Hello, it's Anthony Chadwick from the webinar vet. We are doing a podcast for the first time for a couple of months. I've been I had a bit of a break over the summer, so welcome back everyone.

I'm really, really pleased to have an old mate of mine, Luke Michel, who locumed with me and for me at my practise in Liverpool in the, I think, mid 2000s. Yep, 2006. Yeah, so it was great to have Luke over at that time, so we're gonna talk a little bit about locuming, he's gone back to Australia if you picked up the the accent there, and has worked in Australia since so talking a little bit about the experience over there what it's like to work in Australia.

For those of you listening in Australia, you will already know that, but you maybe don't know what it's like to work in England or Great Britain, so we can talk about that as well. And then Luke is a fellow tree hugger, eco-warrior doing some great stuff in his practise. I always like to talk a bit about sustainability, so we'll bring a bit of sustainability in, but first of all, thanks very much, Luke.

I know it 1 is late and 2, you've probably had a busy day, so really appreciate you coming on. Yeah, no worries, good to have a chat. And it wasn't that long ago we were together because I think last September, so almost a year ago, almost to the day I, I went over, and my mates skipped me a bit paradoxically to talk about sustainability, courtesy of Royal Canon to some of the big corporate groups and also was at the Vet Expo in Melbourne, which I presume is happening again around about the same time, Luke.

Yeah, it's next week we'll be heading over. Right, oh brilliant, I'm heading up on Wednesday, yeah. So first of all tell just so people know a little bit more history, a little bit about yourself, er where you're from, where you qualified from etc.

So I grew up in Sydney and going to school, always wanted to, to be a vet and managed to get into Sydney Uni and, so I graduated from there in 2003 and then, Looked around for jobs and the best one that came up was down here in Wollongong, which is about an hour south of Sydney on the coast and pretty much set up here ever since. Just love, it's a nice, very nice part of the world on the, on the water here. Yeah, and as I say, I was with you in September, it wasn't particularly Australian weather, was it?

No, no, it was pouring the whole time, like I couldn't show you any of the good views because there was just grey cloud everywhere, but I promise it is a beautiful spot. Yeah, no, but I was with you, I think in about 2011, 2012 I came over as well because my aunt was not well, she'd been a 10 pound poman, I knew she didn't have a long time left, so she was a really, Well, somebody I really loved, so I got over to see her and I think came over to see you as well at that time and I remember the sun did shine then. That's right, yes, we, it's usually pretty good down here, so we, we tend to get afternoon rain sometimes, but yeah, the mornings are pretty spectacular.

Yeah, brilliant, so, 2003, so you did a few years as a young vet at the Wollongong practise, came over, now how long were you over? Because it's now back in the mists of time, but yeah, so I, I did about 12 months, but I probably only worked half the time I was there. I sort of, I would work for a bit and then travel for a bit.

I think you did quite a lot of time with me though, didn't you, several months, you were with me, yeah, I did a few months at the start to build up a, a bit of, bit of money to help with the travel and then, and then came back as well and did a bit more and then you travelled into Europe, didn't you? Yeah, so I went to the World Cup cause that was on in Germany that year, and it's the first time Australia had made that for 30 odd years, so I went to that and yeah. And saw lots of different places, but, but yeah, mainly worked with you in Liverpool and a few different places around Kent as well, which was good.

It's interesting, you know, before we started, we, we were chatting and maybe that kind of crossover from Australia to UK and vice versa is a, is a bit less common now, would you say, or is it still. Yeah, it used to be a rite of passage for Aussie vets to make sure they head over and do the locum, the locum stint for at least a couple of years and, So yeah, it doesn't seem to happen as often now, but when I did it, the exchange rate was really good, so came back with some, some money and it also was a lot easier travelling on the pound than on the Aussie dollar, so, so yeah, it worked quite well and, and it wasn't very difficult to transition from working here to, to working in the UK. I, I, I had friends from uni that actually came out from the UK and, and went back there once they'd finished their degree, so I knew that, And I was able to catch up with them when I came over, so I knew I'd be able to cope alright.

