Practice Profile: Stellar Vets

After more than three decades in the profession, David Hodges certainly knows a thing or two about developing successful veterinary practices and delivering the kind of pet care clients want.

As one of the co-founders of Pet Doctors – a practice he helped grow into a 27-site chain before selling to CVS – and a Petplan Vet of the Year finalist in 2022, David pretty much wrote the playbook.

So, having joined the large band of pandemic start-ups in January 2021 when he opened Stellar Vets – a practice built to leverage an array of digitised and automated systems to improve efficiency and client engagement – it comes as no surprise that the practice is doing well and David is thriving back in the independent sector.

He said: “I stayed on with CVS for a good few years after the sale of Pet Doctors, and to start with it was fine. I was left alone to get on with just being a vet and I really enjoyed that, but then things changed a little bit and I just started to find everything more and more disheartening for one reason or another.

“And I just thought, ‘sod this’. It was like, ‘What the hell is going on here?’ So, I decided I was going to quit and go back to do my own thing, and I am so glad that I did it.

“Of course, finding the right site takes a lot of time to get right, but I managed to find a great spot in Littlehampton, close to where I had been working, and things have just gone from strength to strength.”

Starting the journey

Having graduated from vet school in 1991, David spent much of his career working with fellow Cambridge vet school alumni Garret Turley developing the Pet Doctors chain.

Even during their time at Cambridge together, the pair had a strong business focus, ultimately predicting the corporatisation of the veterinary sector well before changes to the Veterinary Surgeons Act opened the door for the likes of CVS and IVC.

Getting their plan off the ground wasn’t easy in those post-recession days, however, and they had their work cut out finding the finance needed to buy their first practice and begin their journey.

But in 1995 that journey began and from its first practice in Chichester, Pet Doctors consolidated throughout the south-east and by the time of its sale to CVS for around £10 million, the group had grown to include sites from the Isle of Wight to Ely in Cambridgeshire.

David said: “Garret and I knew it was going to happen even when we were at vet school as we had seen it happen in other professions like accountants and opticians, and there was no reason why it wasn’t going to happen for vets.

“So, we worked hard to build up a pot of money to buy a practice as, in those days, just after another recession, the banks weren’t keen to lend.

“But we knew the writing was on the wall, and we took it through to its logical conclusion – there was nothing to stop national chains taking over. When we started, our model was to be the nationwide branded veterinary provider. But a little way through we decided that we had missed the boat on being nationwide as we didn’t want to be venture capital backed. And we thought that was probably what you would need to do to get big enough to be nationwide.

“So, we pivoted our strategy and grew Pet Doctors until one of the big boys knocked on our door and bought us out, which is what happened of course.”

A state of independence

Following the sale, Garret went off to pursue a career full time in private equity, but with the profits from the sale of Pet Doctors safely stowed away in various pension funds, David decided to stay in the profession and go back to doing the thing he enjoyed most – being a full-time GP vet.

And while that plan worked out for many years as a vet in charge with CVS, David is clearly in his element, getting back to basics as he builds something on his own from the ground up.

He added: “With this place, I wanted something that was near to where I live and had been working, and that tightened the geography quite considerably. With a site, you need visibility, so, you need people to be able to see you and find you, which I have here, plus there is also great parking as it is literally within 30 seconds’ walk from four car parks.

“So, visibility – tick that box; parking – tick that box. And next it needs to be big enough – every single practice I’ve ever worked in, the limiting factor has always been the number of consult rooms.

“So, I wanted something where I can have lots of consult rooms, which is why I have four here, even though I only use one, because a consult room potentially could be an office, or even an op theatre on a bad day. But the most important thing is that it allows for planned expansion; so many practices don’t consider that from the very start and end up constrained by their building.”

While some questioned the logic of starting a new business in the middle of a pandemic, in many ways the prevailing circumstances lent themselves well to the venture. The sudden emergence of COVID-19 and the restrictions that came with it meant landlords and property owners were suddenly concerned they would be missing out on rent, and David was able to take advantage.

Perfect site

After finding the perfect site in a former Citizens’ Advice Bureau close to the centre of Littlehampton, David was able to negotiate a highly competitive 15-year lease, with breaks at 3 and 10 years, and the first year free, which kept costs down. Being in the cheaper part of town also meant zero business rates.

He then set about dividing up the rectangular building the way he wanted it, with a large reception area feeding into four consult rooms with a large prep behind, kennels, theatre, x-ray, ultrasound and the kitchen area.

It is a no-nonsense approach that allowed him to stay within a relatively slim budget, with the entire cost of the project – lease, build and fit out – coming in at around £80,000.

Throwing money around was never part of the plan. David said: “It was a really simple design, but that is the way I wanted it. I am funding this without borrowing money and I just wanted to get it done, have no debt and just get started doing practice the way I wanted to do it again.

“Because I had to wait six months after leaving CVS to when I opened this place, I had plenty of time to do stuff. Most of my equipment is second-hand and I think the only thing I bought new was probably a microscope.

