Episode #80 — Silja Schiller-Moumtzidis

From Boardroom to Strays
Silja Schiller-Moumtzidis joins The People of Animal Health Podcast to share her journey from global corporate leadership to ending pet homelessness. As Co-Founder and CEO of Zero Stray Pawject, she explains scalable prevention models, municipal change, police training, and purpose-driven leadership reshaping animal welfare worldwide today globally.

Transcript

Stacy Pursell:
Do you work in the animal health industry or veterinary profession? Have you ever wondered how people began their careers and how they got to where they are today? Hi everyone, I’m Stacy Pursell, the founder and CEO of The Vet Recruiter, the leading executive search and recruiting firm for the animal health industry and veterinary profession. I was the first recruiter to specialize in the animal health industry and veterinary profession in the United States, and built the first search firm to serve this unique niche. For the past 25+ years, I have built relationships with the industry’s top leaders and trailblazers. The People of Animal Health Podcast highlights the incredible individuals I have connected with throughout my career. You will be able to learn more about their lives, careers, and contributions. With our wide range of expert guests, you’ll be sure to learn something new in every episode. Thanks for tuning in, and enjoy the episode.
Hello everyone, and welcome to the People of Animal Health Podcast. Today’s guest is Silja Schiller-Moumtzidis. She is a purpose-driven leader changing how the world tackles pet homelessness, with 24 years of global leadership experience across Mars Petcare, WPP, Johnson & Johnson, and major consumer brands. Silja has built and revitalized organizations on three continents. She is the co-founder and CEO of Zero Stray Pawject and Zero Stray Academy, Greece’s largest animal welfare advocacy, and an emerging international nonprofit recognized for best practice models. Her prevention focused approach has reshaped municipal compliance, trained thousands of officers, and dramatically reduced stray populations. Silja is redefining what’s possible for animal welfare worldwide. And Silja, welcome to the podcast, and how are you today?

Silja Schiller-Moumtzidis:
Thank you, Stacy, thank you for having me. It’s a true honor to be here, it’s so nice to see you.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, it is nice to see you again as well, and I’m so happy to have you on the podcast today. I want to start off at the beginning, what was your life like growing up and where did you grow up?

Silja Schiller-Moumtzidis:
I grew up in Berlin, in Germany, at the time when Berlin was divided still in four zones. I grew up in the West side, in the British sector. It was the end of Cold War, and I was there when the wall came down, which was quite an interesting experience. I was a child, but it was a very interesting experience. My dad had a shipping company, and it was quite tough to get inland navigation to get his ships through the communist area. I was always fascinated how he did that. So, he was an entrepreneur and my mother was a nurse, and she specialized early on on HIV in the 1980s, when the disease very much had a stigma to it and fear.
And what I [inaudible 00:03:09] very much about my mother was the approach that was deeply rooted in curiosity rather than fear. And she told me many stories, many of them stick with me, and probably deeply shape my curiosity about diseases. How do they start? How do they spread? How can you cure them? So, looking back, I think the combination of my father and my mother, entrepreneur and science, made me the person who I am today, combined with a massive love for animals.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, that is so interesting. I was a senior in high school when the wall fell, and I was taking a political science class, so that was front and center being in a political science class. So, I remember that vividly. Well, what an interesting childhood. And I am curious, how did you get into the animal health industry professionally?

