Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Charlotte, and thank you for joining us for this evening's webinar. How do I create a Marketing plan fit for 2023, presented by Justin Phillips.

So, a little bit about Justin. Justin spent 7 years in practise helping to grow his local vets into a national brand before moving to oversee the marketing for 350+ small animal practises with vet partners. He has won 4 Veterinary Marketing Association awards and lectured internationally on veterinary marketing.

As the founder of practise made perfect, veterinary marketing consultancy, he now provides proven industry-leading marketing and veterinary business advice to vet practises around the world. He is passionate about coaching and inspiring others to raise the standard of marketing across the veterinary industry. He loves making things better, growing practises, creating great workplaces, and extending pets lives by removing barriers to care.

Therefore, he is a perfect presenter to lecture on tonight's subject. This evening's webinar has been sponsored by BMG. So it's a big thank you to BMG for sponsoring tonight's webinar and the practise management series.

I wish to let you all know that this webinar will be recorded and available on playback, and you will all receive a certificate for tonight's attendance also. Please use the Q&A box for any questions you may have for Justin throughout the presentation, and at the end of the presentation today, we will. See if there's any of these questions we can answer for you.

If you run out of time, we will email out any responses to responses to you in the next few days. So with no further ado, I'd now like to hand over to Justin to start this evening's webinar. Thank you, Justin.

Hello, hi there, good evening. Thank you, Charlotte, very much for the introduction. I'm gonna share my screen with you all so you can see this now.

And yeah, so good evening or good good morning or good afternoon, depending on when you're watching this on catch up later. I want you to get as much out of this session as possible, so if you have any, questions, ask my way in a chat now or by all means, catch me on LinkedIn or via the webinar there or via Praimateer.com and I.

Go away, want to, want to help you get as much out as possible. So for the next 40 minutes, we're gonna talk through, how you sort out your marketing, for, for the next 12 months ahead to, to support you and your practise to achieve their goals. So here we are.

First of all, just, as Charlotte covered a little bit about my journey in the industry, I've been in marketing for 20 years, but in this industry for 10, specifically, so I think, by virtue, one of the longest, serving marketing people in the industry, which probably means I've also made the most mistakes, marketing practises over the years. And what I want to do is share with you some of those learnings, so you don't have to make those, same mistakes and learnings on your journey. So, learn from my wisdom and, and build off that.

It all came, started when I, was marketing manager for my local vets, which grew from 4.5 million turnover to 14.5 million, and went on that fabulous journey, learned lots of things, and I'm gonna share with you those, those with you today.

After that, I spent a year and a half at Vett Partners, learning, how that worked, and that gave me the opportunity to see inside lots of different practises. And what I learned from walking into, I actually physically went into 120 different practises is, you can learn every practise is doing something really, really well. And you can, everyone is an opportunity to learn and, and adopt, to, to take back and, and deploy in your practise, it's a good opportunity to, to expand your knowledge.

And then, just over 2 years ago, I set up on my own with my co-founder Poppy Gabriella, and we set up practise Made Perfect, so business consultancy, for veterinary practises and we provide all the ancillary marketing support, so website design, copywriting, pet health plan, consultancy, and so on. I'm gonna share with you a little snippet as we go. And I think the key thing I bring as a, so I'm a non-vet and coming with a marketeer is looking at veterinary practise through the eyes of a pet owner.

And that's what I would like to challenge you to do over the next 12 months, is, take a step back, view the practise of the pet owner who is bringing their dog or cat to you and how they're interacting with you. And that allows you to see the sweet spots of where you can improve on that journey. So, just like to, to shake things up and in terms of the mission statement of practise made perfect is I think while the corporates are trying to build their empires, consolidating.

Practise made perfect at arming the rebels, and that's both through sharing as much knowledge as possible, with you guys and implementing stuff and learning and changing things and challenging the status quo. If you, like what you hear today, please go onto my website and I've got loads and loads of blogs on all kinds of things, from health plans, to how to get more Google reviews, how to build websites, all things we'll touch on over the next 40 minutes. So really sharing the knowledge, please, devour those and start implementing them in your practise and if you find that helps, drop me a message and tell me, because that'd be really cool and I'll see if I can, nudge you back on, to even greater things.

So what we're gonna do, we're gonna talk about the role of marketing and veterinary practise, we're gonna have a bit of a recap really, what does, in this industry where marketing is still very much in its infancy, and we still talk about the, you know, it was only 1999 where we were allowed to do marketing for veterinary practise. Before that we were limited to a brass plaque on the end of the gatepost and the yellow pages. And so what does marketing mean right now in veterinary practise?

