Episode 19 – Navigating Uncertainty in Veterinary Care: Insights on Innovation and Leadership

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In this week’s episode

• Transforming First-Opinion Practice with Advanced Diagnostics: Brian Faulkner highlights how advanced tools like CT scanners have become essential in first-opinion veterinary practices, revolutionising diagnostic capabilities. These tools allow vets to identify issues that might otherwise go unnoticed, raising the standard of care and accuracy in everyday practice.
• The Emergence of Subscription-Based Vet Tech Models: explore the rise of vet tech start-ups offering membership models that focus on foundational care, from routine check-ups to preventive treatments. This trend reflects a shift towards segmented services, allowing practices to cater to clients’ specific needs, whether they seek comprehensive or specialised care.
• Striking a Balance Between Technology and Human Interaction: While technology offers time-saving benefits, Faulkner and Peploe both stress the importance of human connection in veterinary care. Tools like AI-driven chat aids can enhance efficiency, but they are most effective when complementing the genuine empathy and nuanced understanding that vets bring to client relationships.
• Enhancing Efficiency with Targeted Tech Integration: Practical tools, such as automated health plans, allow vets to streamline routine discussions, freeing up time for more complex cases. Thoughtful integration of these systems helps practices maintain a high level of client care, using technology to support—not replace—their essential human touch.

Tune in to Brian Faulkner and Jack Peploe to explore how today’s diagnostic tools, innovative subscription models, and balanced tech integration are transforming veterinary care and client communication!

Transcription

Jack Peploe:

Coming up on modern veterinary practice.

Brian Faulkner:

So I guess in a nutshell for me, building confidence is about understanding doubt and self-doubt. And you must deal with those rocky foundations before you try and build up some sort of potentially narcissistic gleeful confidence or where you’re trying to build a house on the

Jack Peploe:

Sand. Welcome to the Modern Veterinary Practice Podcast. I’m your host and veterinary IT expert, Jack Peploe. In this episode, I’ll be welcoming Brian Faulkner to the podcast who will talk to us about innovation, effective communication and shaping the future of veterinary practices. Brian has, nearly 30 years of experience as a veterinarian, entrepreneur and educator will explore his insights on first opinion practice, the role of psychology in veterinary medicine and how technology is transforming the profession.

Brian Faulkner:

So yeah, I’m Brian Folkner. I’m a vet almost 30 years graduate. Simple Northern Irish farm boy really that went Edinburgh University back in the late eighties, graduated mid nineties. I’ve actually worked in about 250 practices in my career before, during and after setting up, well, six of my own non COAs assisting another six or seven practices that I am a joint venture in as well. I see myself very much as a first opinion practitioner and I still like what I do. I work as a clinician three days a week, Monday, Tuesdays and Friday, and I do my fair share of weekends, but on we season Thursdays now for the last 10 years, I do nonclinical support to the profession. What that means is I use a couple of other social science degrees that I did. I did an MBA after five years, and then I did a master’s in psychology after 13 years graduate. And I use those degrees to basically assist whatever it may be in first opinion practice. That might be communication from vets to clients. It might be colleague to colleague communication. It may be business conceptualization, strategy, leadership, whatever the particular role in practice needs or what’s from me, as long as it’s connected to first opinion, mainly veterinary practice, I hope fine. I’m of some use to them. So that’s what I do. I’m a clinician consultant and I guess I describe myself as a confidence coach, especially with the beauty client or client communication.

Jack Peploe:

Well, Brian, I have to say I think you’re like the happiest vet that I know, but welcome to the Modern Veterinary Practice podcast. I’m obviously thrilled to have you join us today. Now obviously I would regard you as a titan in the veterinary field, who’s accomplishments has spanned from obviously the business development to mastering the art of communication, which I’m really excited to talk to you about. Obviously it’s a privilege to have you with us. How are you today?

Brian Faulkner:

I’m good, thank you very much. Yes, I was at BBA live last week and I had a 30 year reunion for my original year. So because I did an intercalated my original year were 30 years, graduated this year, but they invited us originals, so we had a lovely weekend in Edinburgh. Also went to see Taylor Swift whilst I was there. And so we’ve had a wonderful, wonderful week. So I’m still riding high from my euphoria of last week.

