Episode #6 – Dr. Kerri Marshall

The ‘Steve Jobs of Veterinary Medicine’
With a passion for ending economic euthanasia, Dr. Marshall has combined her love of technology and animals to build a career dedicated to health and wellness.

Speaker 1:
Welcome to the people of animal health podcast. The host of our podcast is Stacy Pursell. Stacy is the Leading Executive Recruiter for the animal health industry and the veterinary profession. She’s the founder of Therio Partners and The Vet Recruiters. Stacy has placed more professionals in key positions within the animal health industry and the veterinary profession than any executive search professional. And along the way, Stacy has built relationships with some outstanding people who are doing incredible things to make a difference.

Speaker 1:
The People Of Animal Health Podcast features industry leaders, and trailblazers who have made a significant impact or are making an impact in the animal health industry or the veterinary profession. Stacy chats with them to learn more about their lives, their careers, and the unique and interesting things that they have done to contribute to the animal health industry or veterinary profession.

Stacy Pursell:
Hello everyone, on today’s show we are talking with Dr. Kerri Marshall. Dr. Marshall has had a very interesting career in veterinary medicine and is someone I have known since 1999 and have enjoyed following her career. Dr. Kerri Marshall has dedicated her life to continually reinventing herself to improve the health of animals. For decades, she has been a driving and tireless force in veterinary innovation, health and wellness, and the client experience. With Kerri leadership is not a position or title, it is action and example. Kerri’s true passion is innovation and acceleration of business growth through technology, IT operations, disruptive business models, strategic partnerships, and team building.

Stacy Pursell:
In 2020, she won the coveted Iron Paw Award from the Kansas City Animal Health Corridor and was the first person in technology to win this award. A recent winner of the 2018 VMX Veterinarian Innovation Award. She spoke to a packed house of veterinarians about the exciting new opportunities to expand and transform the industry through telemedicine, mobile practice, millennial engagement, P4 medicine, nanotechnology, and more. While most people find change scary, Kerri finds it exhilarating. Kerri has been called the Steve Jobs of veterinary medicine by one of her former CEOs. Welcome onto The People Of Animal Health Podcast. And how are you Kerri?

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
I’m doing great. Thanks so much, Stacy. I’ve really enjoyed our relationship, friendship over the years.

Stacy Pursell:
I have as well, Kerri, and I’m so grateful that you’re here today. And Kerri, you have had such an interesting career and you’ve had tremendous success, but I’d like to start off at the bottom in the very beginning of your career. What was your life like growing up and where did you grow up, Kerri?

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
I grew up in many places my first five years, but [pre-emptively 00:03:06] in Lompoc, California and my parents were both veterinarians. Dad did the large animal. Mom did a small animal practice and so I grew up in a veterinary hospital. I think I’ve done every single job there is to do in the veterinarian hospital. And the fact that I still love it all this time, it’s really special. I was very lucky.

Stacy Pursell:
Yes. And I’m curious, Kerri, when did you first figure out what you wanted to do professionally?

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
Because both my parents were veterinarians I always said I was going to pharmacy or something else, but I was riding around with Dick Mansmann when he was publishing Equine Medicine And Surgery I was just riding around because I love horses. That was another part of my growing up, I always had horses. And when I rode around with him… I don’t know. I just decided this is what I want to do it, I’m not going to worry about doing the same thing my parents do. I’m just going to go for it. And that was really what started it. I had a great background and I did love veterinary medicine. It’s just, you want to sometimes branch out and then if you really love it you should do what your heart says anyway.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
And that’s really the first time. The first time I went on a call with my dad I was five and it was a post-mortem of a cow. And I was five years old, curly, little hair hanging over the fence. You can see this picture and this cow was opened up and most little kids I think would have freaked out. Or there was quite a bit of concern by other people there that my dad was showing me this. And I was fascinated. I will never forget that. And I think that also that curiosity, and wanting to help animals by understanding, rather than just thinking about how it looks, I think it helped you with surgery and everything else you have to do in this career.