We're gonna talk about, align your efforts with the goals of the, goals of the business. So actually, the, the goals of your practise to make sure that your marketing, time and resource is, is to achieve the, the business, the objectives that the business want, that the senior management team want, that the owners want. I'm going to introduce you to a concept of evergreen marketing and share the mistakes I made along the way.

I'm gonna give you some examples of how you can market your practise, and I'm gonna encourage you to, go away tomorrow and look at your practise through the eyes of a pet owner, and perform an audit on your own practise there, so I'm gonna give you the tools to do it. So with no further ado, let's look at the role of marketing vet's practise. What does it mean?

And so, I like to look at it as in, it is improving the health of the herd. And by that we're talking about, improving pet care. How do we increase the number of pets vaccinated, that are coming to see us?

How do we ensure that those, all those pets over the age of 4 that have underlying dental problems are getting picked up, they're getting the right treatment, whether that's scale and polish, whether that's regular brushing, whether that's extractions. We're trying to make sure they're not walking around with painful mouths that stopping them eating, that are generating, that are gonna lead to underlying conditions. It means preventative care, so spotting stuff early and helping our vets and nurses and clinical teams spot stuff early, and, result in better patient outcomes.

Things like obesity, it's about, owner education around how to, how to do that. It's about adding value at all the different, touch points. It's about educating pet owners to be the best pet parent they want, they can be.

So I always talk about Poppy Gabriella, who's my, she was the first thing, wife and I had tried to keep alive before we moved on to, onto, children. And actually, when we brought her into the family, we wanted to be the best pet parents. We wanted to do the very best we could for her, but she didn't come with a handbook.

My car came with a handbook, my fridge came with a handbook, my cat didn't. And actually I was reliant on doctor Google, I reliant on my veterinary practise to educate me to be the best owner I could be. And the more my knowledge increased through marketing, or being on a recipient of marketing, then the more likely I was to take up the recommendations of the the vets and nurses are telling me.

It's time for Poppy to have a, have a, a dental. We think the best thing for Poppy in this situation is, regular flea treatment or regular worming treatment and so on. So, by, as marketeers, by producing that marketing collateral, increasing, our clients' understanding of what's going on inside their pet, we get increased increased compliance, the more I take you up on your recommendations.

And it's about listening to what your clients want and ensuring that's, that's how you position your practise, so align your practise to deliver what your clients want. And so, you know, on the bricks and mortar side, it's making sure your practise has curb appeal. In the, the signage, it's about cutting back all those trees that are overgrowing over the signage.

It's about removing the litter outside of practise. From a digital practise that right now, that's about making sure that . Pet owners can book appointments online, and pay for those appointments online.

It's about making sure that they can, purchase a health plan online to do the best they they possibly can. It's about meaning that they can sit on the sofa at 9 o'clock on a, on a Wednesday night and carry out all their life laundry, that they can, they can take care of all those things for their pet that need to digitally from their smartphone while sitting on their sofa. And this is what I want you to think about as marketing, in 2023.

So it's about removing barriers to care, which is a favourite expression of mine, and so a barrier to care is anything that stops you from being able to, stops a, a, a owner bringing their pet into the practise, . And, as a team of marketeers, your job is to remove as many of those as possible. And we'll have a look at some of those, because if you can't see them, if you don't see them, if they're not coming into your practise for whatever reason, you can't treat them.

You can have the best clinical team in the world where if that pet isn't put in front of that best vet or best nurse, they can't do anything about them. And so in terms of. Looking at what are those barriers to care, you know, from an operational point of view, they are answering phone availability, and right now when capacity is a massive thing for, or lack of capacity is a massive barrier for practise at the moment.

There's lots of operational things and marketing, things you can do to free up capacity, whether that's, post op, post-op checks going online via via tools like PetsApp or Viett. All kinds of things that you can shift as a from a as a marketing standpoint, you can shift to increased capacity. Next, lack of awareness, people in the local community don't know your practises there or they don't know all the stuff that you actually offer.

They don't know that, you know, PETSO4 are more likely to need a dental. Lots of things like that, as a, as a marketing team, you've got to raise awareness that, yes, your practise is here. It's open for business or it's open for business as long as you join the pet health plan to to jump the the waiting list, and that you can provide all these services that their pet needs causes their pet can't put their hand up and go, Mum, Dad, I'm feeling a bit achy today.

