Episode 43 – Dr. Joel Parker

A Standing Ovation
Dr. Joel Parker shares his journey from a new private practice owner to a leader in “Owner-Independent” Practice™ management. He reveals the strategies that transformed his practice and now fuel Parker Business Solutions’ mission to create thriving, Standing Ovation Practices.

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.

Welcome to The People of Animal Health Podcast. On today’s show, we are talking with Dr. Joel Parker. Dr. Joel Parker, a Vetrepreneur, speaker, author, and longtime champion of private practice ownership. After jumping into private practice two years post vet school, Dr. Parker faced the challenges of managing day-to-day operations, but eventually discovered a management system that allowed him to create a thriving owner-independent practice. Since then, he’s founded several successful ventures and has dedicated his career to helping other practice owners achieve similar success. Now through Parker Business Systems, he’s focused on transforming practices into standing ovation practices. Please welcome Dr. Joel Parker to The People of Animal Health Podcast. Dr. Parker, how are you today?

Dr. Joel Parker:
Great, Stacy. Thanks for having me on. I’m really happy to be here, and yeah, I’m looking forward to this. It’ll be a lot of fun.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, so excited to have you here, Joel. We’ve known each other for a number of years through the industry, through Vet Partners. I followed your work for a number of years, but I’d love to start off at the beginning. What was your life like growing up, and where did you grow up?

Dr. Joel Parker:
That’s a wonderful question because I had kind of a funny background. I was born in Alaska, believe it or not. My father was a marine biologist, and he did his early PhD thesis work up there looking, walking through salmon streams and so forth. So in about 1960, we moved down to Canada, down to Vancouver Island, and I grew up on a waterfront house there with chipmunks and flying squirrels living in the house and owls and crows and whatever the local neighborhood and friends of my father’s would bring to us. So I had a very early childhood with really unusual animals. I didn’t get my first cat until I was well out of high school and my first dog until I met my wife. So I started off with this very early love of these wonderfully fun animals. The flying squirrels would get up in the middle of the night. They’re nocturnal. So I’d get up in the middle of the night and play with them. They’d be flying around the house. It’s quite something.

Stacy Pursell:
When my dad was growing up, he had a pet squirrel that lived in their house.

Dr. Joel Parker:
Yeah. All right.

Stacy Pursell:
So at what point did you decide to become a veterinarian?

Dr. Joel Parker:
I think I looked early on, and I think it was back in the days when, well, there was an author named Gerald Durrell that grew up in Corfu, I think, and had all kinds of little animals and so forth, and I’d read those books. I just got the idea of working with animals out of high school, wondering, drifting a little bit career-wise. I did a year of university, and I thought, yeah, Veterinary medicine, that would be fun. That would be working with animals and using my hands and skills like that. So I would probably say the decision was out of high school a year or two after doing a year at university. Wondering, why am I going to university? What am I going to do here? And then, really looked at veterinary medicine and went, yeah, that’s the path to take right there.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, and then you jumped into private practice ownership just two years after veterinary school. What drove you to take that leap so early in your career?

Dr. Joel Parker:
Well, it’s an interesting one because I’ve been working now, as you mentioned, with a lot of veterinarians, thousands of them over the years. And I would say the vast majority are like me, that ended up in practice ownership because we wanted the autonomy to practice good medicine. We did not want to be governed by another practice owner telling us to practice this way or that way. In your first year or so, you’re kind of looking for guidance, but after a while you begin to chart your own course of high quality medicine.

The only practices I’ve ever worked in and bought and sold of all been AHA credited practices, so my standards were high. And the first practice I worked in, I just kind of felt that it wasn’t the level that I wanted to practice at. And I was also doing emergency work that was very high level, so I could see that I could do that. I started doing some relief work in the smallest AHA practice in North America, a little practice called Animal Medical Clinic that was privately owned. It was 860 square feet. And after a couple of months of doing relief work, the owner said, “Joel, I’m burnt out. The clients like you. You should buy the practice.” I said, “Oh, okay. Let’s do that.”

So it wasn’t any master plan of doing an MBA and doing a big market. It was none of that. It was simply, I wanted the freedom and autonomy to do my own thing, and I think that’s really still today. I like the freedom and autonomy to do my own thing, to make my own decisions. I think that’s true of a lot of practice owners out there when you talk to them. We got into it for the love of medicine and wanting to do our own thing. It was really an afterthought that we had to worry about hiring and finances and marketing and all that kind of stuff.

Stacy Pursell:
Yeah, all those things that come along with practice ownership. And you often speak about the stresses of being an owner-dependent practice owner. What was the breaking point that led you to rethink how you approached practice management?