Now would you say that because I think the education standard was always very similar but perhaps you weren't paid quite as well as we were, whereas that seems to have also normalised as well. Yeah, yeah, it's sort of, I think we're paid a bit, it could always be better, but I think we're paid a bit better here now than we were back then, especially the, the new and the recent grads, that sort of bridged the gap a little bit as well as the exchange rate's not quite as, as good as it was back then. Yeah, what did you see as the, Maybe the similarities but also the differences, so how easily did you settle in, did you feel there was stuff that you learned when you were over or had you, you know, I remember you being very competent as a, 2 to 3 year old back when you came over.

Yeah, it was pretty good. I, I, I quite liked living in Liverpool because there's not many Aussies in Liverpool. There's Aussies everywhere in London, but in Liverpool there wasn't many, so I was a bit of a novelty, so a lot of people wanted to talk more about Australia than they did about their, their pets that made it easier when I was working over there.

But I think standards are similar, I think the training's similar and, yeah, the animals that you have training mainly there in small animal practise would be. It was a pretty easy transition, there wasn't too, too many stressful moments and wasn't as many online resources back then as there, as there is now too, so I think that it would be even easier now I think for for vets to come out from Australia and, Based themselves in the UK and yeah travel back and forth and see part of the world that's quite far from here, so it's not, not easy to do a trip from here to, to Europe, but it's very easy to work for a few weeks, then travel for a few weeks or even, you have a more, more permanent stint for a bit and then take long weekends to to see parts of Europe. And we have to talk about, I know it's a veterinary podcast, but we have to talk about Liverpool because obviously I'm brought up, born in Liverpool, big Liverpool supporter as you were.

We got to I think a couple of games, but you've had a bit of a mixed sort of history of missing games when you've tried to come back, haven't you? That's right, yeah, my record of coming back hasn't been great, so I was coming in April 2020 and, COVID got in the way of that and it would have been the first time we'd won the title for a while, which is a bit disappointing and when I came back a few years later, it wasn't quite as wasn't quite as, as good, we weren't playing too well that, that season, so I'm trying again in April this year, coming with the family this time so. Hopefully 3rd time lucky forward to seeing you and of course when, when you came for the first time we had Steven Gerrard in his pomp, scoring from all over the pitch, so I think you had a bit of an experience of that, didn't you?

That's right, and we won the FA Cup that year too, so I remember watching that at a pub and then going to the parade the day after, which was, which was cool. So yeah. Excellent.

So you've done the practise with me, you go back to Australia, you work again in your original practise. Yep. A couple of years later that's cos I you know I think almost Australia in some ways was ahead of the game with corporatization but now probably we've overtaken in the UK and Europe, it's much more corporatized.

What sort of level of corporatization do you have in Australia? I don't know the exact figures. It'd be less than less than half corporates, but they do have a big part of market share over here and yeah it was.

About 15 years ago that they bought the practise that I was in and when they bought in one of the partners retired and I became the lead vet at the same time and, and in part invested with them, and that works, that worked quite well for a long period of time but just got to the point where I wanted to do something a little bit different and make decisions of myself and a bit faster. And you're now in a in a coastal vet collective in Wollongong, tell us a little bit about, How long has that been going on, is, is, how's that going, you know, from the where you were hoping to see it at this point? Yeah, it's going, going really well, like it's, it's growing faster than I was aiming for, which is terrific.

The reception from the clients has been really good, having where we are, there's not many local, locally owned practises. People find it hard to see the same, the same vet, and they really like that relationship, whereas coming to us, they, they get that and, It was fortunate that a few people that I've worked closely with in the past, asked if they could come along as well and and wanted to invest in the practise, so there's a few of us that, that own it which which, which shared the risk around but also yeah we're all invested in the success of the practise so we all put a lot into it and, and I think that, that shows in the, the service we're able to, to give and so it's been A very enjoyable experience, that the debt is slowly going down, which is, which is good, and it's a lot less scary when you, when you first open, like, we knew, I knew a lot of people and they're all like, oh we're gonna come to you and you can sort of get a bit swept up in, oh we're gonna be busy from, from day one, but the reality is that people don't need you until they, they need you, they, they're not gonna give you $100 to come and say hello, it's . So, yeah, when the doors first open, it's a few a day, you're sort of thinking, oh my goodness, what have, what have we done, but yeah, that's the reality of, of opening a, a brand new practise from, from scratch and it didn't take very long for us to, to develop more and more clients and, Wollongong, it's, it's quite a big city, but in the same time it's quite a small town and, and where everyone seems to know everyone and word of mouth has just been by far our biggest way of getting new clients and most of the clients that come in, you know, for all the money you spend on Google ads, that, that person that goes down the dog beach and says, oh, I went to Coastal Vets and they were really good, take your dog down down there, and that's, that's really been where most of our growth has come from.

