Dr. Jules Benson joins Dr. Andy Roark for a deep dive into the economics of veterinary care, where it’s headed, and what it means for your practice. Using data trends from the last few years, Dr. Benson breaks down the troubling pattern of rising veterinary service costs and declining client visits, projecting what that could look like by 2030. But this isn’t a doom-and-gloom forecast. Together, they explore practical, optimistic strategies for keeping care accessible, building client trust, and thinking entrepreneurially about pricing, transparency, and innovation in independent practice. If you’re a veterinary professional looking to understand where the industry is going and how to stay ahead of it. Gang, let’s get into this episode!
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ABOUT OUR GUEST
Dr. Jules Benson is the Principal at Tapetum Lucidum Consulting and the 2025 Chair at the Veterinary Innovation Council (VIC). With over two decades as a practitioner, industry executive, strategist, and data and technology leader, his focus lies in identifying and applying innovation that can improve the lives of pets, pet families, and veterinary healthcare teams.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Dr. Andy Roark: Welcome, everybody, to the Cone of Shame Veterinary Podcast. I am your host, Dr. Andy Roark. Guys, if you like to see behind the scenes in vet medicine and to talk about how the sausage is actually made, meaning how vet medicine actually pays for itself. This is a fantastic episode. This was maybe a little bit of a long one just because I really didn’t want this episode to end.
I really enjoyed talking to my friend, Dr. Jules Benson, and we talk about how do we keep, how do we keep care affordable? And Jules brings out some, nice data about where we are, about how prices of vet medicine are going up and visits from our pet owners are going down and what does that look like if we project it out?
Spoiler alert. It’s about a 40% increase in price and a 15% in decrease in the number of visits. I don’t think those numbers work. I think if we try to keep increasing the price at that rate, I think you’re gonna see a bigger drop off than 15%. But we get into it, we talk about it, and I just, it’s a really fascinating.
Look, this is not a doom and gloom episode. Let me just say that up front. You’re not gonna hear us, cur vetting about, oh, everything gets more expensive and nobody’s gonna want to come and let us take care of their pets. Neither one of us believe that we actually have some pretty good ideas.
We think they’re good ideas. We have ideas. About how medicine continues to function and what happens in the future, and what adjustments are made and how we adapt and evolve and we, I think we end on a very optimistic and positive note. And anyway, I think this is a great episode as far as being honest about the situation that we are in as a profession and looking at how we fix it.
And so anyway, without further ado, let’s get into this episode.
Kelsey Beth Carpenter: 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. Jules Benson. How are you, my friend?
Dr. Jules Benson: I’m excellent. Thank you, Andy.
Dr. Andy Roark: Oh, man. It’s great to have you here. For those who do not know you, you are you are the principal at at Tapetum Lucidum Consulting principal being guy who does stuff. You’re the, you are the guy who does stuff.
Dr. Jules Benson: Chief Bottle Washer, CEO, all those things. Everything in between.
Dr. Andy Roark: It is you and a pile of hats that you wear. Yeah.
Dr. Jules Benson: It’s good.
It’s to be the king, but also the jester at the same time. I like that.
Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah, it definitely keeps you humble. You get to make all the decisions because you get to do all of the work that comes from those decisions. I, know that life you and I have been friends a long time. I always enjoy, I enjoy your insight. I think you’re super smart. I really like the way that you look at the industry.
You had a post on LinkedIn recently that I really liked and so you’ve been actually writing a lot about things like this recently. So here the post, the one that caught my eye was how unaffordable will vet care be in 2030. And you did a really nice job of looking at some data from Vet Source. I had Sheri Gilmartin a while ago talking about their data and stuff as well.
So people who listen to the podcast will be a bit familiar with kind of what that part is. You went ahead and did the work of doing some projections out into the future that I thought were really interesting. And so I wanted to talk with you about quick recap of where we are as an industry, but then I really wanted to get into your crystal ball of kind of looking down the road.