Jack Peploe:

That’s Swifty as something which we’re going to dive into a bit later. Excellent. Now obviously what I thought about today was we were going to dive into how innovation and effective communication are pivotal in shaping the future of veterinary practices. Now, obviously with your background both in setting up practices and teaching at a university level, obviously you are the perfect person to guide us through these discussions. So, if we go back and talk about your six practices that you’ve launched, what kind of inspired you to take this entrepreneurial route in the veterinary field and what are the most valuable lessons you’ve learned along the way?

Brian Faulkner:

So I grew up on a farm, our own owned farm. So, the idea of being self-employed, working for myself and the hopeful principle that effort is proportionate to reward was always something that I guess had, and I had a wonderful first employer practice in Leia, and they were excellent to me. They were really, really very good and they gave me a sense of organisation management. And just around that time, it was mid to late eighties, the corporate idea was starting to emerge. I think VPI was the first veterinary practice initiative, which I think became one of the kernels of what became CVS, I think from Memory companion care. Previously the former name of retro pets were also starting to come, and I really was interested in that idea. So I thought that this idea is going to be here to stay. So I did an MBA, my wife did an MBA with me, and she was a economics graduate.

She understood this whole idea and she said to me six months before I started my MBA, you should do an MBA, you keep talking about all of this stuff that’s MBA, and I didn’t even know what an MBA was. I said, what’s that? And I went, oh, that does actually sound quite interesting. So I did that at Nottingham University Business School. That was our honeymoon year. We got married and we basically together did an MBA study class together. And I used to copy her answers, but I was slightly better at throwing pretty pictures around them. So I used to get 1% more and that annoyed or no.

So that whole idea, I graduated with my MBA and then it was do I buy a practice? Do I set one up? I couldn’t compete with ultimately the corporates who were purchasing practice that time. And I’ll tell a little story that led to ultimately where my first practice is, and I hope this doesn’t upset or offend anybody, but actually I think the people here, it’s relevant to know anyway, so you can cut it if you have to. Jack, we had two dogs and we were across our dogs, lived with my nine in-laws in Suffolk, and we were across visiting friends, university friends in Oxford. Shell one weekend. And my father-in-law called me and said, oh, Tessa, the 8-year-old, slightly fat female Tibetan terrier couldn’t stand up. And I asked him to do a few things, but from the description I was a bit concerned she’d done something to her back her spine and I said, oh, well it’s four o’clock on a Sunday afternoon.

It’s a penny, but you’re going to have to speak to your local vet, their local vet. And they called and they were asked to bring the dog down. And when they arrived in the car park, they opened the boot and Tessa then jumped out of the boot, ran around the car park, apparently fine. And I said to my father-in-law, let me speak to the vet and I’ll empathise that. Of course, being a vet, being called out for something, it doesn’t seem very emergency, is annoying. So I have to say the vet wasn’t particularly, what’s the word? I don’t know what the word is, let’s just use you. It wasn’t particularly mass. And I said, really? Thank you for seeing my dog. I know what it’s like. I’m a small level vet as well. It’s just not near my dogs at the moment. I was a bit concerned about spine and I don’t know the words that she said. I can’t remember the phrase, but basically she said something like, you mustn’t be much of a VE if that’s what you thought. And that motivated me. Basically, I put the show down and I said to my wife, we’re setting up there by chance. The very next week I found the perfect building in a very good location and we set up, and that motivated me for seven years. I woke up in anger to basically say, I outcompete you for saying that.

That was actually what ultimately led to setting up my very first practice. Now, I always had the idea setting up or buying a business, but was actually what set that one off. And so we grew hard on that and also a little in terms of strategic for that practice. I had heard in my venture capital module in MBA that you do something for seven years and then you kind of move a business on. So I had this notion that seven years, and I think that’s exactly what happened. I sold the business to CVS after seven years, and I was also at that time had done my master’s in psychology. So that’s kind of my story as to how it happened in the first practice. And I could look back and I could tell you all the wonderful on paper strategic ideas that I could have and should have had in relation to that business. And I’ll tell you that 50 to 80 maybe percent of it was serendipity and luck and with a lot of hard work to do. But actually I was better at describing a strategy after I had exited it than actually what the strategy was going into it.