Silja Schiller-Moumtzidis:
So, I actually am not a veterinarian, I did something boring, if you might say that. I studied economics, so I have a bachelor in economics and business administration. I studied [inaudible 00:04:16] and Paris. And then I started my career in a corporate job in medical devices at Johnson & Johnson, and then later on moved into the pharmaceutical industry. Stayed there for 10 years, as I said, there was always something about my mother being deeply curious about diseases, illnesses, how they start, how they spread, how do we cure them, what other ways to do that? About a decade later, so now a decade ago, in 2014/15, we found a Zero Stray Pawject.
And it was originally a shelter, and then obviously evolved to something that we have today, which is the largest advocacy and education organization in Greece, and also now recognized for global best practice. And soon a veterinary organization, we are building up a veterinary team. So, during that time, I had just gone through the first decade of getting off, in the pharmaceutical industry, getting off blockbuster drugs. Moving more into precision medicine, moving more into real world evidence, genomics, biotech. And then, I started this organization working with veterinarians. First as shelter, we had a lot of dogs with very difficult diseases, so we had to find the right treatment patterns, and I realized there are a lot of patterns that are similarly to the pharmaceutical industry. So, I entered through Zero Stray Pawject, worked for a decade on that, now we are setting up a veterinary organization.
Later on, I worked at Mars. So, I joined Mars actually because of the work of Zero Stray Pawject, they were looking for somebody who could set up new business models with shelters. So, Mars has a very big team, with breeders, obviously now in the veterinary space, the diagnostic space, e-commerce, pet stores. But what they didn’t have at the time was they didn’t know how to really interact right with shelters. And the brief was set up a new business model, set up new business model, trial some new business models, how we can break into that segment, but doing good at the same time. It’s not just, of course, we need to generate revenue, but also doing good. So, that’s when I started work across the whole Mars ecosystem, from Banfield, VCA, BluePearl, Antech, Heska, and then obviously combining it with Royal Canin and all the different brands and tech, and from Kinship, that was very interesting because I learned a lot about the veterinary profession.
And that brought me back as well to the work we’re doing in Greece. At Mars, I was very fortunate because I had a team in India, I had a team in the Philippines, I had to build these business models, which some were very successful. One is actually now scaled. But I learned really the nuances between the different countries. Veterinary care is very different in the Philippines, India, Greece versus the US. So, from the pharmaceutical industry into the animal health industry, seen quite a lot of things, and now at Zero Stray Pawject, as I said, we’re setting up our own veterinary team, which is very interesting. Oh, and the business model that I scaled, one of this might be now becoming known, it’s the Adopt A Pet Shelter Plus model, which is now being scaled. So, I’m proud of that.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, you have led transformations across global companies, from Mars Petcare, to WPP, and Johnson & Johnson before co-founding Zero Stray Pawject. What moment or insight caused you to shift your career toward ending pet homelessness?

Silja Schiller-Moumtzidis:
There’s one name, Caprice. So, Caprice was our dog, we found him in 2014 during our wedding week in Greece. We took Caprice from a hoarder, we didn’t know at that moment that the woman that we adopted our dog from was a hoarder, we found out a year later. But we brought him home, he was an ex-stray, abused, we had to do a lot of training with him. Later on, he became a service dog, so that is a completely different story. But he opened my eyes about the whole problem of pet homelessness, and also how it links back to public health, how it links back to public safety, because pets on the street is not the right thing that we need. So, there’s one word, Caprice, he unfortunately passed away last year, of old age, so it was a big hit for me. But his legacy lives on, and he’s the reason why we’re here.

Stacy Pursell:
I love that his legacy lives on, and Zero Stray Pawject has become Greece’s largest animal welfare advocacy, and is now evolving into an international nonprofit. What core principle or model makes your approach scalable across countries and cultures?

Silja Schiller-Moumtzidis:
So, our philosophy is to shift the focus towards prevention. Similar to what’s happening in the pharmaceutical and also in the animal health industry, we have tackled the problem since we started in 2015, more from a preventative point of view. To intervene, to find ways to intervene before a dog or a cat ends up stray or homeless. Another core principle for us is we don’t draw any red lines. We work with every stakeholder. We work with a breeding association, with a hunting association, with a pharmacist association, with everybody… Of course, with the veterinarians. With everybody in that ecosystem. So, we are not drawing any red lines. So, what we are doing in Greece is we are trialing different models. We’ve trialed the Aegina proof of concept, which has become a global best practice, I’m happy to dive more into that. And we have also tried other models. But the point is we are trying to really set up systematic models.
We’re trying to go in, analyzing the problem, not just the problem after the dog is on the street, which obviously needs to be tackled as well. So, anything that’s done today, TNVR of strays, shelters, rescue, adoption, all these are very, very important points, but we have to admit that over decades of that work, it hasn’t reduced the number of strays systematic and sustainably. And that’s what we’ve tried to tackle. We really went in and found a model that works in Aegina, a systematic model that’s built around long-term outcomes, and really reduced the number of strays. And that’s probably what distinguishes us from other organizations.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, the proof of concept, reducing stray dogs from 300 to just 30 in three years is now considered a global best practice. What were the critical levers that made that intervention so successful?

