culture

This week on the podcast…

This week on the Uncharted Podcast, practice management geek Stephanie Goss is joined by a very special guest: former practice manager and author of the new AAHA press book Lead to Thrive – The Science of Crafting a Positive Veterinary Culture, Josh Vaisman, MAPPCP (PgD).

Josh believes all veterinary professionals deserve to feel fulfilled by their work each and every day. Through his company, Flourish Veterinary Consulting, he draws on over 20 years of veterinary experience, a master’s degree in applied Positive Psychology & Coaching Psychology, education in Positive Leadership and Positive Organizational Scholarship and a passion for guiding leaders to cultivate work environments in which people can thrive.

Fun fact – Josh is also an avid beekeeper who teaches beginning beekeepers how to tend to their buzzing buddies.

Josh and Stephanie are looking at Josh's new book through the lens of his practice management road and the journey he took to becoming a positive leader and force for good in our field. They discuss their own success and failures in an unflinchingly honest and vulnerable way. Let's get into this…

Buy Josh's New Book – Lead to Thrive here (AAHA MEMBERSHIP NOT REQUIRED TO BUY!)

Find Josh and his team here and here!

Links for resources shared by Josh during the episode

Adam Grant's website (including book links)

Martin Seligman's website (including book links)

You can also listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts.

Do you have something that you would love Andy and Stephanie to role play on the podcast – a situation where you would love some examples of what someone else would say and how they would say it? If so, send us a message through the mailbag! We want to hear your challenges and would love to feature your scenario on the podcast. Head over to the mailbag and submit it here

Submit your questions here: unchartedvet.com/mailbag

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Episode Transcript

Stephanie Goss:
Hey everybody! I am Stephanie Goss, and this is another episode of The Uncharted Podcast. Today I am joined by a very special guest, my dear friend and colleague, Josh Vaisman. Josh is joining me to talk about his journey as a leader and how do we lead to thrive. He's got a new book out that has the title, coincidentally has the same name, and he and I are talking through the science of crafting a positive workplace. It ties directly to Josh's journey as leader. And I had so much fun talking through this journey that he has been on and just having a conversation with a dear friend. I would love for you to join me. And now let's get into this.

Speaker 2:
And now The Uncharted Podcast.

Stephanie Goss:
And we are back. It is me, myself, and I, Andy is on vacation this week; however, fear not, friends because I am so, so excited to bring a conversation to you with my friend Josh Vaisman, who is here joining me on the podcast today. Hi Josh.

Josh Vaisman:
Hey, Stephanie. I just want to say really quickly, I'm so sorry, but Andy is on vacation. It's like 105 degrees here in Colorado, and you're in a closet. Something doesn't seem right in the universe.

Stephanie Goss:
You hear that, Andy Roark? I think Josh is saying that I should be let out of the closet more often, although I do not want to be in 105 degree Denver weather either, because that's gross.

Josh Vaisman:
No, not fun, man. Not fun.

Stephanie Goss:
How are you, friend? I feel like I'm really excited to see your face and talk to you. And also I feel like my cup is still full because I just got to spend a whole bunch of time with you at AVMA recently, which was amazing.

Josh Vaisman:
It was amazing. I was literally going to say the same thing. I'm still seriously walking through life on a high from that event. Seeing you and just like all of the, gosh, there are so many really, really good human beings trying really hard to do really good things for the profession and getting to spend that much time with so many of them in one space, it's just such a heart filler. It was pretty awesome.

Stephanie Goss:
And you had extra special, amazing time at AVMA because, so for those who don't know, I am bringing Josh to you for so many reasons, least of which is that he's just an amazing human being. And if you don't know who Josh is, you need to check out the link to find him in the show notes because he's amazing in doing wonderful things in our profession, and he is smart, and he wrote a book and it is fantastic.
I am not all the way through yet. I started reading it on the plane on the way home from Denver, but Josh had his book launch party at AVMA and it was so fun because Josh knows all of the great human beings in veterinary medicine, and they were all in one room at AVMA to celebrate you. And it was so much fun to have the energy in that room and to see all of, like you said, the people who really care about making a positive difference in veterinary medicine, I feel like in one place.

Josh Vaisman:
Yeah, it was so awesome looking out on that room and seeing such amazing humans. Yeah, it was pretty cool, cool experience.

Stephanie Goss:
And there was lots of fun too because your team helped decorate with googly eyes all over the place, which was so fun.

Josh Vaisman:
Okay, so since we're in the business of outing here, I'm going to out one of the infamous Uncharted members, Dr. Sarah Wolfe, whose idea sparked a movement, #AVMAGooglyEyes. It was-

Stephanie Goss:
Is that really a thing? I have not seen that hashtag. Oh, I need to go down that rabbit hole now.

Josh Vaisman:
We definitely did it. We definitely did our best to represent the hashtag well throughout the conference.

Stephanie Goss:
Okay. I love it so much because it's very Sarah, it's very Uncharted. We have our own several things. We have the Janelle Hutton challenge, where everybody tries to catch Andy in the background and point at him and their selfie without him noticing you. And so that is right on brand for us to have the googly eyes. This does not surprise me one bit that Sarah was involved in that.

Josh Vaisman:
Oh my god, it was so fun. It just made AVMA that much better.

Stephanie Goss:
Okay, I'm going to have to go down that rabbit hole and view things on social media, but so you and I have known each other for a while and I want to make sure that our listeners who maybe they haven't heard of you or they didn't know that you have a book out, so let's start there. Tell us a little bit about you, your background in veterinary medicine, because really you are a positive, wonderful human being, and I know that you would be that way without veterinary medicine, but tell me how you got to where you are in vet med and how you got so excited about creating a positive culture, because that is really a drive for you.

Josh Vaisman:
Big time drive. Well, Stephanie, I'm a Pisces who enjoys leisurely walks and … Yeah, so I-

Stephanie Goss:
Oh my God, your microphone is going to make you sound so fantastic right there. I love it so much.

Josh Vaisman:
I sort of stumbled into veterinary medicine. I had moved to Colorado from Wisconsin actually in the late '90s, and I was working at a PetSmart in Boulder, Colorado. I was in the specialty department, so I was the guy that you saw about the fish.

Stephanie Goss:
Love it.

Josh Vaisman:
And we had a PetSmart Veterinary Services in our building, which is dating myself pretty well now. I got really intrigued by what they were doing over there. I sort of befriended the chief of staff and some of the team members and started to have these ideas that maybe I'd want to go to vet school someday. I like to think of it as the time in my life where I had a psychotic break. I have since been disabused of this troublesome mindset, but I thought if I'm going to go to vet school, I should probably know what it's like to work in a veterinary hospital. And I walked over there and I asked if I could volunteer on my days off, and they were like, no, we can't really do that, but we can hire you. Which was a surprise.
So I switched from PetSmart to PetSmart Veterinary Services and was trained as a technician assistant and worked there for a number of years, and that was in '98. So that's how I started in vet med. I just immediately fell in love with it. Obviously the animals part, we have a small menagerie of creatures in our home, and animals have been a central part of my life for as long as I can remember. But the truth is it was really the people that drew me in. The people that come to work in veterinary medicine are a special kind, and you can take that as a double entendre as far as you'd like, really some of the very best people.
Like that laugh that you just had is such a common thing in a veterinary space. And to be able to be that real and that raw and that joyful and that vulnerable and be around people who are like that is, oh God, it's just such a good feeling. And so it stuck with me, and I did that for quite a while. A few different hospitals all around Colorado, pretty much all small animal, most of it GP, a little bit of ER work. And then one day a hospital that I had worked at was sold to a veterinarian and a vet tech, and that was the first time that it occurred to me that you don't have to have DVM, or sorry, VMD after your name to own a veterinary hospital, at least in the state of Colorado.
This was like mid 2000s and I'm making maybe $9 an hour or 9.50 or something like that. And I walked into the doctor's office and I sat down next to one of the associates there and I was like, “I feel like we could do this. You want to buy a vet hospital with me?” And six months later we did that.

Stephanie Goss:
Oh my God, shut up.

Josh Vaisman:
Yes. So myself and two veterinarians, I found a way to get us financing to buy a hospital that just purely coincidentally had gone up for sale publicly. It was through a brokerage, which was very uncommon in the Boulder market. It was at the time a one doctor practice that had been two to two and a half. It was kind of declining, and he was really ready to get out of ownership. And so we got in a banging deal and it was four miles from the practice that we had worked at.

Stephanie Goss:
Oh, that's awesome.

Josh Vaisman:
So we had built in clientele. So we bought that practice, and over the next five plus years, we had a good bit of success. We took this hospital that was a one doctor practice, and when I left, there were four doctors on staff. We had tripled the revenue from when we bought it, all the standard metrics of success that people look at, and I felt like, “Gosh, I'm good at this. I like it. If I could do it once, I could probably do it 15 times. Maybe I should start trying to do that.” And so I ended up leaving that practice and going to another practice, bought that hospital along with a friend and business partner and a brand new startup group, so a corporate group that was just getting off the ground.
And so we all got together and bought this hospital. It was our first partnered acquisition. It was this corporate group's first acquisition, and they were raring to go to buy multiple hospitals. I got under the ground level with these guys. I thought, that's it. This is how the launch is going to start. This hospital, as I said, is about 75 miles from where I live here in Firestone, Colorado. I was going to be the managing partner of the practice and the onsite hospital director. So I started commuting to this practice 75 miles from my house every day. Hospital was open seven days a week, and I was often there-

Stephanie Goss:
Of course it was.

Josh Vaisman:
Yeah, of course.

Stephanie Goss:
You couldn't have picked a eight to five, four day a week GP practice.

Josh Vaisman:
Oh, gosh, no, no, no, definitely. No, no, no. We picked the seven day a week extended hours, sort of like pseudo defacto emergency facility in the area. And vastly underperforming financially and culturally a pretty big mess. So all of the, I'm using air quotes, “opportunities.”

Stephanie Goss:
The dumpster fire that was awaiting you.

