Episode #15 – Dr. Ivan Zakharenkov

Extinguishing Vet Burnout
With a heart for veterinarians, as well as for animals, Dr. Zakharenkov is using technology to combat burnout and reignite passion in the profession.

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 and veterinary industries. She’s the founder of Therio Partners and the Vet Recruiter. Stacy has placed more professionals in key positions within the animal health and veterinary industries 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. 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 and veterinary industries. 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 or veterinary industry. She is here to share their stories with you. Now here’s the host of our podcast, Stacy Pursell.

Stacy Pursell:
Hello and welcome to The People of Animal Health Podcast. On today’s show, we are talking with Dr. Ivan Zak, a veterinarian and entrepreneur, and a passionate advocate for the wellbeing of veterinary professionals. Just recently, Ivan announced that he’s taking the lead in a new veterinary healthcare system, Galaxy Vets. Galaxy Vets aims to bring veterinary medicine back to veterinarians. Ivan initially started as an emergency vet. He worked across multiple hospitals in Canada. After 12 years of practice, he decided to commit his further career to combat burnout in the veterinary profession with the help of technology. Ivan is a creator of Smart Flow. A workflow optimization system now used in hundreds of hospitals across the globe. He is also the founder of Veterinary Integration Solutions, an executive consulting firm. Where Ivan developed a unique business methodology for veterinary enterprises that has burnout prevention built in. It’s now used to build Galaxy Vets. Welcome onto The People of Animal Health Podcast. And how are you Ivan?

Dr. Ivan Zak:
Thank you. Wow. That’s quite an introduction, so I’m great. Thank you for having me here.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, we’re so grateful that you have joined on our podcast today, Ivan, and I know that you’ve experienced tremendous success in your career. I’d love to start off at the bottom and the very beginning of your career. What was your life like growing up and where did you grow up?

Dr. Ivan Zak:
It’s interesting because when you zoom out on every entrepreneur that went through successful events, it always looks like a straight line up. But if you zoom in on that, it’s not all like that. There’s a lot of ups and downs. And when you look back, it does feel like there’s mostly up, but there was some downs that really make you focus. But I was born in Ukraine. So I grew up in Ukraine actually until I reached my ’20s and I did my first vet school in Ukraine and in the last year of that vet school, I relocated to Canada.

Stacy Pursell:
Wow. And so growing up in the Ukraine, and then you went to Canada for vet school, and then looking back, when did you first figure out what you wanted to do professionally?

Dr. Ivan Zak:
So it didn’t start with most people that I talk to when I say I’m a veterinarian, most people say, “Oh, when I was eight years old, I decided I will be a veterinarian” or someone who is not a vegetarian says, “I thought of being a veterinarian.” I grew up in a pretty, poor family. And when we were growing up, we were going through ’90s, which was in rough period in the Soviet Union. It was right after it broke down in ’91. And then it was a really rough time. And we didn’t have much money. The school that I wanted wasn’t on the agenda. I really liked biology and chemistry when I was in high school. So I was thinking maybe I would like to become a medical doctor, but because we didn’t have much money. So veterinary medicine for me was as plan B. And interestingly enough, in Ukraine veterinarian is not very well-respected profession. So most of my friends were either cops, dentists or lawyers and a veterinarian was a bit of a joke for everybody. So I wasn’t proud to say that I did go to that school in Ukraine.

Stacy Pursell:
So tell us more about that. Why is veterinary medicine or why was it not considered prestigious there in the Ukraine?

Dr. Ivan Zak:
Well, I think it’s getting better right now, in general veterinary medicine. Now that I travel the world with different areas of veterinary medicine, it usually is the business that blossoms in the countries where the middle-class is more profound. And at the time Ukraine economy was really down. It’s not much up today, but it’s much better. And then when people don’t have much to eat themselves, they don’t pay too much attention to animals. So veterinarian as a profession there, and it was transitioning from that old school vision, that it’s a farm animal profession into more companion animal. And it wasn’t that well developed.

