VMP 261: How To Unlock Growth Using Your Veterinary Practice Data

Brandon (00:00:00) - Welcome to the Veterinary Marketing podcast, where it's all about how to attract, engage and retain clients to your veterinary hospital using digital marketing. My name is Brandon Breshears and in today's episode we have Elliot Greenwood from Chckup, which is a really cool app that includes reminders, analytics, and it's a really, really cool platform. And we get into some some great things about analytics and really using the practice data that you have to grow and market your veterinary hospital. I think that probably the owned data segment, meaning owned email lists, owned phone numbers and texting ability. I think these are some of the biggest missed opportunities and also the most valuable sources for more revenue, better clients. It's all inside of your practice management software and Chckup helps to unlock a lot of that. So it's a really great interview. I definitely suggest listening all the way through and if you have any questions, comments or need help with anything, please be sure to reach out. So before today's interview, we just have two sponsors and here's the sponsors.

Brandon (00:01:12) - This episode is being sponsored by the International Veterinary Dentistry Institute and Veterinary Dentistry Dot net. If you're a veterinarian or you have veterinary that you work with, you struggle with dentistry. Or who'd like to be more confident when it comes to dental procedures, then you definitely should go to ivdi.org forward slash VMP that is ivdi.org/vmp. To sign up for a free upcoming live training that's going to go far beyond your average dentistry seminar. This is the gateway to the Veterinary Dental Practitioner Program, an intensive master class program that is a comprehensive initiative designed to enrich veterinary associate skills while empowering practice managers, practice owners to take their practice to new heights. This live training is going to be conducted by board certified veterinary dentist Dr. Brett Beckman. He's been on the podcast twice and is incredibly talented teacher and educator. He's going to dive deep into actual cases. He's going to dissect all the vital components of effective dentistry case management, and this is going to give you some really direct insight and a clear blueprint to improve your prowess in veterinary dentistry.

Brandon (00:02:27) - So if you're ready to elevate your practice and your professional skills, simply go to ivdi.org Forward slash VMP. This is going to be the golden opportunity that helps you to make a significant impact in your practice. It's going to help to give your patients and your clients better care, and it's also going to improve the personal professional development that you have in your career. Go to ivdi.org Forward slash VMP. This episode is being sponsored by two websites by Brad Haven. We have used VR equipment and new VR equipment for over nine years now used that equipment has been helping vets to buy and sell used equipment. You can save money when you buy used everything from cages, kennels, pumps, X-ray equipment, lasers, ultrasounds, dental equipment, surgery equipment, lab equipment from a boxes and tables, tubs and sinks, vet trucks and vet boxes. What do you have to sell at used vet equipment? They bring the buyer and seller together. Also, if you're looking for a new vet equipment with amazing warranties, check out new vet equipment where they show you the price up front.

Brandon (00:03:33) - They have digital X-ray equipment, dental X-ray equipment, ultrasound equipment, surgery, lighting, surgery, tables, autoclaves. When you go to new vet equipment, you'll clearly see the price on every single item for sale. And you'll also know what the warranty is so that you can buy without regret. So without further ado, here is Elliot, the co founder of Chckup and our conversation. All right. Thank you so much for being on the podcast, Elliot. I really appreciate you taking time to talk with me here.

Elliot (00:04:00) - Thanks for having me, Brandon.

Brandon (00:04:01) - Appreciate it. So tell us about how you got started with Chckup and kind of your quick 62nd backstory, and then we'll get into what Chckup is and how it helps and things.

Elliot (00:04:13) - Yeah. So Chckup was started probably two a little bit over two years ago with myself and one of my best friends who has a software development firm that he started while he was in college. We were talking through a bunch of business ideas with a mentor of ours and we kind of stumbled upon the price comparison for human medicine.

Elliot (00:04:40) - And just through the fun nature of iterating and startups where you realize, Wow, that's a terrible idea, but you learn. We basically pivoted from there to veterinary. And then as we started talking to a bunch of veterinarians, we realized that there is a huge need for better and easier to use software in the veterinary space. And that kind of leads us to where we are today is building out software that automates a lot of the things that practices currently do manually, as well as just providing data in an easy to consume way. That kind of helps with decision making so that practices don't have to spend as much time making decisions. They can kind of just say, okay, here's the data, we know what to do with it.

Brandon (00:05:28) - Definitely. And so can you give us a quick rundown of what Chckup is and what it does for veterinary practices? 62nd version of it? Yeah, possible.