Jack Peploe:

So you’ve had time to actually think about it and work out what it was done, but once it was complete,

Brian Faulkner:

Yeah, I look back on things that maybe happened. Some things were maybe without conscious awareness, others we’re just lucky. It was just possibly an awful lot of credit to be given to my first employer who I just followed a lot of what they did. I just thought that was the way all veterinary practices worked. And I really learned after I left that and started LOC going to literally a different practice every week that the spectrum of culture, organisation management, desires, everything across the profession is incredibly varied. And you think that when you’re a first practice, that’s the way it’s done and everyone does it like that, but what you realise is it’s still not, that doesn’t make it better or worse in some practice. I went to phenomenal, really, really good in your red lots. So yeah, that was my story of my first practice.

I think my MBA helped me a lot, maybe not as much as perhaps sometimes people think. One of the things that say with an MBA is having an MBA is dispels the myth of what other people with MBAs have. You realise that there’s no, for me, rocket science in it. I’m sure people who spent hundreds of thousands on hybrid brow nnc, a London School of Economics or all of these very high MBAs would disagree and maybe for high level blue chip executive MBAs perhaps. But the one module that was brilliantly useful was the venture capital module. It was ultimately a business plan, invest pitch critique, demonstrated return. That was brilliant. That made my MBA low worth it for me. But the rest of it, there was an awful lot of, I considered quite soft conceptual stuff, but actually it was useful though to have it, to do it for

Jack Peploe:

Sure. And talking about master’s, so you also got a master’s in applied positive psychology. How’s that kind of study influenced your approach in veterinary practice and specifically I suppose client interaction?

Brian Faulkner:

I sometimes describe that master’s as the best degree I ever did, but I say that sometimes having to reflect that it was actually standing on the shoulders of the previous degrees. I had a platform of veterinary degree, which allowed me to be a clinician. Then my MBA allowed me to, well, it helped me go into ownership. And then having the psychology as the third layer in that stack allowed me to operate within a system. And it perhaps, I don’t know how to describe it, but it just helped me see work in veterinary practice at a different conceptual level. So again, I always had this idea, I’ve always been fascinated by why we do what we do and why we don’t do what we part shooter could do. Psychology has always fascinated me. And the other module in our MBA that I found really, really useful was organisational leaders, leadership and culture.

And ultimately culture is just collective psychology. So it was taught by a guy who had done psychology and he very much inspired me to see that in a different way. So ultimately I thought I was going to have to do an undergraduate in psychology to start that path. I was even prepared to do that. And then I found about the MAP programme MAP stands for our master’s in applied positive psychology. You didn’t have to be an undergraduate psychologist to do it. You came in and I came in, I was very lucky. There was two schools in the whole world. There was Washington and London and I got into London wanted particularly variation. So the fact that I was a vet was interesting to them. So I did that and that was two years and still massively friendly with those friends. Going to someone’s wedding hitter this month connected to that, it just really, really good friendship group that we formed. And so that was useful. And then of course applying some of those psychological principles to life in practice. Maybe we can talk specifically about those. But it was walking through a door that I just went, this is the room I wanted to be in. I didn’t know how to get there until I opened this door.

Jack Peploe:

So can you elaborate more about this room and this door that you wanted to open?

Brian Faulkner:

Psychology is such a massive subject and there’s so many dimensions to it. And I think we think traditionally psychology was always focused on the negative, why we’re depressed, why we’re anxious, and that came on a post World War II era and quite righting with lots of people coming back for the trauma of the 20th century problems. There was a lot of lead for that. But as I guess the economy flew in the eighties, nineties and beyond, people affluent silent survival and it took on its own. It became easier if you like, with its own challenges of affluence. So positive psychology was born literally at the turn of the millennium. And it’s this idea focused on what is it that makes the positive dimensions of our life happen as opposed to this idea, I guess one of the principles that said was just because you’re not sad or not depressed doesn’t necessarily make you happy. The out sort of thing isn’t necessarily the presence of something else.