I love that you picked 2030 as a landmark. So saying five years from now, where will we be? Why don’t you just go ahead and if you don’t mind, at a high level tell, tell me what, tell me what’s going on in the industry and the way that you look at it.
Dr. Jules Benson: Yeah, you and I have been about this years now and I think as we came out of COVID and you hear like smart people like John Volk and others talk about a return to normal. And I think that’s, that, that was a reasonable thing to say of we hit this peak I don’t wanna say productivity, but we certainly hit a peak of kind of seeing of our time and the time we were spending and the money we were collecting through Covid.
That was a, it was a hard time, but there was also a time pretty good revenue for the veterinary industry
Dr. Andy Roark: You’re talking about like during the pandemic when we had the pandemic puppies and things like that? Yeah. Okay.
Dr. Jules Benson: And I and pandemic puppies. from a data point of view, I struggle with that as well, just based on what we know about adoption. But that’s a separate conversation.
We definitely saw some more pets. I don’t think, I don’t know if we saw peak the media call out from things like this, like the third of Americans got pets. I don’t think we saw that.
Dr. Andy Roark: Okay.
Dr. Jules Benson: But yes just some more pets. But as in the year since, and I’m really looking at 22, 23, 24. We start to see some patterns you and I know Dr. Emily Tincher well, so she was on my team at Nationwide and, we used to look at these numbers fairly closely and talk to Sheri Gilmartin and, others, really smart people in the industry a lot, which was this pattern of increased practice revenue decreased visitation. And
Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah.
Dr. Jules Benson: If started to say, is this a good pattern and how long will it last? And I think through 22, 22 and 23, we were saying, there a, is there trouble coming down the line? Do we see the train coming through this tunnel and starting to run over us. I think it wasn’t until I saw the data for this past year, which Sherry and the team of vet sort shared, and it was similar data. It was that pattern again of increased visitation, sorry, increased revenue and decreased visitation. And what I wanted to do was just say, okay, what happens if this continues?
Because right now we’ve had three years clear of this. And I think if someone has said, if John Volk had said this is a return to the normal and everything else for the couple years out of COVID. I think that makes perfect sense. But this is the third subsequent year we’ve seen this, I’d love your take on do you think that 23 and 24 were markedly different years in terms of returning to some kind of pre covid norm?
I didn’t see that in anything else that I was looking at.
Dr. Andy Roark: I really that you call that out. No, I think that you’re right on. I, think for some time this is what it is going to be. I don’t buy the idea that we’ve got some big backlog. That’s still going on today from 20, 21, 22. That doesn’t track for me.
I think it’s probably about two years ago, a lot of the vets that I talked to and a lot of vet hospitals I engaged with started to have open appointment slots for the first time because it used to be you couldn’t get a slot. And I was like, that’s backlog. And now there are open appointment slots.
But I don’t, I feel like they’re starting to kinda level off in the number of open appointment slots we see.
Dr. Jules Benson: And I think that was a fair comment of okay, visitation is down. Is that literally because we’ve reached a saturation point like that there aren’t any appointments to be had and the, and we’re seeing people leave the workforce and all these other things that we hear about, is that why we’re seeing decreased visitation?
Last year was the 24 was the first year where I felt really comfortable saying, I don’t really see any of the accompanying data suggesting that this is anything except fewer people are visiting the practice and with our increase in revenue, concerning part about this, and first of all, I should say, this is not an indictment of any of the practices, any of every practice.
Like we know how tough it’s been over the past few years, and we know that many of these price increases are not things that the practice have a huge amount of control. Whether that’s the cost of labor, whether that’s the cost of goods and services. We know that it’s been a tough, especially the last five years.
So this is not me saying, Hey, it’s been a heyday for veterinary practices.
Dr. Andy Roark: Right.
Dr. Jules Benson: Looking at the data and saying at overall we’ve had increased revenue for fewer people, which means that each one of those people are paying more.
Dr. Andy Roark: Yes.
Dr. Jules Benson: That was the pattern I wanted to highlight.
