Transcription of Ben Shaw for the show Creative Entrepreneurship #148
Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you’re listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast show #148, Creative Entrepreneurship, airing for the first time on Sunday, July 13, 2014. As a radio show host and wellness editor from Maine magazine, I have had many fascinating conversations with our state’s creative and business leaders. This has provided me with an education that most physicians cannot access. I’ve especially enjoyed interacting with entrepreneurs such as Ben Shaw of Vets First Choice and Andrea King of Aristelle. Each of them are today’s guest. From them, I’ve learned that doing things differently is both possible and sustainable.
This is a great lesson for those of us who hoped to move forward successfully within the medical field. I hope that this will prove to be a great lesson for those of you who are listening today. Thank you for joining us. I always enjoy spending time with people who are doing unique things in the state of Maine and are doing unique things that benefit people in a bigger way. They will be speaking, today, we are speaking with Ben Shaw, the CEO and co-founder of Vets First Choice and as someone who exemplifies the entrepreneurial spirit that is growing here in Maine. Ben is the focus of an article in Maine magazine by Susan Conley, so I encourage people who want to learn more about Ben Shaw also to read her article. Thanks so much for coming in here and talking to us today.
Ben: Thanks for having me.
Lisa: Vets First Choice is interesting in some ways because it grew out of something that, David Shaw, who I believe you know quite well was doing in his own life with IDEXX.
Ben: Right, IDEXX has been a great local success in working with veterinarians around the world to provide tools and capabilities to help veterinarians be better practitioners and we saw a great opportunity to do to the front office of veterinary medicine where I think IDEXX has really supported veterinarians within the back office of veterinary medicine.
Lisa: One of the things that I’m fascinated by in this topic is having been, in my own medical practice, doing my own thing and being a small practice doctor and then becoming an employed physician, I know what it takes to run an office. It is not just about being a doctor, there’s a whole business behind it. I think this is something that veterinarians probably do better than doctors in some ways.
Ben: I think it’s a lot and to be an office space practitioner in a cash pay situation where when you bring your patients in for such a broad range of services, veterinarians are really broad practitioners, so keeping up with scheduling, keeping up with appointments, keeping up with just the bookkeeping and managing a viable small business is a huge amount of work. You add onto that the complexity of providing the suite of medical services and surgical services that they provide is really astonishing.
Lisa: Why veterinarians? It seems as though we’ve had so much of a focus on the healthcare providers and health and we’re all talking about the health system needing reform but there was a market and your father side and you have seen an even a more specific part of this market but where do that come from?
Ben: I think these office-based practitioners have really complex business requirements. The fact that there are so many offices, there’s 25,000 veterinary practices in the United States. It’s hard to access the market. You can’t approach a few large hospitals and grab a big share but also the needs, the patient dynamics are so different from human health care. It’s unclear that a lot of the tools and technologies and medications and protocols that get developed on the human side makes sense or translate well into veterinarians medicine but veterinary medicine itself over the last 25 years has really exploded and become a lot more sophisticated. Some of that is following the humanization of pets trend.
Pets are living longer, pets are aging and a lot of veterinarians and their partners are developing better protocols to manage pet care. I think that there’s a great opportunity now to help veterinarians who have really been successful in managing their business to a better job of communicating their pet or their clients, how to engage them when they’re not in the practice? Veterinaries have logged other health, human health care markets in terms of using internet-based technologies to help manage their practice.
Lisa: Your company has really exploded, people have really taken to it, you are in markets all over the United States and I’m assuming internationally as well. Why is this the case? Why have you been able to be so successful?
Ben: We were not the first mover in our market but we saw an opportunity to partner with veterinarians in a way that allowed them to be more successful in meeting changed pet-owner expectations and I value propositions, actually, we’ve been fortunate to attract a huge subscription from veterinarians. We now have over 10,000 veterinary practices in the United States subscribe to our service. What I think that with that momentum and with that value proposition, we’ve been able to attract the right team, the right level of partner support but it’s have been a really exciting time. The company has, is just now finishing its fourth year since being founded and a lot of ways, the real growth and the real expansion opportunities are yet to come.
