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In this week’s episode:

• Primary Care Should Be the Focus – Snoots Vet is shifting the paradigm by making primary veterinary care the centre of its model. Rather than using primary care as a loss leader to upsell specialist services, Snoots aims to make it profitable, effective, and preventative – emphasising early intervention to avoid costly treatments later.
• The Membership Model Removes Barriers to Access – The all-inclusive membership model removes the financial hurdle of pay-per-visit care. This encourages regular vet visits and communication, which in turn improves pet outcomes by catching issues early – much like a gym membership promotes regular use when people are already paying for access.
• Cost Efficiency Comes from Simplicity and Early Action – By focusing strictly on primary care and excluding complex or high-tech procedures, Snoots keeps costs low. Their clinics concentrate on what 85% of pets typically need, using efficient team structures and carefully chosen diagnostics to maximise value and impact.
• The current model of veterinary care is unsustainable for many pet owners – Jonathan shares why traditional pricing and service structures often don’t meet the needs of modern pet parents, especially millennials, who are seeking both value and transparency.

This episode explores how Snoots Vets is transforming veterinary care by adopting a primary care-first, membership-based model that prioritises accessibility, prevention, and long-term pet wellbeing.

Additional Guest Spotlights

• Aoife Smith: Aoifa highly recommends “Morning Pages” – a simple yet powerful tool from The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. Three pages of unfiltered, handwritten thoughts first thing in the morning. It’s like a brain detox: no structure, no pressure, just pure stream of consciousness to reduce anxiety, spark creativity, and make space for clarity and playfulness in your day.
• Next episode sneak peak: Next episode we’re joined by Olivia Oginska. Even in a profession centred around animals, it’s the people we interact with every day that shape our experience – clients, colleagues, and teammates. Olivia Oginska shares how recognising the emotional side of vet life sparked her passion for emotional intelligence and inspired her to turn complex psychology into practical tools for the clinical world.

Show Notes

• Out every other week on your favourite podcast platform.
• Presented by Jack Peploe: Veterinary IT Expert, Certified Ethical Hacker, CEO of Veterinary IT Services and dog Dad to the adorable Puffin.
• Jonathan is the founder of Snoots Vet, one of the world’s only clinic offering unlimited primary care on a flat monthly membership.
• Jonathan’s pet career started at Bark, where he built the Bark Food brand. After Bark’s successful IPO in 2021, Jonathan became Chief Business Officer at Pawp focusing on telehealth, insurance, and pharmacy. Those experiences exposed him to the real cost of veterinary care and the burden that it places on pet parents. Snoots is built on a mission to bring the most affordable pet care to as many pets and their parents as possible.
• Jonathan recommends reading ‘Unreasonable Hospitality’, by Will Guidara
• Find out more about Snoots Vet here!
  

Transcription

Jonathan Moyal:

Coming up on Modern Veterinary Practice, one of the hardest parts of working on an affordable insurance product is that when you deny a claim nine times out of 10, the result is financial euthanasia. I had never heard the term until I got into that space, and it’s pretty horrific. There’s no actual data about how many pets we put to sleep for financial reasons, but it’s not zero and that’s a problem.

Jack Peploe:

Welcome to the Modern Veterinary Practice Podcast. I’m your host and veterinary IT expert, Jack Peploe. In this episode, I’ll be welcoming Jonathan Mole’s, founder of Snoots Vets to the podcast where we’ll be discussing how his unique membership based model is challenging the traditional approach to veterinary care. Jonathan’s mission is to make pet healthcare more affordable and accessible, tackling barriers that prevent pet owners from seeking care early. We’ll be diving into the concept of financial euthanasia, the pitfalls of the existing vet care system and how focusing solely on primary care might just be the key to industry-wide transformation. Expect an open and forward thinking discussion on future of veterinary care, innovation through tech, and designing a system that truly puts pets and their people. First,

Jonathan Moyal:

My name is Jonathan. I am the founder of Snoots Vet. My career in the pet world started about seven years ago at a company in New York called BarkBox where I built a food brand. And ever since I’ve been obsessed with dogs and cats and their people, and so over the last four years I’ve focused most of my attention towards the affordability of vet care and the accessibility of vet care, which I think is the biggest problem facing our industry.

