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Become a Veterinary Conference Commando

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Become a Veterinary Conference Commando

Originally Published: DVM NewsMagazine, April 1, 2011

 

 

It’s the most wonderful time of the year—not Christmas, or Thanksgiving or spring break. It’s conference season. Every year, I beg and plead with my boss to finagle as much time off for CE as possible. I harass my fellow doctors to swap days. I badger the practice manager to tweak the schedule. And I shake down the owner to trade in sick days for CE days—as the father of a 3-year-old in daycare, my immune system is practically bulletproof, or so the argument goes.

I know other people like attending conferences, but I love them. I prepare for them like astronauts prep for a moonwalk, and these gatherings have opened innumerable doors for me. In my experience, if you want to get the most out of your time at a conference, you have to know why you’re going and you need to have a plan before you arrive for how to achieve your goals. When I prep for conferences, I make goals in three areas. They are:

Networking

Shake hands and kiss babies. It may sound odd to make this your top conference goal, but conferences are the one place where you can meet people face-to-face, all day long, who can help your career. Whether you’re interested in asking a practice management guru specific questions about your practice’s finances, making a career jump to industry, joining a new initiative in organized medicine or adding a clinical giant to your Rolodex for those “freak out” moments when your colleagues just don’t have any good advice, conferences are the place to make it happen.

Learning

Build your own curriculum. It seems like most conferences today offer somewhere between 3 million and 2 zillion hours of CE over a four-day period. The big conferences have all of your absolute favorite speakers—speaking at approximately the same time. This overlap of teaching superstars leads to what I like to call the “veterinary squirrel phenomenon.” This is when veterinarians dart full speed up one hallway to stop, look around, change their minds about what session they want to attend, and then dart right back the way they came. The affected veterinarians then become traffic hazards to all other attendees around them, and they end up late to everything they attend. Don’t be a squirrel.

The other problem with taking a wait-and-see-what-grabs-me approach to CE is that you end up with such a mixed bag of new tricks, that you never use the majority of them. You can avoid this problem by deciding what skills and topics you really want to explore, and then devise your own curriculum to make major educational gains in these select areas. You can still pack in lots of variety, but when it’s over you’ll have some new areas of expertise that you can tout to your boss, colleagues and clients. Just research the conference program ahead of time and make those tough choices on whose lectures you’ll attend so that you’ll know where you’re going and can spend break periods finding your way around the massive convention center in an orderly fashion.

Socializing

This is what you did before the days of Facebook. Obviously it’s great to bump into your friends at conferences, but given how rarely you see these people and how important staying in touch can be for your development and career, you should take socializing seriously. Most conferences have alumni receptions for veterinary schools, so start there. Once your reunion is blocked in for one evening, make sure there aren’t any irresistible recreational events offered by the conference, like behind-the-scenes tours, wine tastings, amusement park discounts and so on. If there are, then put out the word to any and all of your friends that you’ll be attending and they should join you. You’ll end up doing exactly what you want to do with a lot of your old friends. It doesn’t get much better than that.

To push your socializing to the next level, leverage social media before the conference. If you’re a fairly recent graduate, there’s a good chance that most of your classmates are on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Post the fact that you’re going to the conference, and ask who else will be there. When people respond, start coordinating ways to get groups together to catch up. Social media is also a great way to promote personal gatherings. Whether it’s at an amusement park, bar, coffee shop, breakfast buffet or dinner spot, don’t be afraid to pick a time and place and call for a party. If rock stars can have huge parties at hotel bars, so can you.

If you go to a conference and pursue networking, educational and social goals, then you can expect lots of new career opportunities, a rewarding experience, and complete exhaustion at the end of the event. So make your goals, set your plans to accomplish them, and take an extra day off work after you get home. You’re going to need it to recover. See you there!

6 Ways to Fight the Veterinary Competition — Without Fighting

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6 Ways to Fight the Veterinary Competition — Without Fighting

Originally Published: Veterinary Economics, November 1, 2011

They did what?” I sputtered. The practice owner I was talking with on the phone was a longtime friend. He lowered his voice and explained, “They bought reviews on Google.”

