VMP 251: Transform Your Veterinary Practice's Marketing With Virtual Assitants

Brandon Breshears (00:00:01) - Welcome to the Veterinary Marketing Podcast,where it's all about how to attract, engage, and retain clients to yourveterinary hospital using digital marketing. My name is Brandon Breshears.Thank you so much for taking the time to listen. Today's episode, we are gonnabe talking about how to build systems specifically through the use of marketingassistance and virtual assistance to help grow your practice. So this episodeis perfect for somebody who is super busy. You wish you had more time, you wishyou had more systems in place, and you wish that you could get more done,especially when it came to marketing. So if you say to yourself, I know Ishould be doing this, but you're not doing something, and if you think that woulddrive revenue or make your life easier or make your life better, this is gonnabe really, really helpful for you.

Brandon Breshears(00:00:44) - So before we begin, I want to mention just a couple of things.First, if you haven't done so already, be sure to subscribe an iTunes, Spotify,Google player, wherever, get your podcast from. Second, I would like to mentionthis episode as being sponsored by two websites by Brad Haven. We have used vetequipment.com and new vet equipment.com. You can save money when you buy usedvet veterinary equipment, everything from cages, kennels pumps, X-rayequipment, lasers, ultrasound, dental equipment, surgery equipment, labequipment from vaxis, idx, and hesca tables, tubs and sinks, vet trucks and vetboxes. What do you have to sell@usedvetequipment.com? They bring the buyer andseller together. Also, if you're looking for new vet equipment with amazingwarranties, check out new vet equipment.com where we show you the priceupfront. You get digital x-ray equipment, dental, x-ray equipment, ultrasoundequipment, l e d, surgery, lighting, surgery tables,autoclaves@newvetequipment.com.

Brandon Breshears(00:01:35) - You'll clearly see the price on every item for sale, and you'll beable to check out the warranties that you can buy without regret atnewvetequipment.com. We show you the price and give you a great warranty. Uh,awesome. Let's get into today's episode. So for today, we are talking to TobeBrockner from katuva.com. He's one of the co-founders of Katuva, and I foundTobe, I can't remember how, uh, we got connected on Facebook, but he postedabout his company Katuva and what they were doing, and I just so happens I hada, a big need for tons of stuff in my own company. I'm working really hard ondelivering a lot of new cool content and training. And part of that is there'stwo parts to my business, right? Fulfillment of services, running ads forveterinary hospitals and helping veterinary hospitals grow their practices. Andthen also working on this podcast and the content on the backend that goes intothis.

Brandon Breshears(00:02:26) - And so I reached out to Tobe and he helped me to get a virtualassistant set up, and I went through his six week training program that he hasand that he talks about. And if you wanna go to veterinary marketingpodcast.com/assistant, you can check it out, it'll take you there. So that'sveterinary marketing podcast.com/assistant. But, um, you know, met through Tobeand the process that he has in onboarding and helping you to really get greatcommunication set up, great system set ups that you're gonna be successful. Ireally can't recommend this enough. So if you are interested, again, veterinarymarketing podcast.com/assistant. But without further ado, here's my interviewwith Tobe, where we talk about how to use a virtual assistant to market andgrow. All right, so in this week's episode, we have Tobe Brockner. Thank you somuch for being on the podcast, Tobe. I really appreciate it.

Tobe Brockner (00:03:18) -No, absolutely man. Thanks for having me.

Brandon Breshears(00:03:20) - So pretty cool. Um, we got connected to you because I'm actuallyusing Katuva and your virtual assistant, and she's actually gonna be the oneediting this podcast, so that is kind of cool, actually.

Tobe Brockner (00:03:31) -I have to make sure we say nice things about her then

Brandon Breshears(00:03:33) - Janelle, thank you so much Janelle, for getting this done. Butlet's talk about first off, who, who you are and how you got started, kind ofin the world of, of digital marketing and things.

Tobe Brockner (00:03:44) -Yeah, so I, uh, I live in Boise, Idaho. I actually grew up in Louisiana and,uh, moved up here in 1998. So I consider myself in Idaho and now, and, uh,we'll probably die here hopefully, um, really love it. But, uh, I went to BoiseState. Um, I got a degree in international business because I can speak fluentSpanish and didn't have to take the classes. That was the sole thought I gaveinto choosing my major. Um, but I was always really drawn to marketing. Thatwas always kinda my thing. And so, and I graduated in December of 2002 fromBoise State, and I, uh, started a marketing company in August of 2003. I wasworking as an intern at a financial advisory place and, uh, really just kind offell in love with the, I, I didn't like the work, but I did like finding newclients.