Actually, you've got to promote that you're offering senior pet, senior pet clinics with the, with the, veterinary nurses. Fear is a massive barrier to bringing pets into the practise, and this is especially true for, true for cats and, and cat owners, you know, going to visit the, the vets is a stressful thing. And so, we, we avoid anything that's inherently stressful.

So, as a marketing team, we have to, remove those barriers to care, whether that's the fear-free initiative in the, that's, coming over. To the UK from the states, whether that's allowing a, whether that's providing on an appointment reminder, whether that's providing the owner with a link to stress relieving music that they can play on Spotify whilst they're driving with their cat in the cat carrier, from home to the practise. All those little ideas we can, we can do to reduce fear that's gonna make it more likely for an owner to bring that pet in.

Apathy, you know, they, they think their pet's fine, and they just don't don't come in, it never gets to the top of their list to do list. Actually marketing, communicating, you know, all the dangers of leaving stuff, . That's, that's 100% the role of marketing.

There, cost as a barrier to care is massive, and, one of the ways we can fix that is, pet health plans by offering owners a monthly payment plan to reduce the unexpected cost of of taking a pet to the vets. We can shift it from an unplanned expenditure to a planned monthly expenditure of 1520, 25, 30 pounds a month planned expenditure for preventive care, that frees up more space in their wallet for all the unplanned expenditure. And then final slide just to refresh us on what is marketing.

So it's combating Doctor Google, where a client says they've read that turmeric is the answer, actually providing our own high quality information, . Helps, helps our clients make the right choices. It is absolutely no selling.

We're not secondhand, car salesmen, we are medical professionals. We make recommendations and we prescribe, treatments based on what we would do for our pet and with our own experience. And then the final thing is it all revolves around pet health plans.

And if you don't, if there's one thing you don't take away from this session, is health plans are the answer. And again, there's lots of blogs on my website, practise Madeer.com, that can help, guide you and shape you and your in terms of your understanding of that.

Now what isn't marketing, so we've covered what it is, so it isn't poaching clients, from a neighbouring practises, not this aggressive, aggressive to and fro of clients. There are, there is an abundance of clients since all these pandemic puppies and COVID kittens arrived. So there are, there's absolutely more than enough to go around, so it's not being, aggressive in that way.

It's not a race to the bottom by slashing prices. Yes, discounts can and should be used tactically to drive certain behaviour. But right now, whilst vets certainly in the UK are oversubscribed, it's actually, about driving price up and, and communicating the value, we're bringing.

And then the other thing marketing isn't, and your marketing plan for next year shouldn't be, is a handful of disjointed Facebook posts. That isn't, that isn't a marketing strategy. Those are, the occasional outputs.

And so what I want to encourage you to do over the course of the next, this session is to think that bit bigger, what more can you achieve, how can you support your practise, and the business goals and the amazing people that work with inside them. So next, let's just a bit of a recap around, you know, when we're putting our marketing hats on, I'm very fortunate. I, because I don't have that clinical background, I don't have other draws on my time.

I don't have to, see that patient. I don't have to run in and, and help the, the team with the emergency, that's going on. I don't have to, deal with the HR queries.

I don't have to stop the client that's about to run out of the practise without paying. Don't have to worry about any of that stuff. So for the last 10 years, all I've thought about is how we can do marketing better in practise and what that looks like.

And so, I'm recommending, that a practise reinvests 2% of its turnover, 2% of practise turnover back into marketing and in terms of, you know, what that is, that it's a brand, look and feel the identity, getting in a high quality photographer to take decent pictures of you and your team and your pets. It's about PR, so reaching outside of the veterinary, outside of your practise. Outside of Facebook, making sure your practise is being heard and being seen in the local press around it, and in the trade press as well, veterinary trade press, really important for, for recruitment.

It's about making sure the signage, you know, your building has curb appeal and right at the end of the presentation I've got some slides on that. Making sure your signage is working 365 days a year for you. Working really hard when all your team are tucked up in bed, sleeping and spending time with their families as they should, your signage needs to be promoting your practise and driving people in and and communicating the high quality service inside.

It's about the website and making sure the website is working hard for you. It's not just something that sits there, it should be working hard to convert clients every single day. There are blogs and content on my website about PR for vets, about, how signage should work for vets' practises and about sharing best practise for websites on there.

It's about internal coms, so making sure all your team buy into the ethos of your practise. Everyone knows the direction of travelling and. Is working towards that common goal, and it's about making sure your social media is glowing as well, so it's about all those things and so this is what I mean, it's not just about a couple of Facebook posts around, key dates, it's about a joined up thinking.

