Transcription of 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.
Lisa: As a physician and small business owner, I rely on Marci Booth from Booth Maine to help me with my own business and to help me live my own life fully. Here are a few thoughts from Marci.
Marci: When was the last time you took a break from what you were doing, from the work that was piled up on your desk and just look up? I know that during the course of my days, I often forget to take a moment or two to just breathe, look up at the sky and dream. Terrible that I have to remind myself to breathe but when I do, I feel energized because in those moments, I’m able to let go of the daily grind and think more about what I want to accomplish, how I want my business to grow. Sometimes, those are the uh-huh moments. If we all took a few moments out each day to stop what we were doing and dream a little about our business futures.
Not only would we feel a great sense of calm but we may come to realize that these dreams can in fact come true. I’m Marci Booth. Let’s talk about the changes you need BoothMaine.com
Speaker 1: This segment of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour is brought to you by the following generous sponsors, Mike LePage and Beth Franklin of ReMax Heritage in Yarmouth, Maine. Honesty and Integrity can take you home. With ReMax Heritage, it’s your move. Learn more at rheritage.com.
Lisa: Today on the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour, we have the great pleasure to have with us Andrea King who is the owner of Aristelle in Portland, Maine and Burlington, Vermont. Andrea is also the subject of a profile that we wrote for Old Port Magazine, the initial Old Port Magazine which came out in June. I hope everybody who’s sitting takes a moment to read it. This is Andrea King from Aristelle. Thanks so much for coming in.
Andrea: Thanks for having me Lisa.
Lisa: Andrea, you have a really interesting story. First tell us, what is Aristelle?
Andrea: It was obviously a bra-fitting and fine lingerie store. I really see it more as a service store. The whole point is to provide women with an opportunity to get fitted to find the right bra size in a really welcoming environment. Our goal is to just be able to serve women of all ages, sizes, shapes by offering a lot of different bra sizes.
Lisa: You did not start out in the bra field. You started out pretty far away from the bra field actually.
Andrea: Yeah, quite. It’s been a long journey to retail. Yeah, I’ve worked in international development with the World Bank. I spent time working in, almost 50 countries, Asia and South America. The last group of countries was Eastern Europe and Central Asia working in London but always knew I wanted to have my own business. When I move to Vermont, I looked to a couple of different things, nothing really grabbed me. Yeah, after talking to a couple of people including my mom who was working at a lingerie store in Canada and she was just telling me this amazing stories about just changing women’s lives, really.
Fundamentally having women say, wow, I can’t believe that I’m actually comfortable in my body or this is changing the way I feel about myself, those kinds of stories. I said, well, that sounds like really fun, yeah, I jumped in there with two feet.
Lisa: Andrea, you’re originally from Newfoundland and gone, went all over the world and ended up with a store in Portland but tell me about growing up in Newfoundland and what that was like?
Andrea: It’s pretty remote. It’s the most eastern point in Canada. It’s, just to give you a perspective, it’s a four-hour flight to London, England. It’s really way out there in the ocean. It’s pretty unique in the way that you’re right on the ocean. You’re very isolated from a lot of other things. It’s not like you could drive to the next big city because to get to Halifax would be a two-day drive including a big long boat ride. Pretty out there, a lot of nature, hiking, fishing, we had a cabin an hour from the city where we would go do great hikes and fishing and canoeing and camping and that kind of stuff.
What’s nice about it too, because you’re so far away, it has to have its own city feel, it has a great music scene and interesting theatre because nobody can go to the closest big city. It has its own vibe that way. Interestingly though, they have a really great French-immersion program. I actually did school up until grade eight all in French. I guess that’s been rooted because it’s in Canada that it have that offering. Yeah, I live there until I was 21 and I haven’t live there since. Id’ love to go back. We go back often but I still can’t move to live in there.
Lisa: Your father is a university, teaches courses at university in Newfoundland but also does a lot of work in the entrepreneurial field. Does this influence the decisions that you’ve made in your education and now what you’re doing for work?
Andrea: Yeah. When you and I spoke, I joked about how whenever I would ask for money growing up, he would say, well, I got this great business idea. As a teenager, you’re thinking, I just want the $50 now. I want a pair of jeans or I just want to go out for the weekend but he would always come up with his ideas that, some of them were good, some of them were bad but just the thought and the concept of you can easily make money or you should try to think of interesting ideas as ways to make money. It was always there in our relationship with him.