Tobe Brockner (00:04:41) -That was always kind of gave me a thrill. Um, I was working straightcommission, so it was do that or starve. So I kind of had to get good at itreally fast. And I built my first, uh, started my first marketing company,basically selling leads to insurance agents and financial advisors. That waskinda our gig. And did that for a long time until about 2014 when my partnersand I had some philosophical differences on the direction of the business whereit should go. Uh, I thought we should move more into the digital space. This wasbefore really Facebook was getting heavy into ads. Uh, I don't even know ifFacebook groups existed at the time, but, um, Twitter had just rolled out a newad platform and Google was ramping up their ads campaigns platform. So I waskind of just seeing everything move towards social media, online, digitalmarketing, and that was where I thought we should go.

Tobe Brockner (00:05:34) -Uh, my partners were basically like, why are we rocking the boat? We're makinga ton of money doing this with a call center. And I just saw the riding on thewall, uh, within two years of me leaving, that business went under. Um, causeeverybody started moving online. Yeah, exactly. And, uh, that, that's where Iwas. So I built another, uh, we called it a creative agency. It wasn'tnecessarily a marketing agency, although that was a big part of it. But webuilt websites and we did logo design and we did ad campaigns and all thecreative stuff. We helped people set up podcasts and YouTube channels and allthose things. So, uh, ran that for about, uh, until about 2018 or so. Um, I hadabout 10 employees at the time. For some reason they thought it was a, uh,democracy at that business, and at best it was a benevolent dictatorship, andthey couldn't understand that I was the one that was gonna be calling theshots.

Tobe Brockner (00:06:30) -And then while I valued their input, at the end of the day, it was my money andbusiness on the line, not theirs. And so I started looking for ways to, how doI replace what I'm doing? I just kinda got sick of running this business withall these employees. My payroll was running about 40 to $45,000 a month, and Ijust was getting sick of it. So I, I basically fired everybody, but I was stillhaving to deliver on creative work. I'm not a designer. I don't, I don't do anyof the creative stuff. So I, I was looking at hiring a virtual assistant fromthe Philippines to kind of step in and do that, and I found a graphic designerwho could help me with the creative, and then I, it, it just sort of grew fromthere. I, I made a lot of mistakes in hiring the first, the demo graphicdesigner I hired, he actually stuck with me for about four years, five yearsuntil he moved onto a corporate position.

Tobe Brockner (00:07:22) -But, um, I made a lot of mistakes hiring people, failed multiple times, didn'tknow what I was doing. And over the course of time to sort of establish thisprogram, this consistent system for hiring, training, and managing thesevirtual systems. And that's where I, when I, when I started looking at otherbusiness owners, I, I realized that the need was very great, that they were inthe same boat. They couldn't afford to, or they didn't want to hire somebodylocal. Um, it was maybe cost-prohibitive or they just didn't think that theywould be able to manage that person. And so, um, I started teaching people howto hire virtual assistants for the Philippines, and that's kind of where Katubawas born. Very cool.

Brandon Breshears(00:08:04) - So again, you kind of described what in your opinion is a virtualassistant, and, um, just as for people who aren't familiar with that and alsoYeah. Um, the kinds of things that you have them do.

Tobe Brockner (00:08:19) -Yeah, for sure. So I think the first time I ever ran across the, the phrasevirtual assistant was probably in Tim Ferris's book, four Hour Work Week. Ithink a lot of us, yeah, in the marketing space who are kind of runningfreelance marketing agencies or small marketing agencies, we all sort of lookto that book as this dream though. I can, I can create this product that sellsitself online and uh, I can have a, a virtual assistant from India or Pakistanor Bangladesh or Vietnam or Philippines run it for me. Uh, it was veryseductive. And I, I, I even, that was back in 2007. I mean, I had even experimentedwith hiring virtual assistants from those countries to come in and do varioustasks for me. So they were bookkeeping even. Uh, a lot of creative work. Solike a lot of graphic design.