And so right now, so, this might, you know, you may already know what these are, or you, these, if these are a mystery to you, this is the time now to show the senior leadership team in your practise, this video, this, this recording, and get them to share with you what are the main, the main, objectives for your practise for the next 12 months. And you can even turn this around as a question, what are your three biggest problems in practise right now? And listen to those problems and then spin those into marketing campaigns cos there are solutions for all those.

And if you get stuck, shout, message me and I'll I can help share with you some of those solutions. So, you know, traditionally, oh, no, traditionally, for my 1st 5 years in the industry, most of my time as a marketeer for a vet's practise was spent on driving footfall into practise, of getting more clients. We had a very, new immature, state of, of practises.

We opened brand new practises from from scratch. And we had to fill those full of, full of clients. And so it was all about customer acquisition campaigns and so that was a big, a big part of my time.

So 50% of the time was spent on customer acquisition, about 25% of my time was spent on internal communications, making, creating culture, making sure everyone was coming along on the journey with us. And then the other 25% of the time was on everything else, so things like digital transformation, building out the website, conversion tracking, Google, Google analytics, I think, and pet health plans. And so on.

Right now, when we have this abundance of clients, we have a practise they're oversubscribed. Actually, the only practises that want more clients right now are the, the Phoenix practises, so the ones that have started in the last 23 years, either by the senior vets that have left and and left those corporates and started up, or the people that have sold those corporates, they've, spent a few, 2 years seen out their non-compete. And decide that they want to go again.

So those are the people who are in the market for more clients. Everyone else, you know, the common position is they are creaking their capacity. So the, the things they need and probably maybe resonate with your.

It is, it's about growing, the pet health plan, increasing that subscription revenue that's coming in. And, by, by increasing, by growing your pet health plan, you're, selecting a better quality of client for your vet's practise, rather than the tyre kickers that come once a year, for the vaccine and then don't take up on the recommendations, get people onto the pet health plan, they much more bonded into your practise, so the better ones you want. Doing more stuff digitally, you know, for a lifetime, we have, all the calls to action on our marketing is phone the practise.

You need a vaccination, phone the practise, you want to join a health plan, phone the practise. That model well and truly blew up over COVID. And it's time to move on.

So the challenge, for your practise is, you know, how much stuff, how much those repetitive tasks can be shifted to being done digitally, and that is absolutely a responsibility of marketing to think that bit bigger and drag practises. You know, we want to give it the buzzword, we call it digital transformation, but drag practises to a much more modern footing. And that is a really rewarding and worthwhile change.

It's about increasing efficiency, so the practises are full. Actually, there's a lot of inefficiencies in those practises right now, and, if we look at, look a bit smarter and work a bit smarter, we can massively increase capacity, which is better for everyone. Whether that means, you know, the nursing team more, doing more, stepping up on second vaccinations and so on, or being given the opportunity to get involved in second vaccinations, whether that is doing post-op checks digitally, via.

Tools like PetsApp, fantastic. You know, there's so many ways, whether it's, you know, eliminating missed appointments, again, there's also the, the tools we can do to do that. It's about driving profitability, especially now while we're oversubscribed, we should be looking to increase our, increase our pricing.

Inflation in the UK here is running at 10%. If you're not, pushing through a 10% price increase, you're going backwards and you are, drastically harmed the profitability practise. Again, these are functions of marketing.

It's about protecting your team right now, you know, it's a tough time to work in practise, and we should be doing absolutely everything we can to look after our guys and make it better. And there are so many things we can do, to improve it. If we keep on doing what we've always done, we get what we've always got, and that is burnout, that is fatigue, that's people leaving the profession, and that is absolutely not OK.

There are solutions to all these things, so we need to do better. And if you're interested, yes, get in touch and I can show you ways that you can do it better. And then finally it's about recruiting and your attention, because right now people and available to vets and nurses is your biggest barrier to growing your practise and again to protecting your team from burnout.

And of all my, emojis, the only, image I could find for, for team was that emoji, those two guys holding hands. So, it made me chuckle, but, yeah, recruitment and retention, deploy your marketing resource, your marketing brain to recruitment of finding those special people and keeping those special people in your practise as well. Right, so let me tell you about Evergreen and in terms of, what this means.

