Episode #79 – Jon Ayers

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 plus years, I have built relationships with the industry’s top leaders and trailblazers. The People of Animal Health Podcast highlights 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. Today’s guest is Jon Ayers, a transformational leader whose impact on animal health is unmatched. As former chair and CEO of IDEXX Laboratories, Jon helped grow the company from 380 million to 2.4 billion in revenue, driving a 40-fold return for shareholders and reshaping the standard of care in veterinary medicine. After a life-altering cycling accident in 2019, Jon redirected his strategic vision toward conservation and philanthropy. He now serves as board chair of Panthera and leads major feline health initiatives through the CATalyst Council. Jon’s story is one of innovation, resilience, and unwavering commitment to animals worldwide. Jon, thank you for being my guest today on the People of Animal Health Podcast, and how are you today?

I’m doing fine. Thanks for those kind words, Stacy.

Well, I’m so happy to have this time together, Jon. I’d love to start off at the beginning. What was your life like growing up and where did you grow up?

So I grew up in the woods of Connecticut in Wilton, which was very rural at the time. And we had woods all over us. I enjoyed exploring the woods. My mom said I always kept myself busy. I enjoyed projects. I taught myself a lot of things. I taught myself to be a bicycle mechanic, a bartender, a ballroom dancer, just different things that interested me. But I think the two life-altering experiences I had as a teenager is first my parents arranged for me to spend a summer with a French family when I was 15. And I had two years of high school French, which is not much. So I had that and a dictionary.

I went to visit the family and within three days, the son they had, which was about my age and I, went into the Pyrenees on a French scouting camp, which is kind of a little paramilitary. And of course, nobody spoke English. So here I was trying to figure things out. They’d do a morning reveille and they’d explain the activities for the day and everybody would get really excited. Of course, I had no idea what they were saying. So I had to sort of figure things out.

And so I ended up spending two and a half months in France. And my family at the end told me they surprised I lasted because they had a lot of other boys that they had had mostly from England who just got homesick and went home and I seemed to be able to be there and enjoy it for the whole time. The second experience was my family friend suggested that I was going to public high school in Wilton, which is a very good school, but it was pretty easy for me. I’d get my homework done while I was in school. I wasn’t really challenged.

And so they suggested that I should go to a much more academically rigorous school. And I ended up going to Phillips Exeter Academy in the middle of my junior year, which is kind of an odd time because everybody’s getting ready to apply to colleges. And so I was thrown into the deep end with all these kids that had already had a year or two or three of already rigorous academic education. And I had to sort of figure it out. And I was pretty overwhelmed at first, but I ended up figuring it out and doing well enough grade-wise to get into a top tier school, Yale. So I think the theme there is I’m very comfortable jumping into situations that are brand new and figuring them out. And that’s really been the theme of my professional career and maybe even the theme of my recovery after my accident that I’m able to assess the landscape and figure things out and figure out how to thrive within a brand new environment.

Well, Jon, how did you first get into the animal health industry?

Well, I was, as they say, between jobs. I had my first big CEO operating experience running Carrier corporation, which was an industrial company. And so I was on the market and I was recruited by the board of IDEXX who was looking for a successor to the founder who wanted to retire. He built a company. He was an extraordinary individual, but it sort of, I think, had just gotten too big for him and he really didn’t know how to be a professional leader.

So he and the board recruited me and they took a risk on me because I didn’t know anything about animal health, but I mean, who did at that time? But as I said, I was able to figure things out and I had a degree in biochemistry, which gave me a strong science foundation. Not that that helped a lot, but at least it gave me a little bit of credibility. And so again, I dove in and started to figure things out.

Well, you led IDEXX Laboratories through one of the most extraordinary growth trajectories in the animal health sector with 40 times shareholder return during your tenure and 100 times with your successor. When you look back, what were the non-obvious decisions or bets that truly transformed the company?

Of course, there were many, many, many. But the company, it had an innovation gene when I got there, just didn’t really know how to channel it, but it didn’t get to being from zero to 380 million out of nowhere. It was all a roll-up of different acquisitions, primarily in diagnostics and then really focusing on innovation.