Josh Vaisman:
The dumpster fire that was awaiting me. Now, keep in mind though, I was really excited. I thought this was an opportunity not just for a business venture, but really to make a difference in the lives of 40 people working there and in the community. And that's really what I got most excited about. So I dove in, I dove in headfirst, and I really tried to turn that place around as best I could.
Now, the first year that we owned the hospital, we did the highest gross that that practice had ever done in its 34-year history. So on one side of the coin, you could say, “Wow, it was a success.” What I've sort of come to realize is that success can be defined in a whole variety of ways, and the way that I'm defining it these days is very different than I defined it those days. Yeah, I just completely obliterated myself and some of that, at the time there was definitely a bit of the finger pointing and the blame game. I pointed fingers at my partners and I pointed fingers at the community and I pointed fingers at people on the team, the prior owner who stuck around and felt like he had to keep an eye on me, all that kind of stuff.
But the truth is that I really allowed myself to be in that a position where I started to create a mind story of what I thought people wanted, in particular my business partners who had invested so much time and energy and money into this venture and put me in charge of it. And I allowed myself to start making decisions that put what I thought were the values in that head story ahead of my own values. And what that ultimately resulted in was me harming people and harming myself in the name of the bottom line. And it worked for a while until it didn't.

Stephanie Goss:
As it does, yeah.

Josh Vaisman:
I completely broke down, like the ugly on the kitchen floor crying one morning, total breakdown for literally no apparent reason as I'm getting ready to get in my car and make the drive yet again. It took me a while to realize that I didn't have to be in that space. That was in March. I didn't actually leave that practice and that partnership for another six months.
But when I finally did, because I knew that I wasn't going to get healthy if I didn't separate myself from the environment that was contributing to it, when I finally did, I had a realization that business is a human endeavor and there is no such thing as business without people. And as the people go, so goes the business. And I had put the business ahead of the humans, and I was never going to do that again. And so at first I wasn't really sure if I was ever going to come back to vet med.

Stephanie Goss:
I totally can empathize with that and understand that because a hard space to be, and it's real easy to look outside of ourselves and be like, “This is a hot mess. Maybe I'll just go find a less hot mess place to live.”

Josh Vaisman:
Right. Maybe there's something that's, I don't know, let's go with warm and mildly disorganized. That would be an improvement. You say that and the sense that I get when you empathize with what I just shared, the sense that I get is that maybe you've been in a place like that before?

Stephanie Goss:
Oh, yeah. Oh yeah, for sure. It's funny because as I'm listening to you tell your story and will save mine for another day. But yes, 100%. And I think so many people I've met in veterinary medicine have gone in some way, shape or form through what you're talking about and what you're describing. And your story is a familiar one because so many people, nobody gets into veterinary medicine for the money. Everybody is here for the patients, for the people both. You and I are very similar in that we're here for the people. And of course I love the animals and love the why of what we do to take care of the animals.
But for me it was always about the people as well. And recognizing in yourself, and I've talked about it on the podcast, it took me a lot of therapy to get to a healthy place where I stopped beating myself up for the times when I did make the mistakes and stop putting the humans before the business. I think that's something that's really easy to forget and for a myriad of reasons, least of which is “I'm intentionally.” I don't think I ever was the person that's like I'm putting money ahead of the people on my team, but there's always some reasons like well, I want to hire more people, so I want to make more money so that we can take care of more people.
And that is good intention, but when you focus on that to the exclusion of all else, it still puts the people behind. And so I a hundred percent know what you're talking about and have been there in that place where it's like I don't really like myself very much and what I'm doing here, and really it's funny because since doing the work that I get to do with Uncharted and the changes that have happened with my career in the last few years, I have so many people tell me, and I'm sure you do too, because you're a very positive person. I have a lot of people who are just like, “You're so good at what you do.” And I'm like, “I'm real bad at what I do. I think I'm just real good at being honest about it. Stop trying to put me on a pedestal when it comes to managing because I've screwed up just as many ways as I've done it right.”
And so for hearing you and recognizing that, it takes a lot to not just walk away and that is the piece that I feel the most because I was right there with you. Maybe I just really shouldn't be doing this. Maybe I just suck that much at this and I should go find … I had a career outside of vet med, before vet med, and do I leave altogether and go find something else that I can harm other people less and harm myself less doing? So that place on your kitchen floor, I feel that, Josh.

Josh Vaisman:
Yeah. Gosh, thank you for sharing that with me. It's very validating to hear somebody with your level of success and where you stand in the community now, share that experience that mirrors a lot of what I went through. You said you started to question if maybe you're not that good at this and maybe I should go find something else to do. I distinctly recall saying to myself, “I don't belong here. I really don't. They don't want me.” Gosh, that one really hit me.
So I separated myself from all of that for a while and then it gave me the space to start exploring things, and that's when I really started taking a deep dive into, at first it was Shawn Achor's work, his book, The Happiness Advantage and some of that, and then that turned me on to Martin Seligman and Applied Positive Psychology, and I took a few Coursera courses on that put on by the University of Pennsylvania with him and Angela Duckworth and Karen Reivich and the titans of positive psychology, and it just kept ringing in my head, this is what we're missing.
This is what we need. I had this realization, I think this is going to resonate with you. You said it wasn't like you ever sat there and thought, “Okay, I'm going to make the people second. The money's …” But you never did that. You, I'm certain, have always had people's best intentions in mind as, I have come to realize, almost every single person in veterinary leadership that I have met over the last several years, and I've met a lot of people over the last several years. I can count on one hand the number of people that I can confidently say they don't have good intentions in veterinary medicine. Almost everybody is trying to do the very best they can each and every day with what they have to uplift, support, amplify, benefit the people around them. And no one's ever taught us how to do it.
No one ever taught me, I stumbled into it. Nobody ever taught you. Nobody teaches us. We learn all of these great technical skills, but nobody actually teaches us. How do we actually create an environment that allows people to not just survive, but actually thrive in and through the work that they do? No one ever taught us. And it felt to me like positive psychology had something special to share. I love it. And so that's been my mission ever since then. That's why we started Flourish Veterinary Consulting. That's why we do the work that we do through our organization. That's why I wrote the book is I really want to empower everybody in a leadership position, whether that's by title or in formal leadership.
You're the RVT who's worked in the hospital for 15 years and I don't ever want to be a manager, but everybody on the team comes to you. Guess what? You're a leader. You're an associate veterinarian who just graduated just past your board and is starting your first ever job. Guess what? You got a license. You're the tip of the healthcare sphere. You're a leader. Like anybody who's in that position, I want to make sure that they've got tangible evidence-based skills to create the kind of environment that actually allows people to be at their best. And hey, what do you know? Everything else gets better when that happens.

Stephanie Goss:
Oh my gosh, I love it so much. And there's so much to unpack there, and this podcast could be like nine hours long. But so what I really want to do, I want everybody who's listening to go and buy your book and we'll drop that at the end where they can find it. Because like I said, I'm reading it and I sent you an email right after I started it because you guys, I think I got maybe a chapter and a half or two chapters in and I was so impressed because I could hear you, Josh, in my head, but I also loved that I was reading it and I have done a lot of work, but I will say I have read some of the authors that you were mentioning, but the positive psychology piece is definitely not my realm of education.
And when I was reading it, I didn't feel dumb and I felt like you were speaking my language and you were saying things that I could feel in any position in the practice and that it would resonate with. And so that's just one of the things that I have loved about it so far is that I feel like you can, whether I was in my CSR role and I could have picked up this book and read it, or I could be in the kennel and just wanting to learn more about working in a good environment and pick up this book and least of all be a practice owner or practice manager whose job it is to make sure that you believe in things like this.
I think it's a tool for everybody, but will you tell us a little bit about the basics of, because positive psychology is a phrase that is getting more attention in veterinary medicine, and I'm so glad that it is, and I also think that it's used very interchangeably with positive culture and those are two radically different things, and there's a lot of work and science behind the positive psychology. Will you break that down a little bit for us? Just on a really basic level, and I think that probably ties to maybe why you wanted to write the book in the first place.

Josh Vaisman:
So I like to talk about these kinds of concepts using metaphors, and so if we think of the lived experience of just being a human being as a garden, there are things that happen in a garden. Sometimes weeds show up. You could think of those as the challenges or the bad things in life, and sometimes the weeds get, they're pretty noxious and they take over and maybe the result in the garden really not doing well and it's suffering. That could be mental health issues, things of that nature. Traditional psychology has been very interested, not always, this is not ubiquitous, I want to be very clear about this. It's not everywhere all the time, but generally speaking, there's been a heavy focus traditionally in psychological research on weed management. What are the things that we can do to make sure that the weeds don't show up, that when they show up, we can nip them in the bud, that when they get real thick and bad, that we can alleviate those problems?

Stephanie Goss:
Know how to get rid of them.

Josh Vaisman:
Yeah, eliminate them. That's an important part of keeping a garden. Anybody who has a garden knows that weed management is important. But let's assume that that's the only thing that you do in the garden. If the only thing we do is focus on weeds, first of all, probably not actually going to succeed. There's really no such thing as a garden that's a hundred percent absent of weeds a hundred percent of the time, and that's the truth for life. Life is hard. There are difficult things. We have this word in our lexicon called stressors for a reason because they're everywhere. Every single one of us faces stressors on a daily basis, so we're never going to get rid of all the weeds from the garden. But even if you could, let's just imagine we'll play a mental game here. We'll imagine that somebody comes up with that special spray that you spray in the garden, and never again are there weeds. Great. What's left? Dirt.
Part of gardening is also growing things. Positive psychology is interested in what are the things that we can grow in the garden? What are the nutrients we can add to them to make sure that they really thrive and flourish to their full potential, so that even in the presence of weeds, we're going to look at that garden and say, “Ah, that's a beautiful garden worth keeping.” It's the same thing with life. So positive psychology is very, very interested in what are the nutrients that add to a life worth living?

Stephanie Goss:
I love that metaphor so much because A, because I followed it and I feel not dumb and because it's midday and I've not had enough of my caffeine yet, and B, that speaks to my soul because what person, especially in a job like veterinary medicine where we genuinely get into it because we love what we do and we care about the patients, who wants a job that consists only of managing weeds? That job would suck. I don't want the job where all I'm doing is the thing, but to your point earlier, I think so many of us in leadership roles, we don't have that intention and the tools that we are given generally are focused on weed management and solely on weed management.
So most of us are not equipped to do more than look at that general psychology view of, “Okay, I know that if I have a discipline problem, these are the steps that I have to take to solve that problem.” We don't look beyond that. And that for me, in a management role in veterinary medicine, I like all the weird things that other people do. I love spreadsheets. I love all of the weird number crunching. Don't ask 4th grade Stephanie about that because I hated numbers as a kid.