Jack Peploe:

Jonathan, it is great to have you on and it’s a fantastic obsession to have. I think I’ve got the same level of obsession as you, but obviously great to have you on the Modern Veterinary Practice podcast today. Now I’m super eager to find out more about Snoots Vets and particularly your membership model for veterinary care. Now, obviously you’ve referenced it just there. The veterinary care industry is evolving quickly with rising costs and increasing demands on pet parents. What were the key issues you identified in the traditional vet care model that sort of pushed you to develop Snoots Vet? Why was the membership model the right solution in your eyes?

Jonathan Moyal:

So the membership model is sort of half the battle for us. We have a lot beyond the membership, the membership’s, the packaging, but what’s beneath it is really what makes a difference. My previous role, I ran a company as chief business officer, which did affordable insurance in the us and one of the hardest parts of working on an affordable insurance product is that when you deny a claim nine times out of 10, the result is financial euthanasia. I had never heard the term until I got into that space, and it’s pretty horrific. There’s no actual data about how many pets we put to sleep for financial reasons, but it’s not zero and that’s a problem. So when I started digging into the vet industry more deeply, I realised that we are still operating clinics in the same way that we have been for hundreds of years, which is to say that all clinics are generalists.

Most clinics pretty much operate as hospitals, and most of the work that’s been done has been done around efficiency. Can I get more efficient? Can I fit more appointments in a shorter amount of time? Can I have less admin or paperwork or things like that? And when you look at the human healthcare model, which has had to grapple with rising costs for the same reason, the reality is that we don’t operate human healthcare the same way. We don’t operate as generalists, we don’t operate as full service hospitals. You don’t go, or at least the NHS doesn’t want you to go to the hospital because you have a cold. That’s what your GP is for. So the real innovation of Snoots is not the membership model. The membership model, I’ll get to why we got there in a sec, but the real innovation is the focus on primary care, which is to say if you want to build a better product, you need to do one thing and you need to do it really, really well.

And primary care has often been the overlooked ugly duckling of the vet industry because it’s been a loss leader. And I know it’s not a popular thing to say, but most vets will tell you, I do primary care because it helps me get the client base to then do high value items. And so we wanted to say the opposite. We wanted to say, why don’t we make primary care profitable? Why don’t we make it very profitable and only do that and then we’ll leave the high value items to someone else? The membership model is there for much more human reason, which is that I think the biggest problem with any care is when you build a cost barrier to it, people will not go and understandably I do it for myself, I need a dental cleaning. I haven’t been to clean my teeth in a while because I have to pay for it, and it’s annoying.

And so the membership model was built with that psychology in mind, which was, if you’re already paying for it, will you come more often? And every vet who’s listening to this will say, if we could see pets more often or if at least we could hear about them more often, the end result would be better and you could add more years with less cost down the line. So that’s really what it is. And it’s funny because most investors that we speak with say, oh, okay, I get it. You’re like a gym. People pay a membership and then they never come and that’s how you make money. And we’re not, half of my product team’s focus is how do we get people to engage more regularly. So that’s really why we have the membership.

Jack Peploe:

No, that’s cool. It’s a very good idea, especially considering especially in the UK with the NH, people don’t really understand the value of healthcare. So obviously it’s almost devalued in a way, which is a big challenge. And I think the way that you’ve approached it is clever, but how do you ensure that you keep the quality of care high while offering a more predictable and accessible payment structure?

Jonathan Moyal:

So to be clear, so that everybody knows what we’re talking about, our membership includes everything that we do. There are other membership models out there which are sort of gatekeeper memberships, which they allow you to come in and then you get charged for things. So our membership includes everything, and I love doing the laundry list. It includes all visits, it includes all vaccines including rabies and kennel cough, it includes blood work, x-rays, ultrasounds, labs generally. It includes travel certificates and it includes telehealth and a few more things. So the way we think about it is that’s what we consider to be primary care. And so from our perspective, that’s 85% of what anyone will ever need over the lifetime of a pet. And our hope is that it’s also a hundred percent of what 85% of people will need if we do our job, if we do the preventative.