So again, I had a background in Wall Street, actually, nine years on Wall Street. So when I talked to the Wall Street analyst, they said, “Well, look, you’re going to be valued based on growth.” And so I said, “Okay, I’m going to go figure out organic growth. So I’ll figure out organic growth.” So we really worked on the innovation and we really focused on innovation. And the company was a leader in diagnostics and also had a pharma position, which was extremely small. So we ended up actually getting out of that business. But the diagnostics, and then it was also a leader in software, which I thought was kind of a nice match because software is about information management and diagnostics.

The product of diagnostics is information, which allows for a differential diagnosis. So we really doubled down on investing organically instead of through acquisition in diagnostics. And then we had the luck of the tailwind of the growth of the pet health market. And then in 2014, probably, many people would say is my most important single decision is we decided to go from a hybrid distribution direct model in the US to a fully direct model.

And that was very challenging to execute because we had a lot of people upset with us, but that actually allowed us to get closer to the customer. And after kind of a rough 18-month period where from the outside it wasn’t clear that it was going to work. We knew it was going to work. We were totally committed to it and we made it work. And then once it was fully in place, we had a year of being direct behind us. The distributors finally went on to other priorities because the year over year was already behind them. That’s when things really took off and we had a second wave of tremendous growth over that period, over the next four years… Five years, actually ever since then.

IDEXX invested more than 80% of the industry’s R&D and diagnostics and software under your leadership. What strategic insight convinced you that diagnostics rather than therapeutics was where the future of veterinary medicine should be or would be rewritten?

That’s where we were. We ended up being the leader in both in house equipment and test kits and reference labs. That was our core competency. It was a recurring revenue business. Everybody now talks about recurring revenue, but back then it wasn’t as big a thing. And we got out of a therapeutic business in 2008 because it was just very small and we had really no idea what we were doing. And so combined with the software business, and then it turned out to be the highest growth segment. Part of that was because we made it the highest growth segment. And then part of it and all the innovation and the helping customers understand the value of diagnostics and understanding the pet health and the trends. And then so we both created that wave and rode that wave. And also because we were really unique in doing new product development, we were able to consistently gain share for a long time, probably over the last 15 years.

Well, your transition from the CEO seat to a new life after your 2019 cycling accident is incredibly powerful. Could you share the moment you realized that your strategic leadership could and would continue even as your physical realities changed?

Well, yeah, that was a pretty profound physical change. And first I had to attend to making the adjustment. And so I rode off as CEO and I stayed on the board for five years. And then I was already interested in wildcat conservation. I developed that interest two or three years previous. I’ve always loved cats. I always loved nature. So one day I asked myself, “What kind of cats are in nature?” And I started researching that and finding out there are all these small cats and then a few big cats and the whole field just fascinated me. And then I started supporting Panthera, and then they kind of woke up to the fact that I was getting to be a bigger and bigger supporter, and they put me on the board and immediately made me chair of the finance committee because nobody knew what was going on in finance.

And by the third board meeting, the board chair told the board without actually talking to me, he said, “Well, Jon’s going to be our next board chair.” And he gave the reasons why, which were, first, I had a genuine, unique interest and affection for the cats in wildlife. And second, I had the business skills. And I think that was within two years of my accident, so March of 2021. And of course, he talked to me after he said, “Look, tell me if I went too far.” And I said, “Well, I am a quadriplegic so I don’t care.”

And it was like this, the guy, Tom Kaplan, he’s just an extraordinarily unique individual. He was the founder of Panthera. He put a lot of his own net worth into it. I think it was sort of the validation that I could still make a contribution, and I could make a strong leadership contribution. And so in a kind of a weird way, that actually rebuilt my confidence, and then I really go to figuring things out. So I figured out how to be board chair, and I learned the organization, I met all the board members. And now we’re five and a half years into it, and we’ve doubled the size of Panthera, and it’s got the best prospects ever. And he’s still on the board, very strong supporter. We have a great board, a great management team, and its sole focus is Wildcats, which is my thing. So that’s why it made such sense for me to do this.

