Crafting Delightful Experiences in Veterinary Medicine

A Conversation with Peter Weinstein, DVM, MBA

Driven by his extensive experience within the business of veterinary medicine and his commitment to bringing positive change to the profession, Peter Weinstein, DVM, MBA, shares insights into the importance of personalized experiences in veterinary practice.

From customized education to creating delightful moments for clients, the conversation delves into the changing landscape of our profession. Discover how the veterinary profession can learn from hospitality principles and navigate the changing dynamics of client expectations. Weinstein—owner of PAW Consulting, an author, and a podcaster—also reflects on his journey, from building and selling his own practice to teaching the next generation of veterinarians.

Katie Berlin: Peter, would you mind just giving everyone a little bit of bio on yourself, who you are, and what it is you’re really excited about right now?

Peter Weinstein: I started my own hospital three years out of school, but realized how little I knew about running a business. I went back to school at night while running my practice to get a business degree, which was extremely eye-opening. It gave me new ideas on how to run my business so we were able to build it, expand it, move it, expand it, and ultimately I sold it to a consolidator so I could do other things within the profession and be a greater influencer from that standpoint.

I’ve had a passion for organized veterinary medicine. I was the executive director for the Southern California VMA for 14 years. I’ve been very involved with setting the tone, setting the leadership, and being an advocate for the veterinary profession. I left organized veterinary medicine to see to what I wanted to do for the last third of my professional life. And I focused on education and teaching.

One of the things I do now is teach veterinary students at Western University College of Veterinary Medicine in Pomona third-year business and finance. I come to conferences like AAHA Con with no business to promote except the business of veterinary medicine and a mantra that says we need to bring fun back into the veterinary profession. I do a lot of this because I have two children, both are millennials. One is doing marvelously in Austin, Texas, selling software. The other is a June 2023 graduate from Oregon State University (go Beavers) and is a doctor of veterinary medicine practicing in her first job in Cairns, Australia.

KB: There’s a lot there. You just won an award, too, didn’t you, from the SCVMA?

PW: I won the State Award for Lifetime Achievement from the California VMA, which to me was a real honor, and it probably reflects the fact that I’m old.

KB: Old is relative. But not everyone, as they get more experienced, wins a Lifetime Achievement Award.

PW: I appreciate it. And I appreciate the honor from CVMA for the commitment and the time that I’ve given to organize veterinary medicine. And for anybody who’s listening to this that has not gotten involved, your local, state, and national associations have a very important role in helping you, as a veterinarian, direct your future from a public relations standpoint and from an advocacy standpoint. They’re really there to be your cheerleader. Think about organized veterinary medicine and how you can get involved to help set the tone and the direction for the veterinary profession going forward. That was a paid political announcement.

KB: Actually, it’s one that’s echoed by a lot of guests on this podcast, who are from a pretty diverse body of professionals. Yet many of them have that same refrain, which is: get involved, find out ways that you can get involved, and contribute a voice that isn’t being heard. I think that’s a really good message. You also have a podcast, Peter and Phil’s Courageous Conversations, and you’ve been doing that for a couple of years now?

PW: We’ve been recording for over three years, and we’ve got about just over two years’ worth of content that’s online. You can find it at Spotify, Apple, or any place that you listen to your podcast. Or you can go to our website at www.peterandphil.com. Dr. Philip Nelson and I talk about social issues. We talk about the veterinary profession. We talk about sports. We talk about music. We get on every couple of weeks or weekly for three hours and just sit there and shoot the stuff.

KB: I really like that you bring both veterinary medicine and real life into it. You can bring all the things that matter to you outside of vet med into your career in veterinary medicine. It’s okay to be a person outside of the clinic and to want to know about stuff that isn’t vet med.

PW: We started the podcast with no intentions of anything more than just having conversations. We envisioned the conversation two neighbors would have over a hedgerow or sitting on the front porch in a rocking chair, just talking about the issues that were there. With maybe some different thoughts and opinions, but the willingness to speak with one another and respect the different perspectives that people have.

KB: Hard agree. We’re hearing other perspectives and responding calmly to those perspectives and being able to agree to disagree and see things from different angles; but where’s the line between that and “I want to burn this down because I don’t believe in anything it stands for?”