So how many vets and and nurses in the practise now? So we've got 3 vets and 1 casual as well who fills in when we're on holidays, or have a gap to fill, and then we've got, I think 8 or 9 nurses, so some are just casual that fill in when we, when we have gaps, but, but yeah, like, Day to day there'd be 2 vets consulting as well as 2 nurses at the back and 2 receptionists as well, so. And the nurse situation in Australia, are nurses trained in the same way as UK or is it not quite the same as the UK?

It can be, like our nurses are, but they've, they will do a lot of things for us. The, the vet board, what they allow them to do, I think is more restricted than what they can do in the UK. Yeah, there's a few restrictions there, but, Certainly the medical cases, yeah, they'll be looking after most of them for us and we just, you know, check in and assess the treatment and and write and make the plans for them, but yeah, they'll be getting them on fluids, taking, taking blood, taking x-rays, they're doing all those sorts of things for us, so, but yeah, they can't do any surgically, they, they can't do anything there, they can't remove any teeth, so yeah, there's, there's less that they're allowed to do than I think over there, but, but still, Very much try to upskill them and you know they means you can get a lot through a lot more in the day if they're with, if they're they're trained up and and can do a lot.

How much support do you get from one sort of government or state level for setting up a new business and then two from companies where companies quite . Generous as an independent rather than as one of the corporates. Yeah, so, I knew a lot of people from my previous role, from the different companies and, and talked to a lot of them and there's some companies that have in particular sort of helped, Set us, set us up, like we, we have buying groups over here where you can get special rebates if you buy, go with a certain, certain group but I wanted to sort of pick what was going to be best for my practise which is might not have been the best financial decision to start with, but from a relationship point of view it's been a lot better and, and they've certainly looked after us, so MSD do our vaccines and they've been a terrific help.

So we just, Saxon, who's a supply company, wholesalers we've, yeah, I, I met with a lot of people and just sort of tried to stick to a few main companies and, and they've certainly, certainly really helped in that initial setup with, with, with startup stock, with better deals to, to get us up and going, flexible terms as far as knowing that not as much money's gonna come in through the door, so, yeah, so that was, that was good. There's not much in the way of government, there is for, Like deductions of depreciating, depreciating your assets, you can do that straight away, so that's, but if you're not making money then you're not really taking advantage of, of, of those things, but as far as government grants to start a new business, there isn't much like that, you, you've got to do that yourself and borrow the money from the bank. So you've got 3 vets permanent like yourself, some nurses.

Who is the, you know, because the difficulty is you've, you've obviously been a clinical vet, you were clinical director in the other practise. Yeah. But the business skills don't necessarily come as a part of that, so is that you running more the business side or are you sharing?

Yes, sure, how are you doing? Yeah, but there's 5 owners and, and those people I wanted them to be part of it, because they bring different skills to the, the place than, than what I do, like they, I love working with them, but they're, they've all, we've all got the same values, we all want to do, you know, high quality service, we believe in that. That customer service side of things and that, that bond with the clients and the patients, so we all have those sort of values, but what our strengths are are quite a bit different and I'm probably more on the, the business side than the others.

Kevin, who's one of the other vets, he's owned a practise before, so he's really good with that too, and the others are interested in that side of things and learning as we go, but that's probably after running a big practise for a long period of time, that's certainly probably more the area I'm looking after at the moment. And so how much time do you still get to do clinical and surgery and so on? It'd still be like I'm, I'm at the clinic at least 3 days a week, and those 3 days would be definitely mostly clinical, and then if there's quiet times I'll do a bit of business, and then I just do a little, little bit at home on those, on those days off.

