Hello everyone, it's Antony Chadwick here and welcome to another one of our vet chat podcasts. We're very fortunate today to have Matthew Wood, who is the sales manager for the UK and for Spain for Provets, which is one of our practise management systems that's used in the veterinary profession, so. Hello Matthew.

Great to see you. Thank you for having me. Excited.

Yeah, Matthew, tell me a little bit about what, what did you get up to before you went to Provat? How long have you been at Provat for? So I've been at Provet now for the best part of 2.5 years, before that, I, I've been in many sales roles, but, kind of the one before that and where I got into veterinary is that I worked for Idex for a number of years, looking at the, the software side of the, the business for Idex, did, did very well there.

And then met the now CEO of Provet, and, he wanted me to come to Provet and, and start heading up the team for the UK and, and start really ramping up the, the sales and production for, for Provet within the, the UK market. And then they realised that I speak Spanish fluently because I lived in Spain when I was younger, and I inherited the Spain market as well, just, just to kind of give me a little bit more to do. Oh no that's brilliant and it's always good to meet the Prove guys at when we do that funny thing called physical conference meeting, which I of course haven't done for a little while, but I know Provet originally came from Finland, I think that's where where the group started, wasn't it, but now spread all over Europe.

That's correct. I mean our head office is still based in Finland and. It was, it was a venture from Jane Huttonen, who's our, one of our, one of our directors, and he set up, a small PMS system for, well, in, in university basically, when he was at university, for a veterinary company, and then it kind of grew from there.

And now we're 15 years on, and about 6 years ago, we invented Provet Cloud, which is our second cloud-based system. We had Provetnet before that. Which is being used in mostly Finland by probably around about 1, 200 vets are using it, in Scandinavia.

But we decided with the change of times and the way that the veterinary industry was moving, that we wanted to create something a little bit more agile, and something that could be moulded and developed and kind of keep up with the times, basically. So about 6 years ago, we, we kind of brought out Provet Cloud, and, and that's kind of where we are today. And of course as you say, change is happening.

So, so quickly and the cloud gives you that flexibility. I think any of us who are a little bit older will remember having big servers in the practise that you couldn't touch and you were afraid if you hit a button you could screw up the whole system, whereas having everything based on the cloud just makes life so much easier, doesn't it? Yeah, massively, I mean if you think about the the the waste of space first of all, you know, to have those, as you say, very large servers in a in a room, creating a load of heat.

And they're normally in the offices of the, the practise managers and so on, which is never, never convenient. So you're taking that away, you're taking away the, the amount of electricity that it burns, you know, if you're you're talking about, sustainability and stuff like that, you know, it's, it's just not a good thing to have. And also if we look back to kind of where software used to be, you used to get a, a, a, a disc sent to you every month to be able to upgrade to the new version.

Of the software and you know, you had to do the backups every night or every week or whatever it was, and the amount of people that I've spoken to over the years that have said, oh yeah, we do backups every week, so and so does it, and then so and so's in the room and gone, I haven't done that for months. What are you talking about somebody else. You know, and then they realise that actually nothing is backed up on the system.

So it kind of gives a peace of mind because every single click of a button when you're with a cloud-based software will update the software straight away, so you never lose anything. It's the security of. Of not losing that data, which of course is, is so important, isn't it?

It helps us run the practise. We know what what we've done to the animal last time, if we lose all of that, it can be pretty disastrous, can't it? Massively, you know, if you think about the way that I always look at software when it comes to veterinary, software is the heartbeat of the practise, you know, you can change your labs, you can change your external lab, you can change a lot of different things within the practise, you know, your phone provider, whatever it may be.

And it's not going to have a massive impact on the practise. But if you think about software, software communicates to absolutely everything that you're doing, and every single person that works in the practise, from, you know, nurses, receptionists to practise managers, will be using that system in some way. So any outage or any time without that information that's key to you, to your day to day business, is, is crucial.

So, so the cloud-based side of things just allows you to have that much more secure, and the up time is much better, you know. It it doesn't go down unless somebody hacks it, which hasn't happened in 16 years, so I, I doubt they're going to be able to manage now, you know, you're always going to have your software online, which is, which is really important. We've just done a survey of of the vets, and one of the things that we do the survey for is that we can actually find out what they want us to do, what subjects they want us to cover for for next year, what they like about the websites, what isn't quite so good.