Brian Faulkner:

Positive psychology was focused on, okay, well let’s look at these positive themes. Optimism was a big one. Hope, happiness of course, which is a construct. But the real one for me that I was really interested in was confidence. This idea of what is confidence? How do you define, how can you measure it, how can you develop it? We all, I’m sure, realise and recognising, empathise with this idea that confidence can disappear in the moment. What happened that it’s so fickle and how on earth do you start a process of getting back on the confidence horse if you want to understand some of the mechanics of it to say, okay, well this is what we get back. So I find that really, really useful to veterinary practice because, and I’m going to give you ultimately my stress equation, which is kind of relevant to confidence. For me, stress equals uncertainty multiplied by urgency.

So uncertainty is what happened, what is happening, what is going to happen. Urgency is ultimately some sort of pressure, usually time. It can be money pressure, it can be patient pressure if you want, but some sort of finite resources is burning. And when you think of stressful situations in the world, it’s usually because of a combination of one or both uncertainty and urgency. Not all of them, but a lot of situational problems. So taking that forward is if you take the word uncertainty and substitute it with the word doubt, there’s a big difference between doubt. I am not sure what’s going on because usually I don’t have enough information. And self-doubt is I’m not sure what’s going on because I’m not good enough. And once you make that flip from doubt to self-doubt, I call that confidence cancer, it becomes a spiral that is self-perpetuating and hard to stop if you don’t realise you’re in that self-doubt free fall.

And it’s literally you lose sight of, and there’s lots of studies and everyone I’m sure would understand this as well, there’s moments they look back on things where they totally just lost all sense of composure, but actually may look back and go have only, I had just done this very simple thing, I could have stepped out of that stateful. So I guess in a nutshell, for me, building confidence is about understanding doubt and self-doubt. And you must deal with those rocky foundations before you try and build up some sort of potentially narcissistic gleeful confidence or where you’re trying to build a house on the sand’s, lots of books with do this, fake it till you make it, all of that sort of stuff. But if you haven’t got your foundation of understanding how doubt can lead to self-doubt under control is any confidence you try and build through behaviour is for me, ultimately futile, if that makes sense.

It’s trying to understand the rockiness of doubt, situational doubt. And one of the really interesting things is the more a person is exposed to situations with doubt and uncertainty, the more their brain will say to them is It must be me. Because I constantly feel unsure. And guess what veterinary practice is? Well, it’s called uncertainty multiplied by urgency. Lots of uncertainty. What’s causing the lump just by feeling it? We can’t tell. So there’s lots and lots and lots of uncertainty and that’s just the way it is. That’s medical practice. But what I find a lot, and I find it myself, I find a lot of colleagues is they very quickly will assume that because they’re chronically exposed to uncertainty, it must be some lacking or feeling or an adequacy in them. And that slides into the self-doubt. And then once they get into that, I’ve seen some of them free fall, and I mean I’ve had people that I’ve coached actually genuinely cry and say, are you saying I don’t have to feel like this forever? Wow. Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. You just need to understand how to get out of the game that you’re in.

Jack Peploe:

Fly me. Well, I’m going to slide out of psychology briefly if you can, Brian. That’s nuts. I can very much see it. As you say, it’s something which is very evident within the profession, even as someone like me who I’ve not grown with you guys just because I’ve been in the industry for 20 years this August, which is bonkers, but I’ve never been working in practice, actually in practice. But it is incredible to see from a third party perspective these kind of challenges that the profession and the professionals in the profession face. It’s scary in a way, but it’s yeah, bonkers

Brian Faulkner:

Without actually everyone’s life. Everyone is faced with uncertainty. It’s a ubiquitous concept. It’s not unique to veterinary.

Jack Peploe:

No, no.