Lisa: You’re now partnering with 40% of all the veterinarians in the United States, how are you going to get the other 60%?
Ben: We’ve been expanding our sales force. Just this past week, we welcomed 10 new field sales team members in training in our offices. It’s a really exciting times. We build a national field sales organization that’s able to really partner with veterinarians and help them think about not really if they need our service, they absolutely do but how to incorporate the role of Vets First Choice and what to do. What is its role in the business? How well, is it a segment of their patients that are looking for the convenience of online ordering and home delivery? Is it that they want to outsource major product categories to us?
These account managers are almost business consultants. More than just signing up more practices, it’s really creating a deeper relationship with veterinarians that are already using our service.
Lisa: In addition to having relationships with veterinarians, you also have to have relationships with the manufacturers and you have to have relationships with pet owners themselves, what are some of the similarities and differences that you’re seeing? How can you build upon what you’ve already learned?
Ben: On the manufacture side, we’re a very regulated business. We’re licensed pharmacy in 50 states. We have certain high standards that we have to adhere to, after all, we’re dispensing prescription medications by mail to pet owners. We’re fortunate to have all 75 of the major veterinary drug companies and nutrition business like Purina and Hill’s and Iams who have partnered with us to really see that this is, this presents our major future, future of veterinary dispensing, the ability to have cloud-based technology services that can support practitioners and avoid the need to over-inventory too much product in their practice.
At the end of the day, the pet owner engagement, the pet owner experience is what’s most critical. Our team has really focused on making Vets First Choice a terrific experience for pet owners that they can’t imagine life before Vets First Choice, the convenience of having your diet and your medications shipped straight to your house and have timely reminders about when Fluffy needs her medications and do it in partnership with your veterinarian is really powerful. We continue to focus on ways to make Vets First Choice or allow Vets First Choice to provide a much better pet owner experience knowing that we have all the important infrastructure in placed with the manufacturers, regulators and even in our actual veterinarians to make sure that we’re doing that in a really high-quality manner.
Lisa: Do you see any possible lessons for humans and human medications and human interactions with their providers?
Ben: I think we’re still in a point where we’re able to adopt a lot of success and successful models from human health care and to incorporate them into veterinary medicine in around disease management protocols or around the way which we measure compliance or medication compliance, how successfully patients are staying on therapy? In a cash pay environment, you start to recognize quickly what pet owners value, how much they’re willing to spend forward against diagnosis and how much they’re willing to spend for treatment. I’m sure that there are lessons to be learned there. When you actually have to put that in your credit card and pay for your drugs, that full retail value, you start to appreciate the cost of care.
Lisa: If you’re going to invest in a pet, then you might be more interested in making sure that that pet is healthier just in general, so maybe you’ll be more careful about your pet’s weight than perhaps you are about your own weight?
Ben: There are less space that link how well you’re taking care of your own health to the quality of care you provide your pet and there’s also other data that shows people are often more willing to take better care of their pet family members than they are themselves but I think that absolutely, I think that diet and exercise and just overall healthy living probably bodes well for the whole family household.
Lisa: Do you have pets?
Ben: We have a seven, five and one-year-old children who would love to have a dog and we just don’t know if it’s a safe environment for a dog to join our household right at this moment but we love pets and I think the part of the attraction of so many of the folks who’ve joined the Vets First Choice team has been to be, who are really passionate dog owners, really passionate pet lovers but has been part, this is a very community-driven market, very local and people are really connected to their local shelter organizations local animal welfare organizations, local animal welfare organizations, local veterinary practices. A lot of our former staff worked in veterinary medicine, is practice managers or veterinary technicians. Clearly, this group has deep roots in the pet market and in veterinary medicine.
