It’s expensive out there. Eggs locally are $12 a dozen. One trip to the grocery store for a family of four costs a small fortune. The monthly insurance bill for your car is almost as much as the car payment itself. I had an electrician out to replace a breaker and the bill was $900. Not to knock electricians – this isn’t unique to them, and I’m definitely not getting out a screwdriver to start fidgeting around in my electric panel.
Per the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics, our cumulative inflation rate since 2020 is 24.2%. You see this in nearly every consumer transaction, and the veterinary hospital is no exception. We know high veterinary bills, especially the unexpected ones, can really put the hurt on your personal finances. It happens to us as pet owners as well. Despite having all the resources at Rise on hand, there are times our own pets need critical care or advanced surgery at a specialty hospital, and we’re suddenly thousands of dollars out of pocket just like everyone else.
As a practice owner, I’m constantly juggling the costs of running a veterinary hospital. We have payroll, staff benefits, rent, workers comp insurance, liability insurance, commercial property insurance, life insurance (mandatory for the building lease), a stack of professional licenses and dues, IT services, facility and equipment repairs, and loan payments. We have supply vendors, pharmaceutical vendors, and laboratory vendors. Those last three especially are methodical in their pricing increases, in some cases this is done multiple times per year.
Before this gets too long-winded, we do have a plan that may help. If you want to get to the point and bypass my rant, skip to the asterisk (***) about 11 paragraphs down.
If you’re still reading here and really want to get into the details, I thought it may be important to discuss the different types of veterinary hospitals so you can better understand our philosophy at Rise.
There are three main types of small animal general practice…
1). Low-cost/High-volume: If the model is low cost, the only way to pay the bills is through high volume. I’ve worked in these hospitals, and they are absolutely needed. My hat goes off to every employee doing this good work. Where I see this fall short is in client communication, individualized patient care, and staff retention. It’s extremely difficult to have a lengthy quality of life discussion when you only have 7 minutes or less to do so. Anesthetic monitoring may not be super thorough as technicians usually circulate through multiple patients at once. And these environments are extremely stressful for employees. You know that neighbor’s dog that won’t stop barking? Put 20 of those in your office and try to get some work done. Mix in piles of vomit and bloody diarrhea every 40 minutes, and that’s a taste of what those employees deal with on a daily basis (almost always while being short-staffed).
2). Corporate Small Animal Hospitals: Veterinary medicine is being consumed by large, private equity backed corporations. Their goal is to increase efficiency and profitability, and this can translate a lot of different ways. Some of these practices are run very well and have an excellent culture and client experience. But, more often this is the exception to the norm. There’s usually a significant disconnect between what “corporate” wants vs. the reality faced by their employees in the trenches. As a result, practice morale suffers, and the culture turns negative. Their clients sense this; some begin transferring care, employees start jumping ship, and corporate’s solution is to further raise prices to compensate for declining revenue. That only makes things worse. You get the picture. On a side note, a lot of these corporations will buy a veterinary hospital and retain that practice’s original name and branding, so clients aren’t necessarily aware the hospital is part of a larger corporation.
3). The Independent Practice: No frills here – just a solo veterinarian or a partnership of a couple vets running a small business. In the old days an associate vet would buy a practice from the original owner and carry on after that owner retired. Or someone simply strikes out on their own. Either way, these practices often have that pride of ownership I see getting lost in corporate practices. They are not without their own set of issues. For one, an independent practice is always paying more for their lab tests, supplies, and pharmaceuticals (ironically, some of the labs and vendors they use are owned by the same corporations that also own hundreds of vet practices as well). For another, being a veterinarian and a business owner are two very different things. Just because you have a doctorate degree in vet med doesn’t mean you know anything about running a business. But their heart is in it, and that makes a difference.
Rise Vet is an independent practice. It’s just me as the owner, and no one else. My philosophy is simple, and it’s this…
If I take care of my staff, they’ll be emotionally available to take care of you and your pets.
This isn’t just about paying them a competitive living wage, but that’s a large part of it. And although it would be amazing to have my staff be the best paid veterinary employees in the country, you can guess how that would potentially impact the pricing of our services. So, there’s a balance there of paying the right number of employees the right amount of money to handle the required workload to keep the practice going, without having to either exorbitantly jack up prices, pay people inadequately, or let people go.
The other big part of taking care of the staff is preserving their quality of life. This industry is plagued by burnout. The job is stressful, and there’s no shortage of sad cases. You start stacking years on end of no lunch breaks, going home late, and distraught clients emotionally venting on the support staff and it’s easy to start looking at other options. Add in apathetic corporate managers, a national staffing crisis, way less average pay than the human medicine field, and it’s easy to become very jaded.
I don’t want this, and of course you don’t either. That’s why I believe quality of life is perhaps the most important benefit I can provide. It’s simple things, like being closed on weekends so staff can be with their families, or not overbooking the end of the day so we can try to get home on time. We offer a longer lunch break, so people can get out of the building and have some fresh air. And we pay a competitive living wage.
We also want the right people on board…people that understand veterinary medicine is a team effort. Work culture is an ecosystem, and everyone in it has an impact on the energy in the space. We hope this energy is palpable, and I believe pets can sense it as well. The ultimate goal here is to provide you with the best possible staff of engaged and emotionally available veterinary professionals to care for you and your pets. I believe this is the root of good patient care, and it’s what’s missing right now in the industry as a whole.
I mention all this to hopefully help you understand what you’re supporting when you come in through our doors. It’s not a low-cost model and it’s not corporate. We’re independent and proud of it. A downside here is that it increases our costs. Tack on the steady stream of price increases from vendors and I do worry about what this looks like 5-10 years down the road.
***So, back to the main topic of ongoing inflation and rising costs…
To combat these high expenses nationwide, I’m strongly suggesting that all clients consider pet insurance. It makes no difference to us one way or another what carrier you go with (or if you have it at all). It’s not like a human model where there’s in-network/out-of-network providers. Most carriers operate on a reimbursement model, meaning after you pay the invoice, the carrier reimburse you directly.
There’s a great pet insurance marketplace called Pawlicy Advisor. On their website, you can compare pet insurance quotes and coverage (please note, you will get a several emails from providers after submitting your information). I’ve witnessed this help countless clients in tight situations, especially during those unexpected emergencies. I could rant all day about my own frustrations with health insurance in human medicine, but in the pet world it’s a much cleaner, more straightforward process. Decision making in times of crisis is difficult enough, and pet insurance significantly lessens the money part of that equation.
Somehow, I ended up using 1500 words to say, “we recommend pet insurance,” but that’s really the whole point here. It felt necessary though to explain the “why” behind it. Our pets are important. Our goal is to offer you the most thoughtful, compassionate care available, delivered by professionals that treat your best friend like their own.
Thanks for reading,
-Andrew Boal