Dr. Ivan Zak:
So I had weird classes in vet school, like a civil defense course, what to do with the breeding stock in case of nuclear war when the Americans will attack us. So things like that, it was obviously the inheritance from the Soviet Union courses, but it wasn’t really something you feel proud to be a veterinarian, at least I didn’t, because it wasn’t that prestigious, you wouldn’t make much money, and then you’re not a doctor, you just a vet that that does rectal exams on cows.

Stacy Pursell:
Wow. That is so interesting. Well tell us a story of your early career. How did you get started in veterinary medicine?

Dr. Ivan Zak:
Well, I left Ukraine in my last year of vet school, and then when I relocated to Canada, it was very interesting experience because it was typical immigrant story. We came with nothing and then I just started to look around and I was in my early ’20s. And I thought, I’ll check out what’s going on with veterinary medicine here in North America. And I ended up getting a job in the vet hospital where to get a full-time job making, I don’t remember it now, eight and a half dollars an hour as a minimal salary in Canada then. I was four times in an afternoon a animal care attendant. So just holding animals, walking, and feeding, and then to get the full-time job. The other four, I was cleaning the clinics. I was also a janitor, so that was my first year of veterinary career in Canada.

Stacy Pursell:
Wow. And then how did you go from there to transitioning over into the animal health industry? Because you eventually became a general manager at IDEXX. Tell us about your start, working as the animal care attendant and how you got from there to general manager of IDEXX.

Dr. Ivan Zak:
The background of vet school from Ukraine did give me some knowledge and I quickly realized that we didn’t have a technician per se profession or nurse if you’re from UK or Australia. So we had a vet and that’s it. And I think maybe kennel attendant would be another one, but not really a technician. So I realized that at that point I couldn’t be a veterinarian because there’s very hard exam. So I aim to become a technician because I could use my knowledge to do that. And not all hospitals required the RVT when they hire you. So I quickly started switching hospitals to ramp up from kennel attendant to the technician, and then several positions like that. But in the meantime I met a dear friend of mine. I haven’t seen him in decades, but his name was Caesar Bonilla.

Dr. Ivan Zak:
And he was a doctor from Mexico or from Salvador, but he went to school in Mexico City. And he tried to take a national exam six times, I think at that point and he failed all six, and he gave me the best advice I’ve probably received in my life. He said, “Don’t try to pass this exam. You’re young, just apply for vet school.” And I listened to him. And then when I was like, “Well, I don’t know if I want to go back to school.” And it was interesting because he said, “Because when you’re in school, the only thing is required is to read. You don’t have to clean camels, you don’t have to hold animals, just read and memorize.” So I applied for vet school and with this luck of the draw I got into Atlantic Vet College on Prince Edward Island.

Dr. Ivan Zak:
And I went through the whole program there. I could say again, but I should say that it’s for the first time, because the knowledge that I acquired from Ukrainian vet school with more agricultural oriented or nuclear war oriented. So technically I have two DVM educations, but I think that what really propelled me, not only in the veterinary profession, but also in integration as the newcomer into the professional world, because when you’re graduated from the North American recognized school, when the [Navalie 00:10:08] was a part of your education, not this after effect when you moved here, it does put you in position with everybody else. So I thought that that was great from that perspective as well. On top of the knowledge that I acquired along the way in how treating animals. So that was the second vet school story.

Stacy Pursell:
Wow. And then keep going. So what happened next, because I’m curious about you came out of the second vet school and then became general manager of IDEXX. So walk us through those steps that you had next in your career.

Dr. Ivan Zak:
There’s quite a lot in between those steps. So this is where the unusual stuff continues or begins, I should say. So the entrepreneurship, I think now that I look back I understand that’s where it got under my skin. And I went in my last rotation at the vet school. One of the rotations that I did was international experience. So you could go to another country and for two, three weeks and gain experience in some form of veterinary domain. So I went to Moscow, Russia, and I wanted to learn a little bit more surgery even with the level of veterinary medicine. There was a lot of human doctors that would do advanced surgeries in the veterinary domain. So when I came there, I wanted to learn surgeries. There was a lot of human surgeons that were performing interesting surgeries like PDA, orthopedic surgeries.