Well, you’ve often described yourself as a cat person, and you just talked about what drew you to wildcat conservation specifically. How does it connect to the strategic mindset that you honed in corporate life?

Well, yeah, that’s an interesting question. Generally speaking, people in nonprofits don’t really understand strategy, finances, administration. They’re really focused on whatever their mission is, quite frankly, aren’t very good managers. And so I was able to bring really key insights into conservation. And just to give you one example, this seems really obvious if you’re a business person, but it was totally new to parts of conservation. So if we’re trying to conserve, say, tigers, and they were really good at doing this, the question is, well, what’s the wild tiger population?

Tigers are actually pretty easy to measure because every tiger’s stripes are different, it’s called their pelage. And so you take a photograph, it’s pretty easy to distinguish one tiger from the next. But one of the big areas we’re in was lion conservation and the whole lion conservation, they were doing all this work to protect lions from poaching and encroachment and all this, but no one was actually measuring the lion population. It’s like, “Wait a second.”

Now, lions are harder to measure than tigers because they’re monochrome, but there are ways to do it. So I brought the whole concept of, “Hey, if we’re going to do all this conservation, we need to have an objective…” To use business terms, and I use this for business people, “We need to have…” Of course, we’re doing all these different things. We need to make sure that we’re protecting the area, that we have good relationships with the countries we’re in, we have good relationships with the local communities, indigenous peoples, but we also need to measure, are the lion populations stable or growing? And it turns out lions are like what we call an apex or a keystone species because they’re the first to go when a geography is challenged for all sorts of reasons. And when the apex goes, it puts the whole ecosystem out of kilter.

So this is actually an innovation that we have brought very… We’ve actually achieved alignment very recently over the last year that. In addition to everything else, we actually need to measure, are the lion populations in those areas that we’re protecting, are they stable and growing? And so it’s an example of how you bring business skills to conservation, marry the two and get the benefit of both.

Well, as chair of the CATalyst Council’s Feline Market Insights Committee, you lead research on emerging trends and the future of feline health. What is one insight from your recent research that you believe veterinarians and industry leaders still underestimate?

Well, I got involved with CATalyst Council late last fall when I resigned the board of IDEXX. I was approached by Jane Brunt, the executive director, whom I known because she knew I was a cat guy from 16 years previously. And she asked me to be on the board. And as we thought about it, I said, “Well, I think the most value I can bring is market insight.” And the veterinary industry just got very poor data. I don’t know why. At first, it’s hard to measure. And second of all, it’s like no one really has the skillset. I don’t know. No one has the intellectual [inaudible 00:18:44]. It’s really important data. So the insight that I said is, “Well, we need to start not only measuring visits, which is the key volume metric and revenues, but we need to measure dogs versus cats because I think cats are different than dogs.”

We had some preliminary indications. And as everybody knows who’s been in the veterinary industry, overall visits have been declining for four years ever since the peak of 2021. Well, guess what? Cat visits are not part of that decline. They’ve been growing since 2023, and they’re about 23% of all visits right now. So it turns out cats are very different than dogs. And so the drivers of cat populations and trends are very positive. And of course, the overall, which is mostly dogs, are negative. So that was the first insight. And then the second insight, we really needed to dig in to what was affecting not just cats, but overall visits. And we dug in and I would say that the key insight we came across was that the price of veterinary medicine had grown significantly. Price increases for a variety of reasons had taken place since COVID.

And just to put a number on it, while overall CPI since before COVID has grown 25%, veterinary service inflation has grown 45%, so 20% more. And it’s just priced a lot of pet owners out on the market, and that’s one of the headwinds that we’re seeing with visits. And so of course, nobody wants to admit that, but that is a major driver. And we see it in the primary research when we do interviews with pet owners. And it’s very clear that cost of veterinary medicine has really gotten out of reach in that middle income bracket that prior to COVID was better able to afford it.