And I, think it wasn’t, I think the reason it’s been able to go so far without someone’s more people across industry racing their hand and saying, Hey, I think this is a problem. It’s because the revenue’s been going up. There hasn’t been a lot of like pain from a, whether it’s corporate, whether it’s your local independent practice, like there hasn’t been a lot of like financial pain saying, Hey, there’s a real issue here that we as a business have to work out. I think there’s more of a long term, if people looked at it, they said, Hey, we might have trouble if this continues. And I think this was my opportunity to say if this continues through the next five years we’ll We could be in real trouble.
Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah.
Dr. Jules Benson: What are our expectations around what people will be able to spend?
Dr. Andy Roark: I think that you’re right looking ahead. I think, I’m worried I’m getting more cynical, Jules. So I was in Las Vegas, right? And so we were at Western Vet Conference and I.
Dr. Jules Benson: Which is a place to be cynical.
Dr. Andy Roark: Which is this breeds, it’s, it breeds cynicism.
It really does. So, I have a friend, right? And he goes there and he goes to the Starbucks that’s in the casino where the conference is. And he orders his regular Starbucks drink
Dr. Jules Benson: Yep. Yeah,
Dr. Andy Roark: He gets his regular, he gets a, protein bar, right? So protein bar and a regular drink. And it costs him $9 and 20 cents.
Okay, that’s on Sunday. On Monday he goes back, he goes to the exact same Starbucks and orders the exact same drink and buys the exact same protein bar, and it’s $16 in change. And so he gets it, and so he says to the barista, he’s Hey man, I, bought this stuff yesterday. These exact things. It was $9.20.
I could still got the receipt in my wallet. And the guy goes, yeah, on the weekends. The tourists come in the casino and they don’t want to chase ’em off, so they keep the prices low. But on Monday, we know that the only people here are business people at conferences who have expense accounts. And so we raise the prices.
And I know, and I was like, again, you can say I’m becoming more cynical. I’m like, good God, capitalism in America is bananas. And Yeah. It’s, just, i it that really, it really bothered me in some sort of fundamental way of boy, separating people from their money is becoming a huge national pass. In Vegas, also was the first time I was ever I was paying for something and I’m trying to remember what it was, but it was like at a convenience store, right?
I went and paid, and now I expect the tip button to pop up, right? do you wanna leave a tip?
Jules, this was the first time that there was no opt out. You couldn’t say no. It was like how much, I swear it. It was the first time ever and I looked at it and I talked to someone else who they were like, I, had that same experience at the same place and I put tip, and then I just put, I changed the numbers to zero and hit okay.
Because it was something where tipping in my mind was completely inappropriate. It was literally a convenience store where I went and got the stuff. And like self checked out
Dr. Jules Benson: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Roark: This like, this extraction of money is just, it is everywhere. And so all that, to come back around to vet medicine, say, one of the things that I, feel like has been going on is I feel like there has been incredible cover to raise prices in vet medicine because, I saw a thing that said, the price of groceries has gone up 58% in the states since 2020. And so I’m like, I think the price of everything are going up and I feel like vet medicine has gone along and so I don’t know, do you buy that?
As far as we have maybe gotten less pushback because it feels like everything is getting more expensive.
Dr. Jules Benson: I think there’s that, and I think there’s also, I think the omnichannel space has been super interesting about that. The fact that people are getting more and more goods from elsewhere, and this was something like early in my career here in the US when, we first started seeing Foster’s and Smith and 100 Pet Meds and some of those like, hearing from practice management consultants are talking about, hey, if your ACT, if your average client transaction is going down because people are buying their frontline elsewhere, then you have to increase products and services on your side. And again, I totally understand it from a, an economics, from business point of view, but my first thought was like, how does the consumer feel about the consumer?
If the consumer previously spending $200? And now they’re gonna spend, they’re gonna go outside and spend $50 somewhere else, and they’re expecting save 60 that they were spending in the practice, and suddenly they’re spending $250, I feel like that’s a microcosm of what we’ve been doing as an industry around like, how do we make sure that we’re, charging the right things in our practice and being sustainable within our practice and being practice focused as we should be. But I think that’s really hard then to be client focused at the same time and say let me understand the overall pressures on the client, it comes even, just spending on their pets.
Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah, there’s a way to do this and I, so I’ve thought a lot about this. Okay, people have been saying the pharmacy is going away since I started as a veterinarian, 15 years ago, people were like, the pharmacy is gone.
Dr. Jules Benson: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Roark: So I’ve thought a lot about this and what it looks like.
So let’s just say that I’m a vet and I have a vet clinic. And I have flea and tick prevention and I sell it at the practice and just say I sell it for 50 bucks just to keep the numbers easy. Okay, and then there’s a big box retailer or a online home delivery service or whatever that’s hey.
We can sell this thing for $35. Okay? If I give that box up, here’s the thing. I sold it for 50. I only probably made $5 selling that thing. And so there’s a scenario where the pet owner can go buy the flea and tick medicine for $35 online. I raised the price of my exam by $5, not $50 $5. The client actually pays less.
I make the exact same money and I don’t have to stock and carry this thing. And so there is a scenario where that all totally works out. You, have to play with the numbers a little bit, but it is conceivable.
Dr. Jules Benson: But I think that’s a great point. Again, when we look at, so let’s follow this five year trend out. So we talked about…
Dr. Andy Roark: Okay.
Dr. Jules Benson: fact that we’re seeing this, it’s basically plus 3% revenue year over year and that minus it’s 2.6, two point half percent or
Dr. Andy Roark: So wait, explain that out for people at home.
Dr. Jules Benson: So, if you were, in 2023 you were making a hundred dollars in 2000 and seeing, hundred clients
a hundred thousand dollars on clients in 2024, you’d be making a hundred two or $103,000 and you’d be seeing, 97 clients for.
Dr. Andy Roark: Gotcha.
Dr. Jules Benson: Revenue up, good. Everyone likes revenue up. Visits down. Nobody likes visits down.
Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah.
Dr. Jules Benson: There are pain points, like it does relieve pain points of I have more availability. I have more flexibility, and I’m still making the same money. It’s a medium to long term view that’s hard for us to take as a practice.
I feel like, I think it’s one of those things where it’s like this feels like it should be bad, but it’s not really causing me any pain points today.
If we follow those things out, and so I think it’s say Einstein who’s attributed the quote of the greatest magic in the world is compound interest.
Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah.
Dr. Jules Benson: So the same thing happens. If we were to put those, plus 3% revenue, minus 2.6% visitation into a five year trend, the numbers get really scary. We talk about then saying, okay. at our spend per pet, if we look at it from the pet, from the pet owner side, the pet family side, we then say in 2030, if we were to just keep those same numbers in, and this is not, and I’ve talked to very smart…
Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah.
Dr. Jules Benson: people like Matt Salois and Clinton Neil, and this is not a economic projection. This is just like literally, if we have a linear relationship between those two things see what and we see the spend per pet goes up by almost 40% for zero
Dr. Andy Roark: In five years?
Dr. Jules Benson: In five years.
Dr. Andy Roark: Okay. Wow.
Dr. Jules Benson: And the number of pets per practice decreases by 15%
Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah.
Dr. Jules Benson: So again, as we look at this and we say, this is a linear relationship, like we see the two graphs, two straight lines crossing. The reality is we probably hit some elasticity points of that.
Dr. Andy Roark: Yes.
Dr. Jules Benson: Somewhere in there as well. And we say that the actual pets per practice goes down even more than that
Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah.
Dr. Jules Benson: straight line.
Dr. Andy Roark: I don’t think you can raise prices 40% and only lose 15% of your clients like I, that seems amazing to me.
Dr. Jules Benson: But it’s over five years. is it the frog in the water? I mean, again, been seeing some of the same things over the past few years.