Stacy Pursell:
Yes. And you talked about your parents were veterinarians but you chose a different path than they did. So there’s a number of paths that one can choose in their veterinary career. And Kerri, I know you’ve had just this amazing and very unique career. And I’d love if you could tell us the story of your veterinary career. I know our listeners would like to hear about it.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
It’s a very long story, but I’ll do the cliff notes here. Yeah, so I went to veterinary school. I went to undergraduate in Santa Barbara and then moved to Washington to go to Washington State for veterinary school. And I really focused on equine. Of course, horses were my love, equine medicine. And when I first got out, I did practice in a predominantly equine practice and learned a lot there. I have some good stories we’ll talk about later of my first call and everything, but that gave me the background of this. I love this, but I was always struggling a little bit in my career with quality of life. And you just get so immersed in it that you forget other pieces of your life.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
So I’ve been on a quest, both for finding new things to do. I’m always curious about things, and also quality of life. And I haven’t always had that balance, but you define it yourself. So my quality of life isn’t everybody’s. But so after that I’m in Idaho doing large animal and equine, I went back to my parents’ practice and thought of taking that over and worked with them. But I can tell you three Marshall in one practice is too many Marshall. We’re all of very strong personalities and it’s good for me to get out and see the world a little bit, maybe come over… And when I left their practice, my dad said, “Well, you always have this in your back pocket. So go out there and try things.” And I think that was a great statement for me.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
And I did relief work in California and did work in a specialty practice. And so I got a lot of great ideas there. I did move to Davis to work at the UC Davis Primate Center. That was probably the most adventurous move to that point in my career, but that taught me a lot about animals and research and how they’re cared for. And I believe the veterinarian has such a crucial role there. It’s amazing research that David Ho who developed the treatments for AIDS and is developing a lot of treatments for COVID now. I just had some really great experiences there. But I think I also have this tremendous desire to run a business or was really interested in business. And so a university wasn’t quite the right place for me at that time.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
And so I at the time I was there, I think after three years and there’s a whole bunch of interesting stories there. It’s just a fabulous research center, but I met my classmate, Scott Campbell. He was in Oregon, I was in Washington and these two schools were together when we went to school. And he had just started this business called back then, VetSmart. And so he called me up and I took a tour of the Sacramento location, one of the Sacramento locations and walked in and saw… I just looked at things like I was walking into a pet store. You didn’t see veterinary hospitals inside pet stores back then. And I just saw, I walked in and looked at the clean new facility brand new built, the electronic health record, which is for me, it was amazing.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
I have terrible handwriting having two veterinarians as parents. And I had these memories of my mom doing medical records late into the evening. And I just thought it’s got to be better. And the digital medical records piece was really key to my heart there. But also on the business side, I saw people coming right past my door and I had tried for years to try to grow practices to buy them or figure out where I wanted to end up and what I wanted to buy or buy my parents practice and work there and build that. And so I had really thought about that a lot, and I thought this is an amazing opportunity. This is going to grow like crazy, and it’s great for the client because some of them coming in, probably don’t even know how to care for their pet.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
And it’s so convenient to have it there. So that was the turning point. And it was a great growth period for me there. At Banfield, I played 12 roles in 16 years and through operations mostly, and then into what it means running hospitals and then running a piece of the business. Mostly, technology projects that turned out in operations as we scaled and grew and had to provide better and better tools for the business and for our hospitals. So that’s really gave me a great foundation, an incredible foundation from there on, I went to Trupanion. I had this quest and my quest theme in my life and my career was I wanted to end economic euthanasia and at Banfield I wanted to combine doing veterinary with my mission.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
And my mission was to end economic euthanasia. There was too many pets that got brought into me that had something I could fix. I’d went to work at a specialty. I could do surgery, not specialist surgery, but I could do good general practice surgery and people would sometimes not be able to afford that. And that was just frustrating. So I looked at pet insurance for a while at Banfield but we didn’t quite get the model right.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
But we had a wellness plan models. So we had the wellness prevention side that was so important. So then I looked at the pet insurance landscape and saw Trupanion, and really liked their model. Compared it with other models that had developed over the years and this new model coming in of making things simple and paying out higher claims cost per amount of the client was paying for their policies that’s called a loss ratio that gave you more value back and being more in line with some of those figures in human health care rather than property insurance.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
It was a really interesting learning experience, completely different business model, and also fitting with my ending economic euthanasia. Certainly, I believe in euthanasia, but economic euthanasia has no place ethically or morally in our profession. So I do believe it’s the duty of veterinarians then to teach people about finances and how to help with their pet, whether it’s medical insurance for pets, or whether it’s care credit for when they haven’t been able to plan appropriately at the end. All those different tools are the purview of veterinarians who have that mission with me. So anyway, that is, as you can see, a career of passion. I moved from there to several technology startups and those are very fun and very risky but very exciting to see what’s building out how to build a startup from ground up.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
I invested in quite a few of those. Two after the Trupanion IPO and all of that. I had a little bit of money to help give back to the innovation world and learned a lot through those investments. And then I joined Compassion-First, recently as a chief information officer during a very challenging year. The because I joined in 2019 as VP of innovation, but quickly moved into this CIO role. And I was just honored that John Payne has always been a great mentor and has put that faith in me. And it also gave me an opportunity or a very big stretch opportunity for my career as they had 42 specialty hospitals and emergency hospitals that most of them are open 24/7. So very rapidly growing area of consolidating and giving support back to them and yet letting them keep their identity and brand they’ve built in the community and quality of medicine.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
So really great experience there. Very tough during COVID. All these new technologies you’re rolling out on top of the day-to-day support and it was just a really wonderful year learning from the doctors that showed up every day during those really tough days. And helping them in quarantine with telemedicine. And just payment, types of payment, all those things that you have to put in place for COVID. So great experience there.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
And then now we’ve joined with NVA National Veterinary Associates, and I’m leading an effort to form a new team for clinical technology focus. So all the modalities and all the wonderful applications and software that veterinarians use in medicine. So really having a medical focus, which I think is so important that a large organization that has invested in a lot of these hospitals to give back and be able to support medicine as well as business. So I really applaud it NVA, and I’m really excited to be part of their team.

Stacy Pursell:
Kerri, I really enjoyed listening to your story. I’ve heard some of that along the way and have followed your career since we’ve known each other for 21, 22 years, but I enjoyed hearing that story. And you’ve built this career focused on technology and you were telling me before this podcast today that your dad was one of the first veterinarians to use a computer in his veterinary practice.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
Yeah, this is funny. He was an early adopter because in 1985 I graduated from veterinary school and at my graduation, the keynote speaker talked all about technology and how computers were going to change veterinary medicine. So really they were not common back then. And my dad went back, I don’t think he was the first, but there was very few people out that were using it. And bought, I think one of the AVS might’ve been the name I can’t even remember anymore, but he bought that system.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
And then of course, didn’t know what to do. There wasn’t a lot of implementation support. So he got my little brother to help him… My younger brother, I should say he’s bigger than me. To help him set up the whole hospital. And then my brother goes off on to a career who’s now in pharmacy informatics. So it’s funny what a speech or a talk will do to inspire you and change your life. And it changed my life, of course, as well as my dad’s and my mom’s practice.

Stacy Pursell:
Yeah. So the technology has evolved so much over these years and continues to evolve at such a rapid pace. Kerri, looking back over your career, is there a point in time when you felt like you were truly beginning to gain traction with your career?

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
Yeah, I think by traction, I guess I would define that as starting to get into a rhythm and a theme, because I had moved around so much trying to find quality of life balanced with innovation and continual learning. And that’s what my dad always told me is that, “You’re not in vet school to memorize. You have to memorize, but you’re not there to do that. You’re there to learn how to learn.” I think the traction started when I joined Banfield because I guess, I was learning what’s now much more common but was pretty new, very new back then and very controversial, extremely controversial. I think most of my mentors told me not to do it when I joined Banfield. My dad pulled me aside and said, “Hey, you always have this practice in your back pocket, you have the freedom to try these things. And I think this is the future of vet medicine.” And I go, “That’s what I think too.”