So how do we keep the cost down? I think the reality of it is that we are trying to change the paradigm in the sense that we are trying to make sure that people come in earlier and sooner for little things so that any vet will tell you there’s a difference between this tiny little bump that I might need to do an f and a on just to check, versus there’s a massive lump here and there’s really no other option but surgery. And there’s a hundred versions of that, right? There’s a hundred versions of if you came in three months ago, we could have done something on the cheap, but now actually we need to do something complex. So we keep costs down by focusing on primary care. We don’t do very heavy stuff. We don’t have heavy equipment. Our surgeries are, they’re not really surgeries, they’re clinics.

It’s funny, in the UK you call them surgeries, but we are clinics very purely. We don’t do a lot of the things and then we try to innovate on the things that we do. Do. We try to use our teams effectively. We try to ask, what’s the gold standard here? What’s really necessary? What’s actually going to help this pet live their best life for a longer time in better circumstances? Versus just what is the test that we can add here? How many more exams can we do? We’re just not incentivized to keep doing that. We do have a challenge understandably built in our system, which is we have to keep ourselves in check and always make the best decision for our patients with no questions asked. And I think we do that. We make sure to have sort of a Chinese wall between the business side of this, which is trying to make sure our margins are clear and clean and the medical side, which have full reign to do any number of tests or any number of things that do have a cost associated with them.

Jack Peploe:

No, that’s cool. And I mean, I’m going to come back to, I want to talk more on the membership model, but one thing, being a tech always engaged in it and intrigued by obviously an element of engagement with your client could be through education, for example. So trying to keep them informed. And have you got any ideas of, are you planning on integrating any form of wearable with regards to increasing that engagement?

Jonathan Moyal:

We are. So that’s the other side of the sort of black box is that we are a tech company. We have software engineers, we have a product team. We are very focused on that engagement piece. And that engagement piece comes mostly on the technology side. It’s not a secret that if people need to come into our clinic 45 times a year, our clinic wouldn’t work. But we’re trying to get 45 touch points a year because we want our patients to feel like they’re being taken care of all the time. So a lot of those need to happen via tech. We are speaking with two wearable companies right now, and it’s definitely something that’s on the roadmap Act, having lunch with one of them right after this. So your timing is impeccable, but we are also doing, there’s so much to do on telehealth before you even get to wearables.

My gripe with telehealth, and before this I also worked in telehealth. My gripe with telehealth is twofold. One, it’s always reactive, never preventative. No one has a telehealth membership for preventative stuff. It just doesn’t happen. And two, it lives in a vacuum. It always lives in a vacuum, right? It’s never attached to your vet. The reason being because your vet wants you to come in because that’s how they make money. And if they do telehealth, it’s usually as sort of like a triage or filtering system to get you to the right deployment or they charge for it. And so there’s really no point. And then two, because the other guys, the telehealth only guys are usually software people, which is where I come from. So no judgement  and software people are allergic to the real world. And so what they want to do is they want to live only in the cloud and it just doesn’t work.

It doesn’t work because the vet that you’re being connected to doesn’t have your medical records, doesn’t speak to the team that knows your pet, that has put their hands on your dog. And so at the end of the day, what ends up happening is out of an abundance of caution, eight times out of 10 they tell you to go to the vet. And from a veterinary standpoint, that makes sense. You know what? We saved 20% of appointments, this was a good problem, but from a client standpoint, that is a horrible experience. Why am I paying you to tell me to go pay someone else the thing I would’ve paid them if I wasn’t paying you? And that’s the problem with telehealth today. We obviously bundle it in, but we also just think of it completely differently. It’s not just a reactive tool. It’s something that we try to engage our customers with very regularly.

Jack Peploe:

This is something that you guys manage, so it’s not an external service.

Jonathan Moyal:

We manage it. We looked at the external services, we thought about it. At the end of the day, it’s too core to who we are as a business and it matters. Our telehealth team, they’re fantastic, but they’re on Slack with the rest of our team. So all day I’m seeing messages where IHA is on a call with mochi and she’s asking Rachel, who’s in the clinic who saw mochi last week. And so that’s where the magic happens and that’s how you actually make it work.

Jack Peploe:

No, that’s cool. So I’m going to go back to the membership model. So obviously subscription models do bring many advantages, but what are some of the potential setbacks or challenges you face in implementing this type of structure and how have you worked to overcome them?