Dr. Ivan Zak:
And when I arrived in the first week, we did a mitral valve transplants to a dog. So it was a very advanced and interesting. So I went there for three weeks and while I was there, I wanted to submit a histopathology sample to the lab of the animal. And then they told me that they don’t have histopath. And I was confused. I said, “How do you receive your samples?” And they said, “Well, if you really want, we can send it to a human lab and they will do it. And it takes about four to six weeks. So if it’s cancer we’ll progress anyways. So we don’t do it that often.” I just noted that when I came back to Canada, I graduated, but then I talked to a head of pathology lab or just reference lab in the vet hospital, no, sorry. In the Atlantic Vet College.

Dr. Ivan Zak:
And the head of pathology said, “Do you want to build a lab in Russia?” And I said, “Absolutely not, I just moved from that country to here. So I’m not going back.” And then I went outside and I thought for probably 20 minutes, I came back and I said, “Let’s do it.” So I ended up packing bags and going to literally with just suitcase to Russia to build the first diagnostic lab in Russian Federation. And I ended up doing that. So we build the first lab in there. And this is where I received my first really a rough lesson on collaboration, alignment and everything else as the leader, because I ended up leaving that organization, but not on my own accord. We misaligned with the co-founders. So I was a founder and I was the vice president of the Russian operations there.

Dr. Ivan Zak:
It was very interesting actually, the way we build it is because we had got funding from Canadian Promise, from PI and to get the funding we needed to employ people in Canada. So in 2007, I was processing samples in the lab, in Russia and we were digitalizing them, sending them to Canada into the vet school. And vet pathologists in vet school were interpreting them. So we actually employed pathologists in Canada. And later Lacuna I think guys that’s a startup that sold couple of [inaudible 00:14:06] I think. They did that startup, I guess, 15 years later, but I was doing that in Russia in 2007. But the roughest experience was that one morning I walked into my office and it was a regular call with the president of the company.

Dr. Ivan Zak:
And then he called everybody in for a stand-up meeting and on a speaker phone in front of all the staff that I hired train and build the lab, fired me and said, “Turn in the keys, the computer and walk outside and we’ll change the locks behind.” So that was a very humbling experience in my life, which taught me a lot. But I think with the learnings from it, it propelled a little further. So that’s how I ended up with that project. I did get a small exit out of it, which was not significant, but it was enough for me to drive across Canada from Atlantic provinces to Vancouver and Vancouver Island and continue with the path that I chose while at that school, I wanted to be an emergency veterinarian.

Stacy Pursell:
So what was that like? You’d worked in industry and then now you’re in a veterinary practice doing emergency medicine. What was that experience like for you?

Dr. Ivan Zak:
It was interesting because I felt that the academic part in the vet school wasn’t my strongest, but the practical skills were pretty good. Throughout the vet school, I worked overnight, I worked in the emergency hospital in the vet school and during the day I was sleeping in the class and then doing homework. And while I was overnight in the hospital, but that gave me a lot of practical skills. So a lot of new graduates when they leave the nest of the vet school, they are afraid to jump into things like emergency, and I felt pretty strong jumping into that right away. But I did have a year lag from that experience and doing this lab thing. But I had great mentors. So I was in the Central Hospital in Victoria.

Dr. Ivan Zak:
I was pure ER vet, and that’s where I learned that veterinary medicine shouldn’t be paid on commission. And they actually, the first year, I think we had this discussion before by the non-commission, but they put me on commission there and I was making probably the highest pay in my entire graduate class. But I quickly realized that it’s misguiding what I’m believe in. And it’s just pushing the prices on the customer that is in desperation because we sell services and the sale that the emergency veterinarian does as much easier than the sale that the GP does. And you have collapsing animal in front of you, you need four and a half thousand dollars for a surgery, an overnight stay with a transfusion and you put that in front of a customer. They have to buy it or not.