My wife's a bookkeeper, so she does payroll, all the accounts, and she does that for quite a few different businesses, so it's worked quite well that, That our practise manager Brodie can be on the floor looking after the staff and so she's nursing as well as, as the practise management side of things and she has a day from home that she works and does a lot of those management roles, roles there but, Isn't getting bogged down with, with doing something that, that takes a lot of training to get good at and I see it, in, in my other roles and I, I spent a year locuming between my old role and and starting this hospital, worked in 6 or 7 different practises and saw that, You have a lot of practise managers that are trying to, they, their, their skills aren't utilised, they're, they're having to, to spend a long time doing something that they haven't done a lot of, which means it takes longer, which is understandable, whereas I, I wanted a practise manager that can, I think their biggest role is looking after the staff and making sure that's all running OK, so it's good having them on the floor to do that. And it's, it sounds like you're also encouraging, which I think is becoming more and more, more important, that flexibility of a bit of time in the office as it were, the surgery, but also doing some work from home as well, that's kind of a pandemic type thing that's come in, isn't it? Yeah, that's right, and I mean there's there's things that are, that are tough to do when you're working in the vet practise, there's a lot more interruptions, and so to have that day where you can just hammer through all those, and then it means when, when we're there on the day.

If, if it's all clinical then that's fine, we can, we can cope with that, so, and that's what we enjoy doing, I I, like I, I did get offered some roles in a management level, not running a practise, but I didn't want to stop being a vet. I still enjoy that vet side of things. Yeah, exactly, so still got hopefully quite a bit of time left, so I don't wanna stop being a vet yet.

Well, you're probably the same age as I was when I, And I still think of myself as a vet although I'm not, you know, treating animals as much because I'm still very much involved in the profession, but you know, probably I started a business when I was 46 and I probably, well I'm saying about 52 at dermatology and then, you know, I've basically just been. Running this, just maybe to finish off, tell us a little bit about your sustainability journey, why you've done that, how do you feel, you know, I, I'm saying and I'm talking at WSAVA in October, and I'm saying it's good for the practise, it, you know, it makes sense. It's the right thing to do, but it's, it's making sense from a financial perspective, it's good PR.

Keeps, you know, hopefully your team see the reason to do it, but also clients go, oh, solar panels, you know, low energy lighting, but you know you're very much at the coalface, tell us a little bit about, you know what you've done and then how you think that's been seen by your team, but also by clients and if they've been involved in pushing you towards that or was it very much led by. Yourself, so yeah, just a little bit of thought on that. I think, I think I, like at home, we've had solar panels for a long time, we've just got a battery, got my first EV I think that it is like you said, you want to do your bit and it's the right thing to, to do, but I think it now makes if if if you put that, if you don't care about that and you want to put that aside, it, it makes financial sense as well like.

So we've got a lot of sun here, we've got, we've got the perfect roof at the, at the hospital for solar panels, and then we've got the battery as well, so. Our power bill in pounds is probably about 50 pounds a month at this, at this point, so whereas we're using, You know, close to 100 kilowatts a day when we're there depending on the weather, like if we haven't use the air conditioning quite a bit, it's, that's, that's where we can get up to, so, Our bill is just so much smaller than it, than it, than it would be, so we're setting up the panels and the battery. Just from a power bill point of view, it'll take 5 or 6 years to, to pay it off and when you think about the interest you pay all the money to put that in, it's, it just makes, it's a no-brainer as financially to to to put that in and you know what I've found at some of the other practises I've worked, you have a power outage, and if it lasts for any length of time you've got to close up.

It's obviously cost the business a lot. We've had two power outages since we opened and just, Keep going through because the battery just kicks in and we're fine to just run normally, so it's hard to measure how much that saves you not having to, to close things down, but we keep operating. I use it as an example, you know, if, if you're in the middle of a bitch pay and all the lights go off, yeah, I mean that, that isn't just a money perspective, that's a kind of, that's a disaster of patient care.

The dog's in danger isn't it, so people always say, you know, what's the return on investment, and I, I kind of rejoined by what's the return on investment on a hot water boiler. You know, you kind of need to have that bit of technology in, you know, obviously in the UK that's gonna often be gas powered. So there's a resilience side which allows you to crack on, you know, which is obviously good for the business because you're still working, but it, It shows for clients, oh, I went to this practise, they had an outage and I couldn't go, these are the practises so, I would imagine a lot of practises though.