Elliot (00:05:38) - So the way we look at Chckup is you have a veterinary practice, has their practice management system that they use to run the clinical side of their business and then check up is the kind of all in one.

Elliot (00:05:54) - We're constantly adding new features, obviously to keep adding to that, but we're really the trying to be the all in one solution. To be the only plug in a practice will ever need to their practice management system in order to help them run their business and the business side of their veterinary practice. So in plain English, we do scheduling, we do client communication, we do analytics, we do reviews, things like that.

Brandon (00:06:21) - Absolutely. So I think it's kind of unfortunate that you are needed just because it would be so great if practice management softwares like got it together and started putting out features that were beneficial. But I think everybody who's listening would agree that their practice management software just doesn't cut it when it comes to data, when it comes to booking reminders and things like that. It all kind of does sometimes something, but there's so many holes inside of that. And I think there's nothing more important than the data that you own, especially in the future. When platforms come and go, algorithms change, like having access to that data that's not locked up in a place that you can't use it, you can't understand it, and it doesn't help you to grow your business.

Brandon (00:07:06) - I think that's one of the most frustrating things, like there's nothing more valuable than your own customer list, in my opinion, from marketing standpoint. And so unlocking that is just tremendously beneficial. So I think part of that too is that online bookings are really, really important. So kind of walk us through how that works with check up with like online bookings as a place to start, and then we'll kind of go into the other features that I think are really beneficial.

Elliot (00:07:32) - Yeah. I mean, online booking, we wanted to make things as easy as possible. I mean, our founding team is for 24 year olds. We grew up with a lot of technology. Our standard of what we deem acceptable, I guess from a user perspective is very high. So whenever we started noticing, especially as a lot of our peers. And even the co-founders started having to, you know, take their own pets to the vet. We realized that there's just it's kind of ridiculous how long it takes to just get into the vet, whether you have to wait on hold for way too long or whether you have to just send an email or just request an appointment.

Elliot (00:08:14) - We were just like, we should make this instant. So the idea is you just go to a practice's. Website or you can do it from pretty much anywhere that they want to put the booking widget. You can also do it from the client portal. You basically just select your reason you're going in and what time you want to go, and then it automatically writes it and drops it natively in the practice management system. So we do this in a way that it looks exactly as it would if somebody called in and the receptionist put it in. The only difference is we just say it came from us so you don't have to worry about setting up a I know some systems have a one dedicated kind of column in their practice management system that they then, even though they write back in, they have to drag it over and stuff like that. You don't have to do that. You don't have to manually input all the info in. All you have to do is basically if you can teach staff members how you schedule your practice, you can teach our system how to schedule appointments and you just set that up once and it's pretty much a set it and forget it after that.

Brandon (00:09:25) - Very cool. And with that, so I think I've seen a ton of online booking tools in general and a lot of them are super clunky when it comes to like friction of getting people booked, in my opinion. What and I think the thing that I like about yours is that it doesn't have as much friction in that process of booking. Like there's especially, I think, seeing people with their booking that it's like, choose your doctor, choose the time of appointment. I'm thinking of a competitor. I'm not going to name name names to be critical, but they are. It's like a lot of process. And especially if you have a new client who you don't necessarily know, you know, which doctor to use or things like that, I think you're going to run into conversion problems and I see that happen. So, you know, what kind of things do you do You guys do that help with that?

Elliot (00:10:19) - Yeah, I mean, that was kind of the core reason why we built this in the first place.

Elliot (00:10:26) - I mean, scheduling has this its own place in our heart because that was the first initial version of the product was scheduling. So we pretty much have broken it up into removing as much friction from what we'll call the two different avenues, the new patients and the returning patients. So for new patients, we want to make it as easy as possible. So if they've never heard of you, they've never been to your clinic. Let's say they moved from out of state. Half the solutions we see if they're not a request form either require you to sign in, download an app or just email them. And that's just kind of a lot of people don't want to do that. A lot of the practices I feel like don't put themselves in the shoes of the pet owner enough. Some do. I don't want to just make a blanket statement there. But the AI for a new client, it's literally four steps. And if you have a basically if you require payment, it's five. It's very easy. You can do it in a minute and a half.