Well, Jon, you’ve had a front row seat to major global operations from Asia-Pacific manufacturing with Carrier to M&A at Morgan Stanley to strategy at United Technologies. How did these earlier chapters shape the way you ultimately led IDEXX and now guide your work in conservation and boards?

Well, I had a very eclectic career. So I majored in biochemistry and then I went to work for IBM and selling and providing technical support for computers in the late ’70s. Then I went to business school, and then I went to Bain for strategy consulting, and then I went into investment banking, mergers and acquisitions at Morgan Stanley. These are just totally different areas. And then I went to provide operating leadership in an industrial company as part of United Technologies’ Carrier. And then I came to IDEXX.

I think when I came to IDEXX, all of a sudden, all those different pieces of my career fit in. The biochemistry gave me confidence and understanding the technology and the medicine. Obviously, working for IBM helped me with the software side of the business. The strategy skills that came from both my Harvard Business School experience and my three years at Bain were extremely important. I think you have to have a really strong vision of strategy to be CEO.

And then my finance skills from being on Wall Street and understanding how Wall Street worked, understanding finance, understanding how companies were valued. I took companies public so I understood that. And then really the operating career is what I started when I went to United Technologies, eventually running Carrier, so being a P&L manager. So all those different pieces finally clicked in the gear when I came to IDEXX and I leveraged them all to provide a outsider point of view, but dug really deeply in trying to understand the medicine, the technology, the customers, the competitors, the global footprint. I knew that from several of my prior experiences, and it took me a little while. It took me probably a year or two before I had a level of confidence. And of course, I’m still learning today. Here we are 23 years later.

Well, you do bring rare visibility across the entire veterinary value chain, including diagnostics, software, therapeutics, and consolidation dynamics. Where do you believe the next major disruption in veterinary medicine is going to come from?

Yeah, so the big disruption, particularly in some markets, US and certain international markets was the consolidation wave, which I never really… At first, I kind of downplayed it. I didn’t understand it. I really didn’t see where there was synergy and putting a bunch of disparate practices together. And we could come back to that, but I underestimated how powerful wave it was and then the rate of consolidation. But I think that is… Bold statement. I think the rate of consolidation of individual practices into groups is probably behind us. That was a big wave, not to say there weren’t going to be some. I think it’s more of a [inaudible 00:24:54] but the independents I think are going to stay independent. And then the big one is AI.

AI is… We wrote a paper on this. The veterinary industry is uniquely, if you will, exposed or inherently benefits from AI technology. And we wrote 15 different reasons, but the big ones are that it’s not regulated, that it’s a medical service, which has a lot of information associated with it. It’s driven by the pet owner economics. And so I really do believe that AI is going to transform a lot of industries, but I would put vet [inaudible 00:25:50] put on a scale of one to 10, most industries will be transformed, maybe five, six, seven. I would put veterinary industry at nine in terms of its susceptibility to being transformed.

And I don’t believe most people still understand that, even though we’ve been trying to make that case for the last couple of months. But those who understand that will be ahead of the game. I think it’ll create a fair amount of turmoil, but I think at the end of the day, pets and pet owners will be big beneficiaries from this as the industry grapples with how to utilize AI technology and the pursuit of animal care.

Hey, everyone. We are interrupting the episode briefly to talk to you about today’s sponsor. This episode is brought to you by The VET Recruiter. The VET Recruiter is the go to executive search and recruitment firm in the animal health industry and veterinary profession, dedicated to connecting exceptional employers with high caliber candidates. With a deep understanding of the animal health industry and veterinary profession and a vast pool of talented candidates, we make the hiring process seamless and efficient for the animal health and veterinary employers who have critical hiring needs.