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
And I think touching a lot of people, having access to educating them, and taking care of their pets, and these wellness plans he’s talking about, I think they’re the future. And I think that what Banfield really gave me, as I told you, was a foundation for how to approach big problems and actually tackle them and finally get them accomplished. And anybody can have an idea and there’s a lot of ideas floating around and not lot of very, very good ideas. The question is, especially for these big ideas, how do you implement it? So I think that’s where I started piecing together how important it was that I knew. In fact, I could have started in Banfield running the region and that was offered to me.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
But Scott said you really should start in the hospital and learn this new electronic health record system. You should learn wellness plans inside and out, and then you’ll know going forward when things are not going to work out for the veterinarian at the hospital. And that’s what’s important. And I thought that was really good advice. So I did practice there and then every step of the way as we grew… And nobody had really done much multi-site management, there may have been a few hospitals with satellites back then, but nobody had run even a few hospitals. I think I had nine hospitals. You have to hire and let people go and do all the HR, we had HR to support us. So that was really helpful. I thought, I don’t have to go do that myself as I would if I opened a practice and we had all of these support processes, including the technical support at our hospitals facilities support all this other stuff built around.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
So I started seeing the value of that. And I just think that that was so critical that I’ve kept that theme with me and all those foundational things and I really gained traction. Then I fell like I’d always pulled into technology kicking and screaming. I didn’t think it was right for a veterinarian to be in technology and I didn’t feel like I fit. It was the best move that I ever made. It gave me a focus that I enjoyed. It’s not that I love all technology. I’m just as frustrated as any other veterinarian when it comes to something not working, whether it’s for my business stuff or for the systems in the hospitals, I get just as frustrated.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
And I’ve had to learn over time to temper that and figure the way forward through that. And it’s hard when you’re trying to get things done, but that gave me that focus and that’s what really set the tone for the rest of my career. I had half opportunities after I had my MBA to go outside the profession. And the farthest I ranged was partially into dentistry, but it was a company trying to start animal health. But I quickly moved back into… This is my space, I love it. And technologies gave it something new for me to tackle, and there’s not many people doing it, but I do believe there’s more out there that want to. And I’ve talked to lots of young veterinarians who actually came to that from technology.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
And I think this forum we had for American veterinary informatics… Excuse me, the Association for Veterinary Informatics, AVI, that association really was at that collaboration area. We did move some things forward as well, but the most important thing is we all got to know each other and help each other with our careers. And then also know when I go to a new business, “Hey, that other person might be able to help us over here either in consulting role or hiring them or whatever.” So it’s been a really great sharing group of technology in veterinary medicine that I’ve really enjoyed. I looked mostly to my inspiration outside to human healthcare technology. But there are some great inspirations happening now in technology in that as things move in as we’re growing and consolidating.

Stacy Pursell:
It’s so interesting to hear all of that and going back to Banfield that’s when I first met you back around 1999, you were talking about the field director managing nine hospitals. And I’ve always thought that Banfield was instrumental in creating some great career paths for veterinarians. You mentioned a couple of multiple career paths within Banfield, but that’s when I met you when we were working together building Banfield. And during that time, I remember Kerri, you were instrumental in getting the reciprocity in California. I remember talking with you during the time that you were doing that, and I’m sure our listeners would enjoy learning more about how you did that.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
Yeah, that was a really great project. It was also one of those difficult projects. Scott, my classmate who was CEO of Banfield, Scott Campbell just had the most I guess, wonderful sense about people and what you needed to do to keep them engaged. And so I think, he knew he needed to challenge me constantly. And so he would often throw me projects that probably, he knew nobody else would take. And so we were having difficulty, and I’ve experienced this difficult to before Banfield, trying to hire veterinarians and grow in practices. And if you can’t get a veterinarian and you’re already committed to opening a satellite hospital or another hospital, then you’re left in the lurch with your business. As well as, if somebody leaves and you can’t find somebody, then you’re left with the clients being not served and pets in your community not served.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
So it’s an extremely important, I guess that was my first national role was recruiting that’s why we met. And building a database and learning how to recruit and doing all of that. But reciprocity came apart because when I was in recruiting, I looked at all the stats and California, which was our biggest market, had the second lowest veterinary population per capita. So out of the whole population, we were second behind Nevada, in the whole country. So we had the lowest number of veterinarians per population, and we were fast growing. So we were heading into, I thought a pretty good train wreck in California. I saw that’s burning out. My parents couldn’t sell their practice. The boards were quite difficult to do so you needed a big pipeline to get in.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
And if you’d been out 10 or more years, and which is the people you want to hire often, or buy your practice, you had to pass the National Board Exam to come in. Well, how many of us after that many years can remember, and [inaudible 00:26:23] seven species on it. Because focused your career on something by then. So it was very difficult. I know VCA was having that problem too. So they helped a little bit on that on getting it going. I had to hire a lobbyist and then figure out how are you get a bill together to change this? I had to try to partner with the Veterinary Medicine Board and the California… That med board, California CVMA.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
And I had worked for CVMA as a volunteer building the disaster program and other things, so I had lots of strengths and relationships there, but this issue was pretty controversial. It was more about competition, that’s coming in and there are fewer jobs and it was just this feeling of scarcity, which actually wasn’t what the data was showing us. But it was like UC Davis wanted to preserve jobs for their new grads coming out and all this where arguments. Our board is in California, it’s the business and professions committee that the veterinary profession is under. It’s different in different areas in different states. I did some professions committee hearings. I had to learn how to frame things. I had to learn how to go and talk to other aspects of the veterinary professions, such as Poultry Federation, Dairy Council.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
And some lobbyists took me around he’s a great lobbyist from the Dolphin Group took me around and introduced me to all them. And I told the story and of course, Poultry Federation couldn’t bring veterinarians in. They’re having a hard time getting up veterinarians. And I had learned earlier in my career at the Primate Center, how important it is to have a veterinarian always with any type of animal you just have to have them, they have to be there to promote animal health, wellbeing, humane treatment of animals, all those things that are an important part of our oath, public health. And so, we got a larger coalition on this because I couldn’t get traction in the early days of CVMA and the board. And that would have been a no brainer if we could have gotten that.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
But eventually I think they saw that it really at the end did not harm anything. It actually helped expand the opportunities for the new graduates in the end. And we did it in conjunction with both the CVMA and tried to just build coalitions and collaborations. That was a really important thing that I had learned from the CVMA during the disaster program, I’d learned how to get people in every community to volunteer to be our coordinator, so that in a disaster our role was to help, house, and care for pets that were injured. All those types of things, all of those skills really helped me, for this reciprocity bill, and it was just signed by the governor. The governor at the time in California was Pete Wilson. So it was really an honor to get that project done. And I think, in the end, it well, I know it helped many practices, not just the corporate practices.

