s time about the multiples on the, on the EBITDA. And we saw them spiking into the upper teens and into the low twenties in some situations for ERs and urgent care practices. But general practices were in the upper teens for multiple years.
And that was driving by an influx of capital in the space. People were looking at buying practices, holding onto them for a little bit and then bundling them together, which is what’s arbitrage. So taking multiple things, putting them together. To reduce the overall [00:09:00] cost of them, but by putting them together, you increase the value of those multiple things.
So, 1 plus 1 equals 3 in arbitrage. And so, when you do that, you keep flipping these practices. So this is why you saw, you know, JAB would buy a group from Vet Strategy, which would buy a group from this other, and they would continue to pile on. Well, as the capital began to tighten up, People will start holding the bag.
The last at the end of the line was holding a group of practices that they owned in the 20 times EBITDA multiple, but entire groups of practices were trading for 15, you know, 13 to 15 times. So they didn’t have the availability to be able to resell these groups. And so they’re having to hold onto them and actually find ways to do, which all of us in the industry have hoped that they would do is, find ways to actually improve what they’re doing within the practice. Not just flipping them, but actually finding ways to increase the margin within the practices.
Dr. Andy Roark: So just to summarize what was happening? There’s a lot of free money hanging around. So people [00:10:00] were buying practices, rolling them together and then selling them as a higher amount because you’re like, look, there’s more of them. So I can sell them for more and then bundling up. But ultimately, that always has to end.
There’s not an infinite upward level of people who are willing to pay more and more for, you know, for groups of practices. And then as interest rates went up, money was harder to get. And some people who thought that they could buy some practices and then send them up the chain, the interest disappeared and then they were kind of holding the practices. You sound positive and optimistic about how that went. So convince me that\ the people overall who were sort of holding, holding the practices… that that’s turning out well, as opposed to, people who never had any intention of having practices being stuck with them.
Ryan Leech: So I wouldn’t want to sound too positive on it. I’m optimistic, or hopeful perhaps is probably the right term. I at my core believe that consolidation of veterinary medicine at its core value can be a good for the industry. I think that we’re in a situation where there’s a lot of people that were [00:11:00] reluctant business owners that were independent practice owners who got into the situation where they own a practice.
Because that was the way that they were trained that they had to become a successful veterinarian. And a lot of them, when I had conversations with them when I was acquiring practices, they were like, I’m glad to be getting rid of this burden. I just want to be, I want to have made a good income, which I think a lot of them were underpaid to begin with.
And so the ownership of the practice was a way for them to be properly paid. And now they’re going, great, I can cash in on this business that I built and still continue practicing and working and doing the thing that I went to school for and, you know, cared about since I was a little kid, all the way to the point where I became a veterinarian.
So I think getting an accountant and a CFO and a head of corporate strategy to be the ones that are worried about. Okay, what’s our marketing spend, what’s our ROI, what’s our CAC, what are all of these business metrics that aren’t part of vet school? Those people [00:12:00] want to do that and let’s find a way to allow them to offload the work the veterinarians don’t want to do, but freeing up the veterinarians in the best way to be able to really follow their passion.
Now, if you have somebody that bought something with the intention purely to flip it. Uh, that’s a difficult spot to be in, but you’ll see this there. We’ve seen a shift in a lot of the executive teams at some of the groups, and we’ve seen people that are coming in now with more operator experience.
And they’re actually saying, okay, I need to look at unifying our data. So they’re looking at something like digital to, to find a unified PIMS so that they can find, Workflow optimizations. They’re looking at ways to be able to reduce labor costs. They’re looking at ways to improve and upscale the abilities of their technicians by utilizing AHA technician utilization guidelines, those sorts things versus saying, well, let’s charge more.
You know, let’s work people harder and charge more and just try to ride this wave out. So I think in its purest form, it can be a good thing. So I’m hopeful for that.
Dr. Andy Roark: [00:13:00] I like your optimism a lot. I think that’s the beautiful vision of the future that I’m I’m hoping for is that if you just want to practice then there are good, healthy places for you just to go and practice. And there are some systems in place and training is well taken care of and you’re well supported.
And if you want to do your own thing and you want to be an entrepreneur yourself and you want to run your own practice and have autonomy, that, that you have a viable way of doing that where you can be competitive in the marketplace and, Ryan, I, am optimistic.
Ryan Leech: Yeah, well, and I think also there’s this middle ground too, where people that. Want to learn the business side of things aren’t sure of what they need to know are looking at joint venture models are looking at franchise models. They’re looking at starting a small mobile practice with support. So I think as it’s become more competitive, it has opened up more avenues for people.
