Tag: veterinary economics

10 Best Marketing Tips for Veterinarian Practices

by easyDVM

Word-of-mouth once created extreme demand for exceptional veterinarians. Today, amplifying your message and building a strong local presence are needed to increase foot (and paw) traffic to your practice.

Here are 10 tips to keep your lobby full:

1. Make Sure Your Practice Is Top-Notch

Lots of competition exists. Not only are there more vets than ever, but there are also pet vaccine clinics and large pet retailers. Review your location, your hours, your pricing, administration and your pet care. Lacking in any area? Fix it before expanding promotions. If scheduling or recordkeeping are issues, veterinary software will make you more efficient. The convenience of practice hours can be troublesome, so consider adding one late night per week.

2. Formulate a Goal and Strategy

What do you want to accomplish? How can you get there? Consider how you do things now and what works well. Promotions that target current clients are successful and cost-effective since these people already know and like you. Supercharge your use of client mailers and your newsletter. (You do have one, right?)

3. Encourage Word-of-Mouth

Today’s loving and savvy pet owners research well before trusting someone with their furry friends. They’ll ask friends for recommendations and read online reviews before calling for an appointment. Be sure to ask current clients to leave reviews on your website, Google or social media accounts. Offer them a discount for referring friends or family. Surprise good customers with a gift card for a local pet store. You can bet they’ll tell their friends.

4. What’s in It for Them?

Focus marketing on the benefits to your clients and their four-legged friends. Tell them about your friendly team, your newly extended hours, cage-free boarding or affordable rates. Why should they do business with you?

5. Keep Your Message Simple

Figure out your message and stick to it. Keep it simple, easy to remember and effective. Something along the lines of “Jones Animal Hospital: We love your pets like you do!”

6. Use Calls to Action

Your marketing should include a call to action. Even if you are voted Best Vet in Miami, a vet offering a promo discount for new clients will likely attract more of them. Use your status, but give them a reason to call for an appointment right now: “We were voted Best Vet in Miami, and we’ll give you $25 to found out why this week.”

7. Build Social Media Pages With Unique Content

Sponsor photo contests for “best smile,” “laziest pooch,” “most curious cat” or “playful pups,” and watch your fan base grow rapidly. Post links to blog posts offering tips about keeping pets safe on the Fourth of July, or how to keep them parasite free. Offer incentives to current clients who enter their pets in the contest, in addition to a gift for the winners. Promote services sparingly, but give them lots of information, great pictures and stories about your pet clients or your team.

Animal rescue groups are always in need of pet food and other supplies. Donate these yourself, or set up a donation area at your office. You might also consider volunteering to treat injured or ill animals that are rescued. Animal lovers know which vets in town are kindred spirits!

9. Special Events and Collaborations

Hosting workshops about caring for a new puppy or leash training a dog will draw lots of pet lovers. How about a picnic or holiday celebration to thank your clients, or an open house to show off your new facility? Collaborate with related businesses and do cross-promotions.

10. In-Practice Marketing

Promote your services on your lobby walls and treatment rooms, or pin flyers to a bulletin board in your waiting area. Let people know how you are different from other vets in town.

Use these tips to brainstorm ideas for your practice, and contact us for veterinary software programs to streamline administration and boost profits.

Sources:

EasyDVM Practice Software is a cloud-based veterinary practice management software system. We pride ourselves in offering a system that is user-friendly, easy to learn for new team members, full-featured and elegant in its simplicity. Best of all, all devices, multiple users, all your clients and patients, always affordable.

Should I Open My Own Veterinary Practice?

by easyDVM

Open for businessOpening your own veterinary practice gives you a lot of control over your career, but some vets are happy to remain associates in existing practices. The right choice for you depends on what you want out of your career. Let’s take a look at the benefits and drawbacks of each option to see which is right for you.

Why Open Your Own Veterinary Practice?

Veterinary practice owners often have more control over their working lives than vets who work as employees in practices owned by other people. When you own the practice, you can determine the opening hours of your practice, as well as choosing the layout and decor of your working environment. Feeling that you have chosen to come into work every morning can make a huge difference to your state of mind, as you will feel in control of your life. You may also feel more invested in the practice and feel as though you are working toward an important goal.

Why Remain as an Associate?

Associate vets often have a better work-life balance than practice owners. Although they may in theory have less control over their working hours, they often work fewer hours in total. Whereas practice owners must do everything it takes to keep their practice running, including solving any crises that occur, employees are only obliged to work their contracted hours. When you go home at the end of the day as an associate, you can stop thinking about work, whereas a practice owner is responsible for planning the long-term future of their business.

Which Is Better for You as a Veterinarian?