Dr. Ivan Zak:
So it’s a very pushed urgent sale. And probably vets listening to this will hate the word sale, but we do sell services. That’s pretty much it. And I felt like I was overselling because of the commission. So after that’s throughout my entire 12 year clinical career, I never wanted to work on commission again, but I loved the experience. And the only difficulty there is that in that became a later focus of my career because you do so much as an emergency veterinarian, you realize we had four on six off schedule, so you could work four nights and everyone, then six days to rest. So I thought that was wonderful. I could explore, go on little vacations for six days in between.

Dr. Ivan Zak:
Well, what I ended up doing is taking the relief work in six days. So I would work four on six on and then four on and then another six on. So I was really making a lot of money, but what I didn’t know, I was burning the candle on both ends, which resulted in 2009 with a pretty severe burnout. So I ended up in a very, very dark place. I had to stop practicing for six months and I had to seek professional help to get out of that dark place. And that’s later on, and especially now in my career reflected in what I want to focus now, because at that point I was really ashamed. I felt like I broke and I see all these other vets and mentors that work with me and they didn’t burn out. So probably I was the weak one.

Dr. Ivan Zak:
And that’s a problem I think of the whole burnout in the industry because we are ashamed of our burnout. And I think that the way we were conditioned in the vet school or internship is that this is such a heroic act of taking yet another case, being sleep deprived, not eating enough, not sleeping enough. And it’s all a part of the profession. It doesn’t have to be. So I think that, that was an interesting experience for me.

Stacy Pursell:
That was the turning point in your life and your career. Talk about that, if you will, because I know then you went on to do some big things with that experience. So talk about that if you will.

Dr. Ivan Zak:
Yeah, it didn’t reflect immediately on what I do, but it’s certainly slowed down the amount of work that I want to do. And I switched more to the locum work, but I can’t say that. So I thought that locum or relief. I can say that ideally. And I tell everybody right now that if you’re a locum, you can have a perfect work-life balance. You can make your own schedule and you can work as much as you want. You can take long vacations if you want, and you can make as much money as you want. But what I did, I didn’t regulate it. And then I didn’t have anybody to control that. And I think what another problem in the industry is that if I hire a locum or relief vet, that I don’t know how many shifts he or she worked before coming here.

Dr. Ivan Zak:
And now I’m more and more talking about this whole burnout story. And almost like, do we need to professionally regulate the amount of hours people work as pilots do truck drivers do? And then we are the ones that are working long nights, the lives of the animals depend on us. And we have controlled substances in our hands that can either lead to addiction or suicide. And we are not controlled how much we work. So I think that we are the profession. This is probably an easy start. We do a lot of mindfulness, meditation, recommendation, and wellbeing, which is great. I do actually all of that, but how do you make person to meditate? You can’t really say, “Hey, and now stop working meditate for 10 minutes,” and you can’t do that. But what we can do as management is to say, “You can be at work 12 hours in a row without lunch break, you can’t work six days in a row with 12 hour shifts. You have to go on vacation at least every six months or once a year.”

Dr. Ivan Zak:
Those are the things as management we can actually regulate. And I think that that’s what now I’m more looking into, applying to everything I do with the Galaxy and the Vet Integrations as we were consulting consolidators. I think there is a lot of learning that I took from there. And obviously there’s other things I think that in vet school, we should be conditioning people to be in these heroes of your own expense. And there’s another thing that is important. I think recently I interviewed several veterinarians on this and I was just trying to understand what is the work-life balance? And for a lot of people, it changes as they mature and as they go through phases in life.

Dr. Ivan Zak:
So maybe for someone younger with no kids working five shifts in a whole 12 hours and then go surfing and do something fun is okay. But for someone who has kids and didn’t realize yet, that’s now there’s another competing demand at home, and then you’re still dedicated to profession as you were. But now you’re getting anxiety that you can’t interpret because you have kids at home that you also worried about. So all of those things, I think we don’t teach veterinarians that all of these things will come into play at certain phases in life.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, yeah, that’s a lot of stuff there. And we’ll talk about that because I know that you’ve got a new role now Galaxy Vets, I’d love for you to share with our listeners about Galaxy Vets and how that’s different and the kinds of projects that you’re working on there.