We were discussing the megapractice down the road. This practice had been amassing negative online client reviews for months—at the same time that my friend’s clients were posting glowing reviews of his small startup clinic.

But suddenly, the megapractice had garnered 30 five-star reviews in a matter of weeks, all from “clients” who had all—coincidentally?—given five-star reviews to a slew of other unrelated businesses across the United States. Either these reviewers were traveling cross-country together, reviewing the same random businesses, or the competition was buying their praise. Unbelievable.

Now, a little friendly competition can be healthy. It can motivate you to improve both your medicine and your business practices. Plus, the presence of others in your business space pushes you to create better value for clients and patients and keeps you from resting on your laurels.

However, the fear of competition stealing clients can also make for a stressful situation—especially when your rivals play dirty. In my years as a veterinarian—working at a fledgling startup practice, a megapractice, and now at a three-doctor clinic in an area where new practices are constantly opening—I’ve dealt with many different competitors. I’ve led strategic planning sessions for veterinary organizations, clinics, and corporations, and dealing with veterinary competition is one of the most frequently discussed topics.

In facilitating these discussions, as well as leading veterinary teams on the ground, I’ve discovered some excellent tactics for addressing rivals. It’s time for the gloves to come off so you can focus your energy on tackling what’s most important: your practice. Here are six tips for handling interclinic aggression without stooping to your competitor’s level.

1. Don’t take the offensive. Most of us learned this lesson on the playground: Punching back can get you into worse trouble—and sometimes leave you with a broken hand. Even if you’re bigger, stronger, and absolutely in the right, the odds of being damaged by your own aggression are high. Don’t risk your reputation or your business by lobbing aggressive initiatives at competitors. They’ll usually backfire. Strategies to avoid include: direct price and service comparisons; disparaging comments about your competitor’s medicine, morals, location, or business practices; and observations about your competitor’s bad personal hygiene or holiday decorations. (Yes, I’ve heard these before.)

None of these things will make your practice look good. In fact, they’ll do the opposite—and make your clients start to question your integrity.

2. Focus on personal performance.

Stop aiming at your competitors and point your focus inward. Win the battle on your home turf by shoring up your strengths and ensuring that your veterinary team is performing at its best. Pull together your personal advisors, discuss what the competition is doing, and build a strategic plan for what you’ll do to rise above the pressure. Polish your fundamental service model to make sure you’re providing a solid client experience and avoiding common practice mistakes such as missing charges, neglecting your reminder system, and failing to schedule recheck appointments or follow up with clients.

Are you taking your clients for granted? Discounting your services into oblivion? Dropping the ball on preventive care? If the answer is yes (or even maybe), then conquer those issues first. Those are all things you can change at your practice.

3. Start innovating. There’s nothing wrong with adapting ideas and techniques that are succeeding in other clinics and businesses. Once you’ve worked internally to raise your own standards, look externally and consider what other businesses do to better serve clients and distinguish their brand. Read widely, talk to everyone you can, and expand your thinking to find and modify ideas that will help you grow and evolve. Innovation, when applied to a fundamentally sound business, can radically change the competitive landscape.

I have seen clinics pursue successful innovations such as wellness plans, social media initiatives, community outreach events, and niche marketing plans. I was recently involved with a small business that gained a foothold in its community through regular talks at the local gay pride center. The business is currently growing by replicating these talks for local church groups. This is an innovative marketing approach that is working well because competitors aren’t doing it, thus the opportunities are plentiful. The take-home message here is that great ideas and opportunities are everywhere. Don’t be afraid to harvest them.

Once you have a plan for innovation, don’t go all in just yet. Present the idea to some of your best clients and people you respect both inside and outside the veterinary industry. Incorporate their feedback into your master plan and begin the program one step at a time. That way you can gauge success—and prevent unmanageable losses if the idea doesn’t work out. Set up and monitor performance metrics carefully. Remember: Not every initiative will work out, so don’t get too emotionally attached to any one idea, and don’t be afraid to abandon plans that aren’t delivering results.