And so, to, to share with you a little story, first, it would have been ideal if this, this, slide had built, but so what I mean by Evergreen was for my first few years marketing. For a vet's practise, I had my annual marketing calendar which had all my big, seasonal events on there. And one of the key ones at this time of year was, bonfire night and fireworks and Cedar A.

We know it's gonna come round every single year, this time of year. And, fireworks cause stress. Anxiety in pets when they start going off months, you know, weeks and months before bonfire night cause a lot of stress.

And as a clinical, team, we have a solution, that there's a, there's a number of solutions, for that, whether it's desensitisation, whether it's medication, whatever that is, whether it's just encouraging owners to shut the windows and doors and keep the cat in, which reminds me, I haven't locked my cat flap right now. So, again, don't, don't do as I, learn from home stakes. And So this one, Bonfire night was always in the, the calendar or something, and I always got the information through from fellowway and Adaptill about all these, social media posts that I could use.

So I'd spend all this time, in September and October, building my, bonfire campaign and fireworks campaign. I'd produced blogs, I'd produced posters which I'd print, send out all 20 practises I was responsible for. Tell a team to put them up in the poster holders in the consult room.

I would do email marketing out to clients using newsletters and so on. So all this resource, effort and time was spent to produce this whole suite of, of stuff for, around bonfire night, to drive people in for a nurse consult to, to talk about, . To, to talk about, solutions to reduce anxiety in pets, to, to drive sales of fellow and adaptty.

And then, you know, that campaign would finish, and then as soon as 5th of November had gone around, I was moving on to the next campaign, which was maybe building up for Christmas and Christmas dangers at Christmas, danger of chocolate and tinsel and so on, and. I would very rarely find a time to go back and look at, OK, I've spent all that time, effort and money on a fireworks campaign. How much, what has that resulted in in terms of sales of Felaway and Adapt Till?

And how much have I increased that, and how much do the sales of fellaway and Adaptil, res equate to in terms of, the turnover of the practise. When I eventually did that after many years of running that firework campaign, I suddenly realised that the sales of that, you know, were about 0.3%, sales of those two products were about 0.3% of practise turnover.

And I spent all that time pushing something that was never going to be a main driver of revenue. And even if my campaign had been the most successful campaign for, for driving people in for those anxiety treatments. I would never have moved the needle on the performance of the practise.

So I'd spent all that time, resource, effort, all that opportunity cost, not driving recruitment, to do that. That was, that was one mistake. And then when it, I went round to practises and in February, I walked into a practise in Walsall, looking around, I walked into one of the consult rooms and in the clip frame on the wall in that practise in Walsall, was a great big, poster that I designed about, fireworks at Bonfire night, and it just.

I'd spent all that effort getting that poster up there, telling the team to put it up, and we'd never managed to get it down. And so for 4 months, I had this outdated message driving something that wasn't a key driver of my practise, revenue for the practise or growth of practise, and it just hit me, it was like, right, I need to stop doing stuff like that. Avoid short-termism, avoid that seasonal marketing calendar, Halloween, bonfire night, Valentine's Day.

And instead shift to these long term strategic business objectives, you know, what are the three biggest problems in your practise right now? Right? Focus your efforts around those.

It's about improving your pet health plan. It's about growing the number of, pets and the percentage of pets on your health plan. It's about doing more things digitally, better online booking with, payment in full.

It's about fixing and improving and revisiting your patient recall system. It's about proactively driving Google reviews for your practise, and it's about spending the time to tell a better story about why your practise is a great place to work. And it's not about what the candidate can do for your practise, it's about what your practise can do for the candidate.

It's a very important pivot. So shift, it's not Facebook posts, it's not short-termism, it's long term strategic stuff. And, you know, the spoiler alert is you could spend, the entire next 12 months on any one of these things.

Pet Helpline, in particular, you could spend 12 months marketing those. And if you do these things, again, just drop me a message, it'd be cool to see you changing, changing, directional, outlook, and be more than happy to help you with advice or support long term, to, to take that to an even greater level. So, now it's, where are we halfway through, if anyone has any, any questions, please drop them into a chat, and we can also cover those, cover them all at the end.

So, right, examples of practise marketing. So this is your, takeaway to do tomorrow, ring fence some time, you know, make sure this happens, ring fence some time to actually go through and do this. It's a practising practise marked in order, you know, what's also common is you work in a practise for a period of time, a number of years, and you get into the habit of parking in that the car parking space right outside the practise.