Tobe Brockner (00:09:06) -So all of our social media posts and everything, our, our videos, they werecreated by, uh, virtual assistants. Um, you can, but you can have 'em do prettymuch anything you need 'em to do. A lot of the, the tasks that we have ourvirtual assistants do now are even on the admin side. So screening emails anduh, managing calendars, organizing the CRM, building out all the backendworkflows on a CRM, for example. So I have a hole when somebody schedules a, acall with me, there's a whole series of things that happen on the back end. Andmy virtual assistant Jelly is her name, uh, along with another virtualassistant, my main VA, uh, her name is Mylene. They built that together for meand, uh, basically said, here's a series of emails, we need you to write 'em.And I just wrote the emails and they plugged them in and uh, turned theautomations on, and now I don't have to touch it.

Tobe Brockner (00:09:57) -It saves me hours and hours of time, um, which is the goal. That's, that'sreally what we're trying to do, is we're trying to buy our time back. So whenyou think about all the little things that you do every single day, you, whenyou isolate 'em and look at 'em individually, they don't seem to be that big ofa deal. You spend 15 minutes a day on email, or you spend an hour a weekmanaging your social media, which most people spend way more than that. Buteven an hour a week, you do that week in and week out for a full year. That'sover 50 hours a year that you're spinning on publish, just publishing stuff toyour social media. So you divide that by even a 10 hour workday. You basicallyare saving yourself an entire work week by not having to do that work.

Tobe Brockner (00:10:41) -And so you, you start to think to yourself, well, what could I do with thatextra 50 hours every year? I could go on vacation, or I could spend more timewith my family, or I could do more, uh, high value things like meeting withpotential clients or customers or, or whatever. And so there's all these thingsthat you could be doing that you're not doing probably or you're not doing aswell as you could simply because you don't have the time and you're bogged downin the sort of day-to-day, uh, minutiae of all of these different tasks. Andthen you think about, well, I could hire a VA to come in and do that for lessthan eight bucks an hour. All of a sudden hiring a VA from overseas doesn'tseem so crazy. Where it used to be that was sort of novel and everybody waslike, there's no way that would work or whatever. But the world is shrunk downa lot, you know what I mean? We, we can literally, instantly communicate withsomeone in the Philippines. I can pay them through PayPal instantaneously. Theycan send me files almost instantaneously through the, the internet. It, it'sjust a really amazing time that we're living in.

Brandon Breshears (00:11:39)- Definitely. Um, def definitely true. And, um, I don't know about forveterinary hospitals what kind of admin tasks they do, but I'm sure that I, cuzI've never worked in a practice, but, um, my audience obviously works inpractice, so I'm sure there's just a million things that they could be usingVAs for. But from a marketing perspective, like I know that almost everyveterinary hospital has a list of things they know they should be doing andthey just don't get 'em done. Whether it's sending out emails or repurposingcontent or, I mean, if you had a Facebook post, you could have your VA go putthat into chatGPT make a Google business profile post for you. Or I mean,especially with chatGPT, now you can rewrite content that you've done. And forthe most part I've seen, um, the Philippine uh, virtual assistants are reallyhigh quality because they are almost native speakers. Um, there's definitely alittle bit of, it's just really, really high quality work that gets done. Um,and is, is that why you chose the Philippines? Cuz I, I've heard that theyhave, I mean, culturally very similar like movies and things that are in the USare also playing in the Philippines and things like that. So I why did youchoose the Philippines versus other like India? Uh, there's a

Tobe Brockner (00:12:57) -Variety of reasons. Uh, I mean I've, I've hired virtual assistants from allover the world, from, uh, India and Pakistan and like I said, Vietnam,Bangladesh, even Peru, Bolivia, uh, Eastern Europe, um, and the Russian, formerRussian, Soviet Union from Ukraine or Lithuanian or various places. Um, Ialways would go back to the Philippines. And the main reason is just becausethe culture there is so different than everywhere else in the world. The peoplethere are super kind, they're very ambitious and loyal. They crave stabilityover almost anything else. And if you show them that you will be loyal to themand that you will treat them right, they'll, they'll stay with you forever.And, and they, they are always anxious to work. Uh, their quality of output isexceptional. Uh, they're English, it's the second language in the Philippines.The Filipino is the, the national language used to be called the Tagalog andthey, they changed it to the national language.