Brian Faulkner:

And it’s actually,

Jack Peploe:

There is the aspect where they’re probably more susceptible to it. Like you say, you are dealing with patients that can’t talk to you, they can’t explain things in much detail. So there’s always that uncertainty. Well, it is like I appreciate, I deal with computers and they can’t exactly tell me what’s going on, but there’s a lot of logic behind it, which makes it a lot easier to make some sort of succinct choices, if that makes sense.

Brian Faulkner:

Yeah, I agree. But I think one of the things that I realised, and it was actually very useful for me to, we vets tend to think we’re very special and of course we’re unique in our offensive knowledge and knowledge based in situations we get into and all that sort of thing, of course. But actually the book that I am very slowly starting to write, but that’s very far away from anything important is called UQ. You’ve got IQ. EQ will show intelligence in the book I want to write is UQ, which is about being intelligent with and about uncertainty because that’s the basis of wisdom. That’s very IE coping situations and realising the impact to yourself and others and actually the ability to be intelligent with and about uncertainty. And you bring all into that stats, probabilities, prognosis, all sorts of things. When you realise confidence, all sorts of things come into that. And so that’s the concept that I would love one day if I won the lottery and I actually had nothing else to do and literally said I would start writing my book called UQ, how to try and work out Uncertainty and how it relates to 10 themes within our life.

Jack Peploe:

Well, I tell you, I can’t wait until it comes out, Brian, so I incentivize you to get on with it.

Brian Faulkner:

Well, thank you

Jack Peploe:

Very. I wanted to slide into, if we can, the first opinion practice, because you describe it as the backbone of the veterinary profession. How do you see its role evolving with the advancements in say, veterinary medicine and technology, for example?

Brian Faulkner:

Yeah, so as I said, I’ve been a graduate for 30 years and seen quite a few changes. I actually was speaking to someone who’s still practicing who graduated 60 years this year. Wow. I mean that was before the Veterinary Surgeons Act was actually created in 1966, so graduated in 64. So if I’ve seen a few changes, that person certainly had seen more, but within the 30 years, the big changes just to try and give a trajectory of where we are, it’s when I graduated, we didn’t have in-house lab analyzers, certainly not the day I graduated. They came, we didn’t have computers until probably three or four years, just late nineties. And we diagnostic equipment’s, I mean, I tell my team they don’t know their living whenever they have this digital X-ray system and we used to have to put the old wet film into the developer and the fixture and the washer and the weather depending on the temperature in the room and the quality.

And used to, we used to look at X-rays and I’m sure we just made stuff up because the pictures were full sometimes. So we’ve got this trajectory of phenomenal diagnostic and therapeutic equipment that we take for granted nowadays. And I’m sure if I was speaking to myself in 30 years time, we would kind of go, wow, do you remember whenever we used to have this thing called ultrasound and we pretended that we knew what we were seeing in it and something like that, we’ll probably look back and kind of go, yeah, it was whole A game, wasn’t it? So, my point being the continual innovation application and use adoption of technology for clinical technology, never mind nonclinical, but clinical technologies is massive. So, in our practices, we put a CT scanner into all of them because, and even that’s really interesting with that is this controversial?

That seems apparently controversial. It’s this idea by some going, if you don’t know how to read the image, you shouldn’t be taking them. It is as if how some people say it makes you lazy by over diagnosing things. And this is a criticism that is thrown out there now and again, what I can tell you is if you with a CT in first opinion practice, you’ll never be able to go back to being without it. And what I’ve realised is that how many things I’ve missed or misdiagnosed over my career pre it, it is just unbelievable. So having those sort of developments just makes first opinion practice so much more, I think advanced. Then the other side of that coin though is there seems to be an increasing controversy about what we should and shouldn’t be doing in terms of procedures maybe connected to post diagnostics.