Elliot (00:11:27) - And it's super simple and it gets just the bare minimum that we think maximizes conversions. Everything else that a lot of people would include can easily be done in follow ups, whether it's through just reminders or confirmation, stuff like that. The other side of things I would say is the returning patients. We have a client portal for people to access their info, but we don't want to make that the only way as some solutions have, where the only way you can book is if you sign up for this portal. Some people don't want to do that. I understand, but if you do log into the portal, which because we sync with the practice management system, we already try and sync as much to your account as possible. So if you log in with the email that the pet owner has in your system, all they pretty much have to do is create a password and all their stuff should start populating. Yeah. That way. We already have all the pets info saved. We already have your contact info saved.

Elliot (00:12:29) - You don't have to repeat that process. If you literally want to go. I want to go on this day at this time for this reason. Boom, you can do it in like 30s I think is the fastest I've done it. But that's the kind of whole idea is really to focus on who's going to be using this and how can you make the best experience possible, because that's really what maximizes the conversions.

Brandon (00:12:50) - Absolutely. And I think so many practices, I think a lot of the actual booking tools have been designed and co-designed a lot with the practices. And I think that they want to do all of the heavy lifting inside of these conversion processes. But if somebody doesn't know you yet, I just don't think and I've seen it's usually pretty low conversion like usually less than 20% of somebody who starts a form to completion on these sites. And so you're getting really good traffic, but they just kind of give up in the process. And because it's either too difficult or they don't know what to do, it's not clear or it's just like the wrong place.

Brandon (00:13:27) - So I think there's so much value in that in general. And one other thing, too, that I've seen, a lot of, which is for phone sales and things just I've been diving into phone call records for clients and things because we spend so much time and energy getting people from the web that's like really well targeted traffic. And then they go and call and the people that are CSRs are just not salespeople and they're just 100% not salespeople. And that's totally okay. But they don't they don't close. They don't know how to ask questions. They don't know how to direct the call. And so find that the conversion rate from at least advertising versus from phone calls is much higher. And it's also people that are not price shopping, because typically people that will call if they're searching, they'll kind of just ask a list of questions. The the CSR will take the questions and then they won't do anything except for just like answer the questions. And then they don't even say, well, do you want to set up an appointment? It's like, okay, I might call back.

Brandon (00:14:27) - And then they hang up. And so it's just so much missed opportunity. And I think having a simplified process to get somebody to say, Yep, I'm interested in appointment, here's the date I want that changes the conversation when the CSR calls to follow up and confirm the appointment. And I don't think you have to do all of the heavy lifting. Like you don't need to get all the records and everything, just get that first micro conversion and then convert them again. And I think that. I'm excited that you're just set up more from a marketing standpoint to reduce friction rather than to like collect all the data and complete stuff. But I'm super interested with that payment option. When do you suggest people use that and kind of what what is your experience with that so far?

Elliot (00:15:09) - Um, so far it's been good solely because it's mostly done for just deposits. A lot of people in our early conversations don't want to pay for a just the whole appointment up front, but they have no problem with them going, okay, we actually have a new client fee of our deposit for like your first appointment.

Elliot (00:15:35) - It's a really great way because I don't remember the crazy stat, but I know new clients know show way higher than returning clients. Obviously, if you've been going to the same vet for 20 years, you're very likely going to show up. Versus somebody who's just moved is God knows what their schedule is like, but it's a way that we're able to not disrupt the flow. We get to collect the payment because I know some other solutions out there. You they basically go, hey, we'll figure it out after this. But we just want to let you know there's a deposit for us. We just added at the end. It's the same flow as if you bought anything on a website you went through. You browse, you go to checkout. It takes you through. The final step is the is putting in your payment info. If obviously if you asked for that up front, conversions would go down. But it's super simple. I mean, the current partner we're working with will allow it to wear.

Elliot (00:16:33) - Uh. Pet owners are going to be able to store their payment info so that if they also want, they can just immediately be texted a link right after their appointment and they can pay directly there if they want. They can have the card on file saved. So if for some reason there's still a recurring deposit for some reason that they want, or eventually we plan to get into like wellness plans, um, it's just super easy. The pet owner just goes, Yeah, I'm okay with that. Charge the card or they can agree and it auto charges, stuff like that. But yeah, that's kind of where we have, that's the success we've had so far. Well, that's, that's really rambling.

Brandon (00:17:10) - Yeah. I think, I think having that appointment. Deposit is a is a great way to avoid people know showing. Right. You're obviously going to reduce your conversion rate. But if you're already busy and you just can't handle no shows and holes in the schedule, then I think that that increases the client value a lot.