Tobe Brockner (00:14:03) -Now it's Filipino, but uh, almost everybody there speaks great English. Theyunderstand it. Uh, they grew up watching American television and movies, soit's, uh, they, they get the s slang even. And um, it's kind of funny hearing'em say things like, what's up yo and stuff, you know, just teasing them, thatkind of a thing, keeping it light and fun. But, um, yeah, I just, they're just,uh, it's, it's indescribable the amount of value that they're always willing tobring to the table. Um, there was a interview process that we have for when wehire VAs for our clients. And one of the VAs that we were hiring one time, hername is Lady Lee, we were placing her with a client and um, we, he had alreadymade the decision to hire her. So we were doing our onboarding call when wewere doing the calls with her before it was always in her background.

Tobe Brockner (00:14:54) -You could see, uh, her house and, you know, they worked from home most of thetime and you could see her house in, in the background. She was working likekitchen table or whatever. And then, but on the onboarding call, when she goton, we noticed that in the background there was kind of a, in the, on the sidethere was this bed with a railing up and an IV bag hanging down. Like it was obviouslyshe was in like a hospital room. And we got on and, and I was like, Hey, um, soLady Lee, what's going on? Like, why are you in a hospital? And she's like, oh,my daughter had some sort of allergic reaction. We had to take her to theemergency room last night and they're doing some tests and trying to clear upher lungs and all these different things and, but I didn't wanna miss the carand leave a bad impression.

Tobe Brockner (00:15:32) -And, um, I was just like, you know, hey, let's, we'll stop here. We'llreschedule, no big deal. Go sit with your daughter and you know, family firsttake care of that. That's the important thing. But it was, it just struck mehow, uh, crazy that was, that she was willing to do that to make, to not make abad impression. That was, that was the sole reason cuz she was like, this jobis important to me. I wanna show up and be professional and make sure that theyknow that I can be reliable hon. And that was just a huge thing. Um, and reallyspeaks to the character. Uh, if, if I had to point to one story in an arsenalof stories that I have about these people, that's the one I trot out the mostbecause it really just encompasses what Filipino culture is all about. Very

Brandon Breshears(00:16:18) - Cool. Yeah, that's been, that's been my experience too. Um, it'sjust really, really great work ethic and um, very dependable. And so that's,that's really cool. Um, and I've been going through your, your six week processof onboarding. So first off, I've, I've hired VAs through Upwork in the past.It wasn't Upwork at the time, but um, the alternative is to go to a site, um,can't remember even the sites now, but you just get flooded. I remember I gotsomething like 200 applications, uh, when I did that. And so just hoping andpicking right cuz I didn't really have a system for that yet. But, but yourprocess is pretty cool. Um, I can you, can you tell us about your process andyour, your onboarding system? Cause I think it's, it's really beneficial.

Tobe Brockner (00:17:03) -Yeah, absolutely. We call it Empower Plus. Uh, it's like you said, it's a sixweek program. Um, and as a side note, when we run job ads, we also get about200 applications. The difference is we weed through all of those so you don'thave to. And that's one of the biggest benefits. So going through this in PowerPlus program with us is the first call that we do is a kickoff call, uh, wherewe try to understand the client's needs and the types of tasks that they'regonna have 'em do. So when you talk about, you know, like, I'm not sure what Ihave veterinarians use them for, there's a whole slew of different thingsanywhere from anything from social media to, uh, keeping up with a blog toediting if they run a podcast or a YouTube channel. Um, again, managing theirCRM and building out those workflows and automations, all of those, no matterwhat business you're in, whether you're a a a bricklayer or, or a aveterinarian, you need a backend follow up system for leads and clients tostimulate referrals and all of those types of things.

Tobe Brockner (00:18:01) -And the VAs can come in and they can help do all of that kind of stuff. So wetry to figure out what are those tasks in that call, that first kickoff call.And we have our clients take a disc assessment. Uh, we have the VAs take a discassessment and then we try to match you up compatibility wise on the DISCprofile, but also the skillsets that you will need for your VA to have. Callnumber two is a series of interview calls from a pre-vetted list of candidatesthat we found for you. And so if you, like, you'll remember you went through,we, we basically stacked up three interviews back to back to back. They were 20minutes long, so for an hour and we recorded 'em. And you just kind of go inand you try to figure out are they gonna be a good fit for me personality wise?