Dr. Joel Parker:
Yeah, well, I started off jumping in thinking that the only thing I had to do was remember payday. Payday was every two weeks, and that was going to be it. But I was in a highly, highly competitive area. In fact, I don’t know if the video is being recorded, but if you look behind there on those coastal mountains, that’s West Vancouver over there just right behind me. And that’s where my practice was, the highest per capita income practice in all of Canada, and I was surrounded by 17 other veterinarians.

So as it turns out, after a while, there was not enough business coming in the door. I was carrying a mortgage both to the original owner and to a major bank, and there was not enough money left over. And I think it really came to a head, Stacy, kind of in the early part of 1989, somewhere in there, maybe the spring of 1989. I’m not that old, right? I wish, right. But so in 1989, I was right in the middle of a difficult surgery and I was a good surgeon at that time, but sweating it a little bit as you can do. And I got a call from the bank manager that there wasn’t enough money in the bank account and that I should go put some in there. And I remember distinctly of me thinking, for gosh sakes, I’m working as hard as I can work. I don’t know what else to do.

And I think that’s the pivotal moment right there is realizing that you’re good at something, but you really don’t know what you’re doing in some of these other areas. That prompted me to start looking around and reading books and discovery of profit loss statements. There was a number of consultants out there. There was Michael Gerber with the E-Myth that was out. That was a good book, good starter book, but it lacked some teeth and application.

And then, finally there was a company out of the US that just started calling and calling and saying, “Hey, we’re coming up to Vancouver. We’re putting on a management seminar for veterinarians and dentists and other people at one of the Fairmont hotels, a beautiful hotel in downtown Vancouver. Can we confirm you?” And I was kind of grumpy, and I said, “Sure, okay.” And then, after a while I said, “Okay, I’ll come if you quit calling me.” I was kind of grumpy.

And so, I walked into that seminar. And here’s this speaker, very dynamic speaker, very good communicator talking about something called the Hubbard Management System. And this was a system whereby you start tracking numbers and objective numbers. Not only do you track things like all of our software systems do, we have all this data, but importantly what to do with the data and how to manage with the data. And that is what I was looking for because before that point in time, Stacy, I was like many practice owners. You’re just showing up every day. You’re kind of drifting. There’s no real direction. If you have a slow week, you don’t know what to do about it. If you have a swampy week, you don’t know what to do about it. You’re just completely at the ebb and flow of what goes on.

And here was a management system that really started to focus and put you more in the driver’s seat that if you’re having a slow week, this is what you do to get busier. If you’re too busy, this is what you can do. If you look at it, that’s putting you in good control of your situation. If you compare it to flying a plane or driving a car, you speed up, slow down, break, turn the corner when you need to. You’re in control, and that’s what the management system gave me was to put that control back in the system. Well, not put it back in, but give me the control for the first time.

Stacy Pursell:
So how did discovering the Hubbard Management System change the trajectory of your career at that point? And then, how did it help you to build an owner-independent practice?

Dr. Joel Parker:
Yeah. Well, up in that time, the practice was owner-dependent. Everything revolved around me. If I wasn’t there, then the income dropped. People would come to me. We hired a survey group later on to do a survey in a dog park and discovered that clients would take their dogs to the Ampleside Veterinary Hospital or the Marine Drive Veterinary Hospital, or they’d go see Joel Parker. They didn’t even know the name of the practice, and back in the day of personal checks, they’d write checks out to me personally. And I’d have to say, “No, we have a stamp,” and all that stuff.

Anyway, so highly, highly owner-dependent, working until 6, 7, 8 o’clock. And on starting to study the Hubbard Management System, I was twinned up with a good coach who held my feet to the fire and started to get me focused on applying basic principles of marketing to get busier, started applying basic principles of hiring very, very good up-tone positive people and getting rid of the passive-aggressive negative ones of which I had a bunch in the practice, real toxic ones. So I started to clean the practice out.

So it was like an evolution. While we’re marketing and getting busier and focusing on very unique fun plans to get more new clients in there and get more repeat clients, I’m also doing better. I’m starting to fire the passive-aggressive ones and starting to hire better and better people. It’s not that I never made a mistake after that, but I became highly aware of it. As you know, you’re in the recruiting industry, and my feeling is to run a great practice and really push it to where you can get owner-independent. That means your practice is running on systems. Those systems are being monitored and run by great people, your kind of executive layer before you, that head tech, head receptionist. All those people, they’re running these systems. To do that, you’ve got to find quality people, otherwise they drop the ball, and it doesn’t work. And if that happens, it comes back on you.

