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When my printer stopped working recently it provoked the usual reaction from me - a major hissy fit! Hearing the cursing and yells for help, IT support rushed to my aid in the form of husband Jeremy: A quick check of the cables and two seconds later he plugged the printer into the mains, gave one of his ‘looks’ and left!


The point of the story is that I’m not exactly technically minded. So you may wonder how it is that I’ve ended up running an online business? At times I wonder too(!), yet vetpol, vbay and vetmart have taken us on a remarkable journey - one of accelerated continual learning - and I’m so pleased we’ve made the choices we have.

Running a business is never easy, but with a background in pharmaceuticals, years of business experience and a silly amount of marketing and management training you’d think it should be easier for us than many. Except that our online journey is forever taking us to places new; novel situations where the best results involve tearing up the business rule book and thinking afresh.

In this new digital world we’ve found that being flexible, fleet of foot and working with your guts at least as much as your head are the skills required to grasp opportunities and be successful; it’s not all about endless business planning! And perhaps the greatest learning of all is that collaboration rather than competition is what really makes the difference, yet this is contrary to what I’ve been taught…

Way back when I started my career as a pharmaceutical rep, I was told NEVER to mention the name of a competitors product in front of a customer (GP or pharmacist). So let’s ditch that particular piece of wisdom in stating that VetGrad and Vetboss and VeterinaryBusiness.org are clearly competitors for vetpol; all sites offer information, news and jobs to the same target audience - UK veterinary professionals. And I’ve just sinned in not only naming our competitors but providing you with links to these sites. Naughty girl.

And here's more about the sites owners: Thomas Rees and John Sheridan happen to be awfully nice people who also understand the business case for collaboration, so rather than compete we’ve chosen to work together in co-promoting one another sites. You could call it ‘Better Together’ (though that phrase is currently being used elsewhere!) - traffic moves all over the internet at high speed so why would we not benefit in pushing traffic around and between ourselves? And we do.

Our most recent collaboration is with Companion Consultancy, a PR agency specialising in the veterinary sector. They have a great deal of expertise in handling online PR and both our companies are keen to get a handle on internet usage amongst animal care professionals. So together we’ve conducted a survey asking vets about their use of websites, social media and other online promotional tools.

The raw data makes fascinating reading and a summary of the results and what they mean to UK vets will be published soon as a white paper*. It’s already clear to me that in collaborating on this particular project, the white paper will be of greater value to the vet profession than if either our companies had embarked on this alone, as we've tapped into our combined experience, expertise and extensive networks; the end result will be greater than the sum of the whole.

And that, dear friends, leaves me pondering on two further thoughts:

  1. In what ways could vet practices benefit from collaboration at a local and national level? There must be heaps of opportunities…can you identify some?
  2. And finally, I’m wondering if there a local IT expert we could collaborate with so that Jeremy no longer has to be my totally fed-up and ground-down IT support?!!



*If you’d like to be one of the first to receive a summary of the white paper on internet usage amongst animal care professionals, please leave your email address in the comments box at the bottom of this blog. We will send you a copy once available.
You may also wish to visit us at the London Vet Show stand Q20, near the business lectures area for a chat!