Setting and Optimizing Pricing for Your Veterinary Business with Robert Ribciuc

Robert Ribciuc is the Managing Partner at EBITDA Catalyst. He helped establish, grew, and managed a successful advisory/consulting firm focusing on pricing strategy and analytics, go-to-market optimization, and revenue management for middle-market corporate and private equity portfolio (PE) clients in diverse industry verticals.

In this episode, Robert shares the need to understand the veterinary business as a whole, from the service to the non-service products to come up with the best pricing strategy.

Why you have to check today's podcast:

• Understand how veterinary practice is different from other industries
• Consider the use of good, better, best pricing strategies when dealing with veterinary services and products
• Learn to holistically understand the veterinary business from the two sides -- the service and the non-service aspect to create best pricing strategies

"The hypothetical practice where the veterinarian also acts as the practice manager which the more you go up in size you have multiple practices, and then you get to these corporate entities, they try to avoid that like the plague."

- Robert Ribciuc

Topics Covered:

02:31 - Robert's thoughts on what is said as unreasonable expenses in taking care of pets

07:07 - Understanding the dynamics of the veterinary practice as totally different from other industries

11:49 - How are the bigger veterinary companies leading when it comes to price increase?

14:22 - Payment schemes to consider for veterinary expenses

15:22 - How should veterinarians deal with pricing

17:19 - Staying in the veterinary business for long-term

18:17 - The concept of having a practice manager responsible for pricing, instead of the practice owner [implementing the good, better, best pricing]

22:01 - How to effectively manage pricing for the diverse range of services and products offered by a veterinary practice

27:49 - His definition of business success

Key Takeaways:

"One of the trends we should talk about is adoption or non-adoption of insurance in this space and other types of concepts from pricing like subscription or wellness plans, where instead of having that one time pain that is potentially dramatic and brings you to tears, you have a tiny bit of pain every month, but hopefully short of tears." - Robert Ribciuc

"If you are one of these practices and you're selling a product, you take the case of medication that's being sold. And some of these practices sell some of the medication physically in the practice. And then there are providers like vet source, which is a way to have your online pharmacy that's like your practices ordering portal for your practice customers, that's a pretty significant part of revenue for a practice. And so there are questions over there. How do you get sophisticated with pricing in that space?" - Robert Ribciuc

People/Resources Mentioned:

• Blue Pearl Emergency: https://bluepearlvet.com
• Banfield Pet Hospital: https://www.banfield.com
• Mars: https://www.marsveterinary.com
• General Mills: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Mills
• Blue Buffalo: https://bluebuffalo.com
• VHMA: https://www.vhma.org/home

Connect with Robert Ribciuc:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ribciuc/
• Email: robert@ebitdacatalyst.com

Connect with Mark Stiving:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/
• Email: mark@impactpricing.com