Silja Schiller-Moumtzidis:
So, what we did is, as I said, we’re trying to work with municipalities, with governments, with law enforcement, with the judiciary, with the Supreme Court, and with veterinarians. So, what we did in Aegina, we had… And I don’t talk much about the shelter in Greece before because that was only for two years. But then after we basically shut down this [inaudible 00:11:32] situation and built that shelter, and made sure that the shelter’s sustainable, we moved on. We had to find a contained environment. So, we decided to go to an island with around 20,000 inhabitants, quite small, around 2,000 owned dogs. And we got the mayor on board, to say, look, we are bringing the money, we’re bringing knowledge, but you need to give us your team. You need to give us access, or you need to make sure that your director of public health is part of our project team. We want to trial something.
It took us 10 months, to be honest, to convince them because we had no brand. We were just two people from New York, coming to Greece, trying to convince the mayor in Greece to do that with us. He was not an animal lover either, so he couldn’t care less about animals, but we managed to convince him that it’s a public health problem, that it’s a public safety problem. And he understood that. So, he said, “Okay, go ahead.” So, the first thing we did is we set up the technological, the tech. So, we set up a dog registry for the municipality, so that dogs could be accounted for and be traceable. As I said, Ms. Athina, the director of public health, was part of our team, she was the project director. So, after we set up this platform, we had to obviously fill it.
So, we tried different interventions to see what sticks. We realized, without going into all the details, we realized that we needed a form of carrot and stick. We needed to promote responsible pet ownership and explain and make sure that people understood, but we also needed enforcement. So, we offered subsidy programs, we made sure we worked with the police, we had the very first police in Greece, that we donated microchip scanners to, that went around the island, knocked on doors, and said, “Can I look at your dog? Can I scan your dog?” And then would give fines and warnings. That was unheard of.
So, that element of abandonment and microchipping and traceability, we managed, at the end, we had 75% of our own dogs accounted for. They were microchipped and registered in that database. The second part was more the kind of, okay, so now we have people understanding that abandonment is not okay anymore, now we need to make sure that people are also making sure that they’re responsible breeding. So, we understood… We ran a lot of data with owners, all through the municipality, and we understood the reasons for people not neutering, and who’s not neutering.
And then we reached out, we segmented by a reason, reached out, and managed to get people into clinics with local veterinarians to neuter, and we reached over 50% of neutered [inaudible 00:14:06] dogs. So, 75% of microchip, 50% of [inaudible 00:14:09] neutered, and that reduced the number of new abandonments and new strays. In the meantime, the shelters on the island continued to basically get the dogs off the street, and that all of a sudden reduced the production of new strays from 200 to 30, and that was unheard of.

Stacy Pursell:
Wow. Well, the municipal compliance in Greece jumped from under 40% in 2022 to 67% in 2025 under your leadership. What did you learn about driving behavior change and accountability at the government level?