Lisa: Veterinary medicine is interesting and that there are sub-specialists now. There are cat sub-specialists, dog sub-specialists, large animal but in Maine, most veterinarians or many veterinarians are still practicing the full range. That must be an interesting challenge for veterinarians?
Ben: It’s one of my favorite part of the businesses, just stepping back and looking at managing a veterinary practice and the case loves the patients that come in and the complexity of, in the range of medical services and products they’re being dispensed day to day and the breadth of knowledge requires by the veterinary staffs to be able to meet that client demand running across orthopedics surgery to pediatric and geriatric care and oncology and dentistry and cardiology. It’s really staggering or keeping up on infectious disease and local weather conditions that might cause different risk factor.
I think that that’s a real phenomenon and one of the things that we most like working with veterinarians is just they are very smart, very resourceful, have very complex businesses but there are growing specialists and a lot of practices have brought in specialists and there’s a great relationship that has developed between specialists and the referring general practitioners. Here, locally, there are some really outstanding specialists in the Southern Maine market who have been really successful and who are partner with Vets First Choice as well.
Lisa: Is part of your respect for these individuals link to your own entrepreneurial ideals?
Ben: I think absolutely, the managing a small business and particularly a complicated one I think is really interesting but I think that it also creates lots of opportunities for companies like ours to figure out how they can partner with these small business owners to help them be more successful. One of the things that’s fun with Vets First Choice is we have so many ideas and opportunities and services we can provide to support veterinarians as customers but also to help them be more successful in offering a broader, bigger array of pet owner services. It’s really just, we’ve just really gotten started with pharmacy services but have a great opportunity to support them with overall practice management.
Lisa: Did you think you’re going to be working in the veterinary field when you’ve started out?
Ben: We’ve looked at, I think that sometimes derivatives of previous experiences end up guiding you and I think that Idexx, clearly Idexx Laboratories has had such a terrific success in animal health and may not be that surprising that as a derivative of Idexx’s experiences that there were opportunities to work with veterinarians or work with pet owners in ways that are outside of Idexx’s core expertise which is really in diagnostics and laboratory services, when you start providing patient-facing services, that’s a really different kind of opportunity.
Our team is an interesting hybrid between folks who have come from veterinary medicine and animal health and folks who have come from e-commerce and direct marketing and consumer-facing services which is really different kind of expertise. I guess I’m not terribly surprised that locally, at least here in Portland, Maine, there’s such a terrific wealth of knowledge and experience between [inaudible 00:15:15] and Idexx and other organizations on both veterinary medicine and in direct marketing and e-commerce.
Lisa: You graduated from Bates with a triple major in Biology, Political Science and Environmental Studies. That’s an interesting pulling together of fields, especially the political science. Why did you make that choice?
Ben: I think Bates is a terrific Liberal Arts education, some of that could just be my own indecision and having just a broad, general intellectual curiosity. I think that Bates provide an opportunity to pursue a lot of really interesting topics. In some cases, they did come together. My senior thesis was really looking at how Maine could better support its non-profit by a medical research community with facility funding which were some combination of bringing together, from a political science point of view, really bring together state and federal resources to support some really successful and outstanding non-profit biomedical organizations like Jackson Laboratory or [Bigelow 00:16:13] Labs or Mount Desert Island Biological.
In fact, the state has gone to become very supportive of those organizations and the return on that has been really significant for the state of Maine. I was interested in that converge and how policy is supporting our biomedical research community or healthcare community.
Lisa: Have you continued on with that interest any way? Have you done any work more on the national scene with lobbying or other connections?
Ben: We have been really active in a lot of different activities where there, but not just in healthcare and in biomedical programs in the environmental programs and I think there are terrific opportunities to bring teams together to solve really interesting problems. I think that while Vets First Choice happens to be a for-profit organization, I don’t think that there’s a huge difference in launching social ventures that have similarly compelling missions and the need to bring organization and stakeholders together to solve interesting problems and we look forward to opportunities to be part of projects like that.
Lisa: Tell me about some of these interesting projects.