Dr. Andy Roark: I saw a story recently, so I, really enjoyed this. I saw a story recently about how Netflix has raised its prices, and I don’t know if you’re paying attention, but if you have the no advertisements Netflix package, it’s something like $28 a month now. I remember when Netflix was $6.99
Dr. Jules Benson: I remember when.
Dr. Andy Roark: I remember it was $6.99 so the breakdown that I saw was fascinating, and they just raised the price by like $1.25 but they did it every year for 10, 12 years and they marched up from seven bucks up into the 20 bucks and it was, $1.79, $1.43 and they just, by breaking it up and doing these small, steady increases.
Now I’m at 20 some bucks a month for Netflix and I’m like, kids, are we actually watching this? And they’re like yes we are.
Dr. Jules Benson: When we want to, I think that’s a great point around so we don’t, let’s be very clear, we don’t have any data currently that say the decreased visitation that we’re seeing is, definitely caused by the increase in prices. We don’t have
Dr. Andy Roark: that.
Yes. Okay.
Dr. Jules Benson: We can infer that we can make that’s, that, suggest that’s the case and that’s, that certainly seems what it feels like.
And the economists seem to agree that’s probably the most likely explanation without any other external factors. If we continue to increase our prices, like this feels this is gonna continue to be a problem.
As we look at our clients and as we look at what are we gonna have to do and what are the options ultimately, if we have, if we look at the, the, basket of clients that we have in front of us, so we have the people that we, have been seeing regularly, we have the people who are dropping out of regular service, who are this like in that they’re in that minus 2.6% and in the previous years too. And we’ve got people who haven’t been coming to us anyway. I don’t wanna lose sight of those people. I have some really good conversations with April Steele at the Colorado and with Amy Gil and our team charities is Emily Central and I write the, just, we just submitted this book chapter on stratification. One of the questions we asked very specifically, general practice, do mainstream general practice veterinarians have any idea how many pets are out there who are not being seen and the answer resounding was no. could they know who’s out there when they just don’t see them? That’s different or different practices and know, I have people listening who be like, I definitely see so-and-so over here.
But the, pure volume of people who don’t access veterinary services is just very hard to estimate.
Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah. No, and that makes total sense, right? You see dogs at the dog park, you, they’re not flashing a light that says unvaccinated like you have no idea. And people assume their neighbors take their pets to the vet, but they often really don’t know. Like Yeah, it’s an unknowable number, right?
Because you’ve got x number of vet hospitals in, in sort of your geographic area and, you don’t know how many pets. And it’s, it is just an unknowable number. I think we’ve always kid ourselves, right? , I think we all want to believe that we wanna believe people are doing a better job than they actually are.
You see it in the old heartworm data and they would have veterinarians estimate what percentage of your clients are actually using heartworm. It was like, how to stump a veterinarian is ask them how, what percentage of their clients are using heartworm prevention and then they’re always gonna be dismayed when you tell ’em it’s 20%.
Dr. Jules Benson: I don’t know if Alyssa can hear this, but I’ll put an audio cue of my cat is currently up on the cat furniture behind me. I think dropping pieces of KD kibble as loudly as possible.
Dr. Andy Roark: Someone was, that’s what that was. Okay. Yeah, I’m, watching your cat like, explore the climbing wall behind you. And I’m like, man, that’s some serious feline enrichment going on in Jules’s house.
Dr. Jules Benson: He is 16 and he is 11 until he is 25. That’s the deal.
Dr. Andy Roark: This, is a great time for me to mention that the podcast is available on YouTube. If you wanna see Jules’s Cat climb the wall. You can head over there right away, check it out.
Dr. Jules Benson: But, I, think as we look at who are in our practice currently and how do we keep those people. This is a conversation, you and I feel like we’ve had a
Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah,
Dr. Jules Benson: It’s building trust and value? I, think I, think to suggest that, mainstream veterinary practice is quote unquote in trouble, I don’t think that’s a, I think
Dr. Andy Roark: no.
Dr. Jules Benson: don’t think that’s a fair.
