Episode #84 – Dr. Craig Prior

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.

Hello everyone, and welcome to the People of Animal Health Podcast. Today’s guest is Dr. Craig Prior, a veterinarian with more than 40 years of experience and one of the most respected voices in veterinary business and clinical practice. After owning successful small animal and emergency hospitals for more than three decades, Craig now serves as a sought after consultant, VMG facilitator and national speaker helping practices enhance patient care, client service and profitability. He’s a key opinion leader for leading pharmaceutical and lab companies, a media spokesperson featured in major outlets and a longtime volunteer with the Companion Animal Parasite Council. Dr. Prior brings wisdom, humor, and unmatched industry insight. Craig, thank you for being my guest today on the People of Animal Health Podcast, and how are you today?

Oh, very well, Stacy. Thank you so much for having me. Glad to be here.

Well, I’m glad to have you here. Craig, let’s start off at the beginning. What was your life like growing up and where did you grow up?

Well, I’m an Aussie. Grew up in an area called Southeast Queensland, so the state of Queensland, grew up in Southeast Queensland. We are considered what people, in Australian lingo, people from that area would call banana benders. That’s, I guess, what they consider we do for a living is bend bananas. Big banana growing area, but I grew up mainly around the Brisbane area. Brisbane’s about halfway up the East Coast of Australia, so grew up all around that area, and life was good. Weather was always nice and sunny and mostly warm, and beaches are always wonderful, and it was always wonderful.

Well, at what point and why did you decide to become a veterinarian?

Interesting story there. Australia system is a little bit different. We’ve now got universities that do have the two degree system like the US did. I went through University of Queensland. When I was 16 years of age, we had to decide what we were going to do for the rest of our lives. That’s a tough thing to put on a 16-year-old. We used to call back then, they call them OP scores now, we used to get TE scores. You’d finish up high school, you’d have a TE score, and depending on what that score was, depending on what different schools would accept or different faculties would accept. And so, you basically had to say, “What do you want to be?” Well, I didn’t know. I figured I wanted to be in the field of medicine. That was really, I think, planted in my head by my mother, so we can blame mum for that.

I ended up had to have three choices, so I just put down medicine, dentistry, and veterinary medicine. And I said, “I’ll take whoever takes me first.” Veterinary medicine took me first, so I said yes. And I figured that would be a good thing, because I figured that animals are a whole lot easier to deal with than with humans. Little did I know that really, as a veterinarian, you’re in the people business. As a companion animal practitioner anyways, you are in the people business.

That’s so true.

And had no clue about that at the time. I went to vet school at University of Queensland. I graduated in 1984, so yes, I am an old fart. I actually took a year off. We have a straight five-year course, so I went into vet school at 17 years of age, straight five-year course, should have graduated at 22. I took a year off in the middle of that. Well, actually about the middle of that. I realized that I was really burnt out and I took a gap year. Choice was take a gap year or fail because I just really didn’t care anymore. And I was like, “Time to get an attitude adjustment.” I approached the dean, said, “I want to take a gap year.” They said yes. My best friend said to me, “Here, apply for this job. Go overseas.” I had no money and wanted to travel, so like every other Aussie who want to travel, applied for a job. I was one of 24 people chosen Australia-wide to represent Australia at the 1982 World’s Fair in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Wow.

It had nothing to do with veterinary medicine. It had everything to do with just tourism and promoting Australia. I was an attendant at the Australian Pavilion in the World’s Fair. All I did for six months every day of the week or every day was to stand around and talk to tourists as they came through the Australian Pavilion. I tell you what, there is no better experience for learning how to communicate with people than doing that. It set me up for absolute success in veterinary medicine because I learned how to communicate well. We can talk about this a little bit later, but I truly think that, what do you do as a veterinarian? Your number one career is communication, because if you don’t communicate well with that client, you’ll never get to touch the animal. It’s all the communication that leads to treating the animal.