Josh Vaisman:
Stephanie, I have to tell you this really quickly because Tess will not forgive me if I don't share it. Andy and I attended one of your talks at AVMA and on the slide you had, if I remember the wording, it was something along the lines of Airtable Nerd.

Stephanie Goss:
Yes.

Josh Vaisman:
I told that to Tess and she lit up. Lit up, came alive.

Stephanie Goss:
I love it so much.

Josh Vaisman:
It's not just me.

Stephanie Goss:
No, I love spreadsheets. I love Airtable. I love all the nerdy organizational stuff and nothing devoured my soul faster than having to deal with the problem management all of the time. I got zero joy and satisfaction from that as a manager, and unfortunately I spent a lot of time doing that in veterinary medicine. To your point earlier, some of it was the circumstances of the hospital and growth and change and reaching for that bar and moving from one doctor to four and all of the normal growing pains, and I am self-aware enough and have done enough therapy to have this conversation honestly with you. A lot of it was my own making because I was just like this is the tool that I have been given and for a really long time, instead of going in search of more tools and instead of just saying, “Hey, nobody taught me how to do this, maybe I should learn.”
I was like, reach for the management tools and then go garden the hell out of that garden with the tools that I have. And unfortunately, they were the tools that were really just focused on eliminating the problems and not actually dealing with making the garden pretty and focusing on the culture and the people and that feel good thing, even though that was always my intention. I love people and I love talking to people and I love everybody being happy at work. And so of course I wanted to cultivate that, but it took me a really long time to get to the place where I understood that does not happen in a vacuum. You have to actually dedicate time and energy and resources to making that happen.
So it's one of the things that I'm really glad that you are shining a light on in veterinary medicine, because you can read a book and learn lots of things and you guys all should. I'm going to drop Josh's book link in the show notes because you mentioned some authors who I really, really enjoyed reading. And this is a thing you have to do and practice and live, and it has to be ongoing because you don't just get the beautiful garden without a ton of work.

Josh Vaisman:
100%. I totally agree.

Stephanie Goss:
Hey, friend, we have been talking a lot about how we have a bunch of new events coming in the back half of 2023 that are going to let our team share our experience that we have gleaned over the last few years working with hundreds of leaders across veterinary medicine in all kinds of different positions, from support staff to doctors to regional leaders. We have been putting together something big that is coming. I can't tell you all the details yet, but I promise you are not going to want to miss out on this big, big, big announcement that is coming soon, but not soon enough for me. So I want you to head over to uncharted vet.com/insight and sign up for the newsletter. That is the only way to make sure that you have the information as soon as it's ready to hit the presses. It is exciting and I cannot wait to share it with you.

Josh Vaisman:
I would like to validate something or at least attempt to validate something. When you talked about your experience as a manager who was sort of stuck in the cycle of weed management, you talked a bit about context, but you also talked about your own making and the tools that you had. I want to try and normalize that a bit for folks that are listening. I recognize the persona that I carry with me these days, and especially imbued in the work that I do. I can come across as the always positive, always happy person, and sometimes I also recognize that there's a danger in that and that people can sometimes feel like when you're around somebody like that, that you can't ever be anything but the same. And I really want to normalize, Stephanie, you're also … Andy's not here to argue with this, by the way.
You're also a normal human being and because you're a normal human being, you have some very normal psychological features that are literally hardwired into the physiology of your brain, and I use that word feature on purpose. I really want to hammer that home. These are features, they're not problems. One of those features is a negativity bias. And so of course when you're stuck in the stress of a management role, and you're carrying the weight of the context and environment and the bars that you're striving for, and things feel like they're on fire around you without any other tools, without any other support, without any other structure, we're all going to default to our normal brain features. And one of those features is, “What's wrong? How do I fix it?” That's where all of us go. I just want people who are listening to recognize that that doesn't make you bad or broken, that makes you normal.

Stephanie Goss:
I love it so much. You said it with a lot more education and clarity behind what you said than I would, but that's a lot of what I feel like I get to do on the podcast. That's one of the things that I love the most about just doing the work that I'm doing now is like, let's be real because we're all human and there are things that we all do are not great or that we wish were better. But the cool part is we get to choose and we get to be intentional about it, and that's one of the things that I love about you is recognizing that you're not advocating for toxic positivity.
You're not advocating for you've got to have a sunny outlook no matter what, you are looking at how do we acknowledge that the weeds live here too, and how do we try to have less weeds over time? And not even just an instant, but this is going to take time and work and effort and the ultimate goal would be to have less weeds. But the garden, it makes it unique, and that's one of the things I always thought it felt very zen to me to get into that headspace. Andy calls it when he has Buddhist moments, but for me it was very much like oh, just remind yourself it wouldn't be the same without them. Even the people who drive me crazy, our beautiful little messy group would not be the same without the drum major who just cannot keep beat. Sometimes you just have to roll with what you got.
That's one of the things that I love about your work and your approach, whether it's in the book or how you engage with people at events or lecturing or any of the consulting work that you do, just like looking at it from that perspective of I think there's this natural inclination in veterinary medicine in particular, to just go to one side of the extreme or the other. So if you are advocating for education around positive culture and positive psychology and focusing on some of these things, I think there's a lot of people who look at it and say, well, you have to do all of that to the exclusion of other things.
There's this feeling of if you're not all in and you're not making it all touchy-feely and everybody's not sitting in a circle and singing Kumbaya, then you're doing it wrong. And I can promise everyone, I may make people sing in my practice, but it never looked like sitting in a circle and singing Kumbaya. It looked like Boy Band Friday Dance Party in the treatment room and forcing my doctors to sing Backstreet Boys. That is a thing that has happened.
But I do think that people think we've got to be all touchy-feely, everybody's got to be all up in everybody else's business, and that's part of what I love that you break down so well in the book is like, no, no, people are people and you are going to be negative sometimes and you are going to have bias. And we have to look at that and acknowledge that and figure out okay, then what do we do with it? If we acknowledge that that's going to happen, how do we make it better in the future?

Josh Vaisman:
Yeah, it's funny now I'm thinking we should have titled the book Lead to Thrive, the Science of Crafting a Human Culture.

Stephanie Goss:
I like that. I like that too. But I also like the focus specific on veterinary medicine, but I also love that so much of what you talk about is applicable to everybody inside and outside of veterinary medicine. I think we needed a little bit more in veterinary medicine right now, so we need a little love.

Josh Vaisman:
I don't disagree.

Stephanie Goss:
Okay, so there's two big pieces that I want to talk about before we're done here. One has to do with the book. So there's a lot of education and science and study behind positive psychology as a whole, but in particular the work that you share in your book and in your work. And when I was thinking about it and I was talking with my coworker, Maria Pirita, who loves and adores you and is very jealous that I'm getting podcasts with you right now.

Josh Vaisman:
I love and adore her too. She's pretty amazing. Those of you out there who don't know Maria yet, you will and you'll be better for it.

Stephanie Goss:
The world is better for having Maria Pirita in it. But we were talking about it and she was just like, “I think one of the things that both of us were thinking about in getting into the book was why the science is important to positive psychology.” And there is a lot of, again, probably the same people in veterinary medicine who would look at it and be like, “It's too touchy feely” would probably be like, “There's no science behind it,” but there is a lot. And for me, where it really resonated when I was thinking about it was I've worked with practice owners who have looked at life and looked at their team and looked at the practice and gone, “I'm paying them really good wages.”
These are good practice owners, good people who care about the people who work for them. And they're like, “I am paying them really well. I am providing for them. They're getting benefits. Everybody gets breaks. Like I am busting my butt to take care of these people, and isn't that enough? Because I pay them well and I treat them well, shouldn't my responsibility end there? Why should I have to do more work to create a positive culture and a positive workplace?” And I think that there's science behind that and positive psychology that helps explain the why, and I would love your perspective on that.

Josh Vaisman:
Awesome. Thank you. It's so wonderful question. It's one of my favorite ones. I do do get it frequently. I will never forget the first large scale workshop that I was doing delivering this and 60 something people in the room for the day. And about halfway through as I had just gotten done, talking about the science of positive psychology, this gentleman raises his hand and he says, “You know, Josh, this is all fine and dandy, but it's not really my job to make people happy at work.” It was so awesome watching everybody else in the room perk up and watch to see how I would respond.

Stephanie Goss:
Okay, so I'm not the first one.

Josh Vaisman:
You are not. No, no, but oh God, it's a good one. It's a good one. There's so many different tactics. If I'm feeling particularly cheeky, I'll respond to people and I'll say, “You're absolutely right. There is no federal mandate for you to make people happy at work. And how is that working out for you? Tell me about your turnover. Tell me about your productivity.” If I'm feeling a little bit snarky down that day, sassified.
The reality is I think you can actually, for those of us who take that sort of economic tilt, if you go to … I am not an economist by the way, so maybe Matt Soloy should follow me after this and he can tell you more about this. But if you look at traditional economics, traditional economics made the assumptions that human beings are rational creatures and that if A makes more sense than B rationally, then human beings will universally select A. And yet when you go out into the world, we see that people routinely make “bad decisions” for themselves when it comes to economic decisions. Why the heck is that? Well, we got some really great answers when people like Daniel Kahneman came around and showed us that actually human beings really aren't rational creatures. We're emotional creatures who have this unbelievable capacity to rationalize our decisions that are often steeped in emotions.
And that's a bit of an oversimplification, but the reality is that that's how we are. We are driven by psychological drives, by psychological needs, by these desires that we have that really sit more in our emotional centers. We've also evolved as part of our brain that allows us to think at a higher level and we can justify things and rationalize things, and yes, we can have moments where we make really, really good rational decisions. And yes, you're correct that it “should” be from a purely rational perspective. If I pay you to do a job, you will do the job to the T of what the job expectation is. And yet everywhere we look, that doesn't happen. So we can decide to be really annoyed by that and just complain and people should and wave our hands and probably just continue to have the same kinds of problems that we have now, or we can embrace the reality that human beings are psychological and emotional creatures.
And what we see consistently in the research is that when those psychological needs are met, people perform better. One of the ones that I've been using a lot lately, I'll put up a slide in a presentation and it just has the number 15 on it and I tell people, just remember this number. The next time you feel like, “Well, I pay people, well, they should.” A meta-analysis that was conducted 8 or 10 years ago, 92 studies looking at factors that predict job satisfaction, so job satisfaction is one of the best on the research side. It's one of the best antecedents we have to job performance, things like productivity, efficiency, turnover, all those kinds of things. People who are satisfied where they work tend to do better and stay longer. That's just the reality of the research. So what are the things that predict job satisfaction?
What this meta-analysis did was it tried to identify what is the correlation between compensation satisfaction and job satisfaction? So I am happy with how I'm compensated here, my salary, my benefits, so on and so forth, and I am happy to work here, which then predicts all these other outcomes. What they found in this 92 study meta-analysis was that compensation satisfaction accounts for about 15% of the variance in job satisfaction scores, 15%. Now, that's not zero. That's something. What we pay people matters. We have to pay people well, if we want them to be satisfied and do well, we got to pay them well for what they do. It should not be an excuse for us to underpay people, and it should also make us realize that while money matters, where we work matters more and the environment that we're in accounts for 85% of the variance in job satisfaction scores, at least according to this study.
So we've got to recognize that what we're inputting into that environment every day is going to influence the output we get from the people there. Outputs, patient care, number of new clients, average transactions, client turnover, team turnover, all of those things are lagging indicators of human input. What we put into that environment results in those things. So yes, pay people, pay them, well expect them to do a job for that pay and don't rely only on that because it only accounts for about 15%.