PW: That’s the tough thing. In practice we deal with that with social media posts, with Yelp reviews and everything else. And sometimes we don’t understand the perspective of the other person who’s presenting, and we don’t necessarily agree with the perspective that’s being presented. But I think if that person is listening to our perspective as well, maybe we come a little bit closer, because I really do think that this chasm between people has gotten Grand Canyon-esque. I really would like it to get back to the size of a crack between two pieces of cement.

Change starts at the grassroots level. It starts with one person, having a message. And then finding a second person, and four people. And it’s much easier sometimes because of social media, because of how connected we are, although we’re currently connected and also disconnected, interestingly enough.

KB: I love what you said about being connected and disconnected and how now it’s so much easier to find other people who can believe what you believe and want to support the cause you’re championing. I also hear people say that in-person conferences are changing, that sponsors are finding that their return on investment isn’t as good when they go to conferences, especially if it’s not one of the big ones.

At the same time, the people that show up to in-person conferences are engaged and are looking for that real-life connection. You can make virtual connections all day long, but there’s nothing like being in the same room with people and feeling that energy altogether.

PW: I would agree with you that there are people who felt that they were in solitary confinement during the pandemic. And now, the energy, the enthusiasm of those people who are coming to conferences plus the attendance numbers reflect a group of individuals who are really looking to re-engage.

KB: Debbie Boone wrote a book called Hospitality in Healthcare, and she talks a lot about meeting people where they are and not viewing hospitality as one-size-fits-all. She talks about what you can do to make a person’s day a little better, because if they’re not treating you great, it’s probably not personal.

I’m thinking about what you’re saying now. Who needs to be in that group and feel that engagement and feel supported by a community? And who would rather sit at home and get their CE with their kids playing in the same room? We all need different things to feel fulfilled and happy in this career. That ultimately has to be the key to retaining people, keeping them in the field and making them feel supported. Do you agree?

PW: Veterinary medicine is not a health care profession. We are a service industry that provides health care. And as a service industry, it means our clients are looking for an experience. And they’re looking for a customized experience. They’re looking for an experience that is built around them and their pets. And that means we can no longer be transactional. We have to be relational. We have to relate to people. We have to relate to their pets. We have to know their name. We have to know their pet’s names. We’ve got to freaking know their pet’s gender because there’s nothing worse than getting sex wrong.

Let’s say you’re a client in a veterinary hospital and you come in and you’re the only one in the lobby except the receptionist, the greeter. And they say we’ll be with you in a few minutes. And a few minutes becomes 10 and 15 and 20.

KB: You’re sitting in a waiting room.

PW: You’re sitting in a waiting room, which is such a bad term. Why do we call it a waiting room? Because we define it as the fact that you’re going to have to sit on your butt and wait.

KB: Right. Or you’re in your car, which is also not fun.

PW: No, no. I think more Tesla chargers were installed in veterinary practice during COVID because of that four-to-eight hour wait. Well, there is no reason that a client service person in a veterinary hospital can’t turn and say, Hey Katie, Dr. Weinstein’s dealing with an emergency. We know you’ve been here for 15 minutes. Here are your choices to make it more convenient. You can drop off Bluto and we’ll take care of things and you can pick them up a little bit later. You can reschedule and come back at another time, and we will give you a 50% discount on your next visit.

What we’re trying to do for you is make your experience go from negative, to, “Oh, that’s so sweet of you. Why don’t I just drop off Bluto? I’ve got to go do some shopping.” We too often create more problems by being afraid to go tell Katie why they’re waiting. And all Katie does is start to get daggerized.

KB: That’s a great point. You say you should take yourself off the floor sometimes, watch the processes in your practice, and take some time away from being a doctor or manager and actually just sit down and think about, what do we need to make better? How can we do that?

PW: As a business owner and actually as a manager, when you are so deeply embedded in the day-to-day operations of your practice, you rarely know what it looks like in your waiting rooms or reception area. You come in the back door, you go out the back door. You avoid the front because you don’t want to get hogtied by a client who wants to say, “Hey doc, how you doing?”

Working on your business means stopping the technical work that we do every day in our businesses and thinking about how close our business is to the dream that we had when we opened it. That also assumes that you actually had a vision or a dream and you didn’t just open a business to make hamburgers and you’re making hamburgers, but you have no clue what the hamburgers taste like.