Lisa: How’s the idea of selling this concept, whatever it was. I think you told me that one of these ideas was bike tours for people who came to New Finland, another one was baby food made out of fish?
Andrea: Mm-hmm.
Lisa: Not only do you come up with these ideas but somehow you have to convince other people that they are worth investing in, I guess.
Andrea: Yeah, absolutely, then I probably should have been what I’d said to him was, okay, well give me the $50 to start the business.
Lisa: Now that you’ve done Aristelle and you have these two stores and I know that you have plans for many more stores. I think you said you wanted to have 10 stores by the time you are 40?
Andrea: Yup, that’s the idea.
Lisa: Yeah, and you have five years left.
Andrea: Five years, yeah, and I don’t think I’m going to open any this year with the new baby. That would put some pressure on the later years but that’s easier.
Lisa: Tell me what your father thinks about the path, where your path has gone?
Andrea: I would say, before opening the store, he would ask really good business questions of whether it made business sense and would the concept would work and it was nice and challenging in that way to, they helped me work at any kinks in the first store. As soon as that was open, he’s so on board, we’re brainstorming how to make it grow, different marketing ideas. He’s a really great sounding board to bounce ideas off of and discuss the best way to expand.
Lisa: Your brother also has some entrepreneurial instincts as well from what you’ve told me.
Andrea: I have two brothers. My younger brother, actually, he’s the president of Enactus for Memorial University in Newfoundland. This is a group that does social entrepreneurship projects. They just, actually last week, won the national competition. They’re going to the international competition in Beijing in October. Yeah, he’s really very active on this kind of project, working with disadvantage people in Haiti, on making ties and then they’re actually importing them to Canada and selling them. It’s some really interesting projects but very focused on actually making them sustainable business models.
Lisa: I love talking with people who are entrepreneurs because it is a very different way of looking at the world, I think, than has been my training. As a doctor, we tend to be in a very sequential way. Entrepreneurs have to have that sequential way of dealing with things because there’s certainly numbers involved in the whole business aspect with. You also have to maintain this creativity. You have to be able to look outside of what currently exists and you have to have the passion to keep moving in that direction. How do you maintain both of thinking business, logical, sequential mind but also have the openness to be expansive and have to passion to keep on doing these things?
Andrea: I love that question. Interestingly, when I studied entrepreneurship at London Business School, we would always talk about what makes a good entrepreneur and until you just asked me that question, I don’t think I’d ever actually seen myself, I’m an entrepreneur. Obviously, I am. I’ve started this company but I’ve never actually thought about it in that way. I love number crunching. I’m a bit of an Excel geek so I can get a lot of pleasure of going into the cash flow and looking at, if you change this number, what happens to the bottom line and to the sales projections and looking at inventory and open to buy six months later. I can get into that and I really enjoy it.
My past experience with being involved in strategic direction of a bank, that may sound boring that has a lot of creativity because you can go, in three years, where do we want to be and figuring out how to get there with the day to day, that’s really, really exciting to see how that can actually happen. I guess most of the creativity comes from the advertising. That’s where it gets to be really fun and come up with interesting ideas and the part that makes me excited I guess on the creativity side is doing something different. Most underwear stores, I guess most retail stores is actually just use their very attractive 20-year-old models.
I do that sometimes but I really want to break out of that whole stereotypes and use different women, older women, career women, pregnant women. We just did last month, a woman who had had a double mastectomy and it was just amazing and to do a whole story about her in one of our ad. Really, just bringing the creativity that way of how can we show our customers that the store really is for everybody. That’s really exciting. I guess it’s that combo that works.
Lisa: I see, you must have had some interesting brain training when you were younger because you were originally a Russian studies and philosophy major as an undergraduate. It seems like your brain, you’ve trained your brain in different ways to do a variety of different tasks all simultaneously.
Andrea: Yeah. I think a woman who works in the Vermont store is really in to astrology and she would just say that’s typical [inaudible 00:41:13]. I have no idea if it’s what I studied. Yeah, I had a broad range of study. International development as well is very different than arts and literature and then having that business combination.
Lisa: All of this you were doing while you were also having a personal life. You met your husband, Hue, when I believe you were working in Ottawa, is that right?
Andrea: Mm-hmm.
Lisa: You had a overseas relationship. You went to school in London while you’re getting your masters and he was still here.