Brandon (00:17:30) - And so it makes sense under certain circumstances. I think if you're just trying to fill like a new practice launching or something, it probably wouldn't be the ideal situation. But I think it's really unique and pretty cool.

Elliot (00:17:42) - Well, it just I don't know if I explained it clearly enough. It's only going to be when you turn it on. So certain services might not have it, which means they won't have that payment step, which means it's back to just being the, like I mentioned earlier, the four steps on the widget. But it's it's also just for helping practices collect. Payment up front, even though we don't have it as automated as the regular appointments we eventually plan to for practices that offer like boarding and grooming. Obviously that makes more sense to pay up front so you can do things like that and it just makes the whole process kind of easier for everybody. So yeah.

Brandon (00:18:22) - Definitely. Yeah. And I think depending on if if you struggle with no shows for new clients, then it makes sense 100% to turn that on.

Brandon (00:18:33) - Can you tell me about your, your daily huddle features that I think this is a really cool and something that's pretty unique. Can you tell me about that?

Elliot (00:18:45) - Yeah, I mean, the big issue we have seen from our experience with a lot of analytics is especially if you're less experienced with analytics, it's a lot. You're going to look at a bunch of numbers with a bunch of graphs, and sometimes it's hard to digest what that means. So the idea of our daily huddle is to break down your practices performance in comparison to your goals from the previous day, the current day, and the next day. That's it. It's just a very close up snapshot on how you're doing on a daily basis and. We don't also just want to show you your data because I forget who explained this scenario. I think it was the he now is running his own startup, but he's the former head designer at Airbnb. And he was basically he explained that this is the process of how analytics work. And I think it's a completely make sense is you have an analytics platform where that's ideally designed for a executive to make decisions.

Elliot (00:19:58) - Well, they don't really know what the numbers mean, so they go and they hire a bunch of data scientists to go basically actually analyze the data, tell them what it means so that they can go, okay, we need to make decisions X, Y, and Z. The whole idea of the daily huddle is we want to help you skip all of that and just go straight to here's the numbers. What should I do with it? We give some action insights. And while they're static, we're working to make them more automated. So, for example, we search your schedule and if you saw. 20 patients yesterday and only ten of them booked future appointments. We really think that forward booking is the key to running just like a consistent, healthy practice. So we don't just tell you that ten people didn't schedule a future appointment will actually curate that list of ten so that, you know, hey, we need to contact these people and we need to get them in the schedule. Same thing for other things, Like if you have open time slots on your calendar, if people have overdue balances that they haven't paid, we help you try and take action with that by not just letting you know that, but actually giving you the list of those people and making it as easy as possible to fill those time slots.

Elliot (00:21:16) - Collect that payment, stuff like that.

Brandon (00:21:18) - That's I think that's huge. And I mean, just the level of actionable data that you get from that is massively important. And I think, too, that's one of the kind of least favourite marketing things that people just forget to do. And I've had clients especially recently come on board who are just like, Hey, it's slower than normal. We're seeing slowdowns and it seems like we either have clients that are just insanely busy or people that are just starting to slow down and they're just not like a happy medium generally. And so I think, again, keeping that data in a place that's actionable is like owning your own list is the best type of marketing, hands down, right? And so you already have people who know, like and trust you just get them to come back again. And so having that right in front of you, it just is a no brainer and it helps to increase your average lifetime value and get more compliance, get people coming back in.

Brandon (00:22:13) - And if you can increase that lifetime value, the acquisition value, I mean, the cost per acquisition can go way up as long as you're increasing how much each client is making you per year. So I think I think that's a massive underused marketing tool that practices need to get on That is really helpful. And I just when you showed me it, it's super intuitive and it's brilliant. So I liked it a lot.

Elliot (00:22:40) - I appreciate that. And you also touched on it earlier. I mean, we're not showing we're not like reinventing the wheel of numbers to track. All of these are a lot of just metrics that practices track and you can actually pull this from your practice management system. It's just not intuitive. So we just have it set on auto to any time you want to see it. It takes 20s to pull it up and you just have it that quickly at your fingertips. So I definitely agree that just making your or utilizing your own list is like the not only easiest, but like the key to running a successful practice.