If you don’t communicate well, that client’s going to go somewhere else, because they just don’t feel comfortable. It really taught me how to communicate. While I was at the World’s Fair, I had a really great time and spent about six to eight months in Knoxville and spent another four months traveling the world. But while I was at the World’s Fair, I met a young lady, who was in nursing school at University of Tennessee in Knoxville. She had a summer job at the fair and we met and we started going out together, and then we started a long distance relationship. I’m talking in the days of you had three choices. You had snail mail, 10 to 14 days, one way for a letter to get from Knoxville, Tennessee to Brisbane, Australia, or you could pick up the phone and have a $6 a minute landline phone call. That’s a landline, meaning that things plugged into the wall, because that’s the only phones we had back then. Or you could buy a $3,000 one-way air ticket, which in today’s dollars was probably about $8,000 to $10,000 one way.

We did that for a couple of years until I ran out of money and realized it was cheaper to get married and stay in one place, so we got married. I flew over, got married here, and we went back to Australia, so I could finish vet school. Halfway through my final year, Cindy came back over here so she could finish her degree. When I graduated, I came to the US, and then it got really interesting, because I had to go through the ECFVG program, and that was when it was in its infancy, and that was something … Do we have enough time to go in on all this?

Yeah, let’s do it.

The ECFVG, they were just starting the program down through LSU and everyone said, “Don’t do that. It’s still a mess. Just do the national board clinical competencies.” I did those. And then they said, “Work in practices for a year and then you can sit for the state boards, you’ll finish the ECFVG program.” I was like, “Well, that’s fine.” University of Tennessee talked to me. I knew people up there and they said, “Well, you can come up here and do a residency.” The interesting thing was, if I’d gone up there and done a residency, which I probably should have, I would’ve been helping to teach students how to be veterinarians. But if you step outside the system, you’re not worthy of being a veterinarian in private practice. I found that quite interesting.

I decided to go the right route. I had to do the ECFVG program, and the first thing they asked me to do was take English-speaking lessons for three months instead of an English-speaking exam. I’m on the phone, I said to the lady, “What do you think we speak in Australia? Swahili.” Her words were, “I don’t know. What do you speak in Australia?” And I said, “Well, take a wild guess.” I ended up, let’s just say nicely, I petitioned the ECFVG program to change their requirements that if you came from an English-speaking country and did English through grade 12, that you shouldn’t have to meet the requirement of having to learn how to speak English and say for English-speaking exams. They agreed to that and we got the rules changed, which was good for everybody. And then, I had to deal with the local, back then, the Good Old Boys Society in Tennessee, where the Board of Medical Examiners asked me to go back to Australia because they didn’t like foreigners.

Wow.

Yeah, yeah. That was interesting. There’s more to that story, but we won’t get into that. They were quite ugly to me. But anyway, I did my ECFVG program. I then set with my state boards and I became licensed. And then I started working in middle Tennessee and joined a practice and then became a partner, and then finally bought the other partner out and got involved in emergency clinics, and Bob’s your uncle, here I am.

Well, you’ve been a veterinarian now for more than 40 years. You’ve owned both small animal practices and emergency hospitals. When you look back, what foundational lessons from those early years still guide how you practice and advise today?

Yeah, that’s a big question. Don’t give up. People give up too easily. Don’t give up. There’s always a way. It’s a small industry, so don’t burn bridges.

Isn’t that the truth?

You make connections. It’s not just what you know, it’s who you know. It helps to open doors and everything’s an opportunity. Life’s good. Everything’s an opportunity. Don’t get bogged down.

Such good advice. Everything is an opportunity. Well, Craig, as an independent veterinary business consultant, what are the most common operational or financial blind spots you see in practices, and how can owners address them before they become major problems?

Wow. Such a big topic, big, big, big topic. I’ll start off by saying, most veterinarians are really bad business people. We buy a practice and we think it’s going to be great and we think it’s all going to be rosy and it’s just not. It’s a business and you need to understand businesses and you need to know how to run a business. Just because it’s a veterinary business doesn’t make it that much different from any other business. I built and owned a hundred thousand square foot on seven acres storage facility. It’s not that much different from a large size or a medium-sized veterinary hospital. It just has the difference, there’s no inventory and one employee instead of large inventory and lots of employees. If you sell storage, you don’t work on animals, it’s not that different. It’s still a business and you’ve got to understand how to run a business, and there’s really good resources out there for you.