So I was able to evolve into that and get down to working 20, 25 hours as a DVM, which was really fun. It really, really is fun. Then you’re seeing the clients like, you’re doing the major surgeries that you like to do, and you’re also pushing everything else off onto other people, onto those competent people that you find. It probably took me five, six years to find a great veterinarian, one that was really in line. Her concepts were in line with our concepts of quality medicine, who had a good sense of humor, who was fun to work with, all those kinds of boxes that get ticked. It took me a little while to find that. And once we started finding that, then I could leverage and scale the business up.

Stacy Pursell:
That shows the key of the importance of having the right people in your business. And then you expanded. You went into, you had veterinary endoscopy solutions. So what were the biggest challenges you faced when expanding into veterinary endoscopy solutions and canine equipment, and how did you manage to juggle these ventures alongside your veterinary practice?

Dr. Joel Parker:
Well, this started to kind of push me into the Vetrepreneur, veterinarian turned entrepreneur, where I’m working 20 hours a week. If I’ve got time, I’m riding my mountain bike. It’s before my son was born. My wife is working in the practice with me. And I got really interested in endoscopy, so I bought some endoscopes and worked with Dr. Todd Tams out of LA and all of his courses and so forth, and then started using the same principles I learned to expand the veterinary practice on promotion. Started to promote the endoscopy service within my community and started to get a lot of referrals and became a very good endoscopist, and I had some really good wins on that. That one was a lot of running around the country, and the scopes were expensive. I’m not sure I made a lot of profit on it, but it was really fun.

That’s one of the things we’ll run into, Stacy, as a practitioner gets older, is that the routine starts to get a bit too vanilla, and it’s a bit too… It’s not exciting enough. As veterinarians, we like cases. We like helping, and if all it is that we’re doing vaccines and spays and neuters day in and day out, it can get a little bit, let’s call it vanilla. And so, having a special interest, not a specialist, not a specialty, but a special interest in endoscopy kept my head really in the game. It was really fun. I probably scoped a couple of thousand dogs and cats and seeing all kinds of great stuff up.

Then I had a dog trainer that I worked with that brought in this funny, dirty, rusty, kind of woven collar with a triangular chain unit in it called the martingale. She said, “Have you ever seen these before? I can’t find them. A guy made these.” And so, I saw the opportunity there and started to source beautiful tubular climbing nylon out of South Carolina, Blue Ridge Weavers. I spec’d out and sourced beautiful custom-made chains from Herm. Sprenger in Germany. We had a lot of sowers in Vancouver at that time for the climbing industry. The outdoor brand Arc’teryx was started here in Vancouver. You can see all those mountains behind me. Those are all climbing mountains. And so, I hired a sewer to run a big bartack machine, and we started making these collars, these martingale collars. I would take them to the local pet stores, and some of the collars were anywhere from $20 to $45. And this is back in the mid-nineties, and these retailers would look at that and say, “Nah, I need it for five bucks.” They couldn’t get their head around it.

But the cool thing was when I would go to dog shows. There was a very major dog show every fall. When we went to that first dog show, there was dog owners from all over US and Canada streaming past our little booth, and they’d stop, and their eyes would get wide, and they would buy everything we had. So we knew that there was a demand in the end consumer for this, and this is really at the dawn of internet shopping and stuff like that. We eventually morphed into selling online and a couple other products, but it was a really fun company. We called it Canine Equipment – Gear For Dog. It was a little bit tongue-in-cheek. At the year 2000, we showed a picture of a dog in the water with a stick, with an arrow pointing at the stick saying, “Y2K-certified stick.” We had a lot of fun with that company. It was very, very silly, but very, very high quality products.

Stacy Pursell:
Did you end up selling that company, or where is it now?

Dr. Joel Parker:
I ended up selling that company. In about ’01, I got the opportunity to go and move into the consulting business. I had run the practice then for 15 years and taken it up to a very good level, what I call a standing ovation practice, one that clients speak highly of you in the community. In fact, that’s one of the most important things I’ve worked with brand new clients is exactly what is your standing in the community. And Stacy, of interest to you, not only what is your standing in the eyes of your pet owners, but what is the standing in your eyes of the local associate doctors and technicians in your area? What do they think about your practice? And typically with many practices, they don’t think anything at all. It’s not that they don’t like you, they just don’t know about your practice.