KB: I sometimes think about that when it comes to culture, just any place that I work, because it is so easy to get caught up in the little stuff every day and not think about that. These are really good messages.

What does “leveling up” look to Peter Weinstein?

PW: Leveling up to me is like being in an elevator and you go from floor to floor to floor, ultimately reaching the top level. Each person as an individual should be looking to grow 1% per day, just a little bit, just a small growth in some fashion. The difference between water at 211 degrees and water at 212 degrees, is the difference between water and steam.

All I’m suggesting, to level up individually or in a business or in a career, is to look to make constant improvement every day, to aspire to a new level every day. So whether it is that 16-year-old who wants to be a veterinarian, or the associate who decides they want to become an owner, or the customer service person who goes back and gets some courses in business and wants to become a practice manager or a CVPM, I think it’s the role, the responsibility of every business owner to help their team level up each day, every day, all the time.

Otherwise, you are providing people with a job and not a career, and I think that’s one of the biggest problems we have in this profession. It’s not that we need more people. We need to do a better job of keeping the people that we have by giving them opportunities to grow, contribute, get better, give them the respect that they deserve, give them more responsibility, and give them recognition for all of the things that they have done to make your business successful.

Because ladies and gentlemen, we don’t do it by ourselves. This is a team. It’s the only way we can do veterinary medicine.

KB: That’s a mic drop right there. That’s true no matter what that role is. If a kennel assistant wants to stay a kennel assistant, there’s nothing wrong with that. It doesn’t mean they can’t grow within that job and assume more responsibility and learn more skills.

Okay. Last question, do you have a team or individual credentialed technicians that you’d like to shout out while we’re here?

PW: I’d like to shout out to every credentialed technician. Veterinary medicine is a team sport. We are like the rowboat with eight people in it. One’s the doctor or the manager at the front, who’s the coxswain that says stroke, but in between are a whole bunch of team people. One or more is a credentialed technician. If we truly want to move this profession forward, it can’t be via a doctor-centric business model. It needs to be a team-based business model whereby we utilize our credential techs to the top of their job descriptions, whatever it is in your state.

We respect them for the fact that they have become credentialed; we don’t give noncredentialled people the same responsibilities. I would suggest you give them the same respect because they have tremendous amount of skills from that standpoint, but we have to start giving our credentialed technicians the opportunity to grow and contribute and generate income.

We don’t even track how much income our credential technicians are generating for us. If you go to the dentist, there’s a line item for the hygienist and the work that they do. So honestly, we need to start to give greater respect to our credentialed technicians by letting them do what they can do. You need to make sure that you have identified their skill sets and that you trust them to perform up to the level that they have been trained. Then recognize them through line items, through identifying them to your clients by saying, “hey, this is Patty. She’s my credentialed technician. She’s my right-hand person. She’ll be your point person going forward.”

If we could use our credentialed technicians or assistants, depending upon the skill sets and the state boards and what they can or cannot do, to do the work, our doctors can have more time to do the three things or four things depending on your state, that they must do by law. Diagnose, prescribe, and do surgery. Everything beyond that can be done by a credentialed tech.

Bottom line, we need to have a greater understanding of how to integrate our credentialed technicians into the client experience. Then clients can trust everybody on the team, and that it is not all based upon the doctor, but it’s based upon everybody on that boat all rowing together with the common goal of providing a world-class individualized client experience and patient experience.

KB: You just keep dropping the mic, so I think I’m just going to leave it there. That was exactly, exactly what I was hoping you’d say, because I think there are a lot of people that still need to hear it. We hear it a lot, and we need to hear it from all corners. And I really appreciate that you’re a champion for that team-based approach, because I tell you what, once you work with credential techs who know their job, are allowed to do their job—they run that clinic like a ship, then you can’t go back, and you realize there’s no reason to ever, ever, ever go back.

PW: Absolutely. Big high five on that.

Central Line is generously supported by CareCredit. Catch the full episode, and every other episode of Central Line: The AAHA Podcast, on major podcast platforms and YouTube.

Photo credits: IPGGutenbergUKLtd/iStock via Getty Images Plus (Edited with Adobe generative AI), ©AAHA/Robin Taylor, gorodenkoff/iStock via Getty Images Plus