To be able to research and find ways where it’s not just, Okay, Dr. Roark is selling his clinic down the street. Well, I’m his associate vet and if I want to own a practice, I buy this one. It’s, let me [00:14:00] search what fits my passion.
Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, the number of vets that I know who I said to them, how did you become a practice owner? And they were like, “Well, the old one quit and somebody had to do it. And so here I am.” like that. It’s a lot of people that was, that was their model. To your point, that’s probably not the financially healthy, culturally sound way that we want to put our profession together, you know, in the long term.
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I think, I do think it’s interesting that we’re starting to see these corporate consolidators change out and focus more on operations and actually running businesses. I think that does make me feel good. It does feel like a lot of [00:17:00] these groups that had bought up a lot of practice are getting stuff figured out, at least that’s kind of the impression that, that I getting, it really does seem to be that there’s… They’re all slightly different in what they’re doing, sort of how they’re doing it. But, I completely agree, there’s definitely more of a hands on feel now than there has been in the past as far as making practices work together and making this conglomeration make some actual sense for the people in the trenches. Where do you think this goes? Do you think that we’re going to continue to see a focus on sort of streamlining operations in what we have now?
Do you think this is going to start to crystallize? Do you think that we’re going to jump right back into an expansion phase where, as soon as interest rates drop, I mean, what is, as you look into your crystal ball, what does the next 12 to 24 months look like?
Ryan Leech: Well, so the funny thing I say about crystal balls, I was in Wyoming. No, I was in Montana. At some wild place that’s claims that they have a vortex black hole that you can walk into and feel all these different energies and they sell crystal balls there. And so that’s the best I can think about [00:18:00] for a crystal ball.
So I don’t much into my ability to tell the future. But what I do see is I see that there’s groups and there’s people that are taking steps to be able to come up with either ways to improve the groups that they’re with. Or, create new business models of what’s happening. So I think, if you’re working in a practice that was bought in the last two to three years by a group and they, at, at the point when they bought you, they said, we don’t change anything.
We don’t touch anything. Nothing’s going to happen. Prepare yourself for that conversation to shift.
Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah. I was wondering about that. That makes sense when the plan is to, you know, change owners and move these up. But at some point we’ve got to work together in some sort of organized structure to make this model any sense.
Ryan Leech: Someone has to do work. So, don’t feel as if… I mean, you can feel a little slighted if that happens to you, but more so understand it’s probably wasn’t their plan. And it wasn’t your plan, but you’re both in this together and, you know, collaborate and work [00:19:00] together with the, the parent company so that you can find a way to be able to increase the overall value.
And you can also find a way to influence what’s going to happen. So you can say, “Hey, this isn’t how I feel we should be doing it” and really be collaborative with it versus just pushing back on those changes. I think that’s a good way to look at it. And then I think in 2024, 2025, what we’ll see going forward is there’s been an obvious boom in the de novo practices. So fresh built practices. We’ve seen groups like Pet Folk, Pet, Pet 365, Good Vet, Better Vet on the mobile side. A lot of these are, are starting to push on that side of things because when the multiples were extremely high, it was less expensive to build a practice than it was to buy a practice.
And then, the staffing shortage was, was difficult and it still is a very difficult thing. But I think. As some of these groups are starting to change what they had said they were going to do. So if you were bought by Corporation ABC and they said, we aren’t going to touch anything. Well, now they’re [00:20:00] starting to implement changes and they don’t align with your values.
You can go down the street and look at one of these de novo groups that is perhaps looking at a different work life balance or an urgent care strategy or something that fits with you. So I think they are having a good opportunity to recruit there. And then I think as well, we’re going to see a continued growth of mobile practices.
It’s something that I’ve seen a lot of new mobile groups popping up. I think that the age of the DVMs that are coming out of college right now, a lot of them were in vet school throughout Covid. They’re coming out there. You know, I’m not young anymore, unfortunately, but I still think of myself as somewhat young.
And so the DVMs and people are coming out we’re going, ” Hey, we, we want to have some flexibility. I like knowing that at four o’clock, if. I want to go see my girls play or want to take off the afternoon and spend time with my wife or do something like that that I have that flexibility. And I think that’s where we’re seeing some of the newer DVMs migrating towards a mobile practice because they can say, [00:21:00] all right, slide the van door shut and I’m done for the day, which is kind of a different take.