4. Honor your values. As my father and mentor used to say, “In the end, all you’ve got is your reputation.” It’s easy to let fear, frustration, and uncertainty push you to make decisions you otherwise wouldn’t make. But what does your long-term picture look like if you become known for tactics such as buying positive reviews, slandering other clinics while hiding behind online anonymity, upselling beyond what patients need, or never referring cases to specialists regardless of the situation? Think about your actions and image from the perspective of your clients, most of whom know nothing about your competitors or perceived business battles.

If you take a hard look and find you don’t like your practice’s image, then regroup and start fresh. You want to succeed, but you also want to be able to look at yourself in the mirror every morning with a clean conscience.

5. Improve your closing techniques. While client education is of great importance, your ability to get your veterinary clients to commit to and pay for services is what will ultimately dictate success. When clients check out, ask them if they would like to book their next appointment. (Yes, even if it’s a year in advance. Remember, your dentist does it.) Ask price shoppers if they would like to schedule the service they’re calling about. And encourage doctors to make firm recommendations.

Note: These are not recommendations that start with the words, “You might” or “You could.” Firm recommendations start with phrases like, “I recommend” and “I suggest.” Finally, empower technicians to follow up with clients after the exam to determine which products they want to take home. Brushing up on your closing techniques will help increase your practice’s bottom line.

6. Don’t take client behavior personally. Clients will leave your practice. This is a business reality. Don’t let it damage your confidence or, worse, push you into a panic. It may feel like two clients leaving in a week is a mass exodus—especially if they’re going to the same competitor. It’s not. It’s a sign that your competition is doing something that works, and you need to know what that something is. It’s a time for strategy, not emotion. Your veterinary clients will usually act in their own perceived best interest. Understand that inclination and strive to make your clinic the obvious choice for self-interested clients in the future.

Six weeks have passed since I talked to my friend about the megapractice’s dirty tricks, and 18 more five-star reviews have been posted. I asked whether his business had shown signs of suffering as a result. “No,” he said. “The last two months have been the best we’ve had so far.”

What was going on? Well, for one, my friend had hired a technician away from the competing practice. But even more important, he stopped looking at the online reviews. “They’re just a distraction,” he said. “We’re doing great things, so getting upset about the competition just doesn’t make sense.”

You can’t control your competitors. What you can control is your own practice: its strategy, its relationships, its culture. Letting go of the urge to engage in direct conflict frees up your energy so you can direct your best efforts toward your own veterinary practice. It’s like Sun Tzu says in The Art of War: “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”

 

The Quest for Veterinary Mentorship

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The Quest for Veterinary Mentorship

Originally Published: DVM Newsmagazine, July 1, 2012

 

 

Maybe it’s just part of my upbringing, but until about five years ago, the word mentor brought to my mind the original Obi-Wan Kenobi from Star Wars or Mr. Miyagi from The Karate Kid. Mentorship seemed like an involved, antiquated process, and I never thought it would play a big role in my career as a veterinarian.

Today, however, I am blessed with amazing mentors. These people have changed my career and opened countless doors for me. They advise me on tough career decisions, direct me to resources and introduce me to other people who can help me accomplish my goals. They look over my shoulder during surgery and say things like, “I wouldn’t cut that,” or “Maybe we should talk about this,” or “That looks fantastic!” They consult with me in person or over the phone on tough medical cases and validate me when I need someone to tell me that I’m interpreting complex situations correctly. I have dozens of mentors now, and I can’t imagine pursuing my dreams without them.

Keys to a great mentorship

If you want a mentor, try these four steps to find and keep one:

1. Take the initiative. Waiting for a mentor to offer to invest time in your development is the fastest — and most common — way to fail in this endeavor. Establishing a mentor-mentee relationship is mostly driven by the mentee. If you’re not willing to expend the effort to find a mentor, then you won’t be willing to expend the effort to maintain a mentor-mentee relationship. Put simply, if you want mentorship, it’s up to you to find the right mentor and make the relationship happen.