Dr. Ivan Zak:
Galaxy Vets was a result of many things, the dots that connected as Steve Jobs said at some point that “You can only look back and look at the dots. You can never see them in front of you, but you just can hope that they will connect.” And I don’t remember the exact wording, but something like that. So in addition to practicing veterinarian, what it resulted in, which I think was a big leap in changing my career is Smart Flow. Smart Flow was the software product that we developed out of the blue. I had never built software and neither that I build labs before I build one. So with Smart Flow, there was just an idea of improving something in the veterinary hospital.

Dr. Ivan Zak:
And we ended up building this product. I’m sure that quite a few listeners heard about it. And then 650 hospitals later, globally, we sold it to IDEXX. And I was exposed to several interesting things along the way. First of all, I learned how to build software products, which was very interesting. I understood how to build Remote Team, which is also interesting, and it was quite handy during the COVID times because I didn’t feel COVID. Last eight years, I was global and remote. And once we sold it to IDEXX, I did become a general manager of their division then this is the software division. And this is where I both smart flow and I’d ex experience. I bumped into consolidators as a new entity on our market and in our domain. And it’s a completely different beast from what we dealt with before.

Dr. Ivan Zak:
Because if you think about the purpose and the goals of the veterinarian, it’s to help the pets and to help the pet owners with their sick pets. And if you think about consolidators, it’s to produce return on investment to your investors, and as much as consolidators want to say that this is about providing pet care, it is not because if you look through this strategy that these companies have, and what they talk about in the boardroom, they’re talking about numbers, they’re not talking about the quality of medicine, they’re not talking about the quality of life of the veterinarians. They’re talking about revenue, EBITDA, and expenses. So understanding that it was interesting to think that, okay, there’s a new entity in our domain, which is great, because if done right, it can provide a lot of opportunities to the industry, but how do we exploit this opportunity?

Dr. Ivan Zak:
So basically I left IDEXX. It was too corporate and too slow for me. And we decided to build Veterinary Integration Solutions, which became a company which helped consolidators to articulate the strategy, converted into the metrics, and then depending on where they are in their maturity phase, to help them to build a roadmap, how to advance towards their goals, whatever those are. And along the way, we were building a software product that can support and create muscle memory behind this. It turned out that there is no blueprint of how to build consolidation in any domain. There’s no blueprint for dental consolidation, pharmacy consolidation, physiotherapy, or vet clinics.

Dr. Ivan Zak:
So we took an ambitious role to develop, and we did the blueprint of how to build consolidations from ground up and in the last two and a half years, we held several consolidators and we analyze more than couple dozens to build several aspects of consolidation, whether it’s the business development pipeline, whether it’s the operational efficiency, whether it’s a support organization.

Dr. Ivan Zak:
So we essentially in VIS created a platform for consolidation with the methodology behind it, where we can assess where you are and then take from there and build the next steps. So that was the consultancy part. But as we were watching the several consolidators go through successful exits in front of us, we thought well, they were not all buying into the whole burnout aspect of it because the methodology is there, but we wanted to do the methodology with the burnout prevention in mind. And I didn’t see a big appetite for that, but as you know with your line of work, Stacy, that there’s such a scarcity of veterinarians. And I think that this is finally when you don’t treat people right, when you don’t pay attention to burnout, it reflects on the numbers quite significantly because it takes 10 months to hire veterinarian.

Dr. Ivan Zak:
And if an average production of a veterinary is 600K you’re half a million out. And it takes a lot of money to find and recruit a veterinarian. And so I think this is the time where we particularly need to pay attention to that. So the Galaxy project landed on my desk where we help to develop this strategy, do the founding team where it’s a combination of building healthcare system, what we call it’s a vertically integrated system, where we partner with the local clinics in a large urban areas. And then we’re building a specialty hospital in the middle, which will integrate basically the services that GPs now are sending to BluePearl method or Ethos that they can send to their internal network. And then instead of sending labs samples to IDEXX or Antech, they can send also into the central facility.