Stephanie Goss:
Which is absolutely crazy when you think about it just in general, that number blows my mind because I didn't expect it to be so low. Honestly, I expected it to be higher. But when you think about the conversation in veterinary medicine as a whole, as an industry, we've pretty exclusively, for a long time, focused on the money. And rightly so, because to your point, we were lagging very far behind. And so the conversation needed to be about money. And I think that there's a lot of people, and I don't think that it's a generational thing. I think the stick that everybody immediately reaches for is the older generation of veterinarians made it a generational thing, but I think that's total bull–. I think that there is this tendency to be like well, if we deal with the money part and then our work is done, we've done that part and why does it have to be the rest of it?
So I love that you shared that data so succinctly and smartly, that's only a tiny, tiny piece. The 85% is what we really need to focus on next. We've got to take care, hear me, because there will be people who listen to this and are like, “Stephanie says we don't have to worry about paying people.” That is not what I said. That is not what Josh said. You absolutely have to pay people and pay them well, and they cannot be worrying about where the next meal on their table at home comes from. If that is the case, the rest doesn't matter. And when we have taken care of those needs and we are compensating people, well, we have to return the rest of the focus on the culture piece and the other 85%.
What I love about that statistically and science-wise is that it leads right to the output, which I think you and I both knew as leaders in veterinary medicine, if you take care of the people and you practice good medicine, the numbers follow and that the proof is in the pudding there. Those numbers are going to rise or fall as they should when you take care of the people and you practice good medicine.

Josh Vaisman:
I like to think of money, compensation can be a really good recruitment tool. It's not necessarily a great retention tool unless your intention is indentured servitude. If you want people to feel the weight of golden handcuffs, then you could probably use money to keep people longer, but you're not going to get performance out of them if that's what you're after. There are other things. Is it okay if I share another piece of data?

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Go for it.

Josh Vaisman:
So last year we at Flourish got really interested in looking at what are some of the things that might contribute to that other 85%. We were in particular interested in retention, but we looked at a few other things as well. So we took basically the four pillars from the book from Lead to Thrive, and we built an assessment tool around it and then we put out a call to the veterinary community. So this was last fall, in 2022. We just said, “Hey, if you work in veterinary practice and you have a boss, we would like to hear about your experience with that boss.” Those were the qualifications. We got just under 600 people, veterinarians, technicians, CSRs, practice managers, small animal, large animal, mixed animal, general practice specialty.
There was a mix of everything, the whole gamut. And then we asked them to rate, does your boss do these positive leadership behaviors? The things that are laid out in the book, do they do these four things that contribute to psychological safety? Do they do these four things that contribute to purpose, to path to partnership, agree or disagree? That was it on a scale, seven point scale with four being neutral. We weren't asking them, “Do you have a good boss or a bad boss?” We just like, “Do they do these behaviors or not?” That's it.
Then we ask them things like, “Hey, how satisfied are you where you work? How often do you think of quitting your job? How often do you think of leaving the profession? What is your workplace wellbeing like these days?” Those kinds of things. And then we collected all this stuff and then we compared them. We looked for relationships. Now there's a couple interesting things. Number one, on our seven point scale, with four being a neutral, the average response for my leader does or doesn't do these things was 4.4, which is just a hair north of neutral. So it's not happening all the time.
However, it was a pretty even distribution. It was really interesting. So if we took out the neutrals, the people who averaged between three and a half and four and a half, we set them aside. Anybody who had over 4.5, we called them our high positive. So they're on some level agreeing that “Yes, my leader does these positive leadership behaviors.” And then anybody below 3.5, they're saying, “No, I disagree.”

Stephanie Goss:
Generally no.

Josh Vaisman:
“On some level, generally no, they don't do these things.” We looked at the relationship between those two groups and all those outcomes people who said, “My leaders do not practice these positive leadership behaviors,” the average response to how often do you think of quitting your job was often 4.2 out of 5.

Stephanie Goss:
4.2. That doesn't surprise me.

Josh Vaisman:
The people who said, “My leaders do do these things to some extent,” the average response to how often they think of quitting their job was rarely, 1.8 compared to 4.2. That's a 2.3x difference.

Stephanie Goss:
It's huge.

Josh Vaisman:
Yes, money matters. It absolutely matters. And if your goal is to keep people in your hospital and keep them engaged, this stuff matters more.

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah. Oh my gosh, my mind is boggling. And now I want to nerd out with you for another hour about numbers. The last thing I want to ask you about before we wrap it up is a fun question. So I would love to know what is one lesson that you wish that you had learned before you became a leader? Andy and I have been sharing some of our lessons lately, and we had so much fun. I'm like, “I'm going to ask Josh this question.”

Josh Vaisman:
I love that you're asking me this. So I was recently listening to the two part series that you did on those thoughts. Yeah, man, I don't know, because there's so many different ones. So one that I've been playing with a lot lately with some of the clients that we work with is this idea of that you can spend more time to save time, I guess is the way that I'm thinking of it. It's being very intentional in how we spend our time. Relationship development as a leader, it turns out that it's actually a pretty exceptional time saver. So I was really inspired by this originally. There's a researcher out of the University of Michigan Ross Business School, Dr. Kim Cameron. He is one of the founding members of the field of positive organizational scholarship, which you could think of as positive psychology on the organizational level.
In one of his books, he talks about these studies that were done on these very targeted one-on-one check-in meetings, essentially interviews between manager and direct report. And in one particular study showed some really, really impressive impacts on productivity, job satisfaction, and a reduction in turnover just by implementing these in a fairly well controlled study across a variety of organizations. The thing that really stood out to me though is that they interviewed the managers that had to do these. So this is how this program was done. Stephanie, you've got seven people on your team that directly report to you. Here's what we're going to do. You're going to sit down with each of them a minimum of once a month for one hour, one-on-one. So I'm asking you to add, quote unquote, add seven hours of additional work to your regular life as a manager. That can feel burdensome. A lot of people get turned off by that. You want me to do more? I hardly have time to do what I'm doing now.

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah, 100%. I can totally imagine the days where that would've been in the first thing that came out of my mouth. I don't have seven more hours in my month. What are you talking about?

Josh Vaisman:
You cray, buddy. You cray.

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah, exactly.

Josh Vaisman:
That's cute that you think I'm going to do that. So they had these managers do that, and then the ones that did it for the entire 18-month study, they asked them at the end of it how it impacted their ability to do their own work. So they had basically three options. Over the past 18 months, did you find you had less time to do all of your other managerial duties? Did it have zero impact on your ability to do your other managerial duties or did it actually open up time?
And to a T, they all said, “I had more time.” And the average response was, “I found I had an additional eight hours a month to do my work.” Because when we develop those kinds of relationships with the people on our team, when we show them that we actually care about them as human beings, when we help them develop, so we don't look at them as problems, we look at them as possibilities. When we show them how the work that they do matters and the impact and contribution that they're making and how that ties to the higher goals of the organization, and when we give people an opportunity to really express their perspective and voice and feel heard as if they belong somewhere, hey, guess what? They stopped knocking on our door. Because they're doing the work.

Stephanie Goss:
I love that that's the lesson that you shared. As a manager, I would've been happy if you had told me that it was a net-zero. If I just come out even, I would be happy because I would be getting to know my people and it wouldn't be costing me any more time. But how could you look at that? How could you hear that, see the data and not get all behind the idea of, “Look, if we take care of our people, if we grow them, if we develop them, this will come back to us tenfold.”
But where so many of us get caught up is the first reaction I had, which is the holy hell, where in the hell am I going to find seven more hours to spend with people once a month? But if you think about that, 18 months is a very short timeframe in the lifespan in veterinary medicine, and I could do anything for a year and a half, this is not that hard. I love that so much. You did not disappoint with that answer, Josh.

Josh Vaisman:
Thank you. Thank you. I tell you, for me personally in the role that I play now at Flourish with our team, it's been life-changing to have those things. It's just on the schedule all the time. We meet routinely to talk about these kinds of things, and it's all about supporting them and helping them excel in their roles. And I can honestly tell you that I feel three times as productive as a human being now than I ever did as a hospital owner and practice manager.

Stephanie Goss:
We should do a podcast about that. Let me learn your Yoda master ways. I have a feeling that lots of people would like to hear about that. So I want everybody to immediately run out and buy the book because it's amazing and you are wonderful. But where can people find you on the interwebs to connect with you and to find the book?

Josh Vaisman:
Yeah, absolutely. So you can find Flourish at our website, which is just flourish.vet, F-L-O-U-R-I-S-H dot V-E-T. I am pretty active on LinkedIn, so you can find me and Flourish on LinkedIn. We're on Facebook and Instagram as well, and at most of your neighborhood lead conferences.

Stephanie Goss:
I love it so much. And the book is an AAHA Press book. So I have to head over to AAHA's website, but I don't have to be an AAHA member to buy it.

Josh Vaisman:
Correct.