I think this year we’re starting to see. Then this year it’s, down to, to rock people back on the heels a little bit, especially some of our corporate colleagues, because you’re starting to see the two, the early 2025 numbers are that we’re seeing that decrease in visitation. We also see a flattening or a decrease in revenue. I think that’s starting to really worry scare people, which I think is appropriate. But I think as we look at what are the things that, and, you and I talked a little about are into a recession. I think we have to, in general practice, in mainstream general practice, we have the opportunity to continue to reinforce and set that value proposition and say, is what you’re getting for your money and this is how we’re gonna communicate about it, and this is how we’re being client centric and this is how we’re revolutionizing how we talk. So this is your bread and butter. So I, would, love your view on as we go into a recession. Do you ease off the pedal of talked about marketing and training and everything else to me that seems like exactly the wrong thing to do when we’re in a situation where you have to show your value to your clients now more than ever.
Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah, no, this is okay. so we had the conversation and I said, going into recession, one of the first things that people cut is training. And and that’s just been shown again and again. it is the, it’s the wrong move, but it’s easy to understand, right? And so when times get tough, we say we, we need to cut hours, we need to, we need to focus on, on, X, y, and z on, on sales, on things like that.
Dr. Jules Benson: Yep.
Dr. Andy Roark: The reality is that as times get tough, we need to be better at customer service. We need to be better educating clients. We need to make sure we’re spending good time with people and doing it an effective way. Because one of the defining characteristics of vet medicine is that we sell the invisible.
Like people can’t, that the unvaccinated pet and the vaccinated pet, they look exactly the same. They smell exactly the same. There is no obvious.
Dr. Jules Benson: Until they have parvo, then they smell differently.
Dr. Andy Roark: Exactly back to cynicism. But yeah, but you’re right. But you get the point, right? Like it’s, if they’re not infested with fleas wellness care is often invisible.
Unless you go and flip that dog or cat’s lip up and look at its gingivitis and its still disease. It looks the same as it used to look. And so people go, gosh, times are tough, and she looks fine. That is, we should always be aware that is the, that’s the competition. It’s not the vet clinic down the road that’s gonna take your business away.
It’s inaction that’s gonna take your business away. It, always is. And yeah. I, think that leaning into that is, is, key. It’s gonna be interesting. I, it’s funny, you look at these numbers and you look at the straight, linear projections and you go, that’s ridiculous.
No, they’re not gonna continue to raise prices and stuff. Jules, I, don’t know. Because let’s just, let’s play this recession game. We’re going to recession. We’re already seeing rising interest rates. And so a lot of the organizations, the private equity investors who bought vet practices, they got money really, cheap to buy those practices.
That money’s not cheap anymore. The interest rates are going up, and they’re gonna, if we go towards a recession, they’re gonna continue to go up. They’re gonna weigh up, which means people are gonna get really desperate to generate revenue and generate it fast. And I think the easiest knob historically has been the price knob. You just turn the prices up and increase your margins and you generate more revenue. I think we’re starting to see some resistance to that. And to your point, I don’t think, I don’t think people are gonna pay 40% more. And this is my, this is a, since we’re just hanging out in Cynical Town, I’ll tell you this thing I, and again. I popular says, I’m, writing an article right now on rethinking the human animal bond and, part of what I wanna say, and I have to figure out how to say it in a way that people hear it. And I hope that people listening to this podcast like know me well enough to assume good intention on my part when I say this.
But I think a lot of pet owners talk about how they love their pets and their pet is family and things like that. But when it comes time to actually write a $600 check to go to the vet for wellness care, including parasiticide, I don’t know that they’re going to do it. And I think as vet professionals, we want to believe, oh, people will do what they have to do for their pets.
Some people definitely will, but there’s a lot of people who are trying to make end meets ends meet. And at the end of it all, I. Pets generally are they fall in the discretionary disposable income category, meaning we spend money that we have left over on the pets.