It's Australia, I mean, you know, it just makes sense to have solar, or what would you say in, no, it's it's it's uptake's not what it should, and where I worked previously, I've really tried to get them to at least put some panels on, but it just wasn't in the budget, but when you operate through the day and the sun shining through the day, it's a, it's a no-brainer to, to just bring that price down and now batteries are so much easier and cheaper and that is one area where the government is providing good incentives and giving 30% rebates on, Putting batteries in, to try to take that pressure off the, off the grid, yeah, and in Australia we've got sort of an excess of power through the day because so many people have solar panels now, so, you can even get free electricity from for 3 hours in the middle of the day. So if you buy a battery you could charge it up for nothing through the day and then that could get you through and it's your backup as well, so. Yeah, I think it's an easy thing to do and then.

Yeah, the team really like it and they've, we've, yeah, we've got, you know, the recycling bins everywhere, the compostable gloves, the compostable garbage bags, we just have one garbage pickup each week and we half fill the bin, like it's, we've got a lot of, we're definitely not producing too much waste there, which is, which is good, and it just makes us feel good. I think as far as marketing to clients, we probably need to be better at that, because we've, we've mentioned it a couple of times and the, the companies that have put, The battery and the solar in part of the reason we were able to, to get it cheaper was we agreed to be part of their marketing materials. Yeah, that's right, I think that's something we could be better at, is promoting the clients the efforts that we're making to be more sustainable and, so I've got an old colleague that's opening a new vet practise and I'm gonna meet with him on Monday and that's one of my goals to make sure he's putting in panels and a and a battery cos I just think that's, It makes economic sense as well as being the right thing to, right thing to do, so.

How, how do you get on in Australia with clinical waste, are you doing a lot of sort of separating out, cos obviously clinical waste is expensive if we throw everything in, which can be a tendency in a busy practise, so getting people to put things in the right bins is always a challenge, isn't it? I think the, the main thing is accessibility, so it's, it's, it's easy for people to, to walk to the right bin, so you're not, you don't just have one at the back of the practise where you have to walk a long way and if you're busy you're more likely to put it in the wrong spot. So, but yeah, I think the good thing about starting a new practise is you can, you can create a culture and you know everyone sort of, like I said, sort of has the same sort of, sort of values and you know, anyone that comes into the practise from now and that's, they say that's just how we do things, which is, which is good.

It's hard to, it's hard to change behaviour, but when people come in and say that that's just how you have to do it, I think it makes it a lot easier. Do you think, you know, without obviously saying that you've maybe not talked about it as much as you could have done. But do you still see that clients come in and comment on things like the solar or, yeah, they've seen the ads from the solar company on, it pops up on their YouTube and our solar panels you can't see from the road, like it's because it's quite high, but yeah, we've tried to put the aerial views on our ad to, yeah, to, to show it as well, so with the battery being outside.

I don't want to draw too much attention to it as well so that people think that, yeah. But it's an expensive piece of kit to go missing, isn't it? It is absolutely, yeah, so it's been, it's been good, like it's, like I said, it's certainly been able to operate for a couple of afternoons where we would have previously had to close, it's it's very close to paying for itself, and it is quite cool looking at, at the app, even my dad logs in to see how it's all going as well, he's quite interested in it, so he's got the same at his house, we've got it here at home, it's Yeah, the next step would be potentially putting in an EV charger and charging off the panels that we've got on the, the roofs, so it'd be something we look at for, for later, especially in summer we've got a lot of excess.

Yeah, I mean we were talking about or you know we've had this terrible disaster in Nepal and Tibet with the warming weather. We've just had the warmest summer ever, but then you also get floods and I know when I was in Australia last September, the big flood, I think it was in the March, I think it was storm, I think it was Alfred or Albert, I think it was Alfred, had, had killed 150,000. Livestock, I mean it's a massive, massive thing, so.