Stephanie Goss:
Fun fact, Stephanie is not currently an AAHA member and I was able to buy it.

Josh Vaisman:
Me neither. And I wrote a book for them.

Stephanie Goss:
At the non-AAHA member price. But you can head over to AAHA's website to purchase the book. Josh, this has been an absolute delight. Thank you so much for joining me today, and I will hope that Andy doesn't listen and say you were a wonderful stand-in and you are welcome to sit in Andy's chair on the podcast anytime.

Josh Vaisman:
I'm not going to lie, Stephanie, talking to you is an absolute highlight for me. You're so genuinely curious. You are hilarious. You bring levity, but you have this unreal ability to do serious things without taking it too seriously. It really fills my cup, so thank you for bringing me on. It's been a joy.

Stephanie Goss:
Thank you. You guys can't see me, but I'm tomato red now. Thank you, Josh, from the bottom of my heart, I really have enjoyed having you here. And Andy's going to be jealous now because he's going to be like, “Goddamn it, Josh is trying to take my spot.” But you are welcome back as a co-host anytime.

Josh Vaisman:
The plan is working.

Stephanie Goss:
Till my thoughts take over the world. It'll be like Pinky in the Brain over here. I love it. Take care everybody. Have a fantastic rest of the week and go check out Josh's book.

Josh Vaisman:
Thanks everybody.

Stephanie Goss:
Well, everybody that's a wrap on another episode of the podcast. Thanks so much for spending your time with us. We truly enjoy spending part of our week with you. As always, Andy and I enjoyed getting into this topic. I have a tiny little favor to ask; actually, two of them. One is if you can go to wherever you source your podcast from and hit the review button and leave us a review, we love hearing your feedback and knowing what you think of the podcast. And number two, if you haven't already, hit the subscribe button. Thanks so much for listening, guys. We'll see you soon.

This week on the podcast…

This week on the Uncharted Podcast, Dr. Andy Roark and practice management geek Stephanie Goss dive into a mailbag question from a new practice owner who is thinking ahead! They want to take care of their team and set up great employee discounts. And they want to help take care of the pets belonging to their friends and family who helped get them to where their dream of practice ownership is finally a reality. How does that mix with their plans for their team? We'll find out – Let's get into this…

You can also listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts.

Do you have something that you would love Andy and Stephanie to role play on the podcast – a situation where you would love some examples of what someone else would say and how they would say it? If so, send us a message through the mailbag! We want to hear your challenges and would love to feature your scenario on the podcast. Head over to the mailbag and submit it here

Submit your questions here: unchartedvet.com/mailbag

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Episode Transcript

Stephanie Goss:
How many times have you called a client in the last three days, left a voicemail, and then had somebody call back and say, “I had a missed call from you,” not even having listened to the voicemail. Look, the data shows clients want texting. They want online and digital communication. So if your practice does not offer texting two-way with your clients, you are missing out in a big way. And you're also in luck because our friends at Simple Texting have done the research, that one in three clients check their text notifications within a minute of receiving a text, one in three. And that goes up to 85% of all of our clients within the first five minutes after receiving a text. So if you're listening to this and your practice isn't yet texting two-way with your clients, you are missing out in a big way.
And I don't want you to miss out anymore, and neither does Andy. So our friends at Simple Texting have put together a deal for you, our Uncharted listeners. That's right. They have got texting plans that you can try for free for 14 days, but if you go to simpletexting.com/uncharted, they are going to give you up to $100 worth of free credits when you sign up for texting for your clinic. There is no reason, none whatsoever today to not be texting with your clients. So if this is you, head over to simpletexting.com/uncharted, get your deal, check out all of the amazing options.
Hey everybody, I am Stephanie Goss, and this is another episode of the Uncharted Podcast. This week on the podcast, Andy and I are diving back in the mailbag. We got a great letter from an ambitious startup owner who doesn't want to break the bank or employee relationships. They're asking some questions about discounting for their team while also taking care of the friends and family who help support them and get them to the place where their dream is becoming a reality as a new practice owner. This was a really fun episode for Andy and I to talk through. We hope you enjoy it. Let's get into this.

Audio recording:
And now, the Uncharted Podcast.

Andy Roark:
And we are back. It's me, Dr. Andy Roark, and the one and only Stephanie, I've got friends in low places, Goss.

Stephanie Goss:
Now sing it for me please.

Andy Roark:
I've got friends in low places.

Stephanie Goss:
You are no Garth, my friend.

Andy Roark:
No, I know. I have never claimed that I could sing. I can't carry a tune in a bucket.

Stephanie Goss:
But I appreciate that attempt.

Andy Roark:
It's bad.

Stephanie Goss:
I appreciate that attempt. How is it going, Andy Roark?

Andy Roark:
Oh, it's good. It's really good. Things are rolling along here. I'm hanging out here petting my doodle with a self-confidence problem. I was doing…

Stephanie Goss:
Stop it.

Andy Roark:
No. It's worse. It's worse. I was doing my other podcast, Cone of Shame, with the vet behaviorist, Lisa Radosta, who is amazing. She's amazing. And I should have just hit record. I think I'll probably go back. I think I'll probably get her back on. I did that thing where like, “Oh hey, while you're here, I got this dog.”

Stephanie Goss:
You were that client.

Andy Roark:
I got this dog. I was. I was like, “Hey, will you come do a podcast while you're here? Look, can you look at this?” I was like, “I got this dog and he piddles on the floor. If I come home and go to pet him or greet him, every now and then, he will pee on the floor and he's four years old.” And she started talking to me about urination like that and asking me about, “How does he look? What does he do with his ears? What does he do with his head,” all these sorts of things. And she was like, “Yeah, this is a conflict sort of response. And so he's got anxiety around meeting people or people reaching out and petting him and things like that,” and I was like, “Okay, well, what do we do about it?” And she's like, “Well, he has low confidence, Andy. You have to get his confidence up.” So now, I reported all of this dutifully and now I'll be like, “He's a bad dog.” And my wife is like, “You're going to hurt his confidence. Don't.”

Stephanie Goss:
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Let me get this straight. So not only do you have a doodle.

Andy Roark:
I have a doodle with confidence issues. That's what I have. That moment of silence was just Stephanie just shaking.

Stephanie Goss:
I'm dying. This is priceless.

Andy Roark:
Now I sit with him, we do affirmations. I'm like, “You're a good boy, you're a handsome boy, you're a smart boy.”

Stephanie Goss:
Boosting his confidence.

Andy Roark:
People like you.

Stephanie Goss:
Oh.

Andy Roark:
So yeah, I'm working on Skipper Roark's confidence.

Stephanie Goss:
Okay, Skipper, Skipper. I can't even say anything with a straight face. Skipper has got confidence issues. The only thing that Skipper is confident about is his ability to go pee in the neighbor's yard, right where the sign says, “Don't pee on my lawn.”

Andy Roark:
Yeah. He's confident that he wants to poop in the no pooping yard. He's very confident about that, but no, the whole time, I thought he was bad. It turns out he is just insecure. It's a lot like…

Stephanie Goss:
He's also bad because let's be clear.

Andy Roark:
Yeah. Well, it's like the high school boy where people are like, “Oh, that guy is a jerk.” It's like, “No, he's just got self-confidence issues.” And that's Skipper. He 100% went into my wife's purse and chewed up her migraine medicine.

Stephanie Goss:
Oh, no.

Andy Roark:
And she was like, “Why would he do that?” I was like, “Leave him alone. He's got confidence problems.” All right. That's enough. That's enough. We should respect his privacy. Yeah. We should respect his privacy and move on.

Stephanie Goss:
Bad dog. Okay. Fair. Well, I'm excited. We've got a question from the mailbag today. And I was thinking back and I don't think we've actually tackled anything like this topic before, so I'm kind of excited about this. We've got a letter from a new practice owner and they are getting ready to open their practice here at any moment now, which is just big congratulations right off the bat because that's awesome. And they said, “Well, I have a question about discounting,” which I love that they're asking questions before they start doing things.

Andy Roark:
That's super smart. Because once you start, you're in it.

Stephanie Goss:
Exactly.

Andy Roark:
Once you start doing anything with your family, it's hard to be like, “Yeah, I'm not doing that for you anymore.” That is challenging. All right. So go ahead.

Stephanie Goss:
Yes. So they were like, “I want to set up a discount that takes care of my team because I care about them and I want to take care of them. And my friends and my family have really supported me through this whole endeavor. They supported me through school and being in practice. Now, I'm opening my own practice and my love language is gifts and acts of service. And so for me, the ultimate would be to pay back my friends and family and take care of them and take care of their pets as a thank you. My parents, my in-laws, I want to say thank you for supporting me on this journey and take care of their pets.” And so they're a kind and generous person. And so they're just like, “I want to do that.”
And they're thinking with a business head and they're like, “If I take a step back, I want to make sure that I'm maintaining fairness and avoiding creating disparities within the clinic because I don't want to give things away to my friends or my family for free that I'm not willing to give to my team and I need to make this a fair situation.”
And so they were like, “How can I approach the idea of friends and family discounts without compromising the fairness and integrity to my team and the discounts that they're going to get and the clinic policies that ultimately I'm going to set.” And was signed from an ambitious owner who does not want to break the bank or employee relations, which I absolutely love. And so I need us to start with giving this practice owner or this new practice owner big giant kudos for asking the questions because they are great.

Andy Roark:
It's always good to try to figure it out before you get into the moment, before you make it a pattern. Right? A lot of times with practice ownership, we have to figure out, we have to get there before we can start to make policies. I see a lot of people who spend a lot of time making policies for things that will never happen or they'll make big plans about what will happen if this thing, and then it never comes together. But anyway, in this case, knowing that we have friends and family who are around, I think it's good to think this through so you're not just making it up on the fly.

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah. Totally.