Ben: Here in Maine, I had an opportunity to be part of the founding of Maine Hudson Trails here in Western Mountains in creating the concept to both protect and conserve large sections of the Western Mountains but to build hut and trail systems that allowed access into some really beautiful wilderness areas but the utilization and the stay, members are subscribers plus the fees for staying at the huts in fact pay for and cover the cost of managing some of Maine’s most beautiful wilderness areas. I think that’s a pretty, it’s an interesting social venture whose mission it is to conserve and protect some beautiful parts of Maine but to very much take bring together stakeholders, communities, government, mostly state resources to create a service offering.
It has elements of for-profit or some of our company operating. It has to provide great services. It has to deliver surplus but it’s very much a non-profit mission. At Blackpoint Group, which is a firm that I’m affiliated with, we’ve had opportunities to support lots of interesting social ventures like Maine Hudson Trails.
Lisa: Here on the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast, we’ve long recognized the link between health and wealth. Here to speak more on the topic is Tom Shepard of Shepard Financial.
Tom: The most important thing you need to begin a personal evolution is heart. To start your journey, you have to take the first step with your eyes and your heart wide open, open to new experiences and possibilities. Without this openness, your efforts, your path toward growth and positive change will be fought with obstacles that seem insurmountable. If you find yourself looking forward to good things to come, open your heart and take a brave step toward the future. If you’re interested in evolving your relationship with your money, get in touch with us. I’m here to help at [email protected]. We’ll help you evolve with your money.
Speaker 1: Securities offered through LPL Financial. Member of Member of FINRA/SIPC. Investment advice offered through Flagship Harbor Advisors, a registered investment advisor. Flagship Harbor Advisors and Shepard Financial are separate entities from LPL Financial. The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is brought to you by Bangor Savings Bank. For over 150 years, Bangor Savings has believed that the innate ability of the people of Maine to achieve their goals and dreams, whether it’s personal finance, business banking or wealth management assistance you’re looking for, at Bangor’s Savings Bank, you matter more. For more information, visit www.bangor.com.
Lisa: You also spent some time at Jackson Laboratories. What were some of the lessons you took away from that experience?
Ben: Jackson Laboratories is a really special organization in the state of Maine, for me, it was just really fun to be around such talent and folks who are pursuing, understanding the basic biological basis of disease and health. I was really impressed with the organization’s ability to use some of its intellectual capital as well as some of the tools that they had developed in the ordinary course of their research and made those services available to other universities, biotech and pharmaceutical companies to support that program. In that sense, it’s really a much more expanded and leverage organization.
In some cases, those services result in fees back to Jackson Laboratories that are used to re-invest in facilities and development. Up in Harbor, Maine is one of, we know is a really spiritual space where Jackson Laboratories built a beautiful campus and is really do it furthering the basic understanding of health and disease and starting to find ways to translate basic understanding into a clinical context. A really great organization and I really admire the way that they were able to use the social mission to support other organizations to fund its core mission.
Lisa: When I spent time at Jackson Lab last summer, one of the things that they talked about was because they were losing some of their traditional funding sources, they were being called to look for funding in places that require them to learn how to communicate between fields, learn how to communicate with other people who are doing slightly different things or even the same thing in other institutions, but also learn how to communicate with consumers. That’s been an interesting shift where it used to be the science and knowledge where its own thing and then the consumer information and education was its own thing. There’s a lot of crossover now. Is that something that you found with your company?
Ben: I think so. I think that it’s complex and it’s hard to do but I think one of the thing that Vets First Choice has been able to do well has been to bring together a lot of stakeholders into imagining a better way to operate and to imagine a better way that we could do business to create more value for everyone in the process, for manufacturers, our services translate to significant improvements in medication compliance for just pet owners remembering their pets remembering to take their medications but also recognizing that we’re removing a lot of friction and a lot of inefficiency in the supply of products into veterinary practices and dispensing and that we’re able to do it at a much higher quality of compliance with regulation which just continues to get harder and harder.