Brandon (00:23:20) - Yeah. And exactly. And within digital marketing channels like owned email lists are still by far the most profitable for mediums. So it just, it, it makes so much sense. And then also I think there's an interesting stat when you're talking about that with Google Analytics, I think something like 85 or 90% of websites have Google Analytics, but something like 70% of business owners never log in to see their analytics. And if you have to do multiple steps to pull data, it's not going to get looked at, generally speaking. And so I think having dashboards as much as possible to just have something there to look at rather than go through export data, sort the tables, figure out things, it is obvious why that doesn't get pulled and and people don't know it's always on the should do list rather than the done type of list. So I think that that makes a lot of sense. So we have the acquisition of clients, the the booking, we have the current clients like opportunities, all kinds of great data in there.

Brandon (00:24:23) - What kind of like reminders and type things do you also have built in so you can tell us about?

Elliot (00:24:31) - So right now we're kind of re hauling or doing an overhaul to our reminders. According to our development team, you can create reminders. In any possible way that you want, but it's not as intuitive. So right now, the whole revamp that we should be launching in the next few weeks, depending on when this podcast comes out, hell, it might be out. The whole idea is we want you to be able to target and be able to personalize messages in. Any way that you possibly can. So whether that's you want to send a text out to everybody who has a beagle that is seven years or older and that is male, and then even if they have an appointment in the next six months like that is we want to get as granular as possible to where you can really personalize all of those reminders so that you can basically maximize the conversion. I know we a lot of people are probably sick of seeing their basic because I know for human medicine it's a lot.

Elliot (00:25:53) - More obvious that it's automated, but just the basic reminders. I think people are starting to get just. Tuned out and I guess reminder fatigued. So I think by being by allowing clinics to get as specific as they possibly want so that they can personalize that message as much as possible, yeah, it will seem more human. It'll make the interaction more pleasant, which will likely increase conversions, which will just overall increase that lifetime value, whether it's through people come to this clinic more often because they really like the way that they get to interact with it, even if it is automated text or they just because it's so frictionless. Anytime somebody's looking for a vet, they probably will refer it to theirs just because they're like, Look, I've seen the other ones. This is the easiest possible way to just take your pet to the vet.

Brandon (00:26:51) - Definitely. And you can tailor offers far better to segments and make it relevant so that even promotional emails that you send out don't seem like they're unwanted. Right? If you're sending, you know, your your puppy offers to puppy owners and your senior pet owner offers to senior pets instead of lumping everybody in together.

Brandon (00:27:11) - And I've been recently looking at a bunch of studies on on email segment and frequencies and sending a single email versus sending multiple segmented emails is like 2 to 3 times the conversion rate for click through and booked appointments. And so it just makes make sense to send tailored messages to people rather than, you know, broad. Like here's everything that's going on, pick your pick your thing that you're interested in, and that's the future for sure of marketing. It's only getting more specific. And I think as other businesses just really kind of rise to the occasion of having better data, better marketing messages, they're going to expect that from from everybody, you know?

Elliot (00:27:59) - Yeah, I mean, I completely agree with that. I mean, I know one of the things that I get a lot of my inspiration from that has gotten me this far is just finding what works in other industries. I think a lot of what I feel like I've seen in the veterinary space from a software perspective is really just trying to only look at the space and that's the only people are almost like tunnel vision to here.

Elliot (00:28:24) - But we're very grateful that not only do I just look for this in literally any industry, but. A lot of our team comes from a background in dental, which I feel like is just a few years ahead of veterinary and a very comparable way. And I think there have been we've benefited a lot from taking the knowledge and wisdom that our team has gained from doing this successfully to I think at their peak they were 9000 dental practices and scaling it to their they really got to understand what makes a dental practice successful. And we were basically immediately able to take a lot of that info and bring it to the veterinary space, which some people hadn't even thought of.

Brandon (00:29:10) - Yeah, that's that's really interesting. The dental space I would say, is between 3 and 5 years ahead at least. And I think within the paid advertising space, it's probably further than that, just because they have far better attribution dialed in. And it's interesting because they just spend so much more for client acquisition and also marketing services. Everything is like more expensive.

Brandon (00:29:31) - And I think that that's probably fueled all the innovation because it is so expensive. You have to make it count generally very like I would say they're lucky because it's relatively low cost like for for client acquisition, especially on the paid media side. And so it's interesting, I think as a lot more of the VC money comes into the space and things just kind of get taken up a notch, it's going to get more, more difficult and you have to have tools like yours to get attribution down, to get booking down, to get reminders and lifetime value down for sure. One other cool thing that I thought was really generally cool about your app too is your your live webchat that you have. How does that work with practices and how does that integrate?