“I would scour eBay or the medical auction websites and I spent a lot of time just driving up and down the country in a van picking stuff up. When the AHT sadly went out of business, they auctioned off all the kit and I got a fantastic digital x-ray, and loads of vaporisers and anaesthetic equipment.”

Transformational tech

As a dedicated disciple of tech, one of the things David wanted to do with Stellar Vets was to make the practice as digitally focused as possible.

And certainly, at the start of the project it was the only approach that could have worked, as for the first few months David was doing pretty much everything on his own.

He said: “The whole thing about Stellar Vets was that I wanted to test my new theory of how to make stuff as automated and digitalised as possible. I wanted productivity to be a key driver: to maximise the client experience with the fewest staff, by streamlining admin and reducing the need for repetitive tasks.

“That meant clients registering, booking and pre-paying for appointments, and setting up clients’ care plans all done online, while the smart telephone system is designed so that clients can self-serve, answering all the questions that 90% of telephone calls are about, meaning we only get a fraction of calls ringing through into reception. And, of course, the practice management system, VetIT, was cloud-based, so I can get access from home or on the app – it just gave me lots of flexibility.

“By using systems like Vetstoria for bookings and pre-payments and PetsApp, and by having a website that allows clients to do stuff, I was pretty much able to do everything on my own without the clients having any idea that was the case.”

In the early days of setting up Stellar Vets, David also covered his own out-of-hours, but as the number of clients registered with the practice has increased, that work is now contracted out to Arun Veterinary Group.

Stellar Vets has since recruited two part-time team members and has employed the services of Practice Made Purrfect, a marketing firm that helps independent practices achieve their goals.

David said: “So, I came across Justin Phillips from Practice Made Purrfect through a webinar done by PetsApp and thought, ‘yes, this guy gets it’. So, we started with some of his ideas and some of mine, and we just kind of fused them together and from then on, growth went off exponentially, to the point I need another vet.

“Google reviews are the new word of mouth – we have 152 five-star reviews, so we are getting a lot of clients coming to us on the strength of those now, too.

“I love digital marketing and I find that you can use that to achieve most things you want to achieve when it comes to attracting new clients or advertising new services and products – it has been brilliant for us.”

Subscription success

One of the other big ideas at Stellar Vets is the focus on subscriptions, and David already has 385 pets on his care plan, which costs £24.99 per month and includes free consults.

This is something David is keen to build, having launched his new, remodelled plan last August.

“When clients haven’t got a consult fee every time they come in, you can do a lot more, so when you say we need to do a blood test and it’s going to cost a hundred quid, there is far less resistance,” he added.

“My target is a thousand care plans starting at £29.99 – that’s my two-year goal. I think you can run a healthy practice on that without too much stress.”

In fact, the books are already looking quite healthy, with Stellar Vets now averaging more than £40,000 plus VAT every month, with roughly 20% of that revenue coming from the pet health plan.

A pragmatic approach

The innovative subscription model and the digital bells and whistles have no doubt helped bring around 1,400 registered clients to the practice, but none of it works without David and his pragmatic approach to the delivery of veterinary care.

He said: “I believe veterinary care is about the vet – the veterinary business is about customer care; it’s not about gold standard. I hate this gold-standard mentality that has crept into our industry. When you go to buy a new car, you do not go and buy a gold-plated Rolls-Royce Phantom or whatever. Why? Because you can’t bloody afford one.

“You’re quite happy with a Fiat Punto, but the corporates are massively exploiting this and they hide behind the notion of gold standard to try to push people to do, in my opinion, lots of unnecessary investigations – particularly blood tests or ultrasounds and unnecessary stuff; stuff that a savvy vet with a bit of clinical judgement could cut through and go, ‘Do you know what? I think we just need to do this’.

“And clients are not stupid – they now understand that most vets have been bought out by a corporate. Five years ago, they didn’t know that.

“I do the basics really, really well and, like most experienced vets, I can get most of what I need to know by taking the history and chatting to the client. I could do a clinical exam in literally a minute to get 90% of what I need to know.

“Most of my consult time is actually just bonding with the client. That’s what I’m trying to do. It’s that bit that’s important for the long run of your business.”

A Stellar future?

But despite his track record with Pet Doctors, ambitious growth and multiple sites are not part of that long-term plan.

David turns 55 this year and any early retirement plans have been shelved; he is clearly having too much fun. David wants to spend his remaining years in the profession sharing his knowledge and working on his own terms.

He added: “When we grew Pet Doctors to 27 clinics, I realised that was just not me. I am more self-aware now and I know that size of business doesn’t suit my personality, so I want to keep Stellar Vets small and I have absolutely no drive to open more clinics.

“I think the potential in this one site is massive as I’ve got three other consult rooms, which are sitting idle at the minute. And I think we can take on a lot more work just from this one site very, very easily.

“I really want a business partner – a vet who is a bit business-savvy who would want to come on board as, over time, “I would like to pass on what I believe is the way to do veterinary medicine and my approach to practice, which I think has been lost.

“Hopefully, there’s somebody out there who buys into that and might want to come and join me.”