Practice Profile: Pickles Vets

Staff: full-time vets 5 • registered veterinary nurses 4 • practice administrators 4
Fees: £120 per year

When the people behind Pickles were looking for a suitable location to site their first practice, the salubrious environs of west London seemed like as good a place as any.

Teeming with affluent young professionals, for whom subscription-based services have become the norm, if the idea of paying an annual fee for veterinary care was going to take off anywhere, it was here.

The mission statement was simple: to offer absolute transparency on pricing and service levels, and to create an environment that made veterinary practice work better for all stakeholders. It is far too early to say if the Pickles model will achieve such lofty aims, but when it comes to pricing, they have stayed good to their word.

For the relatively modest sum of £120 a year, Pickles members receive unlimited consults, video consults, yearly vaccinations and a growing range of data-led services delivered through Pickles’ bespoke app.

The practice does not offer any ad hoc appointments, which means – emergency first aid situations aside – the only way to gain access to its services is through membership. But despite being such a new concept, pet owners in the area have taken to Pickles in their droves, with more than 1,000 members signing up in less than a year.

Chief executive Richard White said: “Overall, it has been a great start for us and we have actually found that people have been biting our hands off to sign up with us for £120 a year.

“If you only go to the vet once a year, you are probably spending that on the appointment and the vaccinations, in London anyway. But for me, this is about impact.

“Money is a by-product – obviously, you need to make money for the business to actually work, but the idea behind it all came from my dog Pickles and the experiences I had with him at the vet practices I had to interact with.

“Those places were not serving our needs and they were not serving the needs of the people who worked there. I just knew there was a better way and a win-win scenario, and we think Pickles is it.”

Membership model

While the membership model, exclusive concierge service and bespoke client-facing tech has all appealed to the younger demographic, Pickles has captured the imagination of older pet owners, too.

Local (and not so local) pet owners of all ages have been buying in, with more than half of the practice’s members above the age of 40.

With pet ownership numbers at record highs following the COVID-19 pandemic, the fact Pickles has attracted so many clients so quickly might not come as a surprise.

Keeping those clients will be the litmus test for this venture, however, and according to Richard, this is where Pickles’ unique membership model comes into its own.

He said: “We really see this as a new movement in veterinary care, where the benefits of membership become something our clients cannot live without.

“So, we made it easier to get an appointment, we offer transparency over our fees – what people are being charged – and just the overall service and follow up.

“Those were the things that I just felt as a pet owner that could be done better. As a pet owner, I was always having to do all the work, ask all the questions, follow up on the appointment and all the rest of it.

“But it is not one thing that sets us apart, it is lots of little things; it is the feeling you get when you walk in, it’s about how clients feel about the way they are talked to, it’s about booking, it’s about making it easy to contact us – we have thought meticulously about every single thing. There is real attention to detail.”

He added: “I also think that a lot of the time people think they are just buying one service, so if you take flea and worming, for example, clients will come in and collect it, and clients just see that as the product. But we see the service they are paying for is the advice that goes with it, like how to pill the dog or reminders. We just try to think holistically about everything.”

Wonder clients

Even those without a fantastic grasp of mathematics, however, will see the £120,000 generated annually from memberships will not see the £700,000 it cost to set up the practice recouped any time soon.

But getting that all important buy-in is really about selecting the right kind of clients – “wonder clients” who will go the extra mile when it comes to drug courses and treatments for their pets, as Richard explained: “The membership thing is a demand management system and also a selection system.

“Normal vets just open the doors and see everything and everyone, but there is a percentage of clients who are the ‘wonder clients’, and those are the ones that you want.

“But up to now, nobody has looked at how to increase that percentage of wonder clients – those who are compliant and have the resources to spend on their pet’s care. So, we select for those with the £120, as that attracts the people who want to come here and are prepared to invest in us to look after their pet’s health.”

Founded in partnership with Paul Jakimciw and vet Andrew Francis, one of the key investments made at Pickles has been in its tech.

Richard has leveraged his background in IT and software start-ups to develop Pickles’ own mobile app, a custom made PMS, online booking system and a reminder system – in-house and from scratch.

This provides a “seamless digital integration” for clients and means clinicians have as much information as possible ahead of an appointment.

Team members

The focus on the professional and personal well-being of team members is another central pillar of the Pickles model, and one of the main reasons new clinical director Rory Cowlam decided to come on board.