Choosing to remain an associate doesn’t mean you aren’t committed to your career. Some veterinarians choose to forgo practice ownership so they can spend more time reading the latest medical journals and developing their medical skills. On the other hand, practice owners get a wider view of pet care, as they interact with pet owners, insurance companies, and the regulations that govern the industry, as well as the animals themselves. Which option is best for your career? It depends whether you want to focus purely on medicine or explore other areas of running a veterinary business. This is a very personal choice, so take some time to think through which aspects of your job you most enjoy before making the jump into practice ownership.

Which Option Is More Financially Rewarding?

Practice owners have a greater potential to increase their earnings than associates, but they also risk losing money. As an associate, you may enjoy the stability of taking home a fixed salary every month, or you may aspire to build a business that provides you with long-term financial security. If you have access to enough capital to start your own practice, you could create a highly profitable business that gives an excellent return on your initial investment.

Should You Open Your Own Veterinary Practice?

Opening a veterinary practice is a great option for many people, but before you jump into this option, it pays to do your homework. Take the time to learn the business skills you’ll need to manage your practice, such as marketing, accounting and managing practice budgets. Think carefully about what you want from your veterinary career. Are you an ambitious entrepreneur who craves control or an associate who simply wants to care for animals while maintaining a healthy work-life balance?

EasyDVM Practice Software is a cloud-based veterinary practice management software system. We pride ourselves in offering a system that is user-friendly, easy to learn for new team members, full-featured and elegant in its simplicity. Best of all, all devices, multiple users, all your clients and patients, always affordable.

Pricing in Veterinary Practices

by Sam D Meisler DVM

The business of veterinary medicine is fascinating.  When we all embarked on our journey to become veterinarians, how to succeed as a veterinarian seemed to have nothing to do with the business of veterinary medicine. Goal number one was getting into vet school. Goal number two was paying for vet school – i.e. student loans. And goal number three was getting a job and getting paid for it. Somehow, we all assumed that things ended there for us as far as veterinary economics was concerned.  Our negotiation for a higher salary woPricing in Vet Practiceuld be with our bosses, and we could let our bosses figure out how it would all work with clients, pets, services and products. We would try to generally stay out of the business mess.

But then as we advanced in our careers, some of us started to get frustrated with our bosses. Why didn’t he buy that ultrasound machine that I wanted and needed to use?  Why doesn’t she pay her staff more money? How did my paid vacation disappear when I went to proSal?  Why are we always being pressured to sell wellness packages? And then we thought we could do it better.  So some of us became bosses and then after a while, we started to understand that just like our former bosses, we didn’t have all the answers. We also started to understand some of the answers we had been given.

One of the biggest questions I get asked from owners and associates alike is how does one price a product or service.  The simple answer to that question is this: the price you can charge for a product or service is the highest price the market will bear.  Is it to do with what’s fair?  Generally, pricing has nothing to do with what is fair.  Yes, at both extremes of pricing a product or service (ie super low price or super high price), there are ethical questions.  Is it fair to charge people hundreds of dollars for a life saving epipen when the product costs so little to produce? No, that does not seem fair.  So as a veterinary business owner, how do you decide what to charge while still upholding one of the highest ethical standards ascribed to a profession?

Fairness in pricing involves looking at all stakeholders involved in the veterinary business.  Stakeholders in your veterinary business include your lay team members, your associates, your clients, your patients, your vendors, you and your family, etc.  Fairness implies balance.  You must balance the financial impact to you and your team versus the financial impact to your clients.  In most cases, a veterinary practice has far fewer business owners and employees than it has clients. Therefore, any pricing decision has a far greater individual impact on you or one of your employees than on any of your individual clients.  For example, a $5 increase in the average transaction fee (from a general price increase) for a practice with 10,000 transactions per year (perhaps generated by 5000 clients) means potentially $50,000 more for you and your staff.  For the individual client, they spend $10 more for the year on average while you and your staff (say you and 9 employees) receive an average of $5000 in increased pay potentially.  The key point here is your clients can handle a price increase much better that you and your staff can handle a price decrease.

More importantly, you are well within ethical boundaries if your prices are within range of what provides you and your employees fair compensation for your investment of time, capital, education and stress.  So now we circle back to our answer: price your products and services at the highest the market will bear until you feel that you and your staff are being unfairly overcompensated.  (Please post a comment to this blog if you know of any practice that unfairly overcompensates it’s owners and it’s employees.)

By the way, as a general guideline, use the following benchmarks for compensation: practice profit should be 20% of revenues, yearly rent if you are a veterinary facility owner should be 10% of the appraised value, yearly salary as a full-time veterinarian should be around $95,000 plus or minus $20,000 depending on the region, and staff wages should be $15 per hour plus or minus $2/hour depending on the region – in order to be a high quality practice (www.payscale.com).  If you can’t reach these benchmarks, don’t be ashamed of any price hikes in your products and services.  Remember the words “what the market will bear”; these words limit your price increases as well.  Most of the time, however, the market can bear much higher prices than veterinary business owners and their employees can stomach.  Check back for future posts on pricing lab work, generic versus brand name pricing, and pricing expensive injectables for larger pets.