But I think that you need to go into it with one is, especially if you’re buying a practice, make sure you’ve got a good accountant, make sure you’ve got a good lawyer, make sure you’ve got good fundamental setups of everything. I think most veterinarians are way too trusting, and I think there’s an adage out there that I think is very, very true. There’s two types of veterinary hospitals, ones that have been embezzled, ones that they don’t know that they’ve been embezzled, and that’s because veterinarians are too trusting, so you’ve got to set up your systems properly. You’ve got to have the best support personnel around there, and we tend to … There are really good support personnel.

It’s not cheap. Good people are not cheap, but they will really be powerful for you. They’ll do a great job for you. I think that when you look at the average business out there, the things I’d say is that … I used to bid everything out yearly. Your lab companies give you increases every year. That’s fine, it happens. Your pharma companies give you increases every year. That’s fine, it happens. But you have lots of other contracts that you have out there. You’ve got utilities, you’ve got garbage pickup, you’ve got uniforms, you’ve got X-ray back. You’ve got all these things that you don’t think about. Why aren’t you getting them rebid? There’s lots of different vendors for every single one of these things. Even where I’m in Tennessee, we don’t, but in Texas, you’ve got different electrical companies.

You should be rebidding your phones as well. You should be rebidding your insurance. If you get an invoice with something, you should be rebidding it at least once a year. And we don’t, and so we see a lot of these costs creep up. And then, when you do get price increases, I heard of a case the other day, where someone had gone in and done an analysis on a practice, a really large practice that was longstanding practice who was doing really great. They had changed lab companies, but they never bothered to match the prices or the lab prices, what they’re paying with what they’re charging the client. They had also updated their PIM system when they changed everything over. They were selling a CBC to an owner for $3.50. Well, that’s way, way, way below cost. They’re two years into it, and what they found was they estimated that they had lost $380,000 due to incorrect pricing.

You should be checking … This is the business side of it. I used to get my lab bill every month, and it used to list out all the clients and their animals, and what they’d had run on them, and what we got charged for that. The first thing I’m having my bookkeeper do is look at, one is the price we only charge, is that the price that I had negotiated? Or if it’s not, I’ve got a problem with the lab company. But then I’m looking at, they had to reconcile it with what we charged the client, and you would sometimes find until … Now, we’ve got a lot more automated where you put in the lab request and automatically invoices the client. Some systems still aren’t doing that or they’re not set up to do it properly. Well, some clients are walking out without getting their lab work charged.

Well, then you got a phone call to make, and most veterinarians will say, “Well, I feel bad. I’m not going to call the client.” Why not? I go to the doctor, I have blood work run, and three months later, I get a bill from my lab provider that my doctor uses to pay for the lab work.

I do too. Same thing.

I pay it, so why wouldn’t you call the client and say, “Hey, you’re in last month. We did lab work on your little puppy dog. The bill came in and here’s what we need you to pay.” Engage the client, do that type of thing. I think there’s lots of opportunities and things like that. There’s some good books out there. There’s some good people doing consulting out there. I think that, as a practice owner, and I’m not here to make an advertisement for them, but I will tell you that the best business decision I ever made as a practice owner was to join VMG and that’s veterinary management groups. There’s different groups out there and they tend to call them buying groups. There’s VGP, there’s PSI. VMG to me is not so much buying group. It’s an accountability group. You are split up into groups of peers.

When I was a practice owner, I was in one of the early VMGs and there was 20 of us in this group and we used to meet twice a year. And it wasn’t about the practice of veterinary medicine, it was about the art of veterinary business, and we worked on our practices and we shared best practices. We used to bring in speakers that would help us out and it was all about working on your business. Best business decision I ever made was to join this group. You tend to find that once you’re in a practice and you’re in your community, you feel like you’re on an island. You’ve got colleagues around you that own practices as well, but they see you as competition. They don’t want to talk to you. They don’t want to interact with you. It’s just one of those natural competitive instincts that you have, “That’s my competition. I can’t help them or I can’t … ” You can be nice to them at meetings, but you don’t want to share anything, because you may give them a competitive advantage.

