Veterinary Startups: Scaling without spending a penny 📈

Speaker session: So, you’ve taken the leap and started your own veterinary practice, next up, you need to focus on scaling it. Considering the tough competition in the industry, growing a startup practice is difficult. Rachel has achieved amazing growth using organic methods, and without spending a penny!

Traditional methods for growing your practice are well known: advertising, undercutting prices and stealing clients. What if we told you these are not the only way to grow your client base?

Rachel started by considering what matters most to her pet owners. She then used these to inform the core values for the practice. This webinar will cover how to achieve natural growth by focussing on the needs of pet owners, with examples of how Rachel did this at her clinic. Rachel will discuss how reputation and growth go hand in hand, and how these are key for attracting new clients, with particular focus on customer service and word of mouth for customer acquisition. There will be tips on small changes to make in your own practice which will have a big impact in no time.

Key learning objectives:

• How to grow your business organically by better utilising existing resources
• The key areas of the business to focus on to improve your client offering
• Why your existing clients are your marketing engine through word of mouth

Who's Rachel? Dr Rachel Simmons MRCVS, practice director and lead vet of Edhen Vets, has always sought diversity in her career. Alongside working in practice she co-ran an academic travel company for many years. Her interests in reproduction and arthritis have taken her around the globe, including: rabies vaccination and neuter clinics for street dogs in Sri Lanka, wildlife translocation on game reserves in South Africa; and neutering programmes in Malaysia and Cyprus.

When COVID bought the collapse of the travel industry it left Rachel with a lot of spare time, a lot of knowledge in business and a will to create something new. She knew if she was going to return to practice life 5 days a week it had to be under her own roof; Bringing total ownership, total responsibility and occasionally, total pain in the neck moments. Who knew how much admin owning a practice would bring and how many spreadsheets were needed; and who knew how lonely it would be at times.

Edhen Vets is centred around caring for pets and people; with good personal service and 5 key values underpinning everything they do. The past year has been a steep learning curve, but Rachel has quickly identified her weaknesses and what she would have done differently. Nonetheless, the first 8 months has been a resounding success with turnover far exceeding what was predicted and a very happy team of seven staff.