Dr. Ivan Zak:
And then the main thing is that this organization is owned by all. So basically all the veterinarians, whether it’s GP associate owner specialist, they have options in the organization based on the tenure, how long they worked in it, but also technicians as well as receptionists because all of these are scarcity right now. So we want to build an organization with the burnout in mind and as our corporate social responsibility and with equity belonging to all involved in this organization. So that’s the result of all of it. We kind of now this organization Galaxy Vet became a core customer for VIS, both organizations still exist. And VIS becoming a more the thought leader in consolidation and the burnout prevention and Galaxy is a core customer for VIS.

Stacy Pursell:
Hi, I understand that Galaxy Vets is looking for partners to expand, what are some ways to get involved with that?

Dr. Ivan Zak:
There’s three ways to become a part of Galaxy. One is you’re looking to sell your practice, but you don’t want to retire. We’re not looking for people that want to retire in one, two, three years. So we’re looking for people that are entrepreneurial, that they want to still practice for five to 10 years. But the commitment is five years and they can roll their practice up to 100%. The proceeds from the sale of their practice, into the parent organization. Right now most private equity owned organizations allow about 10 to 15% role, because they want to benefit from the upside. And this is exactly what we’re doing different. We want to give veterinary medicine back to veterinarians. So instead of taking money from private equity and buying the clinics, we’re just saying, “Hey, take your clinic and roll it into parent organization and become an owner of the whole healthcare system of the specialty hospitals and the lab,” and it all belongs to these people.

Dr. Ivan Zak:
So that’s number one. Number two, if you’re not ready to sell, you can become a clinic that invests into Galaxy in return, sending their lab samples, your cases and specialty cases to our central facility. And the third way is to just become an employee, whether it’s in GP hospital that we own, or a central facility, anybody between the receptionist, technician, managing managers, and obviously doctors, whether it’s specialists, the RGP, everybody gets options. So you essentially becoming an owner of the hospital without owning a hospital. And the unique thing is also about the relief veterinarians. So relief veterinarians essentially work on hourly rate. They’re going to be a part of Galaxy and there also will be owners. So by the time the five years pass, they will get an equal of if they were partners in a small veterinary clinic, as a check.

Stacy Pursell:
Also, you were talking about the burnout investigation that you conducted last year, and then you’re doing it again now, can you tell us more about how people can contribute to the burnout investigation?

Dr. Ivan Zak:
Yeah, this was a great part of my MBA thesis. So I graduated from the program which was focused on the international health care management. And my thesis for dissertation were about optimizing management in the veterinary organization, specifically consolidators, to decrease the burnout in veterinary domain. So as the research of that part, I wanted to understand how much our industry is burned out. There was a little bit effected because it was not as pure pre-COVID era. I didn’t compare that. So it was right into the first year of COVID. So it did affect it a little bit, but the results were pretty clear cut that the industry is burned out. There was one finding. I really wanted to find out if that’s true or not, because everybody’s talking about it. But I was like, “Is it like a shark attack?” When one happens, everybody’s talking about it, but the statistics are really low.

Dr. Ivan Zak:
So yes, we are burned out. Two, what we found is that the younger veterinarians are more burned out than more senior ones, which was interesting. And the first five years of graduation, they burn out. And number three, what we found is that technicians are burned out more than veterinarians, which is very important. So this year we are repeating this study, we’re running the same professional fulfillment index just to get a temperature gauge on the industry, but we’re adding to it, the work-life balance questionnaire, which is the main questionnaire for it. And some questions about potential resolution of the issues that we have. And we’re hoping to, again, collect at least the same number about 1,500 respondents. If you guys that listened to this can help us, if you’re a practicing veterinarian technician manager, please answer the questions in the survey. It will really help to understand us the industry, and we will directly implement it into Galaxy Vets. And we’ll be continuously fighting the burnout.

Stacy Pursell:
What are your thoughts on why the younger veterinarians are burning out faster than older veterinarians?