Well, now, you’ve got a peer group and the way it’s set up is, because of antitrust laws, you can’t have anyone in your group that’s less than 25 miles away from you. They’re all away from you. I’m one of my group’s people from Florida to Alaska, so spread out all over the country, but you’ve got what I would call a board of directors. I’ve got people I can bounce stuff off. It’s full open book and we just discuss everything. It’s not about how we treat a case, it’s how we run our businesses, and it’s done nothing but elevate the business minded. To help you become more business minded and elevate what you do and run a better business, become more profitable, be able to take care of your clients and your patients and your staff so much better.

At the end of the day, I would like to retire comfortably, but I’d like all my staff to as well. And I think that’s important. And I think that we need to really take care of our staff, because they’re the backbone of our clinics and we’ve got to really help them, but they need to understand that this is a business. At the end of the day, we have to make a profit to keep the doors open.

That’s so true. Craig, your work as a VMG facilitator does give you a front row seat to some of the challenges facing independent hospitals. What mindset shifts do veterinary practice owners need to make in order to stay both profitable and competitive in today’s consolidating market?

Yeah, I think consolidating market, wow. I think there’s huge opportunity for private practice owners out there, and I think they will continue to be. And yes, we’ve seen massive consolidation, and probably what is they say about 40% of practices corporate owned, that they control about 60% of dollars spent on patients. But I tell you, I think that I don’t see it’s going to grow a lot more than that. I think that the day the private practitioner is returning and there’s huge opportunity there. You are local, you’re in that community and people are looking for that. But I think that one of the big things, the biggest challenges I see is that helping practice owners understand their numbers. I love numbers, they speak to me. That’s what you’ve got to understand when you start becoming a business owner. You don’t have to love numbers, but you got to learn to understand them, because they tell a story.

I would liken it to … I hate the term wellness blood work. It’s not wellness blood work. We’re doing serial monitoring to … Think of it as early detection. You shouldn’t be caught using the term, “We’re doing wellness blood work.” Well, my pet’s well, why am I doing blood work? No, we’re doing early detection blood work. What we’re doing is looking at a pattern of numbers, and if something is increasing, it still may be within the normal range, but if it’s increasing over time, something may be going on there that would make you want to investigate further, so that you can preempt potentially a disease state.

Early intervention may just be, it may be a medication, it may be a change of diet, maybe something that will prevent that. Well, you need to think about numbers of your practice the same way. It’s monitoring to do early detection to see patents, to see what opportunity there is. I had a case recently where I had, in one of my groups, I do these dashboards with them, and I was looking at these dashboards and I said, “Your cost of goods is going up. It’s still within the accepted range for nationally what it should be, but you’ve gone up about a percent and a half, and that’s not normal for your practice. What’s going on?” And he looked at me and said, “Huh, you’re right. I need to go see what’s going on?” And he got back and they dug into it and they found a problem. I won’t say what it is, but they found a major problem and they’re able to correct it. That’s what you need to do.

The other challenges, I think, facing independent hospitals, really it’s for everybody, but there’s a limited new client pool out there. Everyone’s chasing new clients, and I’ll tell you what, the independent practice doesn’t have the money that the corporates do to do outreach, to market, to try to get these people in. But I still think you’ve got a great advantage because you’re independent and local. It is expensive to get new clients in the door. I would counsel you that it’s cheaper to keep the clients that you have, and the best source of new business is within your own PIM system. It’s within your own database. You just got to learn how to mine it.

That’s what I’m huge about is, it’s not just numbers, it’s understanding your numbers and mining your numbers. Compliance, so AHA has got a big definition of compliance. My definition of compliance is, it’s a measure of how well you’re communicating with your clients or caring for your patients. I used to run compliance numbers on anything and everything I could, so that I could see patents. And then, I was always looking for what percentages or what numbers do we look for on a national level for what compliance level should be? A simple one is overtime, everyone fights overtime. If your overtime’s at more than 2% of your payroll, you got a problem. And it’s either one, you don’t have enough people hired, so they’re not going to look at your payroll percentages for each department and see what they are within the norms. And if they’re way low and you’re paying all this overtime, well, you probably need to hire more people.