Dr. Jules Benson: and I think, one of my observations has been so when you talk about some of the claims they have in Europe, like the Epic claim, which was, if you treat the dog at stage B two, which is a decompensated but silent period, right? There are these amazing upsides on, longevity and quality of life. because the disease is silent, it was really hard to get people on board with saying, Hey, we’re gonna get this medication.
It’s not super cheap, but it’s really effective and have a really good
Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah.
Dr. Jules Benson: exactly what wellness side find it really easy to justify spending money on things that are visible, which is why I think that whole dermatology side is still so doing so well because dermatological conditions,
Dr. Andy Roark: Yep.
Dr. Jules Benson: they’re a pain in the
Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah.
Dr. Jules Benson: with if you’re a client.
Dr. Andy Roark: you can see it. You can smell it like you’re embarrassed when your friends come over. Yeah. Oh yeah.
Dr. Jules Benson: So, I think this is, there’s some separation of what are the things that we’re gonna have to really double down and see value on? And I think one of the things that I, like about this, I think when we talk about our, corporate colleagues, and I’m not worried about them, I think in the long run
Dr. Andy Roark: Oh yeah.
Dr. Jules Benson: they need to, take care of themselves and, to, they have their great relationships on buying side. I think where I see the opportunity on the independent side, so when we talk about the uncharted community, like I think smart entrepreneurial people there have such an opportunity and it’s through that agility. We, we talked
Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah.
Dr. Jules Benson: agile project management, but hey, if, we decide tomorrow that I. We think that price transparency, for example, is one of the things that is, really driving is a need within our community. Like for us to, for a cohort practice, just to, to decide for that, to go up the chain and down the chain
Dr. Andy Roark: Yes.
Dr. Jules Benson: the changes to the website, changes to the clinic. That’s an enormous, and that’s a change to the brand,
Dr. Andy Roark: Yes.
Dr. Jules Benson: But for a, b, c animal clinic down this down the road from me, if they decide they wanna go price, transparent, they can do that in a week,
Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah.
Dr. Jules Benson: they can change and they can trial things. And I know that you talked a lot about change management with your training, but there are things that you can do and you can measure the effects of.
And I think for the mainstream general practice where you’re, having to build trust, I think there’s massive opportunity. And then stepping outside that and saying. are the needs in the community that are not being met by mainstream general practice? I think that’s the other observation that I have, and you and I, Emily talked about this a lot as well, is that I don’t think it’s possible, we already talked about it with the people who aren’t gonna that already.
Clearly mainstream general practice cannot be this massive tent where we can serve everybody. I think that’s potentially getting less true. Just look at the economics of it. So as you look within your c. What are the other needs that aren’t being met? And frankly, from an entrepreneurial point of view, as an independent practitioner, what are the things either A, you can do within your clinic, or B, you can do outside your clinic?
Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah.
Dr. Jules Benson: models that we can and should be serving?
Dr. Andy Roark: I’m super positive on vet medicine in the future. I think it there, there could be some pain as we adapt, but I always thinking last night, I got a text from my neighbor and he’s got this dog and I wrote about the dog two years ago. He had a splenic tumor.
and I wrote about it because he was, they were kinda on the fence about going and they were like, you know what, we’re gonna do it. And they went,
Dr. Jules Benson: you
Dr. Andy Roark: yeah, that dog, Has lived two more years since then and it had
Dr. Jules Benson: 15% or
Dr. Andy Roark: exactly right. And it was just,
Dr. Jules Benson: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Roark: it was the ultimate beautiful success story. Unfortunately, two years later, the dog has got cancer again. He’s got a mass in his chest and things, and he’s been deteriorating everything. And so I went over there and, I saw him and I think the dog’s got some internal bleeding and stuff, and he’s just not doing well. And I said to him, Hey, look guys, I, think it’s, I think it’s time and the husband was getting ready to leave town the next day to go travel.
And Boy, what they would have given to have, a hospice care vet, something, someone who could have come to their house and done this and, things like that. And it’s just those types of opportunities of, hey, it’s the weekend that I’m, I’m looking for this. And I’m not saying that, I’m not saying independent vets have to work on the weekends, but I am saying that potential to fill niches and find.