Andy Roark:
I have thoughts. The frustrating answer to this question, it's very, very simple. It depends. It wildly depends. Thanks for tuning in everybody. That's our episode. No, it wildly depends. It depends on how does your staff feel about their compensation package, right? Are they struggling to pay for services? Because if they're struggling to pay for services and you're no charging your friends, if they struggle to pay for services for their own pet, or if they're living hand to mouth and they feel like, “Oh man, this is hard to make ends meet,” and then you are giving stuff away to your buddies, they're not going to feel good about that. Or do they feel okay, or do they feel like, “Okay, I understand they're family. I would want to treat my family like that and gives the family the staff discount. I'm okay with that.” A lot of it depends. It depends on how many people are we talking here? Friends and family, what is that, one person a day? Is that one person a week? Is that one person a month? What is that?
I've seen practices. We've gotten letters. You and I have gotten letters from practices where there's an extended family and they're just rolling in all day long, going in and out and getting what they want. And so, how many people are we talking about here? Is this a revolving door of people getting discounts and breaks or is it your two best friends and your brother? Okay. Those are just different things. How do your friends and family act when they come in? How do they treat the staff? We've gotten letters about that where the family rolls in like they own the place. Basically, they don't have appointments. They walk in whenever they want. They don't listen to the texts. They dismiss them. They walk right back into the treatment room with their pet and just the staff feels wholly disrespected by these people who are coming in. And just, man, that's toxic. That's really toxic.
And I totally, I empathize with those letters when we got them. It's like, “Oh man, that's not okay.” And so all of those things really, really matter as far as, what are we talking about here? And again, I don't think anybody would think too much if you have a couple of people who come in every now and then and they're your family or close friends and you take care of those people. It's probably not a big deal, but I've 100% seen it become a big deal. It really depends on how you're doing it. And like I said, it depends a lot on how the staff feels, how they get treated, things like that. All that stuff matters. And the last part is, fair is where pigs win ribbons, there is no… What?

Stephanie Goss:
Oh my gosh. I'd never heard that. And that is the most southern thing that I've heard you say in so long.

Andy Roark:
You haven't heard that? Oh, fair is where pigs win ribbons. It is. So here's the thing, right? If I took a big group of people and I said to them, “Is the electoral college a fair way to do elections?” They would not agree.

Stephanie Goss:
Right.

Andy Roark:
And you would never convince all of them yes or no, but they would never agree. I was just trying to pick a thing that in our country, some people are like, “Nope, not fair.” And some people are like, “It is the most fair way.” And there's not a right answer. I don't know. Is it fair or not? It depends on who you are. It depends on what you're trying to do. It's the point of debate, but that's the whole point.
And so some people would say, “Sure, it's fair that this person's family doesn't have to pay for services or gets a big discount.” And other people would say, “It's not fair when we don't get the salaries that we need because this person's giving things away.” And again, people just depending on their worldview, you can have the same team and they could be split down the middle about what's fair and what's not. There's not a, “This is fair. Everyone's going to see it. They're all going to agree that it's fair.” And that will be the decided upon state of being is yes, fairness.

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah, because fairness is subjective. Right? And so, I think there's two pieces. You're spot on. The fairness is subjective and what one person views as fair may not be viewed the same way as another person in the situation or outside of the situation. So we're totally looking at fairness through the lenses of our own lives and our own experience. So that's number one. And so if fairness is super, super subjective, then there's two other pieces from a head space perspective that are really important for me. Number one is clear is kind. And so fairness is going to be subjective. And so the only way out of this that is positive all around as a practice owner for the team, for friends and family, is to make sure that you are very clear because that is going to be the most kind to everybody. So everybody knows what's happening, everything gets communicated very clearly. Clarity is your friend here.
And the third piece of it that I think is really, really important is that recognizing that what you do today and how you are clear and equity that you put into place today is going to change, may change as you go. Because you are about to open your practice and what works today about to open your practice may be something completely different that works for you six months from now, six years from now. Your practice is going to grow and change and evolve. And so the other piece of head space is don't think about this. I'm going to set a policy for my hospital that is going to be the policy on discounting until the end of time. That's the wrong way to look at it, in my opinion. Think about it as what am I going to do right now and for the foreseeable future, and when am I going to reevaluate? Because that will help you with that clarity for yourself and for your team.

Andy Roark:
I like that. I would also say, it's much easier to loosen up later on than it is to tighten it back down. And so I think that if I would start with a conservative policy, especially as you open. You're like, “We just opened up.” You know what I mean? I'll say something that may come off as… I don't know, it may be contrary or whatever, but I'm not particularly excited about having my friends as clients. And there's a lot of people who just would disagree with me. And you hear that and go, “Oh my God.” But the truth is, I like to be a vet, and then I like my friends to be my friends. If somebody would not come to me as a veterinarian if they didn't get a discount, then I don't really want them to come to me as a veterinarian anyway.
And I don't really personally, I'll just say, I've been doing this for a good amount of time now, I don't really like the veterinarian relationship woven into my friendship relationship. I don't like when I'm suddenly the service provider to my friend who's unhappy with something. You know what I mean? There's an awkwardness there that I don't really like.
And I guess it's one thing if you need the money or you're trying to get something up and going and things like that, and your friends can be your best clients. They can be. They can also be your worst clients and they can also make friend gatherings awkward when you're like, “Yeah, and I heard that medial patella luxation surgery didn't go the way I wanted. And I know that every time you see me, you think about it.” That's odd. There's just a little bit of awkwardness there too.
I'm not saying that other people, you shouldn't do vet work for your friends. I'm not saying that. But I am saying, I don't race out and say to people, “You should come and see me.” In fact, I generally don't. I generally don't. I like to keep my friends and my business separate as much as I can, but that's just kind of always how I've sort of done it. I'm happy with my neighbors to come and see me, that's fine, but that's the level of relationship that we have. And so anyway, I'm not trying to set a rule here or anything at all. And maybe no one else feels that way, but I do.

Stephanie Goss:
No, I think that it's good that you bring it up because I think that it is regardless there's going to need to be some boundaries, right? And I think I'm glad that you brought it up because most of the time, you and I see the opposite end of the spectrum. What you were talking about where there isn't as many boundaries and where the rules are not the same for friends or family as they are for the team and other clients. And that's where it gets people into trouble. And so thinking about it on the spot here as we're talking about this, every single practice that I have ever worked in, there has been a friend or family member. There is someone who gets the discounts, but who is not our client. They don't follow the rules, they don't do any of the things that we make everybody else do. They are the exemption. And in every single situation, boy, did it piss people off, the team-

Andy Roark:
The staff gets really upset.

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah. And because whether it was they could just come in and take meds off the shelf like you were saying, or they didn't ever follow any of the rules. I remember vividly getting into it with the team because we had a rule in our clinic about, we wouldn't see patients and do procedures on patients that didn't have a current rabies vaccination, unless there was a valid medical reason. And yet, we had that one best friend of the practice owner who was just like, “I don't want my old dog to get vaccines.” And it was like, “Oh, they don't need to get it.” And the team was like, “Well, we would make any other client get a rabies vaccine if they were going to have a dental, but we're not going to make them.” And so I do think that it is important to recognize that as a whole. It tends to go in the negative direction a lot more than it does in the positive direction. And so I think-

Andy Roark:
I don't know. I don't know. I'm going to push back on you here. I don't know. I don't know if it really does because here's the thing, everybody remembers that client you were just talking about. You know what I mean?

Stephanie Goss:
Sure. Yeah, yeah.

Andy Roark:
But there may have been seven other clients that were friends and they just come in, they're respectful, they're nice. No one really pays that much attention. You know what I mean? They just get their little discount. They thank the front desk and they walk out and no one thinks twice about it. But it's that one and everybody remembers it. But that was sort of my point about, it really depends is because you could have a bunch of friends and family, and they're respectful, and they're blah, blah blah, and the staff is fine with this. Or you could have one and that person walks in the back and takes meds off the shelf and things like that, and they're like, “This is a nightmare.” Really, it's that big of variation.
And so it's really hard to set. It's really hard to set any sort of rule. I would never be like, “You can have five people.” It depends on the five people and how they behave and how the staff feels and all those things. But anyway, to your point, it's about, does it always go that bad? I don't know. Or do we just remember the ones that went bad and do they really stand out? I don't know. I don't know.

Stephanie Goss:
That's fair. That's fair. Because you're right in that for each one of those bads, I can think about goods in those same practice who were the regular clients who followed the rules, and they got their 5% off and it was totally fine. So I think that's a super fair point. And I think where I was trying to go with it was that there is the potential for that to be what the team remembers, is that one client because that does stick out really easily in our head. Right? And so I think from the practice owner's perspective, when you think about head space and getting into a head space to tackle what are you going to do and how are you going to do it, remembering that clear is kind and that fairness is going to be subjective.
And that your team, you are going to have to have the conversation and you might have the conversation today, you might have it six months from now, but what you decide today may not be the same. And I would agree with you, especially when it comes to friends and family, because friends and family is where just I feel like as humans, a lot of us struggle with boundaries more than anything, but it's pretty easy to have boundaries with a total stranger for the most part. This is our policy, take it or leave it. It's a lot harder to have those same boundaries with friends and family.
And so if you start wide and say, “I love you, thank you so much for making this happen. Come in. I'm not going to charge you for any of this care that your pet is going to need today,” if you start down that path, it is a lot harder to take that away and be like, “Oh, well, now the clinic's making money and so now I'm going to have to charge you.” That is a hard path to walk. So I think your point there is super important to think beyond just today and think about that long-term perspective and know that you can always give them an extra something down the road, but it's really hard to take it away once you've gotten something started.

Andy Roark:
This is not about friends and family. This is just my thoughts on discounting in general. And I talk about this all the time. I believe in intentional discounting, meaning not just willy-nilly giving stuff away. That is the path to ruin. I see it all the time. Just the person walks in, you're like, “I don't charge them for that” or “Let's just take that offer. I don't know. They already paid for a bunch of stuff, let's just not charge them for this.” That kind of willy-nilly, however, I feel discounting is that is bad, is bad for the business.
Here's the other thing too. The research shows that it doesn't make you happy when you just willy-nilly give things away. If you decide these are the people that I'm going to help or this is how I'm going to help, these are the mechanisms I'm going to help, this is a program we're going to place, the research says, you'll be more proud of that. You will know that you were doing it. You will be able to look back and you're like, “How did I help people?” And you will know, “I did this thing, I had this program, I gave this time,” whatever, but you intentionally decided, “I was going to help these people.”
And you know that your money, or your time, or your services or whatever are going through something that you decided was good to do. And so you can intentionally discount. You can budget that. Everything feels more in control. The staff understands why we're doing what we're doing. All of those things are important. So there's intentional discounting, but I would even step back further than that. And so my first thought here is, let's just do a quick, just a real quick truthfulness check. When we say, I want to do this because my love language is gifts, are we doing this because you have decided that these are people you want to give back to? Or are we doing this because you think that people will like you if you give them free stuff? Are you doing this because your value as a person is influenced by your generosity to your friends and family?
And again, I don't know this person at all, but I have seen a lot of people who were making choices about discounting because they want to be popular or because they didn't want to make anybody upset or they wanted to get along. And so my real thought is, again, I don't think that much about family, but friends and stuff. And so I go, okay, the first part of intentional discounting is, why do I want to support this person, and just decide. And again, I'm not saying right or wrong or anything, but it should not be this person smiles when I see them, and so I'm going to not charge them what I charge other people who I don't know. That doesn't make any sense. That's not fair. It's not fair and it doesn't really help anybody in a significant way or anything like that. And so I would start with, why are we doing this? And then I would move on into sort of more specific to what the program looks like.