Stacy Pursell:
Yes. Helped practices and people. So the industry owes you thank you, and a lot of gratitude for your work and effort and in doing that and Kerri you seen so many things in your career. What has been the most surprising thing to you during your career in veterinary medicine?

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
Yeah, this is good. The surprising thing. Gosh, there’s been lots of surprises. Some of them good, some of them bad. Most of them good. And just [inaudible 00:30:30], I guess though the most surprising thing is the resistance to change. Only because that’s not in my nature. And so you always compare things, I guess, to what your frame of reference is. And this resistance to change and how long that takes sometimes to get through and all the effort that’s really been surprising. But the biggest surprise to me, on the more positive side is the number of things you can do with a veterinary degree. When I graduated veterinary school, there was not a chance I would have… If you ever told me I was going to be CIO of an organization as prominent in the profession as Compassion-First, I would have told you, you were… And that there was a Compassion-First even I would have laughed at you and said, “There is no way, why would I do that? I love the practice. I’m going to stay and be a practitioner the rest of my life.”

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
And it’s just funny if you’re just… But throughout my career, I think that Banfield opened that window to see what other opportunities there were. It’s interesting to me and that there’s just endless for somebody who’s creative and just wants to stay somewhere in that ecosystem of helping animals be healthier and therefore helping people be happier and healthier. I think it’s just opportunities are endless. And that was a big surprise to me that you could just not have to be on the same track your whole life. You could actually switch pretty dramatically and be successful. Sometimes be challenged I’m very challenged. So you have to be able to get through those challenges, which sometimes are daunting. But if you can learn how to do that, then the world is your oyster. So they say.

Stacy Pursell:
Yeah. And a big key to what you said is the resistance to change some people are a resistant to change, change is scary. They have the fear of change, but you said that’s not in your nature. So one of the takeaways that I just heard there is, be open to change, don’t resist change. And you’ve certainly been on the forefront of a lot of changes. Kerri, I’m curious, what is your crystal ball say about the future of the care of animals?

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
Yeah, that’s… I love living in a future as you know. And when I look in the future and we just had a… The Veterinary Virtual Care Association just sponsored a bridge club event where we talked about the future of tele-health at 2030. So the future of pet care, I believe is we’ll figure out as veterinarians the consolidation of veterinary medicine that’s happening and that will continue and we’ll figure out how to insert veterinarians into leadership to help shape that even better, to make sure that it happens in the right way, as well as it’s a good business proposition. We’ll also learn how to use technology better. And also, sometimes it’s us paying attention to the client in front of us when we also have to think about the whole ecosystem of where the client gets information and care for their pets.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
And so my crystal ball says the client’s going to start at the pet parent and equine owner and all of those people out there that have animals and love them. I know my uncle loved his cattle. What that says is we’re going to figure out there’s an ecosystem of things that they need tools that they need, that we can help provide and information whether it’s virtually, or physically, we’ll figure out that balance. I think technology is that tool. It’s a very broad term. It will be used in very many ways, but a lot of times technology has done piecemeal and that really doesn’t work. It makes it really hard to do all these things that are the vision. We’ve got to figure out how to not be so proprietary and expand the technology to connect tools to the pet owner. Right now, that’s happening through what we call the PetSpace and the PetSpace is like Chewy and Amazon.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
And all the different players that are coming into that space pretty strong are scaring us. But actually if we just joined forces, there’s a much bigger pie. There’s a lot of pets that could get more care with our advice and our being there in many ways. Right now we’re experiencing a lot of growth, so we have enough on our plate. I think it makes it harder to help pet parents in a more holistic way. I think we’ll look at pets, not just in front of us that day, that minute, but we’ll start to use tools to project the lifetime of that pet and that breed of pet or horse and project out they’re individuals as individualized medicine. That’s going to come into play as genetics improves, and we can make a huge, difference on these animals with their particular genetic footprint.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
So you combine knowledge and genetics. We’re going to merge those companies building stem cells lines out for pets. There’s lots of new stuff coming in, but the way you disseminate that information and knowledge and tools is through technology to get it out there and make it easier. So take all these things that you don’t have to do physically and put them into the virtual world and then keep the physical things and do those really well. And then help people afford it. So those are the technology around pet insurance and technology around financing, all those things have to come together around that pet or that horse or that cow or that bird goat whatever you’re taking care of. That ecosystem is where the future will be. There will be a system that everybody can tap into where people don’t have to just hope that Google has the right answer for them.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
That can be good to stimulate questions, but it’s never good as a final answer when you have these people who’ve dedicated their lives and have years of education that should be brought to play to the pets, pet parents daily decisions, fear-free think about that movement. Those are things we’re never really taught. Now, they’re taught a little bit of a behavior in school, but we weren’t taught any and you get out there and that’s your biggest challenge is how do you handle behavior issues and even just fear in the veterinary hospital that can be dangerous to your staff and you. So all these things though in order to be able to be used like Plumb’s Medicine, think about that, you pull it down, you got your… I used to have to sort through books to find out this information during my practice day.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
Now we can just look it up online. And as that’s integrated into the technology that we see every day and use every day, it’s going to allow us to do much better medicine and that’s already there, but connecting to that pet parent daily in their daily life, and helping them, if they need to go to a referral hospital, whatever they need for their pet, don’t let them guess. You might tell them and think that they’re going to go out and find it on their own, but we have to escort them digitally to that next step for their pet care. Digitally for the future of their pet care and for now, for every day, not just once or twice a year.