2. Aim high. Don’t be afraid to approach great people. I find time and again that successful people are often people who received help along the way. Most are eager to pay it forward if the right opportunity presents itself. Identify people who can help you, be respectful of their time, and don’t be intimidated by their success or stature. The fact that you see great value in their advice and experience will mean a lot to them, and we all enjoy meeting others who share our interests.

3. Bring value to the relationship. The more you can offer a mentor, the better off you’ll be. Travel to them or to a conference they’re attending (see “Mentors galore” at right). Share information or contacts who might be beneficial to them. Publicly acknowledge the contributions they’ve made to your success. And, if all else fails, at least pick up the tab at lunch. The value of mentorship is enormous, and while you’ll probably never be able to repay your mentors, you should at least make an effort.

4. Have a goal or a project.I once met a mentor for breakfast. I asked him how I could take advantage of his knowledge and experience in the limited time we had together. He said, “Tell me what your goals are, and ask me specific questions.”

Most of us don’t have the luxury of spending lots of unstructured time with the best and brightest people we know. We need to have a clear understanding of where we want to go, so we can solicit useful advice in a limited amount of time. It’s also important to have an active project or plan. You’ll be able to discuss specific and real challenges you’re facing. For example, if your goal is to buy a veterinary hospital in the next three years, your project might be conducting demographic research in the areas that are of greatest interest. Approaching a potential mentor with this project underway would provide you with a topic of conversation, specific questions to ask, and the means to start a mentoring relationship.

It’s okay to be in the information-gathering phase of your plan when you approach a potential mentor, as long as you’re trying to make progress. Talking through a project helps you recognize where you need guidance. It also shows mentors how you think, what your priorities are, and what sorts of advice or resources they can share to help. Soliciting advice when you don’t have a plan or project can be difficult and frustrating for the mentor.

Final thought

Whether your interest is in surgery, exotic animals, practice management, public speaking or gourmet cooking, you can always benefit from a great mentor. If you know of someone who can help you, don’t be shy. Introduce yourself, explain what your goal is, and ask for advice. Who knows where the conversation (or the relationship) might go? You could end up with your own Mr. Miyagi.

So I’m a Doctor… Now What?

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Nineteen months ago, I started my first job as a veterinarian. It’s a position where I split time between a large general practice, an emergency hospital and a one doctor start-up practice. This is the time I’d thought I’d unleash all of the great ideas I had in veterinary school about how things should be done in private practice.

As you can imagine, that’s not exactly how it turned out.

After I graduated from veterinary school, I amassed a modest amount of medical knowledge, endless enthusiasm and a desire to use my soft skills and business acumen to be immediately successful. I hit the ground running and unleashed cutting-edge management techniques on the unwary support staff. I printed off checklists, called for meetings and wrote almost weekly proposals to my bosses (a project known to my employers as “the Roark Report”).

Overall, this approach was almost a complete flop. While I was quite possibly the most prolific proposal writer ever produced by an accredited veterinary program, my ideas consistently fell flat. When they didn’t fall flat, they ticked people off. It was certainly not the entrepreneurial explosion that I had hoped for.

Without abandoning my commitment to the soft skills and my deep passion for the business side of our profession, I was forced to step back and look closely at what other doctors were doing successfully. It was my great fortune to be surrounded by a lot of successful general practitioners who had widely varying styles and approaches. I set out to adapt my strengths and interests to the techniques that they were using effectively. In the end, three specific themes seemed to correlate very strongly with success. The more I focused on these areas, the greater my happiness and productivity became. We’ll start with the most important:

1. Communication

I have always viewed myself as good communicator, but I made a mistake early on in this vital area. I explained things well to clients, but tried to be the person that I thought my clients wanted me to be: extra polite, almost overly sensitive and always extremely tactful. Because of this approach, I don’t think my clients saw me as genuine, and it hurt my chances at building trust.

A few months into my career, a pair of very difficult clients helped me realize that if I do my best to educate and advocate for what’s best for the pet, it’s up to the clients to decide if they like me or not. I can’t be all things to all people, so I decided I might as well just be myself and be comfortable with it.