You walk in the back door of the practise, through the prep area into the consult room, and you carry out your day of consults, switching between the consult room, the prep, and the operating theatre. And at the end of the day, you just leave out of the back door and drive home, you get no, you get blind to it. So instead, my challenge is to look at your practise through the eyes of a pet owner.

They're searching for a new vet. What do you like about what, your practise and what isn't so good? What, impressions do you get of your practise, you know, there's a few pointers here, look at the practise website, how easy is it to use?

65% of people look at your practise website on a mobile phone, make sure it looks really good on a mobile phone. And make sure it's really easy to do stuff. Blogs, there's blogs all about this on our website.

Stand on the far side of the street across your practise, and how does your practise look, you know, is this, what is so super common is the Triffids have taken over and you can't see the sign because it's covered in trees. What's really common is the name of the practise, you're majoring on the fact, . Your name on majoring on the fact it's the vet's practise is called Abbey or I'm trying to think of a practise name, it isn't, doesn't belong to someone and instead the the actual names vets are really small, actually flip that and the name, the, the fact that's a vets right there needs to be super big.

The clocks have just gone back in the UK, so you need to adjust the timer on the lights for your practise, to make sure that the lights for the signage are coming on at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, and they're going off an hour before you've finished, an hour after your practise is finished, and again in the morning, they should be coming on 1 hour before you open up in the morning and going off about 10 o'clock in the morning, once it's started to finally get light. All these things, you know, looking at weeds and so on, we'll come on to that in a bit more detail. It's about looking at Google reviews for your practise and your competitors' practise, see how you compare.

If they've got hundreds and you've got 5, you've got a problem. If they're 5 out of 5 and you're 4.1 out of 5, you've got an issue.

Again, there's things you can do about that. There's blogs on our website and there's stuff I can do to help you straight away, fix that. Have a look at your social media, you know, that is Facebook and Instagram, windows onto your practise.

People want to see what's going on inside their local vets, they wanna see. I like to say they don't know how much, they don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. And, you know, we've got these free tools of Facebook and Instagram to communicate those straight away.

Then next, I want you to map the client journey. So, and I, I put this down as a 10 minute group activity, not today, on this, but I would use this as a 10 minute group activity in your practise. Grab some time and list out all those touch points, that a pet owner has an interaction with you as a practise.

When they're researching you sitting on their sofa at 9 o'clock at night, when they're chatting to their mates, what process do they go through? From discovering you to booking an appointment with you to coming in, all those touch points on that journey through the practise, opening the door, does the door stick? Is it painted or has it got paint flaking off?

When they walk in, how does it smell? Does it smell of bleach? Does it smell a cat weed?

Does it smell neutral? Does it smell warm inviting? Is the, client care team that's greeting them?

Are they on the phone dealing with another client with the phone kind of trapped in between their, shoulder, no opportunity for eye contact, or is there a warm, welcoming smile when they come in, you know, every single touch point, break those all down. And once you've got that list, they're all the things that you need to fix with the marketing, or they're all the things you need to optimise or make better, with your marketing over the next, next 12 months. So that, that is the shape of your marketing plan, make those good or make them better.

They don't need to be the best, they just need to be better, and every time we touch something, we try and make it the best we possibly can with the limited resource, time, money, experience that we've got. So, just to show you what this looks like, here the touch points have come up, but I think it's important for you to do these in your team, to get them to think about how does a, how does a client interact, and there, you know, in terms of us talking about pet health plan earlier. And you can quite happily spend the next 1212 months working, optimising the pet health plan message into every single one of these touch points.

How can we make them better? You know, when someone phones a practise, how do we make sure that the first thing they hear is a recorded message saying, did you, our pet health plan covers this, this and this, and is available to all pets who are members of this practise, and here's a link to join, or here's how you join. You know, so you should be optimising every single one of these.

If you don't have time, get in touch with me, and I can do these for you. So this is what I do and me and my team do for practises day in, day out, we optimise every single touch point on here. We've tried and tested pet health plan, messages or recruitment messages or whatever it is you want to achieve in your practise.

Because we've been doing it for 10 years, we've made a tonne of mistakes, we've figured out what doesn't work, and most importantly for your benefit, what does, so you get there quicker. Again, so one of, you know, a practical, element of practise marketing. So signage is there.

It's working 365 days a year to communicate your practise, to drive footfall into your practise, and to tell owners about the stuff you offer inside it. So if you happen to be on a high traffic, highly visible, location, you know, you've got a busy road going past you. Is there an opportunity to have a great big, sign illuminated outside there which promotes your pet health plan?