Should we be doing some of these operations that maybe 10 years ago would always have been done on a referral practice. So spinal procedures, potentially TPLs even, and it’s connected to beliefs about postoperative pain relief requirements and this idea of keeping in house, it seems to become a little controversial in some sort. So you’ve got that. So maybe some of the politics, stroke ethics have to be considered in relation to just because we can, should we. But I do feel, Phil, if you’re going to ask me do I think first opinion practice is going to regress to more simple vaccinations and I don’t know, dentistry even that can be specialised, but no, I don’t think it is. I actually think first opinion practice is going to evolve to be doing things much more mainstream in five to 10 years Time.

Jack Peploe:

So you don’t think that’s going to be a potential border. It’s very interesting because you’re going to get a lot of these vet tech startups that are almost going down that sort of baseline general practice, very, very frontline and offering the very baseline services. It’s just something which I’ve noticed with a couple of vet tech startups, you don’t think that there’s going to be this additional layer that’s going to be that hybrid which you’re talking about, which is kind of what you guys have done.

Brian Faulkner:

So when you say vet tech startups, give me an example. Basic, can you give me

Jack Peploe:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, so I mean, I suppose the likes of, you’ve got pickles, you’ve got creature comforts where they are looking at that regular relationship with the client, fixed price almost serve it or membership, which gives you indefinite limited access to your vet or nurse for advice. And we will do the basics, the flea, the worming stuff, and all the other bits and pieces so that anything beyond the norm is revert.

Brian Faulkner:

Yeah, yeah. And it’s a model really, it remains to be seen as to how useful it is to attract people. I think there’s an element of, and I’m not criticising those brands or the people, I know them, but perhaps vets might find it a little bit monotonous to be doing those sort of things, and they might want to expand beyond basic, and basic doesn’t mean inability at all, but the standard relatively narrow spectrum of services. But the thing of course is there’ll be, I think one of the things we’ve realised over the 30 year really it took my 30 year career, is this idea of segmentation is businesses are starting to pick niches and focus on that. If that’s a niche and that’s what they want to do, that’s fine, and then other practices want them to do other sorts of thing. But picking up on one of the themes that I think where technology, maybe one of the challenges, and this is definitely a core philosophy which come back to my first opinion desire, is that I don’t think you’ll ever be able to technology your way out of good human interaction communication.

Jack Peploe:

Yeah, Completely agree.

Brian Faulkner:

And one of the other principles I’ve realised is that is always expensive, good communication being there, being available, as opposed to thinking that some sort of bot or AI type in way tile evolved, but just having a human being that understands you, your situation as able to give you nuanced answers to nuanced questions is I think we’re very far away from that being Redundant

Jack Peploe:

No, I agree. I think the way that I see technology being implemented well is where it’s a collaborative experience. I agree. I don’t believe that we’re ever going to get to a point where you’re going to remove this human element, not for a very, very, very long time. But it’s interesting where you’ve got situations, I’m going to use a really basic example, but you take the likes of Pets app where they’ve implemented copilot. The whole point is that it’s a solution that will analyse the query from the customer and make a suggestion of a response. The point then is for the vet nurse or receptionist even to be able to review the response and kind of consider whether it’s something that they would agree with. But in doing that, it’s saving them a huge amount of time from having to type that up. And sometimes it’s taking into considerations that we don’t always have time to think about. And I think that’s where I see a little bit of a collaboration, and that’s where I can see that we could benefit, oh, don’t

Brian Faulkner:

Get me wrong, I don’t think it’s either or, and I know you’re not saying that, but where we can integrate the value of both of those sort of human to human and non, non-human to machine. If you want machine communications and extract, you take an example of the healthcare plans, which probably came into the profession 10, 15 years ago, probably really penetrated heart 10 years ago plus. And the wonderful thing that they did was stop having first opinion clinicians talking about fleas, ticks and worms every other consultation because you got the client committed to the programme. And that was, for me, one of the biggest benefits of that was I don’t have to lecture you about this parasite control every other booster consultation. You’re already committed to it. And in other words, what I’m saying is there’s efficiencies that can be gained from new systems. A hundred percent, a hundred percent. Couldn’t agree more.