Stephanie Goss:
And I think I'm glad that you said that because from the letter that we got, I don't get that that is the sense of where this person is at. They had clear examples of like, “My in-laws and my parents or the people who really supported me on this journey.” And so I can clearly see they do care and it is an act of service and a love language to gift them. You've supported me and now I want to pay you back and take care of your pets. So you can totally see that. And to your point, I can also see that same person struggling down the road with like, “Oh, well this is somebody that I care about now. Do I give them the same discount?” The same situation is not in play. I didn't just open my practice. Now I've been open for a year and a half, but this person, now I have a new sister-in-law, now I have new brother-in-law. Am I just going to extend them the same discount because they're my in-laws? And my other in-laws got this discount when we first started. And so now I'm going to…
I'm glad that you said that because I do think that from that big picture perspective, taking the step back and looking at, why are you doing it, who are you trying to serve, and why are you trying to serve them is really, is a good, clear head space to start because I think that there will be questions at some point down the road whether it comes from yourself, whether the questions come from your team, or whether it comes from friends and family who are maybe hitting you up for a discount. I've absolutely had people be… But I'm like, “Don't your friends get a discount?” No, I have to answer that question as a team member or as a practice owner. And so that may not be the situation today, but at some point in the future, that will be a question that you come up against. And so figuring out why you're doing what you're doing is a really important piece of the head space. So I'm glad you said that.

Andy Roark:
Yeah. That's important to me, is just to get my head around, “What are we doing here?” As opposed to just, “I'm giving money away because it feels good.”

Stephanie Goss:
Totally. Anything else for you from a head space perspective?

Andy Roark:
Well, one more thing. I was going to put in the action stuff, but I'll put it here as well. And this goes back to about my friends as clients and stuff like that. I just tell you, this is just personal head space from me. I'm not going to tell anybody else how to think about it or whatever, but I personally like to separate myself from my job. I go in and I do the vet stuff and I like it, but I want to be Andy when I'm not at the vet clinic and not Dr. Andy, just Andy. And so I do think a lot about that.
The last thing that I would say here is if you see what I'm saying and you're like, “You know what? I also have some concerns about kind of weaving my practice life into my personal life.” And again, this is different from your family because you want to help your family out and I get it. You can give and be generous in different ways. Just because you're a veterinarian and you own a practice, that does not mean that's how you have to give to your friends. It just doesn't. There's other things that you can give in other ways.
And so does it make you a lesser person if you charge someone full price at your vet clinic, and then come and help them move a couch up their stairs when they need it? I don't know that it does. You know what I mean? Is it if you host the neighborhood Christmas party, do you need to give everyone in the neighborhood a discount at your vet clinic? You know what I mean? It's not the same. And so when you start thinking about head space, I would say, just don't fall in the trap of, I am a veterinarian or I own a vet clinic and so gifts from me must necessitate professional services. You can give professional services away to no one and also be a very generous person.

Stephanie Goss:
Right. Yep. I love that so, so much. I'm glad that you said that.

Andy Roark:
Cool. Let's take a little break and we'll come back and try to get into some action steps here, how we set this up.

Stephanie Goss:
Okay.
Did you know that we offer workshops for our uncharted members and for our non-members? So if you're listening to today's podcast and you are not a member of Uncharted yet, you should be, but this is not a conversation about joining Uncharted. This is a conversation about all of the amazing content that we have coming at all of you, whether or not you're a member through our workshop series. You should head over to the website at unchartedvet.com/events and check out what is coming. We have got an amazing lineup on the regular. We've got something every month, sometimes two or three things in a month coming at you to expand your brain, to talk about leadership, to talk about practice management, and dive into the kind of topics that Andy and I talk about on the podcast every week.
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Andy Roark:
All right. So I think for action steps, I think we should start with intentional action, figure out what you're going to do. Again, here's where I'm going to throw a wrench into the work for a lot of people and say, “I'm still, I'm going to beat this drum.” I'm not convinced that you have to have a program at your practice where people come in and they just get a discount. I think you should think about who you're trying to help and how you're trying to help them. I would be personally, again, it depends on how big your family is, what you're trying to do, things like that. I would be much more open to the idea of trying to figure out how to do, I don't know, a separate program to help out my friends and family.
Maybe I take one Saturday every couple of months and say, “Guys, I'm doing vaccines over at the house. If you guys want to come over on Saturday, I've got the cloud pin software pulled up, but I'll bring you guys in. I'll do this. I won't have any of my technicians there or I'll have one technician there and pay them or whatever, but I'll bring everybody over. I'll do this little program, blah, blah, blah.” But it's not people coming into the practice, going through our process, taking up tech time, things like that. I'm just saying, “No, this is a little thing that I can do that is separate and I can intentionally do it. And it does not distract from the work of others. It's not putting my friends onto my staff in a way that makes their jobs harder, their lives harder,” things like that.
I think honestly, I'll tell you this. I think you're being really generous if you have an open door policy where your friends can call you and ask you about their pets. I personally don't like that and that's why I don't want my friends as my clients. Again, I'm not trying to be a real curmudgeon about it, but I got kids and I like to go home and I like to be off, and I don't really like people calling me and shaking me down for vet advice or things like that. And of course, I'll help you if you call me, but I'd really prefer that I not get a bunch of calls. And as your friend network expands, you can get a lot of people doing that. And so I personally just like to have some boundaries about when I'm available, when I'm not.
But I mean, I would say the idea that you take someone's phone calls after hours, you invite them to bring their pet by your house so you can have a look, you set up a little gathering to do vaccines or wellness care or things like that for your family or your friends, you do things like that, but then you don't give them a discount whenever they walk into the vet clinic or let them come in with no appointments or things like that. And that makes you not a generous person. I go, “I don't buy that for a second.” And so anyway, it goes back to being intentional. I'm not trying to be stingy about it at all, but I really do think that you can be very generous with people and not have a discount at your vet clinic. I do believe that.

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah. I think for me, from figuring out what to do, what I will say is I think after my feelings around discounting and what do we do for our teams and for friends and family have changed up, down, backwards, sideways over the years because I've done it a bunch of different ways and I've experienced it different ways in different practices. And the why being different in different places. And so I think for me then, this is purely personal, figuring it out meant deciding why I was doing it and what I was trying to get out of it.
And the most clear head space that I have ever been able to get into as a leader and as a practice owner would be to say, “I want the experience for my team.” And this for me, holds true for friends and family, to be the same experience that I would provide for any other client because the why for me is that I want our practice to be a place that any member of my team, any member of my friend group or family wouldn't hesitate to recommend to anybody that they meet to bring their pet into my practice.
And so for me, if that's my why, then it makes it a lot more clear on how I am going to deliver that. Because if I want my team to experience the same level of service that clients experience, that does not mean that their pets get stuck in a cage until the end of the day and dealt with after everybody else goes home. It does not mean that they get the short end of the stick. It doesn't mean a lot of things that we can see happen in practice when it comes to taking care of staff pets.
And the same goes for clients. Totally, I like your idea, Andy, and the outside the box thinking of, well, maybe you do a special thing for them and you figure out what that looks like. And I could totally see that. And at the same time, if my why… For me, my why was about, I want them to experience, I want them to come in. I want them to hear the same spiels from my team. I want them to build the relationships with the team. I want them to have that same kind of white glove experience that I personally cultivated in my practice. And this is totally me speaking from my personal experience here. So not going to be the right fit for everybody.
So for me, I would have a hard time with that because I wouldn't want to… It's funny talking about this. Patty's going to kill me. So when I started working in VetMed, it was a million years ago and we were just kind of transitioning. I grew up with pets that lived in the backyard. They didn't come in the house. And when I started working in VetMed, we had just transitioned and I remember vividly to having our first dog that kind of lived in the house. And God, we love Mercy. She was the best dog. But my parents were not my ideal client now, my parents were far from that ideal client.
It was the bare minimum. They didn't get dentals. We didn't do a lot of the things. And that was because the medicine has changed, but also, because of how we related to our pets has changed significantly. And when I think about about the care that I provided in the beginning for my own pets, it was not the same care that I was recommending in the practice. It was like, well, I know what the bare minimum is, and so I'm just going to do the bare minimum for your pets because that's how you have always treated them. And I think I deprived myself and my family the opportunity to learn and grow and believe in the things that I truly did believe in the practice. And so I think for a lot of us, there is the potential to have that discrepancy there.
And so I think for me, that's a big part of the figuring out what that why is and what you're going to do, because I think it will help you figure out how do you then action plan it. And so for me, I wanted my parents ultimately to experience it. And so I started forcing my mom. I'm like, “Nope, you have to call the clinic and you can talk to me as the CSR upfront, but you have to call the clinic and make an appointment. I'm not going to make an appointment for you. I want you to fill out the survey when you leave. I'm not going to tech your appointment. Somebody else is going to go in there because I want to get the feedback. I want to know how are we doing? How did we stand up to what… I want you to experience it like any other client.” That became a motivator for me as a leader with my own family, but also with my team.
And so figuring that out really, really helped me to have clarity and that ability to see clearly with figuring out, what is my protocol? What is my policy? How am I going to approach this? And really not have it just be willy-nilly. Or I don't know, this is what I decided at two o'clock in the morning and I wrote it down. So that's what we're going to do, which is when we're starting up a practice, that's where a lot of us start from. And so I think, for me, what is right for me is not necessarily what's going to be right for you, Andy, as Dr. Andy, or what's going to be right for our friends who owns the practice down the street. But whatever is the driver, figuring out the why behind that will help you figure out then the what are you going to do with it.