If you are an employer in search of top talent or you work in the animal health industry, or are a veterinarian ready to take the next step in your career, look no further than The VET Recruiter. The VET Recruiter has placed many of the industry’s top leaders from CEOs to COOs to chief veterinary officers to VPs of marketing and sales and heads of R&D and chief scientific officers. We have built sales forces for many leading animal health companies and have placed more veterinarians in clinical practice than any other search firm in the US. Ready to take the next step? Visit thevetrecruiter.com today. That’s thevetrecruiter.com. And now let’s get back into the episode.

So having said that all about the AI, what does your crystal ball say about what the future looks like for the animal health industry and veterinary profession?

Yeah. So there are a lot of people, particularly in the US, who kind of depressed by the decline in visits that we’ve seen for four years and wondering if the big growth wave is over. I don’t think so. I think what’s going to happen is we’re going to see the price bubble be moderated or even pop a little bit. And I think some people are going to start figuring out how to provide lower cost veterinary services for pet owners who want to go to the vet, but it’s too expensive for them. That is going to be figured out and it’s probably going to be enabled by AI.

I’ve seen a couple of ideas, but I haven’t really seen it yet, but it’s just begging to happen because pet owners, they make the decisions and somebody figures out how to serve this middle income customer because just generally thinking most of veterinary services is really serving higher end customers right now, which is, “Okay, that’s great except that what about all those pets and pet owners that are not in the 150,000 household income plus?” And so I think they’re crying out for solutions.

And how that evolves, I think it’s going to be very interesting to watch over the next 12 to 18 months. But as that gets sorted out, and if there is a reversal in veterinary service inflation, I think we’ll see an explosion in volume because I think the underlying… People still love their pets. There’s no question about that. They love their dogs. They love their cat. Here’s an interesting observation. In every culture in the world, people have pets, so it’s endemic to the human condition. I really don’t see that underlying, long-term secular trend changing. And so we just need to go through this period where prices got too high and things need to adjust one way or another.

That makes so much sense. Jon, what has been the most surprising thing to you during your career in the animal health industry?

Well, first, I didn’t really know when I joined IDEXX that… I figured there was a lot of organic growth opportunity, but I didn’t predict that we were going to see 20 years of growing ownership and growing care per animal. That’s been very gratifying. The other surprise, and it was even happening back in the early days, was this consolidation wave. I simply didn’t get the economics of consolidation that you buy all these practices, they’re all completely different. Okay, maybe you save some money on certain supply costs, but that is offset by overhead that’s outside the four walls of veterinary practice. So I just didn’t get it.

But what I did not appreciate until it had gone on long enough that the way it was undeniable was two things that I should have seen. First, many veterinarians wanted to retire and it was a way for them to exit and monetize their retirement, which was their investment in a veterinary practice. And then the second thing is the financial industry, there’s a lot of capital and these corporates, roll-ups, consolidators, whatever you call them, they could buy a practice at the time, six to eight times what’s called EBITDA or profitability measure.

And then their group would be valued at double that. So it was like an arbitrage, buy low and then the more you bought, the more you are worth because you got a multiple. And it was just capital desperately looking for places to upward return. Roll-ups are across a lot of it. Some made a lot more sense than others, but roll-ups were kind of a trend that’s happened across many industries. And it was just very powerful. But I think what’s happened is those multiples got so high by 2021, then all of a sudden the capital markets spigot was turned off and the prices dropped phenomenally and basically no acquisitions of any size happened.

After that, a lot of these groups had a lot of debt or they had a lot of expectations. No one predicted the 2022 reversal. Everybody thought it was just going to keep going, and ’21 was a blowout year, and then all of a sudden visits started declining. No one predicted that. So everybody was caught off guard. So now these groups need to figure out how to run the practices. Well, guess what? That’s not easy.

I developed a very good relationship with one of the earliest consolidators, a guy named Stan Creighton, who founded NVA. He was a veterinarian, and he founded NVA. And I think he was there through the consolidation of about the first 200 practices. It’s now… I don’t know, eight times that size, seven or eight times that size. But he was there through the first 200 practices. I got to know him really well. I won his diagnostics business. And he told me something I’ll never forget. He said, “This business would be really good if it wasn’t for veterinarians.”