Jack Peploe:

Well, I mean, time was run away with us, Brian, I could chat to you for ages, but look, I’m extremely grateful for your insights today. It’s been incredibly enlightening, offering both obviously practical advice and innovative approaches to veterinary practice. So thank you again very much for sharing your expertise. You’re welcome. Experience you just a quick one. So if people did want to get in touch with you, how would they go about doing that? So my consultancy company

Brian Faulkner:

Is called Vetology, just as it’s at vetology.co.uk is my website, and there’s contact access there. And always like everyone else, help me to have a consideration. If I’m not able to help you, I’ll say not. If we’re able to discuss things, everything can be customised. I think one of the things I’ve realised is stick to what you’re good at and what you’re useful rather, and actually try and solve all problems, which of course is what you do whenever you’re starting off in new business, you’re just desperate for the business. But actually I think I’ve got better at saying, this is what I think I’m good at, but actually if you want that, maybe I might even know somebody who I believe it’ll help.

Jack Peploe:

That’s awesome. Well, look, Brian, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time. You’re very welcome. Thank you.

Jack Peploe:

Pause for laughs.

Jack Peploe:

Each episode we add a touch of humour by asking our guests to share their most amusing and unforgettable animal related mishaps or bloopers. This time we have Joe Chickerillo who takes us back to one of the most memorable veterinary adventures. Joe recounts the hilarious tale of a night out that ended with a missing bull python leading to a frantic search around his apartment.

Joe Chickerillo:

So my wife is a huge, huge animal person. There are people that are like, you’ve heard of dog people, and then there’s her dog people. She’s like the crazy one, right? I like animals, but I like low maintenance. So I’ve had a python, a ball python for probably the last 12 years or so. I don’t know exactly, but right around there. And sometimes we go out and we’ll be out drinking and bouncing around and this and that. You come home and you want to cuddle with the dog, or you just get kind of like, ah, I just want to cuddle up with my best friend. Well, one night my wife decided to do that. She loves snakes in general too, so we’re out kind of partied and having a good time. I come home, I just fall asleep immediately, and I wake up at about four in the morning.

We probably got home around midnight. I wake up at four in the morning and the bedroom lights are on, and my wife is sitting bolt up right in bed and goes, where’s the snake? And I was like, I’m sure she’s in her tank. What do you mean? Where’s the snake? She’s like, no, I cuddled with her last night. I’m like, and what do you? She goes, yeah, I don’t know. I really wanted to cuddle her when we got home, and then I think I fell asleep and I don’t know where she’s at. And I’m like, oh my God, are you kidding me? Now, at the time I was going back a few years, we were in an apartment and I’m like, oh, I’m just picturing the headlines. It got into up somebody else’s toilet. We’re going to have to, I mean, I’m just like, oh my gosh, what’s going to happen now?

So we wind up flipping the entire apartment inside out and in our walk-in closet. You could see all this stuff was knocked off of the top shelf. She had climbed up the shoe rack that’s built in and crawled and knocked everything off of the top shelf into the floor. So I’m like, okay. Couldn’t find her in there. I’m afraid she’s hurt. Wind up finding her. Long story short, in the front closet, in the coat closet wrapped around my toolbox, which is interesting because it’s metal in cold. You would think that she’d find something warm. But yeah, that was one of the scarier moments for me that really stands out from a pet perspective that was probably unique. Not everybody’s had that experience. I was just like, okay. So my advice is don’t drink and cuddle with snakes.

Jack Peploe:

Coming up next week, we welcome Julien Poublon and Julian Renard, co-founders of Vetstoria, a pioneering platform in veterinary technology. They share their journey from practicing veterinarians to tech entrepreneurs discussing the challenges and successes in developing an online booking system that has transformed veterinary practices worldwide. We delve into that innovative approach to integrating technology and veterinary care, the importance of customer feedback and product development, and their vision for the future of veterinary technology. Tune in to hear Julien and Julien’s insights on how technology is reshaping the veterinary landscape and what this means for practitioners and pet owners alike.

Julien:

I think that anything which is repetitive and admin related, there is a strong opportunity for technology to deliver value there. In practice, we want as many staff as possible to focus on looking after client and taking care of patients

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.