Tobe Brockner (00:18:44) -Like, am I gonna be able to get along with this person for the next five years?Cause you already know they're vetted for their skills. You already know thatthey have the skills that you're gonna need because we've already done thatlegwork. Uh, once you make your decision on a va, which one you want, we havecall number three, which is a combination onboarding, training and uh, uh,managing and communication we call it. So it's broken up into three parts. Wedo a standard onboarding like you would with any new employee, you give 'emaccess to if you need to give 'em access to your social media accounts or yourdrive or whatever. A lot of clients choose to use the password manager like LastPassor something to let them log into sensitive accounts. Um, I've never actuallyhad to do that. I've never in seven years of doing this, I've never had anissue with the VA getting in somewhere where they didn't need to get into orsabotaging anything or anything.

Tobe Brockner (00:19:34) -But it's always up to the client if they wanna, if they wanna do that. And youcan do that for a while until you kind of build that trust level up orwhatever. But, uh, so we do the onboarding and then the second portion of thatcall is all about systems and, and training our, both our client and the VA onhow to work together to build systems and to create a task management system sothat they stay busy. The client knows how to give them tasks and projects tomake sure that they get done. And then the third part of that call is allabout, uh, how to communicate and manage your new virtual assistant. I've foundthat this is one of the places where most people fail. They hire a new va,they've never done it before, they don't really know how to manage them orcommunicate with them.

Tobe Brockner (00:20:16) -So during that third portion of that third call, that's what we teach them howto do. We use another, uh, personality assessment we call the, uh, that'scalled the Enneagram again, we had the client take the Enneagram, we have the,um, VA take the Enneagram and we teach them how to communicate with one anotherbased on their Enneagram number and profile. And then calls four, five through,uh, four, five and six are just, we call 'em over the shoulder. It's basicallywe create a task list on call number three to work on for the week. And then oncall number four, we review with the VA and with the client. We get on and Iask them, how did it go? Do you need help with anything? Do you need feedbackon anything? You know, we're here as a resource to make sure that they'rekeeping the, the uh, train on the tracks.

Tobe Brockner (00:20:59) -And then we do the same thing and call number five and the same thing and callnumber six. And by the time you get to call number six, you have hopefullyestablished a very good solid working relationship with your new virtualassistant with our assistants. And then you're kind of off and running on yourown, uh, at that point. So it's a, it's a program. I'm, I'm really proud of theprogram we've built cause it, it works so far a hundred percent of the timewith exactly the way we designed it. And everybody has just been thrilled withthe results so far.

Brandon Breshears(00:21:30) - It's, it's worked really well for me too. And I don't, if I knowfor sure if I had tried to get a, uh, either a marketing assistant in generalor either stateside or virtual assistant, I wouldn't have gone through thesteps of understanding disc assessment and how to communicate with the new, newpeople that we'd be hiring and stuff. And so it's been, that's been a big helpjust in terms of figuring out how I, my communication style and then alsotheirs, cuz that's always a, a big headache. Um, but the cool thing too isthat, um, Janelle has been proficient in making systems, which is so coolbecause when she sets something up for me, like whether she's helping me tobuild out a course or publish a podcast, she creates a complete system ofhere's the s o p for that thing. So then first time she does it, she documentsit, it's there. And then if I ever was to re replace that or she was to say,you know what, I'm gonna go get a new job like somewhere else that would justbe in place and I would plug, plug a new person in. So every single time shebuilt an asset, that's a system for me, which is awesome. Um, and it helps to,yeah,

Tobe Brockner (00:22:34) -We really harp on that a lot with, with the VAs when they come in. Um, we'reconstantly talking to them about every time you do a new task, you need todocument the process and you need to, you need to house that process somewherethat's, you can find it very quickly. So again, like even, even if Janelledidn't leave, even if she, you know, you just decided she was so busy, youneeded to hire another virtual assistant to help and you wanted that person totake over that task, you're not reinventing the wheel and you're not spendinghours and hours training them. They can literally go in like we have a bloggingsystem that I just went through and recorded myself doing a blog for the firsttime. The first time I did one, I turned that over to Jelly, jelly, watched thevideo, she had it transcribed, and then she created an S o P A checklist, step-by-stepguide on how to do it, along with the tutorial video that I had created.

Tobe Brockner (00:23:29) -Put that in our drive section where our training stuff goes. And now I canliterally have someone go in there, watch the training, print off the little guidethe checklist, and they're up and running within 20, 30 minutes they can,they'll know exactly how to publish blogs to our website. Um, and that's prettyamazing if you think about it. Cause I mean that, that took me several hours tofigure out on my own, but now that I have this system in place for it, I canhand it off in less than a half an hour. So you, you put in a little bit oftime and investment in, in building the system in the beginning. But the beautyis a lot of the times, like you said, you don't even have to do that becauseyour VA's doing it for you. You just say, Hey, here's a task I need you tocomplete. They go and do it, but then they document themselves doing it so theycan create the s sop document and it's like this little, this littleduplicating machine, uh, that you plug in on input and the output is not onlyis the output done, but the output is replicatable over and over and overagain. Exactly the way it needs to be done every single time.