So one of the key systems I put in is a very, very good public relations system, which is turning up the spotlight in the community, both communities, pet owners and veterinarian professionals, on your practice. And that’s what I did in my practice. At the end, Stacy, I didn’t have to go and advertise a lot for veterinarians. They would hear about us through drug reps and people like that, and they would come to my doorstep and say, “Hey, Joel, I heard really great things about your practice. Are you hiring?” And sometimes we were, sometimes we weren’t. But we started to attract because we were good. We managed well, we were highly profitable, we charged well, we had fun. We were a very, very good practice.

Stacy Pursell:
It’s a great recruiting tool.

Dr. Joel Parker:
It absolutely is.

Stacy Pursell:
You have helped thousands of veterinarians through Veterinary Practice Solutions. What are the most common mistakes you see private practice owners making, and how can they avoid them?

Dr. Joel Parker:
The most common mistake is the feeling that if they just work harder, it’s going to turn around. And that rarely happens. There was Albert Einstein’s famous quote of insanity, doing the thing over and over again and expecting a different result. That really applies there. If you are experiencing an adverse effect in your practice, such as you’re tight for money, you’re tight for time, or both, or you’re stressed out from the people you work with, then there is simply something that you need to go and study. And you can, you’re smart enough as a practice owner to run a great practice. You don’t have to sell to corporate and let them do it all because they’re not any smarter than you are. You can do it yourself, but it is going to take some training. And that’s what I offer, training on how to hire or how to sift, how to find those 10%, how to get the PR dialed up in your practice so that you become the practice that people want to work at, things like that. So the biggest mistake is to think they can do it without some training.

And then secondly, another mistake is thinking they can never leave the practice, that I have to be there. And I get that because I’ve been there. I’ve lived that. I’ve lived those years of 60, 70, 80 hours a week. And trust me, with the right people, you can start to lead the practice. You’ve got to set it up right because if you had a ritual like my practice, I refer to these single doctor practice, Stacy, like a rockstar practice. We’ve all heard of Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones. If Mick doesn’t show, the show’s not going to go on. And that’s the way it is with many kind of magical, talented single practice owners. But if you look behind the Rolling Stones, there’s a road crew and a whole company of 450 people. It’s a big company. And obviously Mick’s got to do his thing for a couple of hours on stage, but behind that is a lot of good people working.

So a lot of starting to create an owner-independent practice is getting the concept of what it is and that you can leave it and have it run independently. Now, if you’re not tracking key major indices, your KPIs, you’re not tracking those, then how do you know if it’s doing well? And that’s another key thing that I bring in working with clients. Let’s get your KPIs in. Let’s start tracking them on a regular basis. Let’s graph them out. Let’s apply some tools in order to get them to go up and things like that so that if you’re on holidays in the south of France or fly-fishing up in Alaska, wherever you are, you can log on once a week and look at your numbers and see whether things are heading in the right direction.

And Stacy, one of the coolest things is for people to be doing stuff like that, cycling in the south of France, and they log in, they realize that the practice expanded when they weren’t there. That is a beautiful moment. And you realize like, “Okay, wow, the plane’s flying. I don’t need to be there all the time.” Now, that doesn’t mean that your clients aren’t going to be happy to see when you get back. They are, but it does show that if you find the right people, this plane will fly when you’re not there.

Stacy Pursell:
Yeah, that’s good. Well, Joel, your YouTube series, Whiteboard Wednesdays, pioneered the use of online tools to educate private practice owners. How important do you think digital platforms are for modern veterinary businesses?

Dr. Joel Parker:
I think it’s huge, Stacy, and again, this comes down to this word, PR. Public relations is what your community thinks about you, so if you’re a practice, and if your practice has been there for 40 years, and you’re like one of these big legacy practices that the parking lot’s already full, then your PR is already in. But if you’re a new startup that I like working with, you’ve got to hustle and rub some PR sticks together in the rain there to get a fire going so the community knows about you. And there’s no better way of doing that than using some of the social media tools like Instagram and Facebook.

And what I did with Whiteboard Wednesdays was our YouTube channel, but I just started recording funny four to five minute little YouTube clips. The tendency is to go longer, but don’t. Keep them really short. Just funny, goofy little things. If you’ve got a goofy cat that can be your mascot that wants to rub your face while you’re recording, anything like that gets to be really fun. So I started recording. I had a cameraman and a wireless microphone and a whiteboard, and I’d come up with an idea. I’d put them in my iPhone. During the week, I’d think of new ideas, and then I’d just sketch it out, steps 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. And I just talk for a little bit and go, “Okay, action items. Number one, do this, 2, 3, 4, 5,” and then repeat, and we’re done.

Stacy Pursell:
No, they’re great. I’ve seen a number of them.