The needs of your specific community? Ju I, think you’re right on. I think that that, that’s really opportunity. I think you can also, you can be, you can run lean today in a way that you couldn’t, the ability to do stuff just moly is so much better than it was even 10 years ago.
Dr. Jules Benson: and this is a construct I think is important for us to think about as failure medicine. So this is, refer to as the iron triangle in right. So, three sides of the triangle, which makes sense. So you’ve got cost on one side, quality on the other side, and access on the other side.
Dr. Andy Roark: Okay.
Dr. Jules Benson: cost, quality and access. If you change any one of those things. It’s a dynamic relationship with at least one of the other things on the other side of the triangle,
Dr. Andy Roark: Right.
Dr. Jules Benson: increase cost, the chances are that access is gonna go down and quality is gonna go up.
decrease cost, you’re probably gonna get decreased quality, but maybe increased access.
So like I think as we look at veterinary medicine, I think it’s really time for us to start talking about, and I, see. So many practices who talk about, high quality care and and that’s great. And I think you can be quality and not necessarily advanced, but I think we need to be, we were talking about words earlier and how important they’re, I think as we look at what it means to, to practice veterinary medicine going into the 2030s, I think we have to get pretty square with what is the product that we’re offering and not feeling inadequate if it’s not the most advanced level of medicine.
Dr. Andy Roark: I feel like we need to probably come to a close here, but I just, I, love that so much. I hate to leave it. I really love this point. I think this is the one I wanna pull out here at the end and hold onto. I agree. I think for, Long, we have focused on high, standard of care.
The quality of your medicine is what defines you. this is, what it means to be a good practice is the, is your quality of care, and the idea that you could step back and be strategic and say, we are going to objectively lower the standards or quality of care in order to provide lower cost and greater access.
That’s not wrong. That’s not wrong. It’s just a different way of doing it. And as the quality of care continues to go up and up and so in terms of what we can potentially offer, at some point you we’re going to have people who will make the call and say, that’s great. That’s not what I’m doing here.
If people want that, then that’s, that’s a different place. But we have got a clientele that likes what we do and the level that we operate on, and we’re gonna serve them unapologetically. I, think that, to me, that’s a, it’s just different how it’s been, but I think it could be a beautiful future.
Jules, where can people look follow you online? What, where can they read your writings when you put stuff like this out and what’s the best place to reach you?
Dr. Jules Benson: So most of my stuff is on LinkedIn. So they can find me Jules Benson LinkedIn and then my website my independent website is illuminate.vet because Tapetum Lucidum and the dark and all that.
Dr. Andy Roark: Gotcha. I love it. It’s a whole theme. Outstanding.
Dr. Jules Benson: or awesome stories is always appreciate it.
Dr. Andy Roark: What a great conversation. I’m glad you’re here. I’ll link up put a link to your website and then also to your LinkedIn page. Jules, thanks so much for being here. I’d love to have you get in the future. I always love our talks.
Dr. Jules Benson: Love. Thanks bud.
Dr. Andy Roark: And that’s what I got. Thanks for being here, everybody. Thanks to Dr. Jules Spencer for being here. Guys. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you do go and follow Jules on LinkedIn. Check out his, website and his writing.
He’s just an interesting guy. I always enjoy getting to talk to him. you can check out my website too. I’m just, it’s, I’m just putting it out there. It’s, I also have a website. It’s dr andy work.com. You can check it out. I write. Every single week, every Friday I write something and I email it out.
And so if you join the Dr. Andy Rourke newsletter, then you will get a letter from me on Fridays, and I promise that I work hard on ’em. And it’s not AI generated, it’s straight up from me. I, it’s, sometimes odd things. It’s things that are important to me in my brain. They, I try to make them all.
Relate back to vet medicine. Sometimes they’re just thoughts and musings on life and what really matters in our time on this earth. But but anyway, that’s enough. Talk about websites, guys. Take care of yourselves, everybody. I’ll talk to you later. Bye.