And I think those people are going to be. I think there’s going to be some real cream that rises to the top of people that buy into franchise model or joint venture models of mobile groups, and then become some of these business leaders that we see in the next 10, 15 years that are really saying, I built a portfolio of 10 mobile practices, and I’ve added telemedicine, and I’ve added brick and mortar and really found a way to grow that.
Dr. Andy Roark: I agree with that. I’ve thought a lot about the mobile practice for the last five to almost ten years ever since my friends Danny McVitie and Mary Gardner Started doing lap of love and I was like god the flexibility is great here And then also the willingness of pet owners to pay for at home service is is real and there is a demand for it.
People in that service, they don’t like loading the kids and their two pets into the car and go. They would much rather you come to them. And a lot people have the [00:22:00] resources to, compensate you for that.
Ryan Leech: Yeah, and Lap of Love is a perfect example of that. I mean they have a massive call center. Not to downgrade the skill level of the people in it, but they have a major call center that takes on a lot of those things. And you know, you don’t need a front desk staff. You don’t need four or five people for every phone to ring to be into that practice.
So you can really offload a lot of that. And I think COVID showed us the ability of flexible work and the ability to hire people wherever they need to be.
Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah. And well, I think you put a your finger right on a really good example of the benefit of, you know, sort of a distributed model or a franchise model, and they’re not franchise, but like a franchise model where you say, “What would this franchise bring to the table?” It’s like a logistical support, you know, communication support, educational support.
There’s a lot of things that organization can offer to doctors and still give them a lot of, of independence and make them, I don’t know, give them a lot of ownership of what they’re doing and also still make it sense to have some sort of a corporate partner with them.
Ryan Leech: I would love to get a list and I don’t think the Banfield will ever give this to me, but if I could [00:23:00] get a list of their charter franchise owners back in, you know, from the early nineties, when they first started franchising, before they brought that back, I think you’d find a lot of those people have gone on to be extremely successful business people. Have built, you know, new groups, new models. And when you start to pull the thread on what people have learned through the franchise model, as they’ve gone into their own businesses, it is a, it’s a on the ground MBA that, that a business can help support you in.
Dr. Andy Roark: Well, I mean, just think about it. If you’re trying to grow your own career and you have sort of entrepreneurial interests and things like that. I mean, I can tell you, I spent a decade or two beating my head against the wall, figuring out the business model for the weird thing that I do. And, if I had come in 15 years ago, underneath a mentor, into an organization that had already figured a lot of things out that would have saved me a lot of time in getting my systems down, you know, I got no regrets, believe me when I say that. But also I go, “boy, I learned the hard way.” And if I had just rolled into a system that worked, I [00:24:00] think I could have picked up a lot of things really fast in my business.
As a doctor. As a practitioner. I did that. I went to a very high functioning practice outside of Washington D.C. And I just take for granted how much I learned about how you run a practice because it was just the way it was. And a lot of other people spent 10 years figuring out just the basics that I took in in the first week of like, “Oh, yeah, that’s how you do it. That all makes.”
And so I really like that. I like your idea of a reshuffling. I need to sit with that a little bit because it does make sense to me that if we’ve got these different types of practices, especially we’ve got practices that are starting to make some changes and make some adjustments.
I think you’re, you’re gracious and a very good outlook on this to say, I don’t think that people were lied to when these practices came in and said, hey, we’re not going to mess with things, but things have changed, and now we’re not able to go on as we were before. Life is like that.
We all have to kind of adjust and, and we are in this together and having a good attitude about it I think is the healthiest thing you can do. I think it makes sense, but it does make sense to me also [00:25:00] to your point that if you’re in this place and we’re seeing a lot of changes happening, that people are going to look around and say, well, this isn’t exactly what it used to be or it’s not what I signed up for. And, there are so many opportunities. The urgent care model is a great one. I go, that seems interesting to me. I very happy in general practice, but home health care, I’ve thought about that.
I’m looking at some practices that are doing like an open hospital model I’ve never worked at one of those hospital models. I think I could get pretty fired up about it and if I’d have to throw myself into it. I don’t think you’re halfway. I think you have to do it or not. But I started going, “oh man, you know, there’s, there’s a lot of opportunity to that.” So the idea that there would be enough change that a lot of people would kind of look around and say,” you know, Hey, look, while we’re all here, I think I’m going to go get in that boat over there because that fits more what I want. But this is still a great boat and other people might want to come here because of what we’re doing.” that, makes some sense to me.