And what they think we're doing well and what we're not doing so well, and that's the way obviously one of our value works is Kaizen, which is continual improvement, and I know, you know, you sure, you share a similar view to that in that you do a lot of listening to your clients. Tell us a little bit about how you listen to to clients and how that affects maybe your road map of development and so on. Yeah, of course.

I mean, one of the things that we kind of learned very early on from kind of other businesses that I've been in as well is that you can have a great product or a product that you think is great, but the reality of the matter is, you know, it's got to be great for the people that are using it. Now, I'm not a vet, you know, our developers certainly aren't vets, they're developers, and they're very good developers, but. You know, for them to be able to develop the right product for the customer, we need to listen to our customers.

So I would say that over 50% of the development that we do on, on a day to day basis comes directly from our clients. You know, if a client comes to us and says, hey, we really like the software, but we could really do it we're doing X. Then we will say great, OK, well, let's get together and you know, we'll have a developing with the developers and with the vet to understand the why.

Why do you want it to work this way, and how do we get it to work that way, and what other ramifications is it gonna have for the practise? How is that going to aid the practise, become more efficient? So we have a, a, a full meeting with them to take down the notes and then we put a mockup together, and then that mockup gets sent to the client to make sure that, you know, what we're kind of designing is along the lines of what was understood.

And then if that's the case, then we'll go and develop that and then we'll launch it. Now, one vet will give us an idea and, you know, thousands of vet vets will benefit from that idea. That's, that's how we would like to work, you know.

We're not a perfect software. I don't think there's a perfect software out there is the reality, but one of the things that Provet do very, very well is listen to the customers, and we know where we're weak, and we're always improving those things. And, and as I say, like you said before, that's coming directly from the vets and from the vet nurses and the people that matter, because our clients are what make us tick at the end of the day.

I think it, you know, you're really right it. I, I really, spent a lot of time looking at customer service because there is so much poor customer service out there and it's so good to hear somebody who actually listens to the clients. I know you do focus groups as well, don't you, which are really useful for you.

Yeah, we, we have a focus group in the UK at the moment, it's the kind of trial really for, for the other countries, but what we do is we get together on the last Thursday of every single month and I have a, a kind of a varied audience, if you will, from, you know, mixed practises, small animal practises, mobile practises, equine practises, you know, and we all get together to kind of, you know, talk about the good and the bad, and it's an open platform for them, for them to be brutally honest with us, you know, if it, if it's good, then we want to hear it. If it's bad, then we, we need to hear it, you know, so we, we, we don't shy away from it, you know, there's a lot of companies out there with software that they kind of bury their head in the sand if there's a problem, and we don't want to do that, we wanna. We want to know what problems we've got, because if we know what problems we've got, then we can start working on fixing them.

But if we don't know, it's impossible to do. But also what we do is we do, normally we tend to try and do 2 user days a year as well. Now we've done those on campus at Edinburgh University, because they're one of our clients.

We've done them at our offices and we've done them in, in various different countries. Obviously with COVID, it's been slightly different, so we've been doing them the last two that we've done, we've done online, but. Once the COVID restrictions kind of allow, we will be kind of putting those together and those user days are for anybody to come to, from any of our, you know, customers from any country or anybody that's not a customer that wants to learn a little bit more about what we're doing and our road maps and, you know, our vision and all that kind of stuff.

I think it's really interesting, . When I had my own practise, you know, I, I look at a few systems and obviously have a few systems in the practise. And I was always a bit kind of looking and saying, gosh, there's no really fantastic system out there.

They were all a bit, did the job, but that was about it and didn't really know how to get them to work completely, so there was a lot of the software that we didn't understand. We were very keen on getting things like stock right and there wasn't always that support and I was really impressed to hear about the stuff you do, a lot of your trainers for the systems of vet nurses, so they're not just geeks who speak in a foreign language, which sounds a bit like English, but we as vets really don't understand the nurses can bring the two parts together, the more techy part, but also the, the veterinary parts, and then actually. There's, there's training videos and exams so that you get an understanding of how good that vet or receptionist, receptionist is at using the system and, and obviously.

We know then how we can improve people if they're, if they're not as good, you know, they can, they can have more lessons and so on, so that is something I've always felt has been missing on a lot of systems that commitment to training and to using the whole, the whole package. Yeah, definitely, and it's something that we, we took the consultation about 18 months ago, probably to make all of our hires in support, training, implementation, anything that's going to have first contact directly with the practise. We wanted those people to be vets or vet nurses.

