Latest News January 2025

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Dates for client workshops 2025

Save the date more details will follow! Our annual end of financial year workshop dates for 2025 for advisory clients:

Non Top Dogs – Noosa 2 September or Coogee Beach 5 September

Top Dogs – Noosa 1 September or Coogee Beach 4 September

Watch those wages

In most of our client meetings lately, the hot topic has been staff wages and pay raises. While wages have stayed steady at 43% of turnover for our customers in 2024, just like the past couple of years, there’s a bit of worry about whether this percentage might start creeping up and nibbling away at profits.

What’s different now is that practices are starting to feel the pinch of price resistance. We’ve noticed that veterinary practices are seeing fewer pets. For almost three years, there’s been a downward trend in pet visits, and we’ve shared these stats at various conferences and webinars. The reason wages have stayed low is that practices have been balancing high wage demands with price hikes, which has worked well so far. But we need to keep an eye on how sustainable this strategy is and find a way to analyze it objectively.

Remember about 18-24 months ago when the big challenge was recruiting and vet shortages? Many practices got into the habit of approving wage increases to keep staff turnover low—a smart move back then, but is it still the right approach now?

Lately, we’ve seen some practices where wages have shot up to over 50% of turnover. Even though these practices have seen some revenue growth from price increases, it hasn’t been enough to cover the wage costs. Once a business hits that 50% mark for wages, it gets trickier to keep profits reasonable.

Run a ‘lean’ business

If you joined us for the web masterclass with Alison Lambert on “Recession Tactics for Vet Practices,” you might recall her insights on running a ‘lean’ business. It looks like that’s the current trend in the UK veterinary industry, and it’s likely to catch on here in the next six months.

With the economy shifting so quickly, practices are moving from the high wage days of the COVID boom to really considering how many team members they truly need.

So, how do you tackle this if your wage expenses are starting to feel a bit too high? Here are a few things to keep an eye on:

1. Are there folks in your practice who aren’t billing as much as others? We’ve noticed that in many practices, some clinicians can bill 20-30% more, and the difference in earnings for the same roles can be as much as $200,000 a year. While it might have been okay to overlook this during the boom, it’s not sustainable in a slowing economy. Our suggestion? Focus on your top performers and consider giving pay raises only to the top half of your team.

2. Is there too much administrative overhead? It’s a common issue where non-veterinary roles have expanded into long task lists that might not be necessary. Your clinical team is crucial every day, but not every admin task is. If you have full-time roles for things like complex bookkeeping, marketing, or social media management, think about whether these tasks can be streamlined or outsourced.

3. Efficiency is key. There’s often a lot of time wastage especially in consulting rooms where inefficiencies can sneak in. This can also happen in the hospital area with poorly planned surgical lists and procedures. If vets are struggling to keep consults on time, consider implementing a structured consulting room technique to keep things moving. And if procedures are overlapping, improve your bookings, communication, and team huddles to make sure busy days are well-organized to make the most of your time and resources.

Web Master classes for 2025

We have been rather organised and decided to pre-plan a provisional list of web master classes for 2025 and their dates so that everyone can see what’s in store. This is a provisional list, there may be some changes. You will still get invites to each event so don’t worry.

22 Jan Budgets, forecasts and your interim reports – this will be a clients only event and we will discuss the ways in which you can optimise the 3 monthly projection reports that we give you.

19 Feb Going into business with someone else. This will have all the updated information on business structure types and what it looks like to expand your business by getting people to come in with you so that they have skin in the game.

12 March Choosing who to sell to. Here we will look at the various types of sales that are currently occurring in the market, what the outcomes have looked like and bring up some of the possible problems we have seen in various sales.

16 April Economic conditions and and how veterinary customers are behaving. We will look at all the new data we are collecting from customer re-activations and reviews as well as the data from our ‘veterinary industry tracker’ and strategise on what practices need to be looking at in light of this new data.

May Understanding ‘owner loans’ in your business. The practice of business owners taking money out as a loan from their business (drawings) instead of through payroll and dividends. Most business owners do this, but it needs to be done with care and you need to be aware of the long term tax implications.

June Strategic pricing. A refresher on how to adjust your prices strategically in your veterinary practice and not annoy your clients.

July Vet wages. We will analyse what the wages are looking like at a point in the year where we are aggregating data for the end of the financial year. This will provide a timely update as to whether wages are starting to erode profits and what strategies to put into place.

Aug How to deal with the loss of over the counter sales by using injectables. We will at this point have a lot of information on how sales of products like Bravecto Quantum are doing and compare them to sales of Proheart which has a very similar sales process. We may also look at the long term sales of injectable arthritis medications. This group of products is something that is unlikely to go over to online suppliers.

Sept Important metrics for vet businesses. This will be an update on the important KPI’s we feel you need to monitor based on our data for the end of the 2025 financial year.

Oct Business unit reports. How analysing your veterinary team as individual small one-vet businesses can give very clear insights into the strengths and weaknesses of your team and actually show you how much profit each vet is making

Nov Cybersecurity for vet practices. A refresher on a very popular webinar where we will look at any of the new cybersecurity threats that veterinary practices are exposed to.

Dog Tales – Wishing you all the best for 2025

We cant believe another year has passed, and what an eventful year it as been! Dealing with the post COVID recession has presented us with a lot of challenges, but its good to see that most of our clients are still maintaining the same profit margins as in previous years.

And of course we need you guys to do well, otherwise there would be nowhere for us to take our new wayward sister Bambi when she gets sick!

With 4 urgent visits to vets in just 7 months, Bambi is doing her part in keeping the veterinary economy healthy. Her last visit just a few weeks ago was due to marijuana ingestion whist out doing her human scenting and tracking training, so she definitely finished her 2024 in ‘party mode’. 

Whilst we don’t wish any bad fortune to other doggies out there, hopefully 2025 will bring back an increase in pets visiting their vets now that Bambi is setting a trend.

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