Silja Schiller-Moumtzidis:
It requires systematic solutions, it requires data, it requires taking the emotion out of the problem. It’s a very emotional problem, but you can only win if you can influence people. Even though we work in an animal health, or an animal welfare, but we’re dealing with people. We are also dealing with animals, but we’re dealing with people. So, what we brought to the government is, A, an understanding that strays are just not good for public health, public safety, for tourism. If you look at TripAdvisor, people saying all the time, “Oh, I don’t want to go to Greece anymore.” And Greece is not the only country, there are so many countries in the world, “Because I see all these trays.” We learned a lot about crime. That’s something that’s fascinating because now we’re working with prosecutors, because we also work with the Supreme Court who are also training federal law enforcement here in the US, or training the FBI.
And I learned that the more strays, the more crime actually, because people with predispositions can now get easy access to an animal and train before they go over to humans. So, we had a whole sweet spot of why is that a problem? And then we had a solution. So, we found that after the success in Aegina, we had to codify in some ways. We founded an academy, and to my knowledge, it’s the world’s first academy in the world that trains municipalities, law enforcement, and judicial, and we had now a path forward. So, we trained, of 332 municipalities, we trained 187, and we’re giving the government a path forward. And then, we had more governments knocking our doors, to say, hey, you’re doing this, how can I learn from this? Maybe a last add-on. Two years ago, I was very lucky I was invited to the World Urban Forum, organized by the UN habitat.
There were about 20,000 people, five heads of state, including el-Sisi, who is the head of state of Egypt, plus 300 mayors of large municipalities, and I was able to speak in front of them. It was all about strategic development goals. And now we talked about strays. And I remember some government official asked me, “Why don’t we just cull every animal, and just get [inaudible 00:16:46]? Why? I understand the health problem, rabies, et cetera, but why don’t we just cull?” And I don’t think we should shy away from difficult conversations.
So, my answer was, and it was a longer answer, but in a nutshell it was, take away culling now, even if you had a magic wand and you took all the dogs off the street, let’s say you have five million dogs, and to take all the stray dogs off the street today, and bring them into loving homes, you think you have solved the problem, but no, because tomorrow you will have new stray dogs, if owners are continuing to irresponsibly breed, abandon, or also not get access to veterinary services, which is another big problem. So, I think if we do that, we can win.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, Silja, you have not shied away from difficult conversations, and in fact, one of the things that you did was introduce the first mandatory police training program and animal welfare regulations, certifying more than 2,500 officers. That’s impressive. How did that initiative initially come together, and what impact have you seen in that officer training so far?

Silja Schiller-Moumtzidis:
So, coming back to the first proof of concept in Aegina, we learned very early on that just by giving a carrot. So, we offered free neutering, free microchip, and free veterinary service to owners who couldn’t afford it, and that was very important. But we also realized that as much as we can try to promote [inaudible 00:18:13] pet ownership, there are always people who don’t want to do it. And we can’t get these people to comply unless there’s law enforcement. So, we started early on in 2018 to train officers in Aegina. So, we were actually the reason why there was the first police force built. I learned a lot because I actually went myself and trained. We took Caprice with us, and we trained, how do you do microchip scanner, and what is animal abuse? And doing these trainings, you learn a lot of questions from officers.
“Why should I do this? What’s in for me? But that’s not my job, I go after crime.” So, we laid out, we realized where the pain points are, and we could actually answer these pain points. And then, moving on to 2021 when we founded the academy to codify, first we went after municipalities and then we went off to the police. And we had a meeting with the current minister of citizens protection, Mr. Chrisochoidis. He’s also not an animal lover, and that’s okay, that’s totally okay. But when we signed the MOU, it was very clear that you said to me, or to us, he said, “You have to find a way to help me to train my officers.” So, we started that through the police academy and through our academy in collaboration.
We just had a police in person training last November, so I was in Greece, we had the most amazing people coming to that training. It was a two-day training in Athens, and a two-day training in Thessaloniki, with senior leadership and junior leadership, with people from all around the world talking and speaking, and people from the FBI. And it was so amazing to speak to them. And it’s not that officers don’t want to do that, you just have to explain why.
So, if you look at the numbers… I just look into the numbers here on my sheet. The reported animal welfare incidents increased by 94% in the last two years, versus the two years before. The case files opened, increased by 34%, arrests by 33%, and administrator fines by 61%, to 12.6 million euros, which for Greece, a smaller country, is quite a lot. So, it’s working because it’s not just education anymore, there’s a passive awareness towards active enforcement of animal welfare legislation.

Stacy Pursell:
You’ve got some strong data to back that up. Well, at Mars Petcare, you helped reshape how the company partners with shelters, including designing the Mars preferred shelter model. How did your corporate experience influence the work that you do now in the nonprofit space?