Stacy Pursell:
Yes. And I heard you in there, one of the takeaways that I heard was a barrier to innovation can be the concern about knowledge sharing because of the competitive nature Chewy, Amazon versus the veterinary practice, for example. And so what I heard when you said that too, is maybe have more of an abundance mentality, not such a scarcity mentality for the industry, because the pie is big enough. Let’s work together across the industry to develop this technology. That’s going to be good for clients and good for animals.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
Yeah. A rising tide raises all ships is what we used to say at our Banfield summits to be able to get that kind of feeling. And there is a proprietary differentiation that you can do on the right technology. It doesn’t mean that every practice has to be the same and use the same process. It’s just that they have to be really integrated so that many different people can take advantage of that information. And so that we don’t lose the fact of what veterinarian is providing them information so that we keep them whole and keep the business whole as well. If we don’t keep our business side whole we’ll never have the freedom to do the right medicine.

Stacy Pursell:
Yes. That makes a whole lot of sense, Kerri. I’d love for you to share with the listeners about the kinds of projects that you’re up to today.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
Well, today as we’re integrating Compassion-First into National Veterinary Associates, NVA, we’re going through this whole exercise has been really fun and really challenging, but really fun to pull two organizations together and create a new one for specialty emergency care. And then I’m looking at all the great things that NVA has developed over their years in the industry and in the profession. And what they’ve done is they had this motto of joining us and staying you and that’s why they’re keeping your name of your hospital and your [inaudible 00:41:08]. Now that adds tons of complexity to trying to support a lot of hospitals with the a IT team. But if you can do this right, that’ll be a huge win, I think, and model for the profession and consolidation.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
John Payne has a great talk about this veterinary consolidators and the history of it. And we used to never call ourselves consolidator at Banfield. It was always just, we’re a practice like anybody else, but really what we’re doing is providing different models out there. So as people start their veterinary journey, they actually have an up side. My parents worked until they were 70, they loved what they did and when they sold their practice which was an aha practice really, they went to a lot of education. They loved it. Dad was doing lots of surgery and mom did feline and exotics and so really great practice. They had generations of clients coming to them. But when they sold their practice, they actually made more on their real estate when they sold it and retired in Montana, their California real estate than they did on their practice.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
And to me, that was mind-boggling, that’s why I was free to look out in my career and find a better, hopefully help, not just better solutions for pets, but also and horses and cows and everything that I helped work on. But I also wanted to find a better solution for me and for the veterinarians I worked with and for us as whole profession we had to have an exit strategy if we built something. And that’s what the consolidation is driving is a good… And this partnering at the end of… So partner ahead of when you want to retire. And then you also get the benefit of all the support you can grow your hospital, build new ones, et cetera. So I think that’s so important.

Stacy Pursell:
Kerri, you’re doing so many different and so many interesting things. Some people in our listening audience might be wondering, what is a typical day like for you?

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
There isn’t any typical day. We have 24/7 hospitals, and they spread from California out to the East Coast. More of them are on the East Coast and I’m on the West Coast. And we have a satellite headquarters here in Vancouver, Washington. And I’m transitioning from a role where it was sometimes 2:00 in the morning might get an emergency call that a hospital’s down and have to round up support to basically trying to think about how do we better improve our clinical modalities and our support for that, for what the veterinarians need to do the world leading medicine that they want to do cutting edge medicine. And there really isn’t a typical day, but I get up very early because of the East Coast meetings.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
I have quite a few meetings every day. They’re very interesting. Very challenging. Sometimes there’ll be things that we just have to work through. And the really most fun I have is when I get an email from a veterinarian or a hospital director or something saying something’s going better than it was, and we fixed it, or we gave them some technology that helped, those kinds of things now are… It used to be the pets are doing better, that I personally worked on, but now it’s the veterinarians are doing better and their team is and that’s very painful when they’re not, and those happen and those frustrations and those things you have to work through with anything that you build.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
But I really am so optimistic about the way that veterinary medicine is shaping itself by the choices that veterinarians make of where they go and what they do. And how they work together. I guess the first… Who was it? Lee Tyner is an anesthesiologist. He was Mississippi, he’s taught there and he joined us at Banfield and he looked around, he goes, “You know why this is going to work, Kerri?” And I said, “Why Lee? Why do you know that?” And he goes, “Because veterinarians are learning how to work with each other.” And I thought that was pretty good. Because sometimes we were competitive in markets. And we have really highly competitive natures and that doesn’t always bode well for collaboration and communication, but I’ve been so impressed with the veterinarians in all the organizations that I’ve worked at and how they learned that working together is just as important as individual accomplishments.

Stacy Pursell:
I know Lee Tyner, I worked with him at Banfield and also at Mississippi State, what a great person. Kerri successful people usually have some habits that contribute to their success. I’m curious, what are a few of your daily habits that you believe have allowed you to achieve success?