Dr. Joel Parker:
Yeah, they’ve worked really well. So what that enabled people to do, Stacy, was go and watch those. And before they even received any marketing from us to attend a webinar or sign up for a course, they already knew me by watching those videos. So there was a certain trust level, and I was able to grow the company, Veterinary Practice Solutions. I was able to grow that at a very astounding rate simply because people would talk to my salespeople and sign up because they’d watched a lot of Whiteboard Wednesdays. And I’ve been to conferences where people would come up and give me a hug with tears in their eyes and say, “Dr. Parker, you saved my practice.” Sometimes people can get really low, and they need those shots. They need that help, right?

Stacy Pursell:
That’s powerful.

Dr. Joel Parker:
Very.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, you founded Parker Business Systems to offer a more concierge style approach to consulting. What sets this firm apart from traditional consulting models?

Dr. Joel Parker:
I think the traditional consulting models are get on the phone and talk with people and so forth. Or in the case of the one I just left, it’s operating an academy where you’re getting people through courses. And what I saw the need just on the delivery that I would do, I would deliver the finance course, the profit builder, the profit booster course, and I would see that veterinarians loved meeting each other. So the new concept I’ve got is to have some one-on-one time with people because every practice is different. Practices, Stacy, are a little bit like dogs and cats. They’ve all got six, seven different systems in there. They’ve all got a cardiovascular system and a nervous system, all that kind of stuff. But every practice, just like every patient, has different degrees of pathology going on.

So one of the key things that the new company does is spend a lot of time analyzing the practice and dialing in a very specific custom-made program for that practice, and once we get going, then merge them into some community Zoom meetings that are going on every week. For example, if you need to know marketing, then let’s work on the marketing program, hop on the Zoom meeting, hear from your colleagues around the country as to what they’re doing, what they found working so we can get a lot of cross-pollination of ideas going on. So it’s a little bit mixing one-on-one with putting people together in groups.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, as someone who has successfully exited multiple businesses, what advice do you have for practice owners looking to prepare their practice for sale or ownership transfer?

Dr. Joel Parker:
Okay, number one, track your numbers because if anybody’s going to buy your practice, they’re going to look at your numbers. And one of the free webinars that I offer is to go and have a talk about analyzing profit-loss statements and how practices are evaluated because that’s super important. So get yourself trained up on the valuation process. You don’t need to become a certified public accountant or anything like that, but I can train you on the general concept and what to look for. And then, take the Dr. Joel Parker oath of practice management, which is, “I hereby promise to do as little as possible in the practice and delegate everything and use the God-given talents of my staff.” As you start to do that, if you’ve got the right people and you’re tracking the numbers, you’ll find that the practice can start to expand as your time goes down.

So in practice, valuations when people exit, and that’s another area I love working in, is kind of a diagnosis and repair and tune-up of a practice for sale. It’s a fun area to work in because the practice is already running. What do we need to tweak over the next year or two years to get that profit up so that the multiple will go up?

So practice valuations are dependent upon the leftover profit. That’s called the EBITDA, the earnings before the interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, just a fancy word for the leftover money. And practices are evaluated on how much money is leftover, number one, and then how many doctors are in the practice and how owner-dependent is it. So if the owner is still working, let’s say there’s two doctors in there, that practice is going to be worth more than a single doctor.

But let’s say that the owner is still working 40, 50 hours a week. They’re one of the two doctors. That practice is going to be worth less than the two and a half, three and a half doctor practice where the owner is the half. They’re kind of the resident relief doctor, and the practice is running not so much on them so that if they’re not there, it’s still running. And that practice will start to command the higher multiples. So we’re looking for that half position the owner go down into, and then focus your other 20 hours a week on management, making sure that your key people are doing what they need to be doing and that you’ve got good veterinarians delivering service.

Stacy Pursell:
That makes sense. Well, given your experience in both hands-on veterinary work and business management, what is your advice for balancing the clinical and the business sides of a veterinary practice?

Dr. Joel Parker:
I think that it needs to be 50/50. I think you can still practice like I did 20 hours a week because it’s fun and you’ve got clients that like to see you. That can still be done. Most of the people that I work with aren’t ready to leave clinical practice. They like it. They just don’t want to do it 60, 80 hours a week and get home after their kids have gone to bed. It’s just too much. But if you can get down to that 20, 25, and then you need another 20 hours to run the business initially as you’re hiring other executives and so forth. And then, oftentimes you can get down to running the business on about five hours a week and hit the golf course, get out and ride your bike, ride your horse, pick your kids up at school for soccer practice and stuff like that. You can get your life back if you know what you’re doing.