Silja Schiller-Moumtzidis:
The work at Mars was very rewarding, and it really helped to solve some pain points from shelters, including pain points like mental health. So, we built a mental health hotline for shelters, something that hadn’t happened before. We know it from the veterinary side, but didn’t know it from the shelter side. So, I think that is a very interesting model. Over the last 20 years, I’ve worked in various different roles, from corporate strategy over to marketing, sales, general management, and you learn a certain skillset, which is, you need to understand, first of all, a problem. And then, you need to find ways or interventions, how to solve that problem. And if we bring that knowledge over to the animal welfare world, it’s exactly the same. What are the problems that we are trying to solve? The problem is pet homelessness. How are these problems arising? Well, various different reasons, but in countries like Greece, or in other countries, India or Philippines, I would say is quite similar, there is still a level of responsible pet ownership that needs to be explained, and needs to be promoted.
And even here in the US, I would say, it’s the same thing. If I live in New York, if I go out, of course people are walking their dog, et cetera. So, responsible pet ownership is very different here than in Greece. In Greece, people keep their dogs in gardens, on chains, letting their dogs roam. If you don’t have your dog neutered, of course, you find you get strays. You get more dogs that were produced. So, you have a supply and demand mismatch. But I think the corporate experience helped me very much to structure problems more systematically and finding more systematic solutions to it.

Stacy Pursell:
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Well, you’ve built and revitalized organizations across Europe, the US and Asia, what patterns do you see globally when it comes to the root causes of pet homelessness, and what still surprises people about this issue?

Silja Schiller-Moumtzidis:
I truly believe for my work at Mars and Zero Stray Pawject, and even the work I’ve done before when I traveled in pharmaceutical, I traveled to Taiwan, I traveled to various different… And I’m trying to see what’s happening. I’m trying to get out into the market. So, the root cause is always the same. The root cause is irresponsible pet ownership. And not because people are bad, not at all, but because people need to understand what responsible pet ownership entails. So, we have to define it. And so, the root cause is the same. Every stray on the street was once someone’s pet, or the [inaudible 00:24:51] of someone’s pet, even if that abandonment happened generations ago, and in the meantime, they reproduced on the street. What surprises me is that after decades of running TNVR, and shelters rescue, and adoptions… Which is all very important, absolutely important.
But what surprises me is that we don’t have more organizations like ours who are shifting more towards prevention. Because I do believe that only with shelters, shelters are incrementally important, but no shelter in the world will ever be big enough to accommodate every stray. And we have a supply and demand mismatch. So, how do we bring down that supply with humane ways? Ideally not with culling, but with humane ways through responsible pet ownership. So, root causes, in my opinion, are everywhere the same, even if we go to India, where you have a lot of community dogs, the question is, and what surprised me is that not more is done on the prevention side.

Stacy Pursell:
Okay. Well, your work spans research, business modeling, and frontline animal welfare, what data or insight have you come across that fundamentally changed how you think about responsible pet ownership?

Silja Schiller-Moumtzidis:
We’ve run a lot of data. Our organization is very data-centric and data-driven. So, over the last eight years, we’ve collected 10,000 of anonymous pet owner data, which is very interesting to analyze. And I think there are a couple of very important things that are standing out. And they might be more relevant to Greece than maybe to the rest of the world, but still I think there’s something that the rest of the world can learn. We asked a question, why do you not want to neuter your dog? And surprisingly, it’s not because I can’t afford it, or it’s a puppy, the main reason in Greece why people don’t want to neuter is they say it lives in a contained environment, so I don’t need to neuter. On the other hand… So, it’s over 70% say that. On the other hand, through our longitudinal study of the pet owners, we ask always the question, do you have a female dog?
Did the female dog have a litter? And was the litter intentional? And we have really thousands of data points on that, and the result is that of everybody who had a litter, 64% of people said it was not intentional. So, on the one hand, you have the controlled environment, I don’t want to neuter, on the other hand, it’s not intentional, so that gives you a little bit of a story. So, why it’s not happening. And that is, I think, something that comes back to responsible pet ownership. And again, not everybody needs to neuter, I’m not advocating that everybody must neuter, because in Greece, for example, we have now a new way. So, you either neuter, you give a DNA sample, which is a blood sample that traces offspring back to the mother, and if the mother is traceable in the national database, the EMZS, then actually the owner is becoming responsible.
So, I’m not saying that every dog or cat needs to be neutered, but we have to think about population control in countries where there are a lot of strays. So, these two data really are, I think, outstanding.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, Zero Stray Academy is positioned to train municipalities, shelters, and professionals internationally. What skills or capabilities do you believe are most missing in today’s animal welfare ecosystem?