Brandon Breshears(00:24:33) - Yep, exactly. And so if it's something that either you can do onetime and record it, it, and that's pretty much all marketing and forveterinarians too, and veterinary hospitals, uh, you know, having, like let'ssay you went through and each month you created an email campaign that wasweekly and then you had your, your virtual system go up and set that up foryou. You could just reuse that every single year and it'd be set up once. And Ithink approaching your marketing as marketing systems that you build as assets thatare gonna work for years to come, it makes the marketing activities ROIincrease dramatically. Cuz you can reuse those things and you know, that's justso, so much benefit plus I bet too. And when I mentioned I don't know what goeson in practice, I'm sure there's administrative stuff that, like you can havethem build out SOPs for hiring new people and just all kinds of things that, Imean if, if it's a project that you want documented and create an s so p aroundnot just for marketing but for anything else too. I'm sure that they could helpwith that. Whether there's,

Tobe Brockner (00:25:33) -Well there should be a system,

Brandon Breshears(00:25:34) - Training system. What, anything. Yeah.

Tobe Brockner (00:25:36) -Yeah. What happens when we bring on a new client, when a new client walks inthe door, what happens? You ask 99% of business owners that question and theywill struggle to answer because it's not a system and it's just randomfreewheeling it every time a new person walks through the doors. But if you hadthis client experience system that you document, okay, here's what we need tohave happen every single time, um, all of a sudden it becomes a much moreconsistent experience. I mean, you think about, and this maybe not the best,uh, analogy, but if you think about, I, I remember going to, um, you know, wewere, we were traveling with my kids and we were, I, I don't even rememberwhere we were going, um, somewhere in Oregon, I think. And we were tired andhungry and we were like, where do we, you know, we need to eat something.

Tobe Brockner (00:26:26) -And there's like these two restaurants. One is a McDonald's and one is somerandom place that we didn't know what it was and look kind of dingy and notgreat. We, so we went to McDonald's cause we knew what we were going to expect,whether it's in Oregon or if it's in Russia, you, the McDonald's are almostexactly the same. And you know what to expect. You have that consistency. Andso that I, I think is a very underrated marketing tool. The the client experience.It needs to be consistent every single time. And then you start to look at allof the little touch points along the way. Like for example, anytime a clientrefers us, someone, uh, we had this happen a while back, we get them a smallgift just as a thank you. And, and so we had a lady she sent, she actually sentus four clients in a row.

Tobe Brockner (00:27:13) -And I sent, I had mylene, my, my executive va. I said, uh, we need to, we needto figure out a system process for what happens when we get a referral. And oneof 'em is, well, let's send 'em a little gift. And Mylene found a flower shophere in town, uh, in Boise where I'm at. And this is where this client happensto be as well shown a flower shop. I told her, here's my budget for the, forthe flowers, for the gift. Uh, she found several examples, put 'em in aPowerPoint and sent 'em over to me and I said, I want option B. And Marlene'sbeen with me for two and a half years, so I really trust her a lot. I gave hermy credit card. I don't have any issues giving her my credit card informationlike that, but she took my credit card information, she ordered the flowers,like all I had to do, it took me two minutes. All I had to do was pick thearrangement that I wanted. But that's now been, that's, that portion has beenactually documented and added to our client experience referral system. And ithappens the same way every single time now. And I don't have to worry aboutthat. I don't have to think is that being done or not? Because it's part of ourexperience. It's part of our system that is deployed every single time. Andthat's huge.