That if we as a veterinary profession can come together and and work together, it's so important because, you know, when the environment is struggling then animals domesticated and alive, struggle in that environment, don't they? Yeah, absolutely, and we've got, we get the opposite here, we'll probably have the opposite here this, this year we've got an El Nino which means we'll probably have bushfires again unfortunately cos it's getting quite dry, so we've had, La Nina for the last 3 or 4 years, so lots of floods in the summer and, and yeah, now we're probably looking at a bad bushfire season unfortunately, which we haven't, fortunately haven't had for a while, but where we are it's quite close to where a lot of those bad bushfires were in 2000, sorry, in 2020. So yeah, I think that it's, yeah, like I said, anything we can do to, to help slow that down is, is, is important because it has an animal welfare knock-on effect for sure.

That's then making sure that you're not building too close to it and then cutting down bush in it, you know, it was always part of a controlled burn, wasn't it, but it's now got to a nuclear stage where it's much bigger than it's ever been. Yeah, I mean we're, we're building closer to those areas where, you know, from the other side we're building more in, in flood prone areas as well, but you just see around here like the, there's a lot more fuel, it's a lot drier, though we've always had bushfires as long, I remember them coming through when I was a kid, but, They're a lot more extreme like the ones they had here in 2020 are, are rough and you, you see it happening on the other side of the world, it's, Yeah, they're, they're coming, but they're they're more severe than they than they used to be and harder to control, so yeah, that's. Like I said, as a profession, if we can do a little bit to help cos we're going to be the ones that look, we have to look after a lot of wildlife when they came through in 2020 and there was a lot lost unfortunately, so hopefully we don't have the same again.

Yeah, Luke, listen, really appreciate what you're doing. I think you know it's great to have examples of people who are doing super stuff, you know, but obviously some of it is a bit more tricky but actually some of it's fairly straightforward, but when you're busy trying to get a couple of quotes for solar panels when you've got 3 operations to do maybe isn't. The personal priority, but just thinking a bit more strategically makes sense from a whole lot of angles, doesn't it?

Yeah, exactly, yeah, like I said, if you're not lefties like, like us, then you can look at it purely from a finance point of view and it's, it's, it's definitely, yeah, the return on investment is, is an easy one. I'm not, yeah, I'm not not across what the prices are on the other side of the world, but certainly here in Australia it's definitely worth, yeah, getting involved in, yeah. It was interesting as part of the talk I was also looking at, Some of the banks, and some of the banks are really good, some of the banks are not so good.

There was one bank, I can't remember names now that half of their properties had solar panels on, so they were doing something really positive that way. And they also had started to basically say they were going to invest more in renewables than in oil. You know, we obviously need transition.

But you know we should be moving away from oil basically and some of the banks are obviously still heavily investing in new oil fields and so on where you know I still think we should be moving away from that sort of thing. Yeah, we're in Australia now half of the new vehicles sold are electric or hybrid, so we've been pretty slow on the uptake of, of EVs where there's. It's a big country where you, you know, going down the road can take 2 hours, so, there's always been that bit of hesitancy, but you know, once the war started in Iran, it, a lot of people went, I can't rely on oil much longer, so it's certainly take of that, so.

It's had a, a terrible thing that it is, but it's had a positive effect on, I think people looking at how can we insulate ourselves against some of the changes that are going on in the world. You know, if you've got a sunny clime, then it, you know, taking the sun and, and, and getting that energy out just makes sense, doesn't it? Yeah, absolutely, so.

But yeah the it certainly helped our practise and I'm very glad we did it. Hm. Thanks Luke.

Well listen, I really appreciate your time I know it's quite late with you now, so hopefully you get a bit of time to relax before work again tomorrow, but yeah I really appreciate it and thank you for you know all the help you gave me when you were in my practise and yeah just enjoying still keeping in touch from the other side of the world. Yeah absolutely, no it's good, always good to have a chat, always keen. Yeah, and let's hope we next time we speak we've er got a few wins under our belt in the.

That's right, exactly, that'd be great. Alright, take care, Luke, thanks so much. Thanks everyone for listening.

Hopefully this has been useful. If you are not a Liverpool fan, then that's just tough, but we, we always have the opportunity to talk about our football. But hopefully you've enjoyed it.

And if you're not doing anything on the sustainability side, more and more now it's making sense to do it. So always happy to help if I can. And I'm sure Luke is the same if you're over in Australia, do look him up and.

Absolutely, come down and say g'day. Yeah, brilliant. Alright, take care, thanks everyone for listening.

See you on a webinar or a podcast very soon.