But if they are within the norms and everything else and your numbers are fine and you’ve got a high overtime, then maybe people are milking the system for your disadvantage and maybe you need to put some responsibility back there on the leads for each section and overtime needs to be justified. Or you can look at simple things, like when we get to patients is that an easy … I always think start the easy way, and the easiest one for me to get people to understand is look at intestinal parasite screening compliance. I can tell you, so I sit on the board of the Companion Animal Parasite Council. We provide the guidelines that veterinarians follow. You pick a parasite, we’ve got the guidelines for you. These guidelines are written by parasitologists, reviewed by parasitologists, reviewed by the whole board, and we publish them and update them on a regular basis.

But you also give life guidelines, which is fecal … Puppies and kittens less than one year of age should have at least four intestinal parasite screens performed their first year life, and we recommend twice a year thereafter. Any adult dog, any adult cat, two intestinal parasite screens a year. No matter what preventatives they are on, we recommend twice a year. I can guarantee you that nearly every patient you have coming in tomorrow is either coming due for, is due for, or past due for an intestinal parasite screen. It’s an incredibly easy place to start when you’re looking at compliance, because it’s such low-hanging fruit.

If you look at that, what should the compliance number be? Well, what I have found, it should be about 50%. Add up all your exams, and I’m talking wellness exams and sick PET exams. Get the total number of exams that you see in a month, and the total number of fecals that you perform should be 50% of that. Most people run in about the 20s. It’s a huge opportunity. I take that as a starting point to say, “How can you change that?” Well, it comes down to … when I’m doing more with the patients I have, it’s good medicine, it’s protecting more patients and it’s protecting more families, because it’s a one health message, you’re preventing zoonotic disease. It’s good for the patient. It’s good for the client. It’s good for the practice. So where do we start with that?

It’s all about better communication. It’s teaching your staff how to have those conversations, more succinctly, better conversations. You help them role play in staff meetings to know how to have those conversations. You look at your reminder systems. That’s one of the big things. Are we sending email reminders, including reminders to bring in stool samples? Are we doing text messaging, including a message to bring in a fresh stool sample? I just taught my clients, sorry, jumping ahead of myself, when you’re doing reminder calls to the clients, having the receptionist remind the client, “And please, bring a fresh stool sample, any postcards as well.”

It’s a matter of getting them all to communicate better to do this. There’s simple things like I see that nearly every clinic has a poop box, poop station outside, so the animals come in and they get them out of the car and there’s a piece of grass there, and right there is a poop stand, baggies to pick up the poop and throw it in the trash can, and they say, “Please deposit stool here.” Think of the opportunities, change the sign, say, “Stop. If you haven’t provided us a stool sample in the next six months, please bring that sample inside now.” It’s simple things you’ve got to think about. Let’s not make things hard for clients. Let’s make things easy. Let’s communicate better with them. You help your staff to communicate better, you look at your reminder systems to do that type of stuff, and then you continue to monitor and adjust accordingly.

And then, think about what else you want to do. Repeat, repeat, repeat. There’s so much opportunity within your own PIM system to improve the things you do. It may be on senior wellness, it may be on dentistry. Name it, you can come up with all kinds of things. I used to run a program when we fall into the fall about senior pets and osteoarthritis, just to remind them of the signs of that and what to be looking for, and we’d engage clients. In the spring, you can be talking about parasites. There’s so many different things you can do as far as that goes, and measure it, measure, measure it. To me, it’s like opportunity, and then it comes down to studying your numbers, knowing what they are.

So important to study your numbers and know what they are, such great tips.

I’ll throw in there and say one other thing is, it’s not just helping your staff to communicate better, but it’s also helping your doctors. We talk about mentoring so much. There’s a difference here. There’s mentoring and there’s coaching. Mentoring is fine, but it’s very, very long-term. And yes, you want to mentor them over time, but mentoring is typically driven by the mentee, deciding what topics. I like to coach. I like to coach people up. I like to coach the doctors up. We’re working on … I think they call it mentoring, because it sounds better. But I want to coach my young doctors up on how to communicate better, how to work cases up better, what we should be doing. I think that there’s, really got to look at that as well. I think it’s, don’t be offended when people want to help you.