Andy Roark:
Yeah, I know. I agree with that. It's funny. We've talked about kind of blowing off staff pets before when they bring them in. Look, talk is cheap and people watch what you do. And so if you have your friend come in and you're just like, “Hey, come on in. Let me just do these vaccines for you real quick. All right. You're all set. All right, take care, buddy.” That sends one of two messages, right? It either sends a message that you don't really care about your friend's dog because you just popped him with vaccines and sent them out, or that all the hand waving you do about how important your exam is, is bullshit. Because when it's your friend, you just pop them with vaccines and send them out the door and whether they're like that-

Stephanie Goss:
But when it's the team… Yep.

Andy Roark:
Because that's what they need. You know what I mean? And so you can choose either of those two beliefs. You either don't care about your friend's dog or you don't care about all the other dogs because really, just doing what you need for your friend's dog and everybody else is getting a bunch of hand waving. You know what I mean? And so the staff is always watching. They're always watching. And again, I want to keep this in proportion where it's not like if you bring your friend Dave's dog in one time and do this, everything you've worked with your staff goes out the window. Of course, it doesn't. It's all a matter of proportionality and those sorts of things. So again, I don't want to over-generalize and say, if you do this one time or you behave this way once, your whole credibility is destroyed, but it does take a toll. And so it's just a lot of that.
So anyway, I think sort of to summarize the takeaways for me with the friends and family discount is be intentional on why you're doing this and that will help you sort of figure out who you're doing it for. Consider doing things that are not just inside your vet clinic, whether it's things that don't have anything to do with vet medicine or whether you set it up and say, “You know what? I do this with my neighbors.” If they'll text me or they'll see me and they'll say, “I'm really worried about my dog.” And I'll say, “Bring her over to the house and let's have a look.” And I do that, and I don't charge them for that, but I do. I just come, and I look, and I honestly try to help them.
And sometimes I'll say, “You need to go into the vet clinic.” And when they get to the vet clinic, they get an exam and they get those things. But a lot of times, just telling them, “Hey, let's give it until tomorrow. Let's see how it goes here. Here, I want you to just keep this clean. Let's see what we got. Bring her back in the morning and I'll take a look.” I mean, that's a very generous thing on my part that I don't charge for, but it's also, I don't consider it discounting.
And when they go to the vet clinic, they go in and they get checked in. Ideally, they see another vet besides me. I always just prefer that, but it's kind of what you want it to be. If you're going to decide that we're going to do friends and family discounting at least for friends, I would say be intentional about what that means and who gets that, and then I would make real sure that your friends' discount is not better than your staff discount. I mean, that may sound common sense, but I've seen friends get bigger discount than the staff who works there for you. And that doesn't generally go over very well.

Stephanie Goss:
Not at all. Not at all. And that was what I was going to say, is that, so the fairness is subjective, but the equity is very, very important. And your team is there day in, day out. And yes, it's not discounting the emotional value of your friends and family supporting you on your journey. That is very important. And I think that's why I am so glad that you brought up. You can have gifts and give acts of service outside of the vet clinic. The clinic is not the only currency that you have when it comes to your love language. And so I'm so glad that you said that because your team, that piece matters to them because that is the currency for you with them, how you treat them, how you take care of them. And to your point at the beginning of the episode, all of those other things, how they get paid, their benefits, all of those things mash up together and create that equality and that fairness piece.
And so I have absolutely seen it bite people in the butt where you tell the team, “I can only give you what the IRS allows,” but then you give your parents stuff for free and they have to put those charges in and zero it out. There's no faster path to having a pissed off team than that inequity, right?

Andy Roark:
Right.

Stephanie Goss:
And so, I'm so glad that you bring that up. And I think that that is a smart path to walk, which is whatever you're going to do for your team, make sure that your friends and family discount, particularly if you're extending it in a broad sense, does not go beyond what you're giving your team. That's just a common sense rule of thumb.

Andy Roark:
Well, And I'll tie onto that, because I think that's a really great point about giving what IRS allows, and then having your team put stuff in and zero it out. Just be mindful about perception and stuff and don't rub their face in it. And so if you're going to have your parents come in and everything, have your team put the charges in, and then just tell your parents, “Hey, I'll send you a bill if there's anything left.” And then have the managers zero it out, or you zero it out, or something later on. But just having the staff do it, and then see it and it just… And again, it depends on the individual. 90% of the staff, they don't care. They totally get it. They wish they could do it for their family, but a certain percentage of the staff is going to care. And the less that they kind of see it, the better.
When you have friends and family come in for things like this, and this is a big one for me, they have to go through the system, where I think what it really hacks the staff off is not so much the money. It's people who come in without an appointment. They walk right into the back, which is the realm of the staff, and act like they own the place and this is their place, not the staff's place.
And again, I don't know if any of your friends would do that, if any of your family members would do that, but I want to take care of my staff as they take care of my friends, which means you should have an appointment. You should come in, you should get seen. The technician should take the history. We should do the whole song and dance, and then I'll send you a bill if there's anything left to pay. And what that means is I'll have the manager zero it out, or I'll look at it and see what we can do, but I'm not going to make the staff do it, things like that. That's a distinct possibility.

Stephanie Goss:
And I have to really quick hop on my soapbox for just a hot second because this is a new practice owner. And I have to hop on what the IRS allows, soapbox for a hot second, because it comes up over and over, and over, and over again. And I have seen so many practice owners use this almost as a weapon in terms of arguing their policy for staff discounts, and nothing puts my back up faster. So the IRS, there are rules, but the phrase, what the IRS allows, is totally misnomer. Because the IRS will allow you. You can discount 100%. If you want to give your team 100% discount on everything, you can do that. What the IRS says is that they have to pay tax on it. It has to be claimed as income.
And so there is paperwork that has to be done, but you can absolutely have a staff discount policy that says, your team gets everything at cost or gets it at 100% discount for services or whatever your policy is. Where people get confused is because what the IRS says is, “We've set a threshold.” So you can do a percentage off on services and do cost plus 10%, so it's 20% off on services and cost plus 10 on goods, that's their threshold. And so realistically, that's where they say, “Look, we'll allow you to discount to this amount without us getting our nose out of joint. Anything beyond that, you have to do the paperwork on it because we want to claim our tax on it, and the government needs to get their piece.”
And so, so many people are like, “Well, I can't give a bigger discount. I can't do this because the IRS says, this is all I'm allowed to do.” You can do whatever it is that you want to do. And so as a new practice owner, knowing that and figuring out, again, to your point earlier, the why, why are you doing the thing? How are you giving back to them? For me, I wanted my team to experience the care that our clients got to experience.
And so you bet your butt, if our standard of care was that every patient who had dental disease was recommended to get a dental cleaning once a year, I wanted my team to be able to access that care. And so my employee discount program was set up to support that. And a dental at our practice was not an inexpensive thing. And so, I had team members who… We lived in a very expensive part of the country in California, in the Bay Area, and there was a lot of them who even though we paid them well, were still living paycheck to paycheck and doing our dental at our client prices, put that care out of reach for their patients, for their pets.
And so for me, it was about getting them to access that care. So we gave a bigger discount, and then we did the paperwork, and they knew that and we were clear about it. It was very clearly spelled out. I answered all of their questions. I kept answering questions. It wasn't just the conversation at hire. And so I bring all this up and get on my soapbox for a second because I think that I've seen so many practice owners use this as like, “Well, my hands are tied, and so this is what I can do.” And we use that. That gets used as a weapon with our team, but we look the other way when it comes to our friends and family. And that's bullshit, for me.
And so I can't resist, I had to jump on that soapbox for a second because that's where the equity comes into place. If you're going to use that as a weapon with your team and say, “Well, the IRS says I can only give you 20% off,” then you sure as hell better be prepared to answer their questions about why your friends and family get it at a 100% discount.

Andy Roark:
Yeah. Sure. And I'll get on my soapbox here at the end. My last point on this is, when I talk about the discounting and things like that, I believe that we should price our services fairly and intentionally. I think when you decide what you charge for your services, you should act with integrity.

Stephanie Goss:
Sure.

Andy Roark:
You should be honest about what your clinic needs to make. You should not feel guilty about earning a decent living for yourself. You should not feel guilty about demanding to be able to pay your team a good salary. You should not feel bad about having a profitable business that has some value to it. And you should also be able to look people in the eye and sort of say, “This is what we need to charge for what we do.” Now granted, that doesn't mean we can't do some discounts for the staff or things like that, but I just found that when I looked at it holistically and said, “This is what we need to charge in order to do what we need to do,” I have a lot less trouble saying to people, “This is what it costs.”
And it made me feel better about deciding intentionally what I want to do to give back, and then just sort of saying, “I don't really play with the prices.” I think I have this sort of negative just aversion to changing prices because I think it's a bad habit. And I think that it's a slippery slope and you get way too comfortable not charging for things and just taking the price down on things. And I think that if you're in an independent practice, I think that's a bad habit to get into. They don't have that practice in a corporate, that problem in a corporate practice. You're not doing friends and family discount when you work for a multi-site practice. I just think it's something that independents need to look out for because it's a slippery slope. And so anyway, if you've gotten the impression, I'm not a huge fan of it today, you're right.

Stephanie Goss:
Oh man, this was fun.

Andy Roark:
Yeah, that's good. I'm going to go spend some time with Skipper, make sure he's doing okay.

Stephanie Goss:
Bolster his confidence?

Andy Roark:
Bolster his confidence, make sure he still knows he's a good boy, give him some affirmations.

Stephanie Goss:
I can't.

Andy Roark:
I know. His love language is gifts too, so he is going to get a treat. Yeah.

Stephanie Goss:
I love it. Take care, everybody.

Andy Roark:
See you later, everybody.

Stephanie Goss:
Well, gang, that's a wrap on another episode of the podcast. And as always, this was so fun to dive into the mailbag and answer this question. And I would really love to see more things like this come through the mailbag. If there is something that you would love to have us talk about on the podcast or a question that you are hoping that we might be able to help with, feel free to reach out and send us a message. You can always find the mailbag at the website. The address is unchartedvet.com/mailbag, or you can email us at podcast@unchartedvet.com. Take care everybody, and have a great week. We'll see you again next time.