Ryan Leech: Yeah I’ve worked at quite a few different companies in my life, and you know, I worked one that is a spectacular company it just wasn’t the right fit for me. It was Red Hat, which is a Linux software [00:26:00] company. People that work there are fanatical about the business, and they do a spectacular job. They have wonderful onboarding, a great team. I just didn’t get fired up about it, right? It didn’t mean that there was anything wrong. There’s people I’d recommend that should go and work there and have a great time. And, and I think you probably could have the same thing if you look at Blue Pearl versus VEG, right?
Those are two, if you were to run the numbers on them, they’re both, you know, ER practices that are growing rapidly. Those are completely different businesses, completely different work life balance, completely different goals. But you could thrive at either one of those. And just because you didn’t fit well at one doesn’t make it better or worse than the other.
But you should really, you know, if you’re a DVM or a practice, you know, anybody within practice, you should look at those different models and say, Do I want this flexibility? Do I want the ability to work remote? Do I want the clinic? Do I want the patients and the pet parents right next to me the whole day?
Do I want them to be dropping them off? Do I want to go to them? Look at it. This is, this is not an industry anymore where a doctor should graduate from school and [00:27:00] walk into the neighborhood clinic down the street and just go, well, this is what it is. This is what it is everywhere. And this all that I’ll have for the next 30 years of my career.
No, you can find these nuanced differences. There’s always unique places for people.
Dr. Andy Roark: I think that there’s this perception that medicine is a ladder. At least there used to be. I think it’s present. I think it’s way overrepresented, but there’s this idea that there’s better medicine. There’s a ladder of quality clinics and you start with, we don’t call it that, but it’s low quality clinics.
And then ultimately we get to specialty clinics, which are the highest quality clinics. And there’s this idea that you’re supposed to want to move up this ladder and that’s just absolutely not true. You know, it’s it’d be like the idea that that dog breeds are a ladder to the best dog breed,
Ryan Leech: Well, we do know that it, it tops out a golden retriever. I
mean there’s a ladder and what, I don’t know what the bottom rungs are, but it does top out a golden retriever. That’s that so…
Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah. It’s a model that, I think a lot of us [00:28:00] internalized that in vet school. When they were like, “this is the higher standard of care than this, and we aspire to a higher standard of care.” And if it’s that simple and you look at it, you say, well, that makes sense that there would be this upper thing.
But that’s just not the truth. The truth is there’s, there’s an ecosystem and there’s so many different variations in how we deliver care and why we deliver care and like the experience that we’re trying to create. And I would like to continue to try to bury the idea that there’s upward ladder and just “no, no, no, no, look at the beautiful diversity of our profession and, and feel free to move around. And it’s not up or down. It’s, where do you want to be?”
Ryan Leech: Yeah. I think a doctor that’s working, doing a high volume pop up clinic at a tractor supply for pet IQ is providing as valuable, and in some situations more valuable, perhaps service then, you know, the research veterinarian at Cornell who is touching four patients a year, right? Like those are completely different things that are.
[00:29:00] Extremely valuable. And, I think the data even shows, right? Like what is your goal? What’s your goal of practicing medicine? Is it most animals that you can save? Is it a hands on impact? Is it a high level research impact? Is it, you know, mentoring? Is it growing? Like, yeah, it’s, it is not a small, small industry.
The number is what? 136 billion were spent on pet care and vet care last year. So there’s room. There’s plenty of room for people to come in and participate in it.
Dr. Andy Roark: Ryan, thanks so much for coming and talking with I just, I really enjoy you. I really enjoy chatting with you. I’d love to talk to you more in the future. Where can people find you? Where can they find the birdbath? What’s a good place for people who want to follow you?
Ryan Leech: Yeah. So the birdbath, we’re a podcast. We’re on every major podcast platform, ‘The Birdbath’. You can also check us out on LinkedIn. We have a transistor website. You can also send me a LinkedIn message as well. LinkedIn.com/leech (L-E-E-C-H) Ryan. And if you’re looking for cloud practice [00:30:00] management software, I also work with digital.
I handle all of our strategic partnerships. So if you’re a large corporation, a business, or anybody that’s looking to do cloud computing in any way, make sure you reach out to digital.com as well.
Dr. Andy Roark: Outstanding. Thanks for being here. Guys, thanks for tuning in to listen. Take care of yourselves, everybody.And that’s our episode. That’s what I got for you guys. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you got something out of it. Thanks to Ryan for being here. Take care of yourselves, everybody. I’ll talk to you later on.