Dr. Ivan Zak:
I have couple of hypotheses they’re not proven. And I’m happy to hear feedback about this, but I have my own experience mixed into it. So there’s a couple of things. One I think that veterinarians are extremely goal oriented people. So if you think about that person who says, “Oh, when I was eight years old, I wanted to be a vet.” And then if you asked some vets, they’ll say, “Yeah, I wanted to be a veterinarian since I was eight years old.” The process of becoming a veterinarian, you your mid to late ’20s from eight years, that’s a 15 plus year journey that someone was so goal oriented that they went through high school, got good marks there, got their bachelor in sciences. Did really good credits there. And then they entered the vet school with a 13 people, proceed competition, went through their hardest school. I think one of the hardest it’s comparable to medical or law school and then graduated.

Dr. Ivan Zak:
So that was a 15 year path towards a certain goal. And now they arrive to the exam room from nine to five, poking vaccines and looking into the ears. So I think that if we don’t have the next goal after graduation, if you don’t set it properly, something remote, like five-year goal, three year goal or 10 year goal. Then you can end up in the place where you find yourself meaningless. What do you do day to day? There’s no big dream to chase. And I think that’s a big burden and I’ve interviewed a lot of entrepreneurs in our industry close to 150. And all of them were extremely happy because they found a diversity and new goals in their career. And I find that those that actually that advanced their education towards the specialty, they stretch that a little further and they set the next goal. But when they reached that, they realized that it’s the same thing.

Dr. Ivan Zak:
So I talked to a friend of mine, Patrick Welch he’s the CEO now of VetBloom, which is educational platform. He’s an ophthalmologist. So he finished vet school. And you said, “I didn’t want to talk about the vaccines every day. So I ended up becoming an ophthalmologist.” And then he realized he was going to be talking about glaucoma every day. So it’s a different talk track, but still the same set of day-to-day same burden. So he ended up becoming an entrepreneur and build a very successful educational platform and he’s happy every day. So I think that goal setting is one of the major things in this younger veterinarians, because they just get out of this momentum of reaching the goal and then go to full stop.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, I look forward to seeing the results of the burnout investigation study. I hope that you’ll come back in and share that with us. I’m curious, Ivan, what has been the most surprising thing to you during your career in the animal health industry and the veterinary profession?

Dr. Ivan Zak:
Separation between the purpose in consolidators and veterinarians. I think there’s a tremendous disconnect between the corporate organizations and the clinics that they acquire. I was pretty surprised that out of 50 consolidators, we have only I think three or four that are run by veterinarians. And veterinarians are not geniuses when it comes to business. And I can say that because I’m a veterinarian, so I don’t want to offend anybody, but it’s difficult to become a business person after you did the whole education for the eight years at least to treat animals. But there are people with MBA on top of DVM and still, we don’t have leaders in these organizations that do understand the industry. So that disconnect between return on investment versus helping pets is quite significant if you dig a little bit into it. On a surface, it’s all great on the website, core values are brilliant, but whether they practice them or not, I’m not sure.

Stacy Pursell:
Interesting. Well, how have you seen the animal health industry and veterinary profession change over the years?

Dr. Ivan Zak:
I think that the character of the veterinarians changed significantly through, I think my career, I graduated in Canada in 2006. So I was still on the tail of baby boomers, which were dedicated people not burned out. And to them, it was like any professional. It was, if you’re a lawyer, you’re a lawyer, your entire life, nobody thinks that you’ll become a pilot or zookeeper. And then if you’re a doctor, you’re a doctor. And if you’re a veterinarian, you’re a veterinarian, you graduate, you work as a veterinarian, then you retire as a veterinarian and sell your clinic and that’s your retirement. And everybody knows you. Right now I think that our profession has a limit. Unless you pivot within the profession. I feel like I pivoted many times anywhere from building a lab, then doing the vet thing, then building a software then building a company for consolidators and now building the healthcare system, it’s all within the proficiency.

Dr. Ivan Zak:
You can pivot within it without leaving the profession, but I get tired from doing the same thing for a long time. And I think it’s not only me. Maybe it’s the millennials, I think it’s generational. I think that’s a part in why younger veterinarians burnout, because right now people value work-life balance much more than before, and they don’t want to work 60 hours a week. They don’t want to make all the money in the world. They want to enjoy life. And I think it’s positive, but I think that’s where the struggle of our profession right now, because we have not enough veterinarians, we have overwhelming amount of pets, and we have the corporate organizations, they’re trying to cut the costs and make veterinarians to work more, throwing more money at them, which they are not interested in. So it’s a vicious cycle, which I don’t know if we’re doing the right things in the profession to combat it, but that’s an interesting phenomenon to observe.