Maybe it's promoting the recommend a friend scheme you've got in practise to drive clients in. Maybe it's, maybe it's just promoting the great work you do in your community, teaching kids about responsible pet care, going to school visits, you know, the nice stuff, is there an opportunity to, to do that? Stand on the far side of the street like I've said, and view your practise through the eyes of a pet owner, fix the basics.

Send me a link to your Google Street View. Let me have a look at it and I'll happily give you feedback on where you can improve and how you can do better. And some of these things cost a lot of money, some of these things are really simple.

Take a look at a holistic approach to, you know, the gardening. There's always weeds growing left, right and centre out of everywhere. There's always light bulbs that aren't working on the signage.

There's always litter that's blown over, you know, it's not our litter, but it's blown over from somewhere, and clients are judging us as a practise on that litter that's in front of our practise, so it's our problem, make it part of the cleaning rota, as well as mopping the floors and so on, to do something about that. It's about, you know, one of the inevitable things as soon as that dog jumps out, the owner, drives to the practise, parks up, dog jumps out of the, car. It's nervous because it's coming to the vets.

It drops, a great big present, and the first thing the owner has to do is pick it up, that magnificent hand warmer. You get this time of year, and there's never a poo bin, and so the first thing they have to do is either ignore it and pretend they've not seen it. Which creates new problem and for, for future, visitors, or they pick it up and the first thing they have to do on that visit into the practise is they have to, like, rather awkwardly, hand it over to the, to the client care team behind reception, which is uncomfortable.

None of us want to do it. So why not build in a fix to that and just spend 150 pounds to bolt a poo bin onto the wall in between the car park and the front door of your practise, solve that problem straight away. You've got paint peeling off, you've got car parking, you know, if you've got it and you're lucky enough, signpost it as free car parking.

Oops, gone on to the next slide, spoiler alert. It's no good. So the other common thing I see is the team members take the best parking spaces right in front of the practise.

They're full every day by team member parking. Find a way to encourage your team to not take those best parking spaces. Get the secure some parking elsewhere in the area for them where they can park and allow clients to park in the, the spaces right in front of your practise, makes it easier for those elderly people carrying their cat carrier from the car into the practise.

It's about finding opportunities in the local neighbourhood to, to promote your signage, to promote your practise with built-in signage there. So, I've come up with a guide for how vets should do signage. It's on the website, so go and check that out, by all means, and if it helps you, let me know, that'd be cool.

So, onto a spoiler, this was a particular case study of the vets over in the Northwest. These vets have been here for 40 years. And so on the front you can see that over time the brickwork has changed colour because of all the smog and the soot in the area.

And just traffic driving past. You can see there is a sign on there, but it's pretty small. There's 3 doors there as an owner.

I don't know which of the 3 doors to walk through. I don't even know there's a practise there, I'll be honest. There's one banner on there, it looks sad and sorry.

You can see the paint's peeling and the, the, the, the weeds are growing. And, you know, I've been to a lot of, a lot of vets practises in my time and I'm sad to say I stood on the far side of the street and I made judgments about the quality of clinical care and the quality of the team in working inside that practise based on what I saw from, from this curb, curb standing on the curbside. And then I stepped into practise, I met the team.

The team were amazing. They had some really good, caring, compassionate, vets, nurses and client care team in there, absolutely fabulous. And they'd invested loads and loads of money into the clinical kit inside that practise.

They had digital dental X-rays and all those cool tools. And yet they hadn't spent any money on the front part of the practise that the client see could see, so we revamped it. And so first thing is I got it chemically cleaned.

So I think this was about 108, 1, 200 pounds to get someone to come and chemically clean the building, bit like sandblasting, but not, it doesn't cause much dust and dirt. So they came and cleaned that. We then, it turned out all this area, I wanted to emphasise the size of the practise, so I made sure the size of the signage emphasised all this was the practise.

I clearly marked the doors, you know, paws and claws this way. Telling the client where to come in, I put a great big sign saying free parking with a great big arrow to it. I, .

I do, took a picture on a sunny day, just to emphasise the point. And then I continued that branding and that signage all the way inside the building, so it's on the consult room doors on the front of the reception desk, right through to the operating, to the, operating board in the . Prep area, right through to the team, so they were all branded up.

Next, you know, again, talk about stepping into practises. I call this poster creep. So this is, all too common that front of house is cluttered.

We've got poster creeps, that's any space that's available for a sign. Someone has, printed out a sign and they've stuck it on with blue tact to any available area. And all too often, these are non client friendly language is passive aggressive, you know, they once had someone that came into the practise with a dog, not on a lead.