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
I think just the basics, good nutrition. I try to be very focused on my health. I did quite a few competitive sports like ride and tie and endurance riding. I think exercise has been really important. If you’re stressed, you have a whole different attitude once you get back from a little jog or even a walk outdoors come back in or a horseback ride. You just feel much more optimistic and you have a lot more energy and those types of things are really important. They’re really hard. You’re on your feet all day when you’re practicing. And you don’t think that doing more of that will help, but it does. It gets your heart rate up a little bit, takes you out of the four walls of wherever you are and opens your mind up and your heart up to different things.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
The other thing really is good sleep. Certainly, I didn’t always practice that well, and that’s really important. And recently we have a new Chief Community Officer at NVA named Turpin Mott and Turpin. He did the podcast that everybody should listen to because it was really about meditation and how important it was. And I know in practice, I went to some lectures and some workshops on meditation and yoga, and I tried lots of stress relief stuff that really did help. But they were really simple things that you could do in a short period of time just to reset yourself like, breathing in, breathing out and just letting other things go because our minds get so wrapped up in the details of our lives.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
So those have been strategies. I would just thanked him for putting a podcast out and just reminding me how the importance of those exercises, especially if you get quite tense or I tend to be a fairly hyper person and so I can get wound up and it’s hard for me to wind down at the end of the day. So just stopping and letting everything go and saying, “It’s going to be there tomorrow.” And everything’s okay for tonight. And I can play with my dogs and go get myself wound down for sleeping. And that’s so important. And it was harder when you take emergency call or things like that in smaller communities to get good sleep, but it’s not to be underrated.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
It’s really helped a lot to just make myself focused. I think my Apple watch helps me with that and there’s lots of technology tools you can have too. And I’ve of course been very experimental with those and sleep patterns and all of that. So those are things… I think the other thing is, the reason I joined the profession and it’s been the sustaining thing for me in a very demanding profession is my colleagues and relationships and friendships that I’ve formed like you over the years that you keep… I saw my parents with their classmates that still come visit them and they’d go visit them. We’d stopped by their places as a kid. And I think that’s also one of the qualitative reasons about why I joined veterinary medicine, because we have this community of people and you get… I’ve expanded that to more of the animal health community and even the PetSpace community.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
And that community of people just really, especially during COVID just having some of these bridge clubs that Catherine Haskins puts on. I think those are just amazing opportunities to connect and refresh and learn more personally about your colleagues, as well as thinking about the future and fun things like that. Those types of things can’t be underrated. That’s the energy that you go get back is taking good care of yourself and in having good sustaining relationships in your life. My husband of over 20 years has been a saint moving all over to my career when needed. He worked at Intel for a long time.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
So I moved up to Portland, but from then on, it was wherever I went and he had a startup, so he could go anywhere and we just worked together, those sustaining the way you negotiate and workout time to spend with your loved ones will get you through some of these really taxing and challenging times like COVID where you feel isolated and your pets, of course, and your horses, and all those things that just add this whole dimension to your life. And a lot of times veterinarians don’t get to enjoy their own pets well enough, and are able to spend enough time. So we’ve got to make more time for us to enjoy that human animal bond as well.

Stacy Pursell:
Good reminders take the time to stop, take care of yourself, connect with your community, get good sleep eat well. And do the things that you enjoy and connect with your own animals at the end of the day. Very good reminders, Kerri. I’m curious about mentors, Kerri, is there a mentor in your career that’s made the biggest impact on your career?

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
I’ve had so many great mentors starting with my parents. But I guess in the career, the sustaining part of the career, it would be Scott Campbell and John Payne. Those two mentors were direct mentors, I’ve worked with them directly. And they just taught me a lot about business of medicine and about how to communicate. And I’m still working on that obviously. And they just taught me so much about that. The other mentor is Darryl Rawlings from Trupanion, he taught me a completely different business model, a completely different way to help pets, but also how to really position that when you have to talk to investors and all of those really important things, as you think about… You see all of that gives me my MBA, of course, gave me some understanding of why the business side might be doing something.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
And that whenever you understand it you don’t feel like it’s being done to you, you understand why. Why we have to worry about inventory? And why we have to worry about all these different things that just seem peripheral to medicine? Because they fuel the medicine when you take care of those things. And those mentors just allowed me… They actually gave me the opportunity to stretch myself and challenge myself and gave me tips and coaches and sometimes nudges and sometimes pushes into things.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
And like, “You got to do this. You’re the only one that could do this so get it done.” And those are the greatest opportunities you can have in life is being given some responsibility that you are responsible for performing on and you have to produce the metrics and the reasons and all the different evaluations that you have to do to get something launched and then implemented in the people and keeping people inspired along the way and in the know. And so they taught me just an immense amount and I just can’t thank them enough.

Stacy Pursell:
You had some very good mentors along the way. And I’m curious, is there any advice that you would give the younger version of yourself?

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
That’s funny advice. So if I could look back. I think there is a true… And I think we call it different things now, compassion fatigue, and workaholic and all that, and that affects your quality of life. And so my advice early on is don’t take it so seriously and try to do good, but always take care of yourself that’s the hard balance for that. But also how to negotiate you get what you cut up with was what my dad used to say. Thelma and Louise’s movie. So that’s what I would tell myself is… And I learned that a really great negotiation class in NVA taught me a different way to look at how to negotiate really a partnership rather than just a back and forth negotiation.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
But also standing up for yourself in those negotiations were not really good at that some of us as veterinarians. And so if you don’t get paid the amount that you should be that’s fair. And because you couldn’t negotiate yourself, that has to be on you rather than on the employer. You have to be able to walk away from things that are not good for you, even if they’re a great position. And then you also have to lean in when you are given the great opportunities that you will be given if you really are clear what your capabilities are. So that’s what I’d tell myself. It’s just don’t take yourself so seriously. Laugh, I guess, make humor. I started figuring that out, that if I was really upset in a meeting about something if I could just figure out how to insert humor, everybody would still get it.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
You could still say it in that way, but it was just not so… I don’t know, just negative. It comes across, it’s funny, but you’re not making light of it. You’re just saying, “Hey, we’re in a really tough pickle.” Or something, even a little phrase. The humor is so important when you’re working with a group of people and I’ve always enjoyed it when somebody could insert that into these difficult situations to get the emotion down. So you could actually focus on the work.

Stacy Pursell:
Yes. That’s that is so true. Kerri, some successful people tend to have idiosyncrasies that are actually their super powers. I’m curious, what idiosyncrasy do you have?