Stacy Pursell:
It is interesting. Well, what is your crystal ball say about the future of the animal health industry and the veterinary profession?

Dr. Ivan Zak:
Well, I think that the bigger fish will swallow the smaller fish in the consolidation world. I mean, this is happening and that’s why all the private equity backed consolidators are there because they want their three to five year flip and make the return on investment, which is great. And then the bigger organizations, I think will figure out the workflows that satisfy the work-life balance that the younger veterinarians want these days. And finally, I hope that the technology will pick up and a couple of organizations that are good at this, modern vet is a good system where they leverage technology to scale their services. So we need to come up with the ways to scale the services, not people. It can be linear. I constantly speak about the fact that even pandemic didn’t convert veterinarians to usage of telemedicine properly. We all talk about it, but we don’t use it. And I think that eventually it has to come into play and just more digital, more technology that will scale the processes, not people.

Stacy Pursell:
Well I’m curious too Ivan, what mentor has made the biggest impact on your career?

Dr. Ivan Zak:
Very interesting question. There’s probably two, there’s veterinary mentorship, and then there’s business mentorship. So I would say that the veterinary mentorship would be my mentor in Central Victoria Veterinary Hospital. And then on the business side James Barola, who was an entrepreneur in residence when we came with a first presentation of Smart Flow, I was two minutes late on the appointment because my bus was late and didn’t have a car. And I ran in, my presentation didn’t work, and I was all frazzled, but as much as I could explain it in words, he said, “It looks like you have a startup to make,” and he accepted me into the incubator and that’s where it all started. And it’s been a great mentor for me.

Stacy Pursell:
What advice would you give the younger version of yourself?

Dr. Ivan Zak:
I can tell, I don’t know. It’s interesting because recently I was reflecting more and more in what happened in my life. And I don’t think that I can take any of the components out of it. I do know that being fired as a CEO was great, a great learning experience. I know that burnout, which almost ended my life was an experience that I can transpose right now and help others. So I can take anything out of it. I just can turn back and connect the dots and continue looking forward, hoping that the dots will connect again.

Stacy Pursell:
I think that was the quote that you were talking about with Steve Jobs. I think he said “You can’t connect the dots going forward. You have to connect the dots, looking back” and that’s very good advice. Ivan, what message or principle do you wish you could teach everyone?

Dr. Ivan Zak:
I think that one thing that I wish I learned a little earlier is to respect the work-life balance and understand where your capabilities are and where you might not know that you’re burning the candle on two ends. This is the hardest thing about our profession. The people that are most affected with the burnout, they don’t feel it until they’re at the very end of it. And sometimes it’s too late and we know it from the alarming statistics, from our domain.

Stacy Pursell:
Some of our guests say that they’ve had a key book that they’ve read that really help them with their career or with their life. Ivan, do you have a key book in your life that is impacted you the most?

Dr. Ivan Zak:
Yeah. I think that a lot in Galaxy and in VIS the management methodology is very influenced by the theory of constraint and the author of the book it’s called The Goal. It’s very interesting. It’s written as a novel, but it talks about the Kanban system and the process optimization. And the author is Eliyahu Goldratt. It’s a classic. And I think that every MBA course has it, but if people in our domain want to understand how to improve processes, this is probably something that will help significantly anybody in any profession to streamline, even in life your processes.

Stacy Pursell:
Good. Good. Well, Ivan, you’ve got 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 today?

Dr. Ivan Zak:
Well, I don’t know. I think that look after yourself before, especially veterinarians, don’t get into a trap of high multiples today and make sure that you’re chasing the dream. And when you achieve that, make sure you’re chasing the next dream and it’s well determined and defined before you had the previous dream.

Stacy Pursell:
So I want to thank you again, Ivan, for being our guest on today’s podcast. It was really great to visit with you.

Dr. Ivan Zak:
Thank you for having me.