And that’s where you’ve got that standing ovation owner-independent practice that’s running without you. It’s that evolution, that transition that’s the tricky part of it. It reminded me when you asked me about veterinary endoscopy solutions and Canon equipment, I had to make sure that, as I spent time on those other projects, the practice numbers didn’t go down. And initially they did, and I had to go in and just make sure that I had good people that knew what they’re doing. The same thing goes with starting a second practice, Stacy, that a lot of people go and buy a second practice, start a second one. They get really excited about that. They’re not yet owner-independent on the first one. So as the second one starts and starts to climb up, the first one drops down. That’s what we don’t want. We want that to be flying on its own without you. You could, again, five hours a week managing is fine, but we want that first practice not dependent upon you as a veterinarian.

Stacy Pursell:
Right. That makes sense. So with so much experience in building and advising businesses, how do you maintain a work-life balance today, and what do you do to unwind outside of the veterinary world?

Dr. Joel Parker:
Yeah, outside the veterinary world, I like playing music. In these hills that you see behind me, I live in Vancouver, Canada, so we’re right on the coastal mountains north of Seattle, and there’s beautiful driving roads up there. One of my best pleasures is to take a small open-air sports car and go and drive on isolated, nice, windy, twisty roads. It’s just so much fun. I love spending time with my family and focusing on work, but realize that if you’re using the right systems, it will survive without you. Yeah, it’s super cool.

And with this new company I’m doing, I did take a couple of months off this summer to go and drive and spend time with families. And now November 1st, I’m heading down for the Evaluator conference, part of that partners in Dallas in a week or two weeks or so. And then after that, we’ll come down. I’m hiring my son to start using an online database called HubSpot, and I’ll get him trained up so that he can start to develop some valuable skills there too, and we’ll start using that.

We’ll just kind of dummy run Parker Business Systems on that and get that thing to tweak and run and basically start delivering free enter services, webinars on profit-loss statement, valuations. There’s one I’ve got called the Extra $1 Million Workshop. There’s another one called Repair and Diagnosis of a Practice, another one called How to Set Fees in the Goldilocks Zone, stuff like that. So a bunch of free webinars. We’ll meet a bunch of people, and then you know what it’s like. You’ll eventually find some people that bond and want to work with you, and then we’ll sign them up more for the weekly subscription model, concierge style consulting program. That’s the model. That’s what we’re working on.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, Joel, I’m curious. What has been the most surprising thing to you throughout your career in the veterinary profession?

Dr. Joel Parker:
I laughed when I read that question, Stacy. By the way, for listeners, Stacy gave me the questions so I’d have a little bit of thought on it, and I laughed. You know what it was? You know what the most surprising thing is? It’s how much money we can make in veterinary medicine. I don’t know why. I think I’m like many of us. I didn’t get into it to make money, believe it or not. It’s different. In dentistry, it’s a different thing. People got into it to make money. You go to a dental convention, you got the local Lamborghini dealership right in the middle center there with flashy cars. That’s dentistry. That’s not us. So that was the most surprising thing is that there were millions of dollars to make and that you could be wealthy being a veterinarian.

Now, maybe you’re not going to be living in the Riviera on a 200-foot yard or something like that, but very few people want that. But the idea of being able to live in a nice house, in a beautiful area, have nice things, and take your family on trips to Europe and whatever, to have that kind of money, I never even thought of it. Isn’t that funny?

Stacy Pursell:
It is.

Dr. Joel Parker:
It is. If you do it right now, there are thousands of veterinarians living quiet lives of desperation because they can’t cash their paycheck. Something’s out. I can help those people. I’ve helped them. It’s a really cool thing. If you go onto my Parker Business Systems website, you’ll see a lot of success stories on there, testimonials of people I’ve helped. You can just read down through them. That’s a fun thing to help is to get people so they can cash their paycheck.

Some of you listening may say, “I haven’t got that problem.” I totally get it. But there’s a lot of veterinarians that do because they aren’t either busy, they haven’t got enough new clients and clients coming in, or their prices aren’t set properly, or they’ve got way too many staff. There’s all kinds of things that goes into it, and that’s where the diagnosis and repair. I end up getting a lot of data from practices, and we shove it into something called a practice potential analysis that shows you what your potential is and what you’re currently doing and gives you and me a direction to start focusing to tweak the practice. It’s a really cool little tool I developed, the PPA, practice potential analysis.

Stacy Pursell:
So how have you seen the veterinary profession change over the years that you’ve been involved?