Andrea: Right. I think I live in four places while we were seeing each other. I was in India and then Washington and the last place was London. Luckily, he has a job that allows him to work from wherever he is. He was able to have the flexibility to come back and forth. I would visit there every few months as well. Yeah, it worked. Luckily, now, we’re able to live in the same city and we really like it so that’s, it’s perfect. Yeah, I think having done all of that travel and he had done a lot of travel as well, makes it a lot easier to settle and not have that travel bug. That’s all which is nice.
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Lisa: One of the reasons you came back to the United States is that you were pregnant. Well, you’re married. Obviously, you wanted to come back and be with your husband but you also were pregnant with your first child. You’re thinking about running a business which you soon would in a few years, you’re getting your master’s degree, you’re married and you’re pregnant. That’s a lot of balls in the air and somehow from my conversations with you, you seem to feel pretty good about all of that and you’ve done well.
Andrea: Yeah, I get really bored very easily. I don’t do well with quiet vacations where I’m not doing anything. I wouldn’t enjoy that. This is the personality thing. I like having a lot of things going on. Yeah, I opened the first store on my daughter’s second birthday. The first year, I didn’t do too much. I really just relaxed into being a mom because the first child is a bit scary. You need to be able to focus.
Lisa: I would argue that the first year you are also acclimating to being living in Burlington and just being, I guess back on firm ground. There’s that and then the pregnancy of course leading up to the birth, the first year, you’re right but always in your mind, you were doing things. You were always thinking about what the next thing is going to be. For a while you have this interesting bank idea that was related to, which is funny because this seems to be your passion but it’s still interesting.
Andrea: It’s very interesting. Business-wise, it actually makes so much sense to help companies find local business partners in emerging markets because if you are an engineering firm and you needed to build a water dam in Ethiopia, for example, you need all these environmental consultant and all these local groups and businesses in the country to be able to have, they’re qualified and find good companies to work with, that’s really, really important but goodness, it was so boring. I still have the website and I still have this huge database of qualified firms but I won’t do anything with it. This is not, you have to be passionate. If you’re going to start your own business, if you aren’t passionate about it in the beginning, you don’t stand a chance for five years later.
Lisa: You got married, you finished your degree. You had to move back to Burlington, had a baby and then you opened your first store last year when you were 34. This was when your daughter, your first daughter was two and then you opened a second store in Portland also last year but that was six months later or so. By this time, you were very pregnant with your second daughter who was then born not so very long ago.
Andrea: Right, it’s February 2nd, yeah, I was seven months pregnant I guess when the store in Portland opened and our plan was to open in the spring but we kept coming here, looking around its bases and found this perfect place on Upper Exchange and just pushed everything forward six months since we really wanted that space. Also, now that I think about it, it’s much easier opening a store seven months pregnant than with a three month old. That was very wise. She’s very easy to bring to the store now but I think there’s a lot involved of those first, the first month before you open and the first month of being open that, yeah it’s better to do pregnant.
Lisa: There’s still a lot of, it’s just a lot of juggling.
Andrea: Yeah, it definitely is. It makes the waking up at 3AM and 5AM really easy because I can nurse and do ordering and think about marketing ideas. The only problem is I might fall asleep midway through an email and I hit send, people get confused. Yeah, it’s a lot of juggling but I have a really supportive husband and I have great staff. I think that’s a huge part of it. I would never be able to do this by myself especially being in two places. I’m having really good employees. I do things in chunks. I do my marketing three months at a time. One day, I’ll just spend the whole day thinking of what I’ll do and then that’s done and you get very efficient.
I think there’s a saying if you want something done give it to someone who’s busy which is true. The busier you are, the more you just going to get things done quickly rather than thinking about them.
Lisa: You also combine being a mother with being a business owner. The only times I’ve ever seen you, you had your baby with you and she’s perfectly happy and you seem very happy in the photos of the Old Port Magazine, for the Old Port Magazine article, you had both of your little girls with you. That seems to work well for you.
Andrea: It really does. I think that’s one of the reasons I wanted to have my own businesses because you’re allowed to bring your children to work as often as you want to where as if I was working for somebody, I wouldn’t be able to do that as easily. I love that part that it’s really up to me. I got very lucky with my new baby. She’s really easy going. If she wasn’t, then it wouldn’t be as easy to have her at the store all the time. I think it’s a nice business. It’s mostly women. I just feel it’s a nice environment actually to have children in as well.