So instead of keeping a load of leads behind reception and just on the off chance, on the odd occasion when someone brought in, getting out from behind the barrier that is the reception desk, handing the client a lead and saying, would you just mind? Instead, we, all too common in practise, we put up a passive aggressive sign saying all dogs must be kept on leads, you know, it's there, it's covered by, a whole host of other signs. It's not good.

You don't you don't see anything for seeing everything. In this situation, the TV is also broken, and you've got this very precariously, balanced sign that every time there's a gust of wind in this practise, this sign falls over risk of, bashing someone on the head. And we don't even want to go down that route.

We should design our practises to be sustainable. You know, I bet, if the front door of your practise looks like this, this is your time to, to change this. Peel them all off, remove them all.

You know, if you've got makeshift ones on here, stuck up with, if you've got stuff that people trip over, you know, that is a health and safety thing. Let's put up a sign, but let's get one professionally printed, properly stuck onto the, door, and let's remove all the other stuff so people can actually see what's important. Declutter.

This was a personal favourite of mine. This was a sign about GDPR, changes, that had taken place a year prior, and there were in this practise, there was a space available to stick up a poster, so it was stuck here. So yeah, that is just, isn't, pull anything stuck with blue tack, pull it down and put up designated poster holders for those messages.

Again, another example, I think in this practise, there were 35 different posters stuck up, different notices stuck up with, with Blue tack. Remove them, find smarter, better ways to promote those and communicate those. Whether it's a TV screen in your practise, I can help with TV screens for practises if if you want a hand there, got a really neat solution.

So declutter, take it all down, look at it with a fresh pair of eyes. This was a, a practise that I have set up from scratch. So you'll see designated poster holders for not for marketing messages.

It's decluttered, it's clear, it's clean, it's inviting, it's warm and it's friendly. And here there are numerous messages, numerous ways of communicating, the pet, the fact the practise has a pet health plan and that it's exceptional value and it's what we recommend, for the, for every pet. So that's enough of me talking.

So just a final recap on what practise made perfect do. So we are independent, we're a whole the market, we are not paid by any third party, so whenever we recommend something, we recommend it because we believe it's the best possible solution for your practise. We've tried lots.

We're complete nerds when it comes to this, so we try lots, we learn and, and we recommend the best solutions for you. We help vets practise predominantly in the UK also all around the world, unlock fun, freedom and profitability, in your practise. We can help with all those things, so we can provide business consultancy.

We'll talk through the pain points in your practise, and then we will talk you through a range of tried and tested things that we've done already to help fix those. You don't need to suffer in silence. You can learn, from other, from tried and tested things and other practises gone before you.

And as well as a business consultancy, I have a team of 9 people around me who are experts in design, copywriting, web development, who can do all these things, whether it's building you a new website or fixing your current one much quicker. we can produce collateral for your, practise, signage, we can, we've got PR experts who will help get your practise noticed. We can help you climb the rankings in Google, and we've got a tonne of try and tested solutions for, recruitment.

That means when you put out an ad in vet times, you don't just hit and hope and take, you have a choice of taking the only candidate that's available. Actually, you, you get better applicants in and you get them proactively. And we've got a load of stuff for team wellbeing.

Where I was at White Cross vets for 6 years, we were voted the Sunday Times' best small company to work for for 6 years in a row. So we had loads of things there that helped improve, improve the, the journey for the people that were, were part of us, so. What I would love you to do is go onto my website, and the other thing that I'd really like is if you took some time out of this and left me a Google review for my business, practise made perfect, it is me and Poppy, we'll set it up.

So, if you took 2 minutes to go onto Google, search practise Made perfect and leave me a Google review on there, that would mean the will to us as well. So that'd be great, so keep in touch, and keep doing well by doing good to do the right things. So fantastic.

Thank you, Justin. That was, a great presentation. I absolutely loved the before and after pictures, which looked amazing.

There were no questions this evening, but if, anyone has any questions for Justin, or just wants to have a chat with him and what he can do for your practise, yeah, the, the email, is justin at practicemadeperfect.com. I'd like to say thank you again for Justin for informative.

Session. And thank you again for VMG for sponsoring tonight's webinar and the practise management series. I'd like to let everyone know that our final webinar, for this year will be on December 6th.

We hope that you enjoyed this evening's webinar, and thank you all for joining us. Bye bye. Take care everyone.