Such good advice. Well, Craig, you speak at VMX, WVC, Fetch, VETgirl, and other major conferences. What topic are you finding veterinarians most eager to understand right now, and why do you think it resonates so deeply?

That’s a very hard one, because when I go to these meetings, I’m typically giving presentations, not in lecture halls, but in meetings myself with lots of different industry people. I get to miss a lot of these. And then when I do go, I go to the ones that interest me. But I think that there’s so much out there about work-life balance.

You and I talked about that at the conference in DC last summer.

Yes. Yeah. That resonates with so many people out there. There’s a lot of talk around that about why they don’t have work-life balance and why you have so many problems. I think that … my advice is filter the noise. I think that if you keep on getting hammered with statements around pick a topic around something’s being hammered in your ear repeatedly that’s negative, you’ll accept it and you’ll embrace it and you don’t have to. I’m a positive person. I filter the noise. I spread a wide net and I filter, and I don’t believe everything I hear.

And I think you need to. Yes, it’s an intense industry we live in. It’s like you’re caring for patients and there’s a lot of stress around that. There’s a lot of patients coming into the door and it’s busy, but it’s very rewarding. You make a difference in these pet’s lives, but remember you make a difference in the client’s lives as well. I think one of the most rewarding things about being a veterinarian is not just seeing what you can do for those animals, but seeing what you can do for those clients. You got to filter the bad clients. I see that one bad client will ruin a whole day for a staff member or a veterinarian. It’ll just destroy them.

You got to help them to look at things a different way and say, “Listen, we had a busy day. We saw 23 clients today, and five of them gave you a hug, and three of them sat down and told you all about what’s going on in their lives, and then asked what was going on in your life, and you had this wonderful conversation with them, it was so uplifting. That’s eight people compared to the one that wanted to complain because you didn’t do something quite right. I thought you did a fine job with them. It was just the perception of that client who’s … They complain about everything. They complain when they go to the post office. They complain when they go and pick up a cup of coffee from McDonald’s. That’s just their nature and you can’t let them pull you down, so filter it.”

The focus is on the positive ones.

Yes. Yes.

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As someone who built an eight-doctor practice and co-owned three emergency hospitals, what does it really take to create a culture that attracts and retains talented veterinary professionals today?

Oh, a lot of work. I won’t take credit for it all. You’ve got to surround yourself from really good people that will embrace your vision. You got to have a vision for what you want and you’ve got to find the right people to support that vision. And then, you’ve got to have enough sense to turn them loose and let them run with it and not interfere with what they’re doing. And if you do that, you’ll see amazing things happen. You’re stirring the shift and you’re giving them the vision, but you just need to step back at that point and watch what people do for you. Because if you’ve got the right people and they share that same vision, you’ll do great things. I’d say that we tend to be too nice. Most veterinarians, it’s a great profession. We’ve got great people. So many of us tend to be too nice and we don’t coach people off our ships fast enough. We keep on giving them second chances and they keep on destroying good stuff around them.

What my mother used to call tough love.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Let them go destroy another practice.

Well, you’ve been described as both a problem-solver and a mentor, I should say, coach in this industry. What drives you today after four decades in veterinary medicine, and what impact do you hope your work continues to make?

I enjoy helping people succeed. I’ll put this out here. I am fortunate at this point in my life. I have been perceived as being an old white guy. I tell you what, if we lose all the old white guys and all the old white girls, we’re the major percentage of this profession, we lose institutional knowledge. We will lose so much. We are here to help the younger generations for their success. We’re not here to break them down. We’re not here to stop them. We’re here to say, “I have a wealth of experience and knowledge that I’ve built up over 42 years. I have probably seen everything and done everything, almost everything, and been in some of the worst situations and knowing how to get out of them, and I can help you succeed. So let us.”

What’s been the most surprising thing to you during your career in the veterinary profession?

The change. Just how far we’ve come. I live in the world of two worlds, really. I live in the world of parasites. I live in the world of business management. Just look at the parasite world. When I started practicing, we had [inaudible 00:39:48] for heartworms that you gave every day, and that was it. And then, we started getting topicals, and now we’ve got these multi-combos that do multiple, multiple parasites, and they’re so safe. It’s just incredible. I’ve gone from handwritten charts up to, I’m talking into a phone that’s doing AI scribing for me. It’s the integration of things. It’s interesting. It’s the efficiencies that we are seeing come into this profession. I think that we are still a very inefficient profession, and I still think there’s a lot of stuff out there that we should be embracing that will really help drive a lot more efficiencies. And it’s all to our benefit, and it’s just a matter of finding it and using it. It’s exciting times. It’s really cool to see what’s going on out there.