Silja Schiller-Moumtzidis:
I think I alluded to that earlier, it’s a little bit the, let’s be systematic, logical, and take the emotion out of things. It’s hard. If I’m on the ground, and when I’m on the ground, I see a lot of things that I… And I’m a massive animal lover that really strike me. But at the end of the day, in order to influence policies, in order to influence governments, in order to influence pet owners, we have to work systematically. And that is, I think, something that the industry is still very emotional, and understandably, but if we really want to drive a shift, we have to take the emotion out, and we have to learn how to really influence people. Yes, we’re working with animals, but at the end of the day, we’re working also with people. People are the customers.

Stacy Pursell:
That makes sense. Well, you’ve been called a purpose-driven leader throughout your career, how do you stay grounded and focused when working on a mission as emotionally challenging and urgently needed as ending pet homelessness?

Silja Schiller-Moumtzidis:
I think it’s very important to understand your customers. So, what I generally do is I like to spend as much time on the ground as possible. So, we are now running a second pilot in Crete, where we work with groups that are well-known, or at least they are accused of being the reason why strays exists, hunters, farmers. There are a lot of farmers in Greece who use dog for herding sheep. So, the dogs live in the mountains with the sheep. Of course, no veterinary care… Not of course, but many times no veterinary care, the dogs breed uncontrollably. So, we’re working with these groups right now. So, these groups are coming to our clinics, we’re offering clinics, free microchipping, free neutering, and also free veterinary services for people who cannot afford it, tumor removal, et cetera. Everything from removing a leg or removing an eye to anything that the dog or cat needs.
So, I’m talking to many of these hunters when I’m on the ground, and it’s not always easy because I don’t speak Greek, but thankfully my team can translate. And Stacy, it’s mind-blowing. You hear these people saying, “I didn’t even know that I have to do this. Nobody told me this.” So, you can’t blame people for not knowing. And they’re actually thankful, they’re not bad, they’re thankful. They come and say, “Thank you so much for saving the life of my dog. You’re doing an amazing job.” So, my opinion, it’s always important to be on the ground, to talk to the people that you work with, and understand their perspectives, and not just judge, but understand their perspectives. And then that’s a humbling experience, in my opinion.

Stacy Pursell:
Comes down to awareness and education.

Silja Schiller-Moumtzidis:
Correct.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, Silja, what has been the most surprising thing to you during your work, during your career in the animal health industry, or working in animal welfare?

Silja Schiller-Moumtzidis:
As I said, for the first decade, I was in pharmaceuticals, saw this change around, away from blockbuster drugs more to precision medicine, I mentioned that earlier. I think we have seen the same, or similar shifts in the animal health industry. So, while the animal health industry is always lagging a little bit behind, but we can see a similar shift. So, 20 years ago, animal health was all around very reactive. The animal gets sick, they diagnosed the problem, the drug treats the disease, problem solved. So, it was all about how fast the symptoms resolved, how powerful the drug was, and it worked, but it was expensive. But essentially, most animal diseases aren’t random, they’re predictable. So, I think it’s a very positive change that we experience right now in the animal health industry, where we see how vaccines and nutrition and genetics and biosecurity are coming together and actually delivering more economic and welfare value than blockbuster drugs 20 years ago.
So, vaccinations become more central part of animal health, 20 years ago, it was not. Now it’s nutrition. I worked at Mars, I worked across all the nutrition brands, I really understood the value of good nutrition, and everything that you have, micronutrients, microbiome management, you have genetics. Genetics revealed that not every animal responds the same to a specific drug. So, there’s specific breeding programs now really targeting selective breeding, et cetera. And also the biosecurity, many diseases were created by management practices. And now there’s much more rigor to it, there are many more animal movement controls, or quarantine protocols. So, things have changed. So, the vet’s role fundamentally changed from treat and cure a sick animal, to design and manage health systems. And I think this is a very, very powerful shift that we’re going through, and it’s a very exciting shift. So, especially when it comes to animal health and animal welfare, that’s exactly what we need.
We need to design the next way of health systems. And then, the second thing that I personally as a pet owner and also working for pets, the whole explosion of pets, we saw it in [inaudible 00:33:45]. So, we had a lot of pets… Many more pets who were acquired. I don’t think anybody would’ve predicted that 20 years ago. The humanization of pets, which I find a beautiful thing. The human animal bond, which has been widely researched and found to be very important for health reasons. So, these two trends are very exciting, in my opinion, and something I’m looking forward to the future, where it goes.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, let’s look into the future. What does your crystal ball say about the future of the animal health industry?