Brandon Breshears(00:28:23) - Definitely. And that's, that's really good thinking too. I mean,with, with your practice, if you had a system for people who got new puppies,for example, like you had a different kind of personal touchpoint that you had,um, automated, or if somebody did euthanasia for example, and you just sent alittle flower arrangement or something, I, yeah, that would make a difference.And I bet there's very few practices that send out like a flower arrangementafter euthanasia and that would just be appreciated like crazy, you know? Soyeah,

Tobe Brockner (00:28:53) -That would be super thoughtful. But again, it's where you start to identify,okay, what do we want this process to look like mm-hmm. , what are all thelittle touchpoints along the way? And then how do we systemize thosetouchpoints? So it could start with the, the whole thing could be built insideof a crm, a client re you know, uh, relationship management software where thewhole thing gets started with the technician who performed the euthanasia, goesinto the CRM and tags them as, you know, euthanasia client. And that kicks offa whole series of backend things that are already pre-built and automated foryou where they get the gift, they get a maybe a, a condolence email of somekind, I don't know, whatever that looks like. Yeah. Uh, maybe, maybe youschedule it out 30 days later where the, the veterinarian gives them a call andthey're prompted from the crm, Hey, call and check up on this client, see howthey're doing. I can guarantee you hardly any of 'em are probably doing thateither. Absolutely. There's, there's, there's, you're limited only by yourimagination for what you can have these VAs do for you.

Brandon Breshears(00:29:56) - Definitely. Well, can you tell us about your six week program andhow people can get started? I've, so I've went through the six week program. Ithas been awesome and I'm really excited about stuff. So, um, I will probablydo, uh, more in-depth training as far as what kind of stuff I have seen out ofthis and, and things and follow up here as I get more systems built. But it'sjust been amazing. I mean, a lot, all the new trainings that are gonna becoming out that'll be mentioning in this podcast will be built by Janelle andit's, yeah, not easy stuff either. It's like, I didn't have time to figure outhow to do this stuff, so I said, figure, figure it out, Janelle. And she wentthrough and did it, so it's awesome. But

Tobe Brockner (00:30:34) -Yeah, Janelle's great and uh, really sharp and, and again, we'll takeinitiative and kind of help see around corners for you and well what if we doit this way or, you know, if I can do it that way kind of thing. Um, andJanelle wasn't always like that. I've known Janelle for a long time. We've hadher place with other clients, um, and um, when she came in, you know, shelearned really fast. And, and that's a, that's the other kind of benefit tothis, but, um, the Empower Plus program, I mean, it j just some basicinformation. If, if your clients wanted to learn more about how to hire a VAand what that Empower Plus program looks like, if you go to our website, Katuva.com,there's a menu item, uh, tab up at the top that says in Power Plus kinda givesa brief, a very brief overview of what the, we break it up into four phases.

Tobe Brockner (00:31:22) -And so it kind of talks about the four phases. And then at the bottom there'sa, there's a, uh, book of call link. So the, the, the best way for them toengage with us would just be a book and what we call an exploratory call. Andit's just sort of an overview of like what they're thinking and where, youknow, we can give some ideas on how they could use a VA and we talk about thepricing and the costs and that sort of thing. So you can hire a va, uh, eitherpart-time or full-time with us. Um, and that's after you've gone through the,actually it's in the kind of in the middle of going through the Empower Plusprogram. Um, so you, you purchase the Empower Plus program and then you wouldhire a VA either part-time or full-time, part-time. VA is $695 a monthfull-time, 1350 a month. It works out to be a little less than $8 an hour. Um,and they're every bit as high quality as somebody here in the states locally,uh, can do anything that doesn't require a sit down face-to-face with a client.You can find a VA to do it. Um, and they'll do just as good of work. So, um,yeah, that would be the easiest way to just as, and, and I'm sure you couldprobably include a link to the Expiratory call,

Brandon Breshears(00:32:31) - Put a link in there for sure. But, um, yeah, I, the, the pricingand how you handle everything, also the benefits that you give the VAs so thatthey stick around, um, and you attract really high quality, um, employees is,is really cool. So I, I definitely encourage everybody to get, get over there,check it out. I'm certain everybody could use a marketing assistant to bebuilding out stuff that you have been, you know, know you should do, but, butyou don't. So, um, head on over to kva.com and uh, check 'em out. So thank youso much for your time, Tobe. I really appreciate it.

Tobe Brockner (00:33:03) -Yeah, I really appreciate the opportunity and I hope that we can help lots ofyour clients because I think every business on the planet needs a virtualassistant or more .

Brandon Breshears(00:33:13) - Me too, me too. I probably, if you hadn't several. So thank you somuch.

Tobe Brockner (00:33:17) -Thank you. So

Brandon Breshears(00:33:19) - I hope this episode was helpful to you. Again, if you'reinterested, going over to veterinary marketing podcast.com/assistant. That isveterinary marketing podcast.com/assistant. Have a great day and I'll see youon the next episode.