So far we haven't managed to convince a vet to come on board. We were very close to getting a very good vet that we would have loved to have on board, but, but all of our team at the moment are vet nurses, qualified vet nurses that have been doing it for a long time, and It it's the little things, you know, what vets and vet nurses might talk about and the problems that you might have in a practise to anybody else that's not, not from the vet world would seem menial. There wouldn't be big problems at all, but actually what they're talking about are big problems that they have a massive knock-on effect within the practise.

So having somebody that's been there understands it, and that can talk the same language to them, we think it is the most important thing. But not only just for the customers, when it comes to development, having those people in the business that, Understand why certain things should work in a certain way. So when a vet's telling us, I want it developed this way because of this, those vet nurses will really understand that and can help the developers create the correct development for the clinic.

And for me, ever since we've kind of gone to that model, it's made a massive, massive difference, and we're very, very lucky that we have a lot of clients that are very, very happy with our software. And that shout from the rooftops, you know, on the forums, on, on, on Facebook and other areas, and we've just done some video testimonials with one of our clients and we've got 3 or 4 of the clients that are offering to do it because they really want to get involved. And, you know, that for me is the key part, you know, it, we're a growing business, we are getting more and more renowned within the UK, but for me, the only way that we do that is through word of mouth and happy customers.

I wanted to move on to to one of my little pet subjects, which is of course we're going through terrible pandemic and obviously lots of terrible things that happened during that time, but actually. One of the positives has been that encouragement for what is quite a conservative profession sometimes to become more digitally savvy. And I know that you've been really leading the way on that and, and also a lot of the universities are also very interested in what you're doing, which is fascinating.

I know you said my alma mater, Liverpool is, is going through the process of changing to the system as well. How do you think or how have you found? With the pandemic.

That have people been more open to change, . During that time, and, and how have you sort of assisted practises in, in rapidly digitally transforming as they've had to do. Well, as we know, when COVID hit, it was a massive uncertainty and I think as it kind of unravelled, we realised how much of a big change it was gonna have within the industry, with it with all the industries really.

And one of the biggest things that hit the, the veterinary industry was the, the fact that obviously people couldn't come into the practise. Now when your business relies on people coming into the practise to be able to see the pets, that's a, that's a big issue. So, as, as we know, what's been happening at the moment is people have been kind of coming to the car park, phoning in the practise, or knocking on the door to say they've arrived and staring at the receptionist until they get the attention, which has been uncomfortable, I would say, for receptionists and for vet clinics.

So we were, we had a beta, telemedicine functionality that we were planning on launching later in the year. So we launched it and we gave it free to all of our customers to be able to aid them a little bit, you know, for the people that couldn't, you know, maybe travel to the practise and. You know, just trying to help people out at that time.

And then we developed, something called, well, pre-registration and self-checking, which basically, on the back of your appointment, you would receive a, a, a secondary email, about 5 minutes before your appointment was due. You can actually time it for 5 or 10 minutes, but. And you would receive an appointment confirmation with a click to be able to log to self-register.

And what that means is you could click onto the button and you could change the, the kind of the stuff that you do do reception. So speaking to the receptionist about the fact that you've changed your mobile number or your email address changed or you've moved house or any of those details, you could update those details via the, the email. Or the text that was sent out to you before your appointment.

And then on top of that, we had a self-checking service. So you could say if the, if the practise had a parking bay, you could say I'm in parking bay 12 or 3 to make it easier for the vets and nurses to know, 1, where to collect the animal from, and 2, where to take the, the pet back to, you know, to be able to charge. But secondly, To, to just kind of aid that transition, so you could, there was a a box where you could put in, you know, I'm in a red Ford Fiesta or my registration is X, and that way it was making it very, very easy for the practises to kind of deal with that because, We know that that was a terrible time, and, and very confusing to, to the vets and the nurses that were working, so we wanted to try and help out.

I liked also your collaboration with AGM on card payments because that can be a bit messy as well, can't it? And I think it sounds like that's been a big help for the vets trying to take payments and taking them remotely for a telemedicine consult or even for things like direct debits or standing orders for. For payment plans.

Yeah, we, we were. With all the integrations and all the, the different things that we wanted to do with Prove, we, we were looking at various different card providers because one of the things that. What's happening in the vet world is that the card reader doesn't communicate to the system, on most systems, which seems daft when we can do it in so many other ways, you know, we, we've got so many different ways of being able to pay with Apple Pay and all these other things and in veterinary for some reason there was no connectivity to card readers, which just baffled me really.