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
I didn’t really know it was a idiosyncrasy thinking about it. I was sitting at VMX, I think it was not quite called VMX yet in the Marriott Bar, whichever we met a lot of health professionals there. I was sitting there and a friend of mine came up and said they, “Hey, I’ve just been talking over here. And they said that you live in the future. Can you tell me how you do that so that I can plan better and do better. How do you do that?” I just at the time I was taken aback. Then I thought about it and I love living in the future and visualizing things about how they’re going to be, and then building towards that and actually getting there because a lot… As I said earlier, a lot of people have ideas.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
It’s how you actually bring an idea to use. So the commercialization or the business process involved in that implementation that’s just as important because [inaudible 00:58:13] an idea we’ll never say it, but you have to first visualize it. And there’s actually a lot of work done on that recently of how you visualize things and then how you actually build that bridge to the future. So sometimes if you live in the future and that’s all you live in, you may not ever produce anything for the world. And I think that was part of my M.O. is I just to create value and provide value along with providing care. And so I didn’t know that I did that, but it wasn’t really a compliment and it made me think, and I said, “I guess I just do it naturally. I just think that way. And I enjoy thinking that way.”

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
But what it can cause is you can explain something and it’s not the way it is it’s the way it will be. And I think you have to be careful and frame it that way. Because since you talk about things in the future, somebody just thinks, so that’s how it is, but actually there’s a lot of work to build it to be that way. And a lot of components that go together and the visualization can be different for different people apparently, and mine is really visual and white boarding and just getting excited about it. And so sometimes if I’m really feeling crunched and I’ve just finished a big project and just down.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
I go out for a little run, come back and then I think about the future and it doesn’t have to be just the future of what I’m working on. Just think about, what would I do here? And what would this be like if we could do this better? And I think for some reason that’s very relaxing for me and very re-energizing. But that was the idiosyncrasy that I guess not… There are people that do that, of course, a lot of people, but I didn’t think it was an idiosyncrasy till it was brought to me that how do you do that? It was funny.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, you’re a visionary and it takes a special person to be able to look ahead and see around the corners. And that goes back to you being called the Steve Jobs of veterinary medicine. That’s exactly what Steve Jobs did. He was able to see into the future and look around the corners. And Kerri, you have been a visionary throughout your whole career.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
Thanks. But I hope that was referring to the Steve Jobs in technology development design and not his leadership style.

Stacy Pursell:
Yes. The referring to the innovator Steve Jobs, not the leadership style Kerri, what message or principle do you wish you could teach everyone?

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
Teaching everyone. Really, I think I’m going to go back to the beginning and say it’s learn to learn and that’ll get you through the change. Technology is going through a lot of changes. The world is going through changes. We’ve had huge changes through COVID and how you adapt to that is just continually learning and being open to learning. And I know there’s been times in my life where I think, hey, this is how it’s done, you get like 16 years in one business model will make you think that that’s the business model, but then as soon as you get out to something new, like when I went to Trupanion that’s, “Whoa, this is all different way and I’ve got to learn about this and I’ve got to understand the business model.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
I’ve got to go to school, I’ve got to do some certifications. I’ve got to really learn things.” And I think just that, that just continuing to learn, veterinarians do a lot of that with learning medicine and going through CE and all of that, but it doesn’t always have to be it’s just medicine. You can learn some business tips. You can go to Ted Talks and get some inspiring things from other people and their challenges. And what they’ve learned about the world. So just continue to learn how to learn.

Stacy Pursell:
Yes. Continue to learn how to learn, that’s good advice. Kerri, some people say that they’ve had a key book that they’ve read that really helped them and their approach to success, or maybe change their mindset about something. Do you have a key book in your life that has impacted you the most? I’d love to hear that story.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
I was thinking about that. If I should tell you that there’s a lot of books, obviously that are really fantastic. I haven’t had a lot of time to read books lately, but I’ll tell you about one that used to inspire and that I feel like I uncovered later on and that’s the James Herriot book. Now of course, like every veterinarian, I have a living James Herriot in front of me as my parents, but you always look out at other scenarios and I read James Herriot’s books and they were so peaceful, serene living out… I just see the first day on my job in Idaho, I thought I’ve done it. I’m the James Herriot because I’m living in this beautiful town in McCall and I’m practicing medicine on these mountains and I’ve made it. And then it was about, I don’t know, second month or so that I got called out on a calf.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
I asked them to bring it into the hospital it was a calf that was scouring pretty severely. And he was in bad shape and very dehydrated. And I said, “It really would be better off in the hospital. Well, put him in your barn right now and I’ll meet you there.” So I took off, it was pretty late at night. It was 10 or 11 when I left and got there. It was about… I can’t remember if, maybe 10 degrees, maybe eight degrees. I can’t remember very, very cold. And it’s high elevation about 5,000 feet. And the calf was just in very bad shape, very dehydrated. So I put IV fluids on him I won’t forget this… Even in the barn, the fluids were freezing in the line. And so I was having to wrap the line and figure out how to warm the line and tried to save the calf and getting the fluids into him.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
And I found out that day that I had the Nod Syndrome. So my hands were completely… I couldn’t feel them I thought I was going to get Frostbite. I was having the most miserable time of my life to get… I’m going to pick this calf up and put him in the back of my truck and take him into the hospital. But I knew he was going scour all of the track and the doc would be very upset with me if I wrecked his truck, so I’m trying to figure out how to do this. And I finally got him stabilized. They got him warmer, they brought in some blankets and we put hay bales around him so he could keep the heat in. It was just such a cold barn. And anyway, we got him stable. I didn’t know if it’d be stable for long, but he was pretty good there.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
And they probably weren’t going to pay me very much, which was also very frustrating for hours and hours of work. And then on the way home I thought I’m going to have a good cup of hot chocolate and sit by the nice hot stove. And I get a call and I have to go to a cat that’s in respiratory distress. This is 2:00 in the morning now. And I’m by myself, go there. He had maybe intestinal lymphoma, because I could palpate that and I had to put him to sleep by myself and it’s just not ideal.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
And you always feel like you’re compromising a little bit of your care when you don’t have enough staff or you’re late at night and have been working all day. So I get home, I’m exhausted. I finally get to where I can make my cocoa and I get my wood-burning stove it’s the only heat I had for my cabin and it had burned out. And so I went to stoke it and that’s where I burned my James Herriot’s book. So you just get those moments and those moments change you then you make a different decision and you go, “I really need to do something a little differently with my life.” And there are so many vets out there that do that wonderful work. I’m so proud of them. It’s very tough work.