Lisa: This is important on a bigger level for you as well because you have two stepdaughters and two daughters and you’ve done a lot of work in the past gender-related issues and it’s really important to you that women feel good about themselves because even having the confidence of wearing a well-fitting bra enables them to go out in the world and be, and have a better sense of themselves. This is why your advertisements really reflect the broad range of women because you can be whoever you were born to be, if there’s a bra that fits you, you’re going to feel good about yourself and that’s going to enable you to approach life in a more confident way.
Andrea: Absolutely. That’s really important to me. That’s why I see it more as, it’s obviously a retail store but the fact that we can empower women on that kind of level of letting them come in to the store where there’s absolutely no judgment, we’re able to find bras that fit them rather than trying to fit them into something that isn’t the right size or shape. Yeah, trying to really promote the idea of let’s just love who you are even if you might want to change the way you are but just love who you are in that moment and go from there is a really hard thing, I think, sometimes because we’ve got all these messages from society telling us all these different things.
Being having two step daughters and two daughters that are more impressionable if you’re younger and they’re going to have to grow up in the society, I’d love to have as many positive messages out there for young women as possible. If I can influence that way that women view themselves, that would make me really happy.
Lisa: In the meantime, your store is doing very well. You’re turning a profit. You’ve been nominated for a bit international, I believe, award. It’s exciting.
Andrea: Yeah, beside the fact that it’s a very welcoming environment, I think what makes the business work is that there’s so many women in the wrong bra size and when they come into the store, the amount of times that we hear people say, my god, it never been this comfortable or wow, I can’t believe that this actually fits like this. I think it blows people away so much that it’s almost impossible to not be successful because people realize, wow, I can actually be this comfortable in a bra. It sells itself really.
Lisa: My guess is that you’re maybe downplaying the effort that you put into this business but despite that, I really do encourage people to read the article in the Old Port Magazine and spend some time in your store here in Portland or people who are listening are in Burlington to go to the Burlington store as well. It is a very welcoming place. It’s also very colorful. It’s very fun. It definitely makes you feel like finding something interesting and putting on your high heels and going out and hitting the town or you can, you have nursing bras, you have standard, I guess you have a lot of white bras, you have a lot of nude bras, you have everyday bras. I think there’s really something for everyone in your store. I encourage people to go explore.
Andrea: Yeah, I think you’re right. The color brings everybody in but for the most part, people end up buying nudes and blacks because that’s what you want to wear everyday but there’s a lot of color in there for all those fun interests.
Lisa: Andrea, how do people learn more about your store? What’s your website?
Andrea: Aristelle.com.
Lisa: Well, I appreciate you coming in and talking to us today and also bringing your little one. She’s the youngest on our audio engineer, so this is the youngest interview we’ve ever had. She’s been completely silent this whole time so people don’t even know that she’s here but we really appreciate you coming in and being part of our show and really appreciate the work that you’re doing in bringing well-fitting bras to the world and happiness to the women of Portland and Burlington.
Andrea: Thank you. It’s been my pleasure.
Lisa: You have been listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast, show number 148, Creative Entrepreneurship. Our guests have included Ben Shaw and Andrea King. For more information on our guests and extended interviews, visit themainemag.com/radio or view their profiles in Maine Magazine and Old Port Magazine. The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each week’s show, sign up for our e-newsletter and like our Dr. Lisa Facebook page, follow me on Twitter and as Bountiful1 on Instagram. We love to hear from you so please let us know what you think of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour. We welcome your suggestions for future show.
Also, let our sponsors know that you have heard about them here. We are privileged that they enable us to bring the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour to you each week. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. I hope that you have enjoyed our creative entrepreneurship show. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day. May you have a bountiful life.
Speaker 1: The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour Podcast is made possible with the support of the following generous sponsors, Maine Magazine, Marci Booty of Booth Maine, Apothecary By Design, Mike LePage and Beth Franklin at ReMax Heritage, Tom Shepard of Shepard Financial, Harding Lee Smith of The Rooms and Bangor Savings Bank. Dr. Lisa Belisle is a physician trained in family and preventative medicine, acupuncture and public health. She offers medical care and acupuncture at Brunswick Family Medicine. Read more about her integrative approach to wellness in Maine Magazine.
The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is recorded at the studios of Maine Magazine at 75 Market Street in Portland Maine. Our executive producers are Kevin Thomas, Susan Grisanti, and Dr. Lisa Belisle. Our assistant producer is Leanne Ouimet. Audio production and original music by John C. McCain. Our online producer is Kelly Clinton. The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is available for download free on iTunes. See the Dr. Lisa website or Facebook page for details.