So we kind of looked at a lot of different providers and we ended up going with a provider like you say called Agen. Because they allowed us to do a marketplace integration, and basically what that means is that we give you the card readers, we give you the rates, we do all of the integration, we do all of the work with it. So if something goes wrong, it's one stop shop, you come to us and we fix it.

But more, more so is the functionality that's gonna allow. First of all, obviously the integration with the card reader, which is pretty basic and we, we all see in everyday life. So that was one area, but then there was other areas to it as well.

So it allows us to do recurring payments. So if you think about health plans and, and how health plans work in the UK at the moment, you know, the, the, the, the, the veterinary practises that are out there kind of always have to use a third party company for taking the direct debits and, you know, who's paid, who hasn't paid. So they give you what plans you can have, what you should charge for the plans, what the terms and conditions are, and so on.

But with this, it allows the practises to have their own plans with their own. Products with their own terms and conditions, with their own, you know, whatever they want to do, they can do it. And all we do is we can take one payment and tokenize the card and then it kind of almost does a recurring payment like you would do for any subscription based like Netflix or anything else like that.

So it means that that payment goes out every single month. And if for any reason the card is declined or the card is cancelled or anything else like that, we have a direct integration with the, the payment platform which communicates back into Prohibit cloud and then automatically suspend suspends the health plan, which means that any of the free products that you might have dispensed out will no longer be dispensed out until you've communicated with that customer to see what's gone on. So that's gonna change, I think, the way that.

Plans work in practise in the UK. We're very, very excited about the launch of that in September. But it's also going to allow other things like click to pay.

So that means when you send out an invoice to the customer, the customer will have a button on their invoice where they can click the button on the email and it will open up a payment portal. They can then make that payment directly to the payment portal, and the payment portal will integrate directly into Probate cloud. So if they make a payment.

300 pounds that will automatically deduct from Probert, which will save practise managers or whoever it is that does the finance side of things for the practise, having to do that reconciliation and look, OK, Mr. Wood's paid £300 today, then go to the software and do that manual work. So the, the time savings involved in that are huge, and, and nearer to the end of the year, we're going to be able to do payments as well.

So what that's going to allow us to do is if Somebody books an online booking, for instance, then if your online booking for a consult is 40 pounds, they will pay that 40 pounds there and then on the website through the booking system, and then that will come into Pro Cloud, which will then stop a lot of the, no shows that we tend to get, which obviously it's not just a waste of time, it's annoying and it's a waste of money as well. So it's gonna make the the practises more profitable. One last thing, we're a very purpose centred business.

What we try and do is, is make a difference and we try to partner with, with people who are similarly inclined. So for example, last year before the pandemic, our virtual conference had a section on rabies, and that was in partnership with MSD who do amazing work in Africa. They donate rabies vaccines out there.

And of course, as you probably know, there's still a lot of people who die of rabies in Africa and this is helping to reduce those numbers. And I was really interested in hearing what you as a larger organisation do around the CSR, the corporate social responsibility. I know there's some really nice things going on there.

Yeah, I mean, as, as, as we've said before, we, we're a larger company called Nord Health, and we have many different kind of arms to kind of what we do, all, all software based, but behind that, the, the, the father of our CEO Charles McBain, he has, another business called The Moja Capital, and what they do is they do a lot of charitable work as well. They've done a lot of work for . And focusing on education and environment and healthcare in developing countries.

So some of the profits of our business, as in Nord Health, go towards promoter capital to help out with those things. So it is nice to know that some of the work that you're doing and some of the, the, you know, the, the, the money that you're generating is going to a good cause and to help out, you know, other countries that, that need a little bit of support and need a little bit of help from us. So it's, it's a nice feeling.

No, that's great, Matthew. Listen, it's been really great speaking to you and, love all the things that you're doing. I'm particularly interested in all the innovative things that you've been up to over the last 12 months, making life easier for the vets in practise.

Obviously I am a vet myself and I know it's been a really tough year, so even those little things like knowing which car you've got to look into to find the dog, is a huge help. So thanks for everything that you do for the profession. Oh, we, we're more than welcome.

I mean, for us, it, we really do want to change the way that veterinary works. We think that too much time is spent not doing vet work and vet vet nurse work, you know, there's too much time, time spent at the computer, and what we're trying to do is kind of eradicate that time at the computer so people can do what they're good at, which is be vets and be nurses and, and help out those animals and, and, and their customers, and that's what it's all about. That's great.

Thanks very much, Matthew and hope you've enjoyed it and hopefully see you on an episode again very soon. No problem at all. Thank you very much for your time.

Thank you, bye bye.