And that was the point is that veterinarians are very independent. They like to practice the way they practice. It’s always been the case. There’s never been any third party payer or anything like that to tell them how to practice. Every practice does it differently, and they’re very proud of that independence. And that makes it very difficult to run a roll up. And I think that’s been the case ever since then, that veterinarians are super nice. They’re super dedicated professionals, but they just think differently. And I don’t think this whole private equity thing is easy for them.

Well, Jon, resilience is a theme that runs through your life from scaling companies to navigating catastrophic physical trauma. If you could condense everything you’ve learned into one message for people facing profound transition, what would it be?

Well, the thing is, most people are going to face more than one profound transition in their life. It may not be a health-related transition. It may be a family-related transition or a career-related transition. There are all sorts of different things that people are affected by, and there’s even studies of how people handle this. So yeah, it was tough physically and also mentally because here I was totally invested. Every waking hour of my day was either focused on my running IDEXX or my family or my health. Those were my three vectors of focus.

And so the family was there, fortunately, but the whole professional thing was just completely taken off the table. And so I’ve always had the philosophy that very simply… One of the things I learned when I was a kid in college was learn how to play poker. I thought that was really helpful. I said, “You got to play the hand in you’re dealt. You can’t cry over it. You just got to play the hand you’re dealt.” You deal with the facts at hand, you understand what they are and you say what can you make of it? You’re grateful for what you have.

Even in the depths of depth, I started developing a habit when I was in the depths of early rehab, basically the five things I was grateful for every day. And that’s a skill that once you get good at, it’s actually pretty easy to think of all the grateful things as opposed to all the bad things. Like I had one guy who was a quadriplegic and he said, “I used to be able to do 20,000 things, and now I can do 2,000 things. Okay, I’m not going to focus on the 18 I can’t do. I’m going to focus on 2,000 I can do.” So you just focus on, “Okay, what is it you can do?”

And I was very fortunate in my accident that even though I landed on my head and broke my neck and my spinal cord, my head was protected by a really high-tech helmet. And so I didn’t have any brain injury. And so that’s one of the things that… That and being alive, those were the two first things I was most grateful for, and then my family and their support. And me being positive helped everybody else through, because obviously this is the kind of thing that affects everybody around you forever.

What advice would you give the younger version of yourself?

Okay. So I did not really focus on my health until I went through a transformation in 2010 and we became empty-nesters. We had more time. I’d gained a lot of weight. And in 2010, that’s when I actually started cycling. And I lost 50, 60 pounds all through diet and exercise. But the main insight was your health is your number one priority. Without your health, you can’t do anything else. So you have to spend time on your health. This might be strengthening, cardiac for your heart, eating well, mental health, dental health, whatever it is, skin health, all those things. You have to put that as your first priority.

And the insight I had was that I first said, “Okay, we’re just going [inaudible 00:39:29] my first priority.” And I totally transformed. It took me a while to really understand what that meant. But I said, “Okay, if my career has to suffer, so be it because I can’t do my career without my health.” Well, what happened was really interesting. Nothing suffered. It actually gave me more energy. I became much more aware and energetic and mindful once I really started focusing as part of being a human being.

And even though I was under enormous pressure running a publicly traded company and having three daughters that were moving from teenager to college and a lot of other things, I found that I was just able to handle everything better. I was able to handle stress better and I never looked back and health has always been my number one priority. And I wish I had figured that out earlier. I made that transformation when I was 54 years old and it made a huge difference in my life. And I think my performance across the board really improved as a result, even though I thought I was pretty good before then, but I think it really helped.

And it’s still my number one priority today, obviously a little different with my handicap. Physical exercise takes a different form, but I still able to do it, but diet is still super… And I’m continually learning things about how to have a good diet, how to have a good mental disposition. It’s just a lifelong commitment to your physical and psychological wellbeing.

And it’s something you can start at at any point.

54 is when I started.

What advice or what message or principle do you wish you could teach everyone listening to our podcast today?