Dr. Joel Parker:
I think it’s changed. In many ways, it stayed the same. The technology has changed, the drugs have changed, but we still use the stethoscope, right? Radiology is still used, but it’s all digital, and now we have ultrasonography and CT scanners and stuff like that. So everything’s gone up in that way. But a lot of the hands-on medicine, the communication skills with the clients, the hands-on examination of the patient, palpating the abdomen, those kinds of amazing artistic skills that a lot of the older practitioners highly developed are still needed. They really, really are. I think there are some veterinarians now that are very, very common sense that when it’s six o’clock, they lock the doors and head home. They don’t pick up the phone. Some of them have got their heads on straight, their work-life balance worked out.

I do know that I see it daily that the one thing that has not changed and will not change ever as far as I’m concerned, is that the end user, the clients and the pets, that clients love their pets. And it is that love of their pets that will cause them to search for services and be willing to come in and do preventative medicine, buy the heartworm, flea, tick meds, things like that. That will always be there.

Those meds may change and possibly the delivery. Like now, people can go online and book appointments. So it used to be that you could track new clients by the number of phone calls that came in. Ah, you’re a new client. Okay, you’re tracking that. That’s one new client. Nowadays, you can go on and check to see that they’ve made their own appointment. So there’s technology that’s coming in like that, but the basic fundamental need that drives the whole profession, Stacy, is people’s love of their pets, and that is not going to change.

Stacy Pursell:
That’s not going to change. You’re right

Dr. Joel Parker:
Nope, it’s not. I daily ran into silly, goofy pet owners that love their dogs and these silly goofy dogs and cats. You see it every day, and that’s not going to change. How we deliver it, how we serve, I think people’s understanding of service doesn’t change either. We know if there’s a friendly receptionist or a grump on the front. We instantly know. We know if somebody’s happy to see us. We know if the veterinarian likes our dog. Those kinds of soft skills, we know that’s not going to change either. So I think telemedicine will come in. I think there’s a place for it, but there’s also a place where people like to bring their pets in so you can have a look at them.

Stacy Pursell:
What does your crystal ball say about the future of the veterinary profession?

Dr. Joel Parker:
I think we are wildly independent, most of us. I think many of us will graduate from vet school and work in some corporate practices, but ultimately there’s always going to be a drive of the solo private practice owner because we like that autonomy. I don’t think that’s going to change. Some of the best practice owners come out of Banfield working there for two, three years, and either they move on to clients that you’ve got, Stacy, that are looking for those good veterinarians, or they go, “Heck, I’m going to just go do my own thing. I’m going to go start a practice. I’m going to buy one.”

But I think there are, Banfield comes to mind, there’s a lot of other corporate practices now. I don’t know how they train people, but Banfield I do know is highly organized on the delivery of medicine. If you’ve got a new graduate that has a eighteen-year-old cat come in with a high heart rate and does not check the thyroid level, then there’s a phone call the next day. Somebody’s running some quality control. Now, maybe somebody’s not going to like that, but I think that’s good for the pet.

But I think that, in the future, we are going to see, as we’ve seen in England where there’s a higher degree of percentage of corporates, but I still see that there’s young veterinarypreneurs out there that want to run their own practice and with some skills can do a really great job of it. I think one of the big myths out there that corporate uses at times is that, “Hey, you’re not trained to be a practice owner. Let us do that. Sell us your practice and then just be a veterinarian.” I think people miss out on the joy of running your own practice. If you do it right, it’s super fun. Again, I got down to 20, 25 hours a week. I actually kind of felt bad. I’d have to sneak out the back door in order to leave and go and work on other stuff. Right?

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

Dr. Joel Parker:
I think do like I did, find a good mentor, and that’s either going to be in the practice you’re at, or in my case, there was a very seasoned pathologist that worked at the local lab that had been in private practice that I would call and talk cases. And then, the gentleman that owned my practice that I eventually bought, a guy named Rick Kaland, I would call Rick up and say, “Rick, can I run a case by you?” And just find yourself some mentors to get your training wheels off so that in that first year you can ramp up and be practicing good quality medicine and know where you’re going.

Secondly, always be learning. Always keep those books open. If you don’t know something, go look it up. And then, look at practice ownership, but don’t look at it from the eyes of somebody doing it poorly that’s stressed out all the time. Look at it as a really fun addition to your career. I think in general practice, Stacy, unless you go off and specialize and get boarded in surgery or medicine or whatever, I think it can stall out a little bit. And I think that’s where practice ownership can give you enough challenge in your life to keep it interesting, and on top of that, create a wonderful asset that you can sell and run a profitable practice.

