My professor said something and I didn’t buy it…

Let me preface this by saying that I really enjoy this prof, and he is savvy and provides a lot of good advice. He is an excellent lecturer and I agree with a lot of the points he makes. Except one. We were told that in small animal medicine, only roughly 10% of your clients choose your clinic based on your prices. Here’s the slide…

His point being, if you lower your prices to attract more clients, you are catering to a small percentage of pet owners that choose a practice based on price alone.

Quite a few people in class also disagreed with this fact, some even asking what exact geographic region this statistic pertained to. We were told “Ontario.” I like that my classmates clearly had experienced something different than we were told in class and were challenging it. This also inspired me to take it a step further.

One of my goals that I made for myself was to write a “one thing I learned this month” post. So about a month ago I started my own “research project” for the blog, and I’ve waited a month to accumulate some results… results I would like to share with you now!

I work at a small animal clinic in a small town. I am one of three workers in the summer, and I am mostly on my own during the day when we aren’t busy and therefore answering the phone a lot. Last summer I found out I had been admitted into OVC, and spent the majority of the summer looking forward to that. It was a bit overshadowed by the sheer number of calls I was fielding from potential new clients regarding the pricing of our services. Remarks ranged from straight questions about specifics (price of spay, office call fee, etc.) to sheer skepticism and rudeness about our prices. The majority of the conversations went like this:

“Hi, I’m just wondering what you would charge to spay my 20 lb dog?”
Me: “um let me see… looks like it’s so-and-so dollars”
“Hmmm.. ok, thanks. I might call you back!”

And sometimes they would call back (presumably after price-checking other places and finding ours to be cheapest), and sometimes they wouldn’t. But it was rare the conversation ever involved other questions like “do you do bloodwork before surgery, or provide fluids? What about pain control? What kind of aftercare do we need to do?” I’m also not saying that geographic location and word of mouth couldn’t have played a role in the decision to go with us, but most of my phone conversations didn’t allude to any of those.

So by the end of this summer, I was a little discouraged. I had the impression that I was entering a field where potential clients were valuing my skills, my knowledge, my communication and compassion solely by the dollar price in front of them. I was starting to be turned off by traditional practice, and even still I’m not convinced that it’s where I’m going to stay in my career (but that’s a subject of another post!).

It has become increasingly common to see veterinary blog posts explaining WHY veterinarians have to charge money for their services. See here and here for some great recent ones. I feel like having to spend my time validating just WHY I can’t do my job for free (after years of eduction and also years of hard work to be admitted to vet school and to graduate) will be exhausting. I can’t think of another medical profession where clinicians feel the need to defend charging for their services. I would love to know how many other veterinary students are considering this and letting it affect their career optimism. I don’t mean for this to be a downer of a post, but this is just something I have been thinking a lot about!

So my experiment idea was simple (and obviously flawed, don’t worry… I’m not claiming any groundbreaking science here). Any calls I would take from potential new clients, I would tally. I would count those that solely asked about prices for services, and nothing else. I wanted to do an update after the first month of doing this, but I plan on taking the tally all summer. These are also only calls that I fielded, occasionally there is someone else answering.

The current tally is:
Total calls from new clients: 11
Number of calls concerned with solely pricing: 7

That gives us 64% of new clients “choosing” a practice based on price alone. Obviously I am assuming that they are calling around and finding the best deal, and then choosing that practice. This is also a small sample size! Bad statistics. I also realize that the data from my class slides are from 1996 – almost 20 years out of date. I would be interested to see some more recent stats.

But like I said, I plan to continue until I go back to school, and these calls tend to come in higher numbers later on in the summer. It should also be mentioned that the other 4 calls were from new clients mostly calling in interest because they had heard good things about us from someone they know…. small town, remember?

My point is, superficially, this is much higher than 10%. I’m interested to know your thoughts! Also if you want me to factor anything else into my tally!