Well, I think it’s very easy to get down and feel the pressure and get cynical. And I would just resist all that. I’m not saying don’t be realistic, of course. You got to be realistic. We took a lot of risk when I was running IDEXX, but they were, I think, prudent risks. They weren’t just swing for the fences. And if you lose, you struck out. But I think it’s important to have that attitude. And at the end of the day, if things don’t go the way you wanted them to go, you still have, “Well, I did the best I could, and there’s always a new day. So look, I can’t beat myself up too much because I put everything into it. I did the best I could.” And every day we’re around, we get another shot at it.

Every day is a new day. Well, Jon, some of our guests say they’ve had a keybook that they read that they helped them. Do you have a keybook in your life that’s impacted you the most?

Well, I thought about this because you gave me that question. I read a lot of books. I read history. I was really into strategy and management books early in my day, particularly the first 10 or 15 years. But somewhere along the way, I read a totally unique book and it was called The Origin of Wealth by a guy named Eric… Last name begins with a B, but if you Google Origin of Wealth… It’s a terrible title, but it’s a derivative off of Darwin’s Origin of the Species. And it really talks about industry competition and structure, and that is its dynamic, and it is a product of the environment and a product of individual actions. And that’s kind of like the Origin of the Species. So it looked at the evolution of industries from a biological point of view. That was such a unique and different way of thinking.

And the book was great. Last third of the book’s terrible, but many books are like that. They just try to do more than they can. But the first story was the ecosystem in a Philippines dump and all the different players and what they did to… Obviously incredible poverty, but it was an ecosystem with different players at different steps of the way. And there was a reason for that. And so you look at your industry and you say, “Why is it structured the way it is? What are the reasons behind that? And what could change that?”

So it is a dimension of competitive and strategy overlay that is recognizing that there are dynamics at play. And by understanding those dynamics top down… And I always try to look at things top down. When I was CEO of IDEXX, I tried to really understand my competitors. I tried to understand the financial markets, private equity markets, our customers, the technology, our employees, and how they thought about things, and of course, any governmental impact, how things were different around the world and why they were different.

And that really gave me, I think, a very strategic overlay that helped me predict changes in the industry that most people didn’t see. I like to say I’m really good at seeing the future when I have a lot of domain expertise. There’s obviously some things I can’t foresee, but within my domain, I think I’m pretty good at it, which is why using my skills in, as you said, knowing all the different dynamics of the veterinary profession and really understanding technology and now really diving in with AI, that allows me to, I think, along with a few other colleagues who have this gift, at least two or three of them who have a similar gift or from a little different angle, we’re able to make these predictions.

And we may not be entirely right, but they’re very different because I think most people aren’t thinking about it. They’re just trying to get along day by day. They see the world as static. They don’t see this dynamic and they can’t always see around the corners. And I think that’s part of being a leader in the industry is starting with grounding versus about the pets and the pet owners, and then really seeing around the corners. And that’s where the opportunities come.

That’s a real gift to be able to see around the corners. Well, Jon, 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?

It’s a great industry to be in. It’s still a growth industry. I find that, basically, industry pulls people in. Some people come into the industry, they don’t have any industry background. It takes them a while to learn. I think that’s challenging for them. There are very few people in the industry who have strong strategy, management skills, and industry experience. Maybe that’s true in a lot of industries, but because this industry has grown organically so much, I think we just don’t have enough good leaders.

Now, hopefully some of the people that have come in, and there are some current leaders that have spent a lot of time in the industry that are growing into more senior positions, but really it’s worth investing in and understanding the industry and going beyond your job, understanding… [inaudible 00:48:42] yourself, understand the customers, understand the medicine, understand the industry structure and the players, particularly if you aspire to have a leadership position. And I think it’ll be rewarded because it’s better to be in an industry that’s growing than in an industry that’s not.

Such a good point. What a great industry we’re in. Well, Jon, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today. It’s been a pleasure.

Thanks so much, Stacy. Good luck with 2026. Happy New Year to you and everybody.

Thank you. You too, Jon.