Elliot (00:30:20) - Um, so it's not exactly live. One of the things that we actually wanted to take a different approach even though. We might eventually turn on, because according to our product head that you've met, he made it sound like we can whip it up in a week with an AI chat bot, but one of the things we thought that a lot of people would appreciate is setting an expectations on conversations.

Elliot (00:30:47) - So while you can message your practice directly from your client portal, if they have the chat widget on their website, you can actually send messages to the practice from there. So we also utilize your we like to link everything to phone and email because it basically prevents duplication in the PIMs, but it also allows us to match you to somebody in the system already in the PIMs so that you kind of know who you're talking to. Because I mean, I'm with this practice we're just working with, maybe I'm my expectations are totally wrong. But they had like. Thousands of thousands of clients. And I was just like, Yeah, I understand. That gets hard to remember who's who. So. Having that length. So, you know, and you can quickly see, oh, they have these pets, etcetera. Um, but as part of the like setting expectation, when you're on the website, it's not you can set your level of response so you can set it to where it's live. If you want to have somebody monitoring the chat or typically we have it to where it's just like expect a response in three hours so that, you know, you don't just have somebody waiting around.

Elliot (00:32:05) - Because that's the frustrating thing about live. Live chat is not it's not never really fully live. Sure. Especially if you're talking to a real person. So this way you don't have to worry about upset clients going, Oh, I've been waiting to try and talk or whatever. You, you know that you can set the expectation. It's very easy. I mean, it's in your face. You can't miss it. So it's, um. We're pretty damn sure the pet owners are going to understand, but it just makes that level of communication a little bit easier. It will get even more easier, I guess, whenever we release the mobile version of the portal. Right now it's just a web app. So because we're being pulled doing different a bunch of different tools, one of them I'm, we're actually working with you on and I'm very excited to get to that in the next few weeks. But yeah, that's I think it goes back to the idea of. Making things as easy as possible for all parties.

Elliot (00:33:13) - And I think that's where a lot of the space misses the mark is they only tailor to one side, whether it's I mean, we most of our software is tailored towards that practices. So while we I mean you've seen it, it's very intuitive and very easy to use. But a lot of other people in the space who do that probably don't think as much about the pet owner side because the pet owner is not paying the money. Yeah, but we also know that. That is still a big core component because if we can improve conversions for our clinics by making things as easy as possible for their clients, they're going to be more likely to want to work with us, want to keep using us. ET cetera.

Brandon (00:33:53) - Absolutely. I think that's I think that's really good with with live chat until there's an AI tool that you have built into it, which would be just amazing. I'm sure that you'll get that here. Just and obviously setting expectations with that to you is going to be important and interesting to see how you do that.

Elliot (00:34:11) - But I think I scares a lot of vet practices because I mean, our head of product literally was like so close to. He was like, I can link basically. I can. He wanted to link a few tools that he's been playing around with to where he can actually have AI, generate responses, feed it into a basically AI voice creation and have somebody on the phone like an AI on the phone talking to clients. But I don't think the space is ready for that yet. So I don't. I don't think it's worth I don't think it'll be worth rolling that one out because I don't know if it'll get used that much. But yeah, I definitely think there's opportunities. It's just they're not ready yet and we're not ready yet.

Brandon (00:34:58) - Agreed. I think. Yeah, but it's definitely coming and having everything integrated into a place where that can be done. Um, obviously it has to be done properly because there's already AI tools out there for phone trees and for booking systems with major companies and they're usually generally pretty frustrating.

Brandon (00:35:16) - So I think things are getting I mean, quickly, it seems like every single day something incredibly amazing comes out in this space. But yeah, I think it's not not quite ready, at least from an industry standpoint. But um, yeah, so the, the main reason why I think that it was good to get you on to this interview was just because I think the app really helps to tailor front end acquisition. It helps to do retention and re-engagement of your audience and your client base. So there's all these features that really, really help. And across all of your all of the funnel, which is is so cool. So before we kind of transition into the next segment here, which I'll talk to you about, we'll talk about this again, how do people go and find out more about your app and how do they book a demo? And see? I think seeing a demo is really important because you can see how easy it is to use, which is really cool.