Jonathan Moyal:

The biggest fear, sorry, the biggest fear when we started, not for me, but for people we talked to, you got to remember, we’re 15 months in and we now have a business that’s profitable and that’s doing really well. And so a lot of people are kind of like, oh, Snus is a good idea. 15 months ago, I sat at a lunch table with a industry veteran veterinarian, and he looked at me, listened to my pitch for 15 minutes, and then looked me in the eyes and said, you are an idiot. And he knows who he is, and he’s probably listening so he’ll remember. But the point is everybody thought we were stupid. And the reason usually that was given was, well, you’re only going to get a bunch of 12-year-old French bulldogs with every issue under the sun one. That hasn’t happened. We attract a lot of puppies and kittens, so we haven’t had the sort of selection bias, but I think it’s a little bit deeper than that.

I think the assumption was and continues to be, and I think it’s a problem with the way we view our customers, clients, customers, patients, however you want to call it. I think the assumption is that vet care is too expensive for people that have a lot of issues. And I think the reality is vet care is perceived to be too expensive by everyone regardless of their issues. And we are failing them as an industry on the insurance side, we are failing them as an industry on the vet side, not by anyone’s faults, just because we keep doing the same thing that we’ve always been doing and we’re expecting people to just accept it. And so the biggest downside to a membership model that’s all inclusive is that it’s going to include too much. And the way we’ve gotten around it is that actually it’s still interesting for people that don’t need that much and it’s still valuable for them. Our churn rate is so low that I can’t even say it because otherwise my competitors are going to copy me. But people really do love what we do and it’s still valuable to them even if they’re not coming in every week. So that’s really the thing that we, I think have proven the biggest thing we’ve proven in the last year.

Jack Peploe:

No, that’s cool. So in your opinion, what needs to fundamentally change in veterinary care over the next, say five to 10 years to make it more accessible to pet owners? And could your model serve as a blueprint for the future of the industry?

Jonathan Moyal:

In my opinion, we need to break it up and we need to start doing things in a different way. And I think that we are the first step towards that. I genuinely believe that we are complimentary to the other clinics, not competitive. And I can prove that because we work with other clinics for the surgeries that we don’t do and for things like that and the clinics that we work with, we represent a meaningful piece of their book and they’re very happy working with us. And so in the same way that your GP will not do your surgery and you’re going to go to a hospital for that, and the hospital is more efficient and more able to do that at a lower cost because that’s all they do all day. We need to, as an industry think the same way. The way I see it is that there is primary care, surgical care, specialty care, emergency care. And right now, the only thing we’ve done is sort of pull emergency care out, and specialty care has always lived on its own, but we need to split that up and we don’t need to compete. I don’t want this. Everybody always says to me, eventually you’re going to, I have no interest in doing surgery. First of all, I’m not a vet, so I’m not obsessed with doing surgery.

I’m obsessed with driving the best value to our customers and bringing more people into the fold. So I don’t want to do surgery. What I want to do is build the model that is so easy for me to scale that I can touch 10 million pets in the next 10 years, and I can’t do that if every single clinic requires a full surgical suite. I just can’t, right? And so I think that in 10 years or so, we won’t be the only ones doing primary care only, and we definitely won’t be the only ones on a membership. It’s a matter of time. And that’s okay. And I think that it will benefit the guys who are set up to really be surgeries and who are only doing primary care. They don’t have a choice, and it’s the only way they make money in order to send them those patients. And I really look forward to a day where we are 50% of the book of the independent vets around us and that we can say, listen, we send you 150 patients a month for your high value items. You need to lower your prices a little bit so that I can tell my customers that we’re giving them the best value. But I look forward to that day. I think it’s going to happen.

Jack Peploe:

It’s so exciting. Well, look, Jonathan, thank you so much for joining us today. Obviously your vision for making pet care more affordable is honestly truly inspiring. And I’m sure our listeners have learned a lot about the future of Many Care. It’s obviously been a pleasure hearing about your journey with Snoots Vet, and I look forward to seeing how your model continues to reshape the industry. Now, obviously before we do close off, if people do want to get in touch with you, how can they go about doing so?