Silja Schiller-Moumtzidis:
Well, I think there will be more consolidations, we are seeing this already. So, consolidations will happen. I believe the pet care market will increase or will grow even further. The whole animal health industry in the last, what is it, 20 years has grown at a CAGR of 5% to 7%. I think we’ll see more growth for pet care, or pets to that point. So, that will happen. I predict that there are business model changes. I’m very fascinated by new business models, and generating new revenue streams, and finding new ways of go to-market. But I think there will be a couple of new business models that will happen, I think we see some of them already, so subscription platforms will grow. Banfield already has that. Banfield, for example, is a vet hospital, they have wellness plans. So, you have a monthly subscription, and then that includes diagnostics, telehealth, and preventative meds.
Not on the Banfield side, but I think that will happen more in the future. And then, also I think there might be an opportunity for more outcome-based contracts. That’s something we explored at Mars a little bit. So, an example would be a dairy farm signs a contract where the company receives a bonus if mastitis cases drop below a threshold, or an animal health company receives a bonus when it goes below a certain actual hurt outcomes in vaccines. So, I think this could happen as well, outcome-based contract. So, couple of predictions. I wish I had a crystal ball because it would make my life easier, but I think we have exciting times ahead.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, I like what you said about the subscription service, I just launched a job board for the veterinary profession that operates on a subscription service. It’s called Vetevate, V-E-T-

Silja Schiller-Moumtzidis:
Fantastic.

Stacy Pursell:
… E-V-A-T-E.

Silja Schiller-Moumtzidis:
Fantastic.

Stacy Pursell:
So, that’s up and running. Well, you’ve had a successful career, what are a few of your daily habits that have allowed you to achieve success along the way?

Silja Schiller-Moumtzidis:
I really cherish one thing that I do every morning, I walk my dog for an hour in Central Park. It’s something that helps me to, not only to have fun, because I really like it, it’s fun to be out with him. And after Caprice passed, we took actually another dog from Crete. We took a straight dog from Crete, he’s called Milo. We found him doing one of our clinics. So, he’s shocked about the cold in New York. [inaudible 00:37:07] never seen cold like this before. But I really enjoy walking in the park for an hour in the morning, because it clears my head, it sparks new ideas, I can order my day, I can order maybe something, like a big project that I have coming up, or a big deadline, and it just helps me to be creative. So, that’s one thing I really, really enjoy.
It’s something that I’ve done for as long as we have a dog. And I wish I should have done this before. And then, the second thing, I genuinely enjoy learning something new. So, now I have a partner in crime, my seven-year-old likes to ask a lot of questions. So, we are now making it a habit every day to learn something new. A new fact, a new… Whatever it is. Either we use ChatGPT, or we go into a book, or we are coming across something, we are talking to somebody. And I’m trying to always make it a habit to say, okay, I learned something new today, which is building this curiosity. And maybe, if I go back 10 years from now, maybe I should have gotten a dog earlier, that might be something. But that’s the two things that I really enjoy.

Stacy Pursell:
I love that. What has been the biggest challenge you’ve encountered throughout your career?