Elliot (00:36:14) - Yeah, no, I agree.

Elliot (00:36:16) - I know a new software is very scary, especially for the fact that we're praising right now or for in one. I know a lot of practices use anywhere from two to up to five. I've seen separate. Ancillary software's on top of their practice management system. So the fact that we're coming in and going, Hey, we're going to basically take all of that and funnel it into one and then. It's also going to be way cheaper than all of those. So yeah, you can find us. I'd say find us on either all social media or just go to our website. Our spelling is a little weird. It's c h c k. Yup. Dot app or either one. We just got.com. So that's just that'll bring you there. Um, but it's Chckup dot app Chckup. Com is probably the easiest way you can book a demo immediately as you get on the site. A demo. If you don't have any questions, we can do a demo at eight minutes. So it's not like it's going to take up a lot of your time.

Elliot (00:37:16) - Um, we normally book a little bit more than that just in case you have questions. But yeah, it takes a demo, takes eight minutes. You'll see. Just as Brandon said, it's very intuitive to use. We're constantly tweaking it to make it to where it's not intimidating, especially as we add new features, because that's the big issue you run into is when you add a bunch of stuff, it kind of gets bloated in a dashboard and then you can't find anything. And then when you go to train somebody new, it's hard to find. We're actively combating that. We are constantly trying to make this the easiest possible thing to use, and we're trying to make it just as intuitive as possible.

Brandon (00:37:54) - So that's why I was really impressed with how easy it was to just have you navigate through it and do everything super easy. And it was very brief to show so many features, which was cool. So I think that was awesome. Well, the other thing that I kind of wanted to pivot to was, especially with the the last guest that we had, Michael Shirley, we talked about finding strategic partners.

Brandon (00:38:19) - And I think one of the things that you've been doing an amazing job of in marketing yourself, right, and talking about what other people are doing. So obviously your business is different where your business to business, but you've been really doing a, I think, a great job of finding people to, number one, talk to you that have similar client lists and have been great places for marketing for you. So when it comes to like relationship marketing and referral marketing and all of these things that are I think they are high leverage, long term value going to bring you lots of clients and things. What has been kind of the, the biggest. Tip that you have for finding and building out referral partners that are going to be positive for you?

Elliot (00:39:04) - Yeah, I mean, I think referrals are a very long term game, but they become a flywheel, especially the more value you bring to your partners. So we really try and take care of the partners that we work with and. I mean, a lot of them are consultants and other people with like other type of agencies that might work with people like you who run the marketing for vet practices.

Elliot (00:39:36) - But. I think it goes back to the reason why we started this in the first place is. We want to make. A truly great product that's easy to use and it touches a lot of different people. And being that especially we aren't from the the veterinary space, I think that proves is a. Really good advantage in the sense that we just immediately go, we don't know anything. You know what you're doing. We would rather listen to you, to what you want. And a lot of times that's especially with partners, if we are working with the consultants and they are like, I have eight clients that have the same issue. It would make more sense if this was the case. Well, why would we not build it? Because they already that would not only one, incentivize them to send people our way, but we are instantly finding or fitting a need for their clients. So I think it's both making sure you not only take care of your clients, but or your partners, but you make sure that.

Elliot (00:40:49) - They are getting as much value and it's not exclusively transactional.

Brandon (00:40:55) - Absolutely. That's, I think, one really important way to look at it. Right. When it came to I don't remember how we met each other either. I'm sorry, but we connected on a demo that you showed me because one of the biggest problems that I have is like a really big problem for my clients is attribution on marketing. And I told you the problem. So then you're like, Yeah, let's let's figure out how to do this. And then we met with, with your partner, Colin. And so, you know, I think some of that stuff is really exciting. I hope that and I think you'll be able to, to solve those problems. But I think as you were talking about, that that kind of epiphany of like you're just solving problems for people and their clients and for veterinary hospital, that would be the same thing, right? There's people out there who'd be delighted to to work with you because you'd be giving them the very specific service that they want and really focusing on that niche.

Brandon (00:41:51) - So I think that's.

Elliot (00:41:53) - Yeah, and I think besides taking what works are there's very few truly revolutionary things I think, and people try and overcomplicate that. The besides taking things that work from another industry. One of the things that we have done very well that I think has gotten us to where we're at is because we just listened to people better. A lot of people, whether it's because of ego or whether it's because of time or what have you. Struggle to really hit that. Core problem that people really want solved. And I think and while we don't do a perfect job at it, there's a million things we could do to make Chckup better, but we just really try and go meet with the people that are going to be benefiting from our solution. And we just try and listen. We just try and figure out how does this work? What do you do for this? Is there a way that we can make this better so that you can then put your time somewhere else? Things like that.