Stacy Pursell:
And Kerri, there’s one more story that I’d love, if you could share with our audience, you’ve told me this story before about earlier in your career, when you drove to a client’s office or you drove to a client and they were surprised that you were-

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
Yeah. That’s my first ever client as a vet. Here I had grown up with veterinarians and all that, but it’s really not the same as when you are the vet. And I had just gotten this job in McCall, Idaho. I was so excited. It’s so beautiful. It’s my dream is coming true. And I’m there. And I show up to the practice and the doc never told me this, but he hadn’t had a vacation for years. So of course, this is a very typical story. I show up as a new grad green and he takes off and doesn’t tell anybody where he is except his wife. And she’s sworn to secrecy. I think he just went somewhere nice hotel and slept. So I’m there and she hands me a map with all the ranches.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
And my first thing is to go out and it’s time for Bang’s testing and shipping cattle. So I got to get out there and do that. It’s brucellosis testing. And so I go, great. We have a family ranch, I’d been there most summers. So I know at least something about ranching as well as, I did take some courses, obviously, in vet school on cattle that wasn’t my focus. It was more equine and small animal, but I certainly had the background.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
And so I was super excited and I took off in the track and I’m like, “I’m vet.” And I saw the mountains, I was pinching myself going, “This is amazing.” And I get to the ranch and I pull up in the truck and I get out and there’s a bunch of cowboys and one of them comes up and he’s looking at the car like, “Is there somebody else with you?” I have long curly hair. I got a round Irish face and coveralls never fit women back then. So big rolled up coveralls so you can get the picture why he might be a little surprised.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
And he looks at me and gets this look of disgust and surprise at the same time he goes, “Are you the vet?” And I just looked at him because I had my hand out stretching saying, “Yeah. I’m Dr. Marshall. It’s nice to meet you.” And he just backed away a step, and I’ll never forget this. And everybody there was just like, “What? This is the vet?” No one’s ever seen a young woman back then… It was 50% of women in my class, but not a lot of us went into a mixed practice back then.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
And so I jumped in the truck and I said, “Hey guys, I totally understand doc, still will be back. He’ll be back in three weeks and I’m going to head out and go to the other ranches on my list. I got a long day. So no problem at all. I totally understand. No hard thoughts taken or anything.” And I gassed it because they were figuring it out. So I just took off with the truck and then went a little bit slower and look back. And they were literally running. They can’t ship their cattle. I’m the only vet around this whole area.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
And so they’re running after me, their boots and their flying off. In my rear view mirror. I was like, “All right, I’m going to enjoy this for a second.” And then they come up running up to me and go, “We’re so sorry. We’re really sorry. Can you please Bang’s test our cattle?” I go, “Okay. That’s more like it.” And it was pretty funny and I got through day and yeah, it wasn’t always like that there was just a few people that went, “What?” But nothing like that. And so I went back and when doc still came back and he came up to me and wanted to speak to me in his office, it’s pretty sure I was going to be fired. I go, “God, my first job. And I just have to blow it with my attitude.”

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
And he comes in and I said, “Well, I know what you’re telling me about. And if you’re letting me go, I totally understand. I might have been perceived as being rude, but it was worth it and I would do it again.” He goes, “Oh no. They think you’re the toughest thing out there. They want to take us both for beers.” So that’s just how you respond to things that are not right obviously, the way you might be treated, but it’s all in how you respond. And I think I took that lesson to heart, I think my whole career and just tried to, again, the insert humor into it and make a fun joke out of it rather than bearing a grudge, I guess.

Stacy Pursell:
That is one of the best stories. When you went back, did you say, “I’ll come back, but I’m going to charge you double?”

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
No, I did something else though. I did end up charging them double because they ran steers through and you’re only supposed to do it for heifers. And they were running steers through to get the tag. And I knew that trick because my uncle had taught me that. Some people would do that, I would never do it, but yeah. So I figured out, well I better watch out for that when I become a vet. And so they were doing that and it was early I saw a steer goes through, but I just tagged him, took the blood. I was marking it pretty carefully so then I can pull it back out. So I let all the steers get in the pen and I’m charging by the hour.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
And then I tossed my head up my little head of blonde up and I go, “Gosh, you know what? I just noticed out there, there’s several steers out there and I must have missed those. But I thought we just had heifers in here didn’t we.” And because that’s obviously what they were supposed to do. And they said, “Oh, we didn’t know there were steers.” I go, “Well, we need to run all of them back through and I need to pull those tags before you let them out.” So we used another hour and a half, two hours to run all the cattle back through, I pulled that, carefully, pulled the blood and I went a little slower than I normally would. And so that was how I got paid more for their attitude.

Stacy Pursell:
I love that. Well, good for you, standing your ground and we train people how to treat us and I love that story, Kerri, you’ve got the mic. What is one thing that you want to share with our listeners as The People Of Animal Health Podcast before you dropped the mic today?

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
I just want to say, thank you to all the people out there that are doing this wonderful work for animals and breaking through some adversity and developing new things, but also just being there on a consistent regular basis for people and their pets and their horses and everything. Just thank you and thank you for all the help you’ve given me in my career and I’m not done yet. I’ve got lots more wind in my sails and I’m learning every day. So thanks a lot though to everybody.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, Kerri, and thank you. Thank you so much for being here today and sharing your stories with us. Lots of inspiration, encouragement. Kerri, you’re one of the most enjoyable people to talk with, and I’m so glad to have had the opportunity to get to know you over the years. And thank you again, Kerri, for being a guest today on The People Of Animal Health Podcast.

Dr. Kerri Marshall:
Thanks Stacy. I really appreciate that. And the opportunity always to talk with you is really fun.