Silja Schiller-Moumtzidis:
Let’s talk about Zero Stray Pawject for a moment, and then I can give an example of Mars. In Zero Stray Pawject, we grew very fast, and quite substantially. So, from zero, in 2020, we are now having almost 24 FTE. So, we’re building up to F 20, including a veterinary organization. I think the challenge was that we had to hire people very fast, and couldn’t find always the right talent, and had to make fast decisions. So, we had in the beginning, a very junior team that I had to build up. Now, I’m half around the world, I’m in New York, I’m working in a country where I don’t speak the language. So, that was a little bit of a challenge right in the beginning to really build that team up, to get a team that you have to mold and you have to form without being there, and that becomes successful.
So, now I think we are in a very good stage. So, now we have a very good team in place. So, some of our country manager, for example, she’s been with us the longest, she was just promoted. So, we see the fruits coming out of it, but I think that was in the beginning quite hard. Another example, when I was at Mars, when I started, the role was, to be honest, not really shaped. All I was told was, “We want to generate new business models with shelters, figure it out.” So, that was interesting because I had to build… I didn’t have a team in the beginning, so it happened much later.
But I didn’t have a team, so I had to really find out what is it that we’re looking for. I had my own ideas. And making sure that I bring everybody on board. Mars, as many organizations, Johnson & Johnson was the same, WPP was the same, were all structured by P&Ls. So, working across the ecosystem, it’s not always easy when you have to bring people together, but I think the result is beautiful.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, it’s not easy, like you said, to bring people together, but you’ve accomplished so much. And looking back earlier in your career, what advice today would you give the younger version of yourself?

Silja Schiller-Moumtzidis:
Network more. I thought I did a lot of networking, but I didn’t do nearly enough. I should have done it more and earlier. That’s one advice. The second advice is, be intentional who surrounds you. I was lucky to have people who were better and smarter than I, but it was more like by accident, it was not by design. So, if I would give myself advices, yeah, try to be intentional about who’s around you.

Stacy Pursell:
Being intentional, networking more, I cannot agree more, it is so important. And I tell this to veterinary students, you got to start in vet school, you got to network, go to conferences, don’t just go to get CEOs-

Silja Schiller-Moumtzidis:
Right, exactly.

Stacy Pursell:
… go to meet as many people as you can, and that’s where new ideas come from often. Well, some of our guests say they’ve had a key book that they read that helped them along the way. Is there a key book that you’ve read in your life that’s impacted you the most?
There was one book I read early on in my career, which is called [inaudible 00:41:30]. That was just a couple of years after I worked at Johnson & Johnson, I started working at Johnson & Johnson. We had a lot of [inaudible 00:41:38] games, how do we increase share? I was heading up market research, and then marketing for Europe, Middle East, and Africa, and basically it was all about how do we steal market share? How do we drive the category, but also how do we steal market share? So, that book was very interesting for me because all of a sudden it widened my perspective about, yes, of course, if we want to grow the market, we need to do it in a way that we are driving revenue for us, and often at expense of our competitor, but there’s also a good way to sometimes collaborate when it makes sense.
Nowadays you have Apple and Google collaborating on apps, right? And I think this concept will become much more important as we go further because markets are saturated in some ways. So, how do we combine competition and collaboration in a way that makes sense and also delivers more value for our customers?
I see so much collaboration in our industry, competitors collaborating, and I agree, I think you’re right about that. Well, Silja, you have the mic, what is one thing that you want to share with our listeners of the People of Animal Health Podcast before you drop the mic?

Silja Schiller-Moumtzidis:
I think true leadership in animal health is about creating impact that outlasts you, and if you have that guiding principle, I think nothing is impossible.

Stacy Pursell:
Create lasting impact, and you’re certainly creating a legacy with the work that you’re doing, that I sense will outlive you. Congratulations on all that you’ve accomplished along the way. And thank you for being my guest today on the People of Animal Health Podcast, I enjoyed our conversation today.

Silja Schiller-Moumtzidis:
Thank you so much, Stacy. Thank you for having me.