Jonathan Moyal:

I give my phone number to everyone who asks it. Every patient of mine gets an email with my phone number, so you are more than free to message me on WhatsApp. And it’s oh 7 7 4 6 2 0 4 3 2 8. I’m sure I’m the only person who’s done that on here, and I’m perfect, was fine with it. But more regularly, it’s jonathan@nuvet.com and you can feel free to message me. I take every meeting and I’m always happy to chat with people about literally anything.

Jack Peploe:

Jonathan, thank you so much.

Jonathan Moyal:

Thank you.

Jack Peploe:

Thanks for having me.

Jack Peploe:

Every week we ask professionals and experts to suggest a best business resource for our listeners. This week’s recommendation is from Aoife Smith.

Aoife Smith:

A tool that I think is really great is morning pages. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, you probably have. It comes from, it actually comes from a book Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, and I’ve stolen it for my psychotherapeutic purposes, shall we say. And basically the exercise is that you fill three a four size pages and full of thoughts. The first thing you do when you wake up in the morning is start writing three pages. And it doesn’t matter what you’re writing, it doesn’t matter if it makes any sense. It’s an absolute complete stream of consciousness onto three pages, and you stop after the third page. You don’t read it back, you don’t read it at all. So you close your notebook and put it away, and that’s it. You get up and you go about your morning. And the idea is that it just gets all of the thoughts that were, when you’re waking up in the morning and some people sneeze loads, some people cough, you’re in the shower and you’re kind of getting all these thoughts out there.

You’re coughing, you’re sneezing, you’re waking your body up. That’s kind of what this is what for your brain. So it just allows you to decompress your brain so that you can sort of get on with the rest of your day and you’re ready to take new thoughts in. Then for the morning. It’s a really lovely way of ground. And I think as well sometimes too, you’ll write something down and you’ll go, oh my gosh, I didn’t even realise I was thinking about that. Hang on, wait, let me try. And I have to sort that out after. It can reduce anxiety, which is why I love giving it to my clients as an exercise to see if it helps, because again, you’re getting all your thoughts on paper and you’re really grounding yourself in that. And also what I like about it is that it’s come from, or this idea has been birthed from a place of wanting to create, which I think is really key and important and fun for people who are dealing with things like anxiety, depression, and we talk about them in such a serious way, which we absolutely should.

We should take them seriously. But I think within anxiety in particular, our brain can really trick us into thinking that things aren’t fun anymore. And to be able to just get the stream of consciousness down on paper gives us that idea that well, actually, we can play. And this doesn’t need to mean anything. We’re not writing an essay or a story. There’s no beginning, middle, or end. We’re just having fun with this and seeing what happens. It’s that idea of play, and sometimes it lets us just loosen up a little bit more and allow us to play and have fun and get a bit creative and just invite fun in. Because again, when something is going wrong for us, we forget that we can have fun and enjoy something. So I think that’s really important too.

Jack Peploe:

Coming up next week, we welcome Liv Oginska, veterinary surgeon, psychologist, and emotional intelligence specialist. Liv brings a unique and much needed perspective to the veterinary world, blending her clinical background with deep expertise in emotional intelligence, conflict mediation, and psychological safety. In this episode, we explore how understanding ourselves and others can create healthier teams, improved communication and help prevent burnout in the high pressure environment of veterinary care, tune into here lives, powerful insights on building a more emotionally intelligent and compassionate future for the profession.

Olivia Oginska:

We interact with people every single day, even though we work with animals, we interact with our colleagues, with our clients, we have our leaders, we have our teammates, and we are all human. And whether we like it or not, there are a lot of emotions involved. So when you think about it, if we don’t know what to do about our own emotions and if we don’t know what to do with other person emotions, it’s not going to go well. So I realised that you know what? There’s such a big space in which we can grow, and that motivated me to learn more about emotional intelligence and also to develop tools that can translate those theoretical frameworks and all those methods presented by psychology to translate them into something really easy to use in our clinical world. So that’s the story behind my passion and my whole life now focused on emotion.

Jack Peploe:

That’s it for this episode. All links and recommendations we talked about are in the show notes. Don’t forget to subscribe and share the podcast if you found it useful. In the meantime, thanks for listening and see you next time.