Elliot (00:43:01) - So, I mean, it's really. All goes down to just actually listen. I mean, I don't know exactly how many you've spoken to, but based on our conversations, I think part of the reason I'm on this podcast is because you were basically throwing a great idea in people's faces and because it wasn't exactly the solution that they wanted and they were just like, but no, we do this. They were just like, Well, it's well, it's whatever problem. Like they don't get to it. Like, obviously. We aren't fully a marketing software, but. You. We. We're doing the same thing. We're both trying to grow a veterinary practice. We just do it from different angles. And if there's a better way to especially this space is very bad at having software communicate with each other. Yeah, there's an easy way to do something as simple as let software communicate with each other better. So even though we don't have to build a whole new platform, if we can at least make it easier for you to do kind of what we're already doing, which we're kind of hinting at what we're getting after.

Elliot (00:44:14) - But if we can make it easy for people to unlock the data that's in their practice management system and do something with it, that they and make it easier to do something with it. So. Even though we're not doing it necessarily for you in this case, if we can cut down that time from it, taking you 30 minutes to taking you three minutes, obviously that's a huge win. So why would we not do that? Because you're getting the value. Your practices are getting the value. It's kind of those going for those. I guess the thing with partners is going for that win, win, win. We win. Our partners win. Their clients win. Yeah.

Brandon (00:44:52) - Definitely. And I mean, I've spoken to every time I've had the chance to speak to a practice management software company and said, Hey, I need this data somehow. Can we get this? And the answer is always like, we just have too many features working on. It's not possible. We can't do it. And so that's that's really frustrating because they just are approaching it basically, like as a digital filing cabinet, we're just going to store the records, keep them, and they're basically locked away unless you manually go pull them.

Brandon (00:45:18) - And then from the side of all of the other booking apps and the reminder apps out there, number one, they're all super expensive and I don't think that they do much for you. And then number two, they just don't have like I can't imagine there's booking apps out there that are solely booking apps and they won't put pixel integrations in. And now pixels are going away in the near future here. But you know, if your whole purpose is marketing and helping people book online and you can't, it's like you take them from their website to your website where you won't share data and you won't communicate with the website and then you go back to their website so you lose that conversion. It just is so frustrating because it's supposed to be for marketing and then they're unwilling to make any changes and and they're expensive on top of it. And so and they make the process less likely that it's going to convert. So that's that's really why I wanted to talk to you because I appreciate that you're working on this problem.

Brandon (00:46:17) - You're helping to connect all of these things and make it useful and beneficial. And so I really appreciate that. And I think that you guys are going to be wildly successful because you're doing all these things that can help people grow instead of just like making it, I think, a little bit easier on the practice if they don't have to take so much data, which is not going to help the client convert and things like that. So I really appreciate your time today. Elliot. It was fantastic to talk with you. So again, tell everybody where to where to go again as we go out and we'll be sure to link everything on the show notes of the website and everything like that too.

Elliot (00:46:56) - Yeah. So you can find us at Chckup app or Chckup. Com. Spelled c h c k. Yup. You can find us on social media pretty much with the same tag. We are actively ramping up our social content, so we're hoping to, you know, we don't want to just post fluff.

Elliot (00:47:18) - We're trying to actually get some more stuff that can help you grow your practice out there. You can from there on the website book, the eight minute demo. And actually, if you mention that you heard it from this podcast, we'd be willing to waive the one time setup fee that we do. It's normally $990, but if you basically say, I heard it from Brandon or heard it from this podcast, you can basically we'll waive it. We'll it'll be $495. I think my math is correct of 50%. But yeah, we'd more than be more than happy to do that. And then we'd love to just get everybody's feedback on, you know, how we can keep making this better, how we can keep helping out practices so they can spend more of their time doing what they want. Helping pets.

Brandon (00:48:11) - Exactly. Exactly. Same keeping, keeping busy, making sure you're paying your your staff well by maximizing revenue and and all that good stuff, too. So thank you so much, Elliot. Really appreciate it.

Elliot (00:48:25) - I appreciate it. Thanks for having me on. Brandon.