This epiphany, probably more than anything else, made me happier in practice. I still explain those medical conditions, but my explanations come with a southern drawl and colorful candor. Amazingly, I seem a lot more popular these days than I ever did when I was trying to come across as “Dr. Perfect.”

Clients have real relationships with me now and because of the trust these clients put in me, I am more confident, more relaxed, and I don’t feel the need to “sell myself” for the first five minutes of every visit. I can focus more of my time and effort on educating the clients and providing the best treatment for the pet. I’ve also found that strong relationships and good communication mean better compliance, and that opens the door to offering great medicine. (Note: I believe that great medicine results in a healthy patient, a happy client, a feeling of satisfaction and the ability to make student loan payments.)

2. Efficiency

In my experience, a focus on communication has been critical to building the tiny client base that I currently enjoy. Sacrificing quality time with the client and patient to stay on schedule is obviously not a good idea. However, running behind all the time has proven to be a poor choice too. The answer is to balance these two evils. I learned how my hospital works, and how I should work within it.

Every hospital has a different system for providing medical care. For example, at the emergency hospital where I spend half my time, there are often a dozen technicians and assistants working in and around our treatment room. The most efficient way to get a dog taken care of here is to get him/her out of the exam room and into the treatment room where the technicians can go to work like a NASCAR pit crew.

At the one-doctor practice where I spend the rest of my time, the only people in the hospital are myself and a technician… And she comes into the exam room with me. If we take a pet from the exam room into the treatment room, we are the only two people there. We had to walk 30 extra feet, and now we have a second area to clean up. Providing services in the examination room makes significantly more sense.

These two hospitals showcase radically different, equally effective, systems for providing care. To be successful in either one, you have to gain an understanding of the system and build a strategy for working efficiently within that system. The development of this stratagem ultimately allowed me to maintain my relationships with clients, stay on schedule, keep better records, make management happy and live a (slightly) lower-stress lifestyle in the workplace.

3. Complete Care

Since my first day in practice, I wrestled with the desire to increase my ACT (average client transaction) while protecting my integrity and the trusting relationships that I have built with my clients. How do I offer our full range of services without looking (and feeling) like a used-car salesman?

When I started my job, I noticed that my boss never talked about ACT. He talked about “completeness of care.” It was probably six months before I understood why this was his focus.

Complete care is all about doing a good physical examination and work up, and then educating clients on what you found, your judgment on the best course of action and why. I feel like, if that is my approach, then I am being entirely honest with clients. It also lets your clients choose their own course of action. The client and I are a team in the care of this pet. When the client makes informed decisions, then I am building this trusting relationship, practicing great medicine and going home feeling satisfied. My ACT benefits from this approach too.

I definitely did not come out of veterinary school at the top of my game, and I really had no idea how to put my interests and skills to work for me in private practice. I know I made as many mistakes as anyone (maybe more – enthusiasm can be dangerous that way), but I have since settled into a personally, professionally and financially rewarding career thanks largely to a focus on communication, efficiency and complete care. If my experience can help even a single associate veterinarian or new graduate be happier and more productive, then this column will be worth the effort (and far more valuable than any edition of “The Roark Report”).

Dr. Roark is an associate veterinarian in Leesburg, Va.

Business Education in Veterinary Schools: The Potential Role of the Veterinary Business Management Association

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Business Education in Veterinary Schools: The Potential Role of the Veterinary Business Management Association

Original Publication: Journal of Veterinary Medical Education 34(5) 2007

Dr. Nina Kieves and Dr. Tonya Sparks did an outstanding job here, and really carried this article. I was lucky to be invited to work with such amazing people back in ’07.

Just as a side note, the word “Potential” was inserted into the title by an insistent peer reviewer on the final draft. I have always felt like that unjustly robbed the article of some of the weight it deserves, and some of the credit that the VBMA should receive for its efforts. I sometimes regret not pushing back harder on this particular point. Still, it was wonderful to get something like this out into the academic literature.

You can view the pdf version online at:

– AWR