If you look at it, if a two-doctor practice can produce two and a half million dollars, this is roughly speaking, and the practice owner is good, and they can sharpen the profit up to 20%, that’s a leftover half a million dollars a year that would go to the practice owner. Now, initially, they might be using that to pay off their Bank of America loan or whatever, how they got started. But once that’s paid off, that’s a phenomenal amount of money to flow through on any family, no matter where you live. Whether you’re in Vancouver, like downtown on the west end here, that’s expensive, or whether you’re out the country, that half a million dollars is still a lot of money.

Stacy Pursell:
Yeah, it sure is. Well, what message or principle do you wish you could teach everyone?

Dr. Joel Parker:
I think be humble, right? Track the numbers. Look at your performance. A good practice should be expanding. It doesn’t need to be going straight up and vertical, but it should be expanding on an expansion curve, on a monthly curve. It should be going up [inaudible 00:40:17] numbers and new clients and money. If it’s not doing that, then get some help. There’s some good people out there that we’d love to help you. A lot of them, Stacy, are Vet Partners, members like you and I. There are really, really good people in the profession. I actually really love our profession. I think it’s a profession that’s filled with really, really awesome people. We used to get together and play music. I’m a mandolin player and used to get together and play music. Remember those days at the Vet Partners?

Stacy Pursell:
I do.

Dr. Joel Parker:
And there’s a lot of fascinating people in there. And so, my advice is that if you’re struggling in your practice, then get some help. It’s great to have a coach. I loved my consultant once I started working with him. Oh, I could call him up bitch and moan. He’d say, “Okay, right, I get that. But what are you doing about it? Let’s look at that.” So just that really hard, hold your feet to the fire. I get that you’re bitching. You think there’s too much competition. There’s not enough people coming in. The economy’s down, blah, blah, blah, blah. What do you do?

Stacy Pursell:
What my parents called Tough Love.

Dr. Joel Parker:
Tough love, yeah. I get tough love. To this day, I love that guy. It’s great. It’s the best thing for me.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, some of our guests have said they had a key book that really helped them and their approach to success. Do you have a key book in your life that’s impacted you the most?

Dr. Joel Parker:
I think there’s a number of them. Key was in within the Hubbard Management System. There was a couple of great books. There was one called Problems of Work that talked about just some simple organizational issues, and another one was How to Live Though an Executive, meaning like you’re an executive, but how to keep your life going. Those two books were really, really pivotal. They were really great.

Stacy Pursell:
Well, Joel, 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. Joel Parker:
Hey, before the mic drop, I’d say if you’re looking at a practice, buy it. There’s so many opportunities out right there now. Don’t be shy. Don’t wait too long. Don’t let your life pass. It’s not that difficult to run a practice. There’s people like me that would love to help you get you sorted out on the direction to go, and it’s super, super fun. Don’t miss up on the opportunity. There are people that are now in their sixties and seventies that never got into ownership, and I do pick up some regret at that age. I also pick up on people that went into practice ownership, and they never learned how to run it properly, and now they’re 70. They’re a little bit too old to go back into the course room per se. But that being said, I have trained people in their sixties and early seventies who they’re still active learners.

So be an active learner. If you need some help, go find it. There’s great people out there to help you, and work with people like Stacy that can find you some good people. It’s so, so important. I think that all boils down. You need good people that can be creative and be friendly and really have your clients bond with them, and that way you can start to get away.

I remember one time I was working on one of my key doctor’s day off. She was a doctor that worked with us that had done a lot of relief work for hundreds of practices. She remarked the practice was magical, and it was because it was fun. But I was standing up front one time looking at a file, and the client came in and said, “Is Dr. Chow in today?” And the receptionist said, “No, I’m sorry. It’s her day off, but Dr. Parker, the owner’s, here.” And the client said, “No, I’ll wait until she’s back.”

So initially in the first couple of years, you go, “Oh no, that’s not good.” But no, that’s good. That’s what you want. You want people bonding with other good people. Now, if you have made the mistake, and you’ve got a passive-aggressive veterinarian in your practice that people are bonding to, then that is a liability. That person can leave and start up at 5.1 miles down the road and take clients from you. So you’ve got to be really on the ball about who you hire.

Stacy Pursell:
Yeah, that’s a good point. Well, Joel, it’s been very inspirational having you here. I always enjoy our conversations. I enjoy seeing you at all the Vet Partners meetings and at the conference. I look forward to our next opportunity to get together in person. Thank you so much for being here today on The People of Animal Health Podcast. It was a pleasure talking with you.

Dr. Joel Parker:
Pleasure’s mine, Stacy. Thanks so much, and right back at you. Love working with you. I’ll see you this next year at the conferences.

Stacy Pursell:
Look forward to it. Thank you, Joel.

Dr. Joel Parker:
You’re welcome.