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

I have no crystal ball. I know that things are cyclical. I think that it’s a good profession. It always will be a good profession. We just need to have more veterinarians being practice owners. That’s where it will succeed. I think that we’re going to see a shakeout with the corporates. We’re going to see bigger corporates gobble up little ones. We’re already seeing some being stressed and they’re closing clinics that used to be really good clinics. I want to see them go back into the hands of the private practitioner, be privately-owned again. I think that economies is cyclical again. It’s been really, really, really rosy times. I think that we’re already seeing less visits as the economy is getting a little shakier. We see the forecast in the future that this year is probably not going to be that good, and 2030s may be horrible.

We don’t have enough veterinarians, we have too many. We don’t have enough, we have too many. We see that cycle as well. And so, we may have too many veterinarians in the future and it will cycle up and down. But as an industry as a whole, people love their animals, they want to take good care of them. We just got to work out how we can do it cost-effectively and efficiently.

Mm-hmm. Craig, what’s been the biggest challenge or adversity that you’ve experienced throughout your career?

This is a tough one. I think the biggest adversities is not so much about the treating the animals. You can always get more help. They’ve got great referrals now. We’ve got great specialists, so you’ve always got more hands there, although things do go sideways no matter what you do. I think the biggest problems … Well, I think it’s easier this way. I’ve got a friend that’s in California that sits on the board out there and 90% of all complaints, he will tell you that he sees 10% of complaints are, what did he say? Ten percent of the complaints are probably reasonable complaints against veterinarians, and 10% of them are just people grinding an X, and the other 80% of them are all about bad communication. I think the biggest problem we have is that we have to communicate better. I truly think that 90% of all problems that I’ve ever seen in practice is either been from what I said incorrectly, what I said, what I didn’t say, or how I said it. And if we learn how to communicate better with our clients, our lives will be a lot easier.

So important, communication. Well, what advice would you give the younger version of yourself?

Go for it.

Go for it. I like it.

Yeah.

Well, what message or principle do you wish you could teach everyone listening today?

Treat everybody the way you want to be treated. And if we all did that, the world would be a better place, and there’d be less problems. I think that’s so important. Treat clients fairly. To me, I always told my staff and my vets who work for me, it’s like, “Just do the right thing. Just do the right thing and the money will follow.” Whenever you do the right thing, everything solves itself. And doing the right thing is not giving discounts. Whenever there’s a problem, the first thing everyone wants to do is just, well, let’s give them a discount. Let’s give them for free. It’s like, no. It’s like, that’s how you go out of business. It’s just do the right thing and communicate well, and things will sort themselves out.

Communicate well, do the right thing, and doing the right thing is not hard to do.

No.

Well, some of our guests say they’ve had a key book they read that helped them along the way with their journey. Do you have a key book in your life that’s impacted you the most?

I’m a voracious reader, and there’s not one key book. There’s many good books out there that will help you with veterinary business. But there is one book that I always go back to, and it’s the Bible, because you have to have a foundation. And if you don’t have a foundation, you’ll be rudderless.

Yeah. Great. There’s great advice there in the Bible. Well, Craig, 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?

Stay off social media. It’s just noise. For the most part, it is often negative noise that drives people in the wrong direction. Work hard, but play harder. Life’s wonderful. Enjoy it. You’re in this profession for a reason. Enjoy it. If you’re not enjoying the profession, find something else to do. There are many good things out there you can do, but you’re in it for a reason. You should be able to enjoy it. Filter the noise and have focus and goals. Surround yourself with good people and find someone that you trust and admire and get them to mentor or coach you.

Well, Craig, thank you for being my guest today on the People of Animal Health Podcast. I enjoyed our conversation and enjoyed you being here today.

Oh, my pleasure. Glad to be here with you. Thanks for having me.