Rory said: “This is all about giving clients the service they want and the information they need at a price that is completely transparent.

“But it is also about providing the kind of working environment that every vet and every vet nurse craves.

“I was working in a practice for five or six years, and I was burnt out and at the point where I didn’t want to do this anymore – probably like a lot of vets out there reading this.

“Working like this is better for clients and better for us clinicians; for a start, having half-hour appointments and having full staff from day dot meant nobody was overstretched or pushed too hard, and had time to care.

“That allowed everyone to ease into providing the high-level service that Pickles is all about. If you look at the things vets don’t enjoy at the moment, it’s being time pressured, cost pressured, under paid, and under valued, and we are addressing all four of those elements here. People are valued, they have the time, they can provide a very high level of service, they have good relationships with their clients, because they are spending time and they have the freedom to do what they need to do.

“We also have a very nice rota here, with vets working four 10-hour days per week and one Saturday morning a month, with no out-of-hours – it is just what people want.”

Vets and nurses are paid well, too, and the Pickles project has clearly captured the imagination of vets – a point highlighted by the fact the practice has a list of 25 vets waiting to join.

Timely turnaround

Nestled among the juice bars, health food shops and the odd artisan bakery so typical of this affluent corner of town, the 3,000 sq ft practice occupies what had been a tile shop.

Once identified as the ideal spot for the first Pickles clinic, a construction firm Richard had worked with previously gutted the building to create a practice that boasts a huge waiting area, where clients are met by a customer experience host before being seating in comfortable sofas as they wait for an appointment in one of three spacious consult rooms.

Also on the ground floor is a staff room, quiet room and kitchen, while the basement area houses a central prep area flanked by a large operating theatre, a separate procedures room, as well as cat and dog wards.

From start to finish, the refit was completed inside 10 weeks and this impressive turnaround time is a key part of Pickles’ expansion strategy, which will rely on clinics being opened quickly once expansion of the group begins in earnest. When Pickles was launched last October, the stated aim was to open 100 clinics across the country, but for the time being, Richard and the team are just focused on getting the first one right.

Richard said: “We took it back to the bare bones and from getting the keys to getting it finished took 10 weeks. We had a team that just comes in and rips everything out, and works almost 24 hours a day to get it done, so we are confident that we can roll out further clinics very quickly, and that has always been a cornerstone of our roll out strategy: to be able to turn these out very quickly to a very high standard.

“We spent more than was expected on this first site, as we wanted to have everything that the team needed, but we are confident it will break even within a year of opening, and I expect this first site will be the longest one to break even.

“I came to this thinking the fundamentals of the veterinary financial model were broken and we are on a journey to proving there is a much better way of doing it. So, our economics should look vastly different to those of other practices.”

Branded range

One revenue stream Pickles is keen to explore is to produce a range of its own-brand products. At present, the practice stocks a small range of items, but this is likely to be extended as the Pickles brand gains traction.

Next month, a range of branded therapeutics and joint supplements will be available online, with plans already in motion to extend the range to include probiotics and pet treats.

A tie-up with wholesaler NVS also means members will soon be able to get flea and worm prescriptions sent direct to their homes, along with some low-level non-steroidals.

Richard added: “It is a long-term thing; if we educate our clients, as well as doing the brand building and relationship stuff, we then earn the right to then earn money elsewhere.

“A lot of pet spend is outside the veterinary sector, and for me, that is madness, so by building a brand people trust, we can then open the door to offering a wider range of services, as we have that trust and our brand is respected.”

Digital development

The Pickles team also plans to develop its brand to leverage the data constantly being gathered from members. Every client is asked for feedback following every appointment and, over time, the team hopes to provide clients with unique insights on their pets, as well as tailored treatment plans based on individual medical histories.

Rory said: “The really good thing about developing our own tech is that we can control all our own data. Once we have enough data, we can start to do some really cool stuff with our database, like being able to offer bespoke treatment plans for our pets going through their lives.

“We will start with breed-specific stuff and then using our clinical data to see efficacy of certain treatments. We also want to start building up a genome-sequencing database, where we want to be able to collect the DNA of every member’s pets and then link that to our clinical data, which in the long term will allow our clinicians to make better judgements.

“This vision is something everyone here completely believes in and they buy into that. This is about creating a great environment, but it is going to take work to change the environment and the product and the service: that all takes hard work and that takes the right people to make it work. ”But we have the right people.”