Not just pharmacy regulation, but also credit card security and transactional security and patient privacy. I think that this is a really exciting time as technology and tools have made possible more successful collaboration but still a lot of work to bring together a lot of, a very diverse group of stakeholders and to help them imagine and then execute a better way of operating whether it’s at Vets First Choice and managing pharmacy services or Jackson Laboratories in terms of imagining different ways that collaborators and principal investigators can collaborate on similar projects.
Lisa: In the past, it may have been possible for people to be very focused on ideas or very focused on emotions or very focused on social connections, you had your academics, you had your practitioners. It seems like now, to be an entrepreneur, you actually have to be able to speak to the head, speak to the heart, speak to the family, speak to the community. Would you agree with that?
Ben: I do. I think that it’s so hard to launch new ideas and to launch new businesses. You have to be authentic. You have to believe in what you’re doing. I think that others have to come along and agree with that. I think that, yeah, I think what you’re describing is a really authentic approach into believing and having conviction that there’s an opportunity to be smarter, to be better, to create value for customers and for their clients then I say yes. I think it’s really hard, bad ideas and or ideas that aren’t totally well thought through, there’s enough friction in the process of getting a new idea off the ground that it won’t take long before bad ideas get weeded out.
Lisa: At the same time, if you have an idea, even if it’s a good idea, if you can’t communicate it well or if it doesn’t speak to somebody’s emotional reality, then that won’t get off the ground either.
Ben: I think that’s right. It’s finding those connection points, what really drives it. There’s no question for Vets First Choice. We have, we’re very disruptive. We’re changing the way drugs are distributed in veterinary medicine and we’re enabling veterinarians to carry less inventory and to have more dispensing opportunities, and so traditional channels of distribution of drugs are under real pressure. I imagine it’s a little bit of the feeling of blockbuster in Netflix or other examples of where entire ways in which consumers are digesting content or media or the e-commerce are changing and that can be uncomfortable.
I think in this case the improvements and the efficiency gains and the quality gains are so powerful for pet owners and veterinarians and manufacturers that it’s the right decision.
Lisa: In addition to having this company in which from what I understand has grown 8,500% since 2010 when it was initiated and having your three children in the Cape Elizabeth School system, what do you like to do for free time? Would you have free time I guess is one question.
Ben: No, I think, hopefully it’s a work hard, play hard. We have a lot of fun. We ski up at Sugarloaf. We like to windsurf and kite board. We find lot of opportunities to take a break from the action. I think that the growth is, continuously, the growth of the company continues to be really rapid. Of course, when you start from a small start point, the numbers can get to be pretty big but we’ve just finished a really successful first quarter. We’re still about three X buyer year. I expect that growth will continue. I just hope to continue to find time to be inspired by not just for-profit programs but some of, there’s a lot of really interesting social mission work in and around Southern Maine and looking forward to part and find more time to be part of some of those initiatives.
Lisa: Ben, how do people find out about Vets First Choice?
Ben: We have a 160 veterinary practices in the state of Maine. Chances are we may be providing pharmacy services through your veterinarian but you can go to VetsFirstChoice.com and look, find, see if your veterinarian is subscribe to our service. If they’re not, we can sign them up but I think pet owners will find that we provide great quality products of huge assortment, great prices but in partnership with your veterinarian. Try free auto ship of therapeutic dog food for a couple of months delivered to your door and see if that’s something worth staying with and try again, VetsFirstChoice.com.
Lisa: If you’re a pet owner out there, then I encourage you to do what Ben had suggested which is try that free auto ship of dog food or somehow just look into the company more because it sounds like a really interesting idea and something and an idea that really that this time has come. We’ve been speaking with Ben Shaw, the CEO and co-founder of Vets First Choice, entrepreneur here in the great state of Maine and you can read more about Ben in Maine Magazine in the article by Susan Conley. Thanks so much for coming in today.
Ben: Thank you very much.