Keeping Track of Pet Vaccinations with David Servodidio

Joe Zuccarello (00:02):
Hey everyone, it’s Joe Zuccarello again, your host of the Hey Joe Pet Pro podcast, and I am always seeking awesome guests for you to listen to be able to put in front of you. And anytime I come across somebody that either is doing something revolutionary or innovative, that catches my attention, particularly because that’s sort of the spirit in which I live is always looking for ways of sort of purposefully but safely disrupting what we consider normal. And I think all of those words described today’s guest. So I am joined by David today, and David is a founder of Verify. And David, thank you for agreeing to be part of this episode.

David Servodidio (00:43):
Yeah, Joe, thanks for having me on. Thrilled to be here.

Joe Zuccarello (00:46):
You are welcome. Now, I can’t wait for you to tell the audience, the viewer audience, the listener audience, all about what Vet Verify is, but before we get into what Vet Verify is, let us know. Give us a little bit about you, maybe some background, what kind of got you to this point in the pet industry?

David Servodidio (01:04):
Sure thing. Gosh, background. Well, where to begin? I’d say so I’m one of three partners and co-founders of Vet Verify, which I know we’ll get into today. But before that, my career is a bit eclectic. I started in the music industry. I live in Nashville, Tennessee. So my career began in the music industry. And from that I realized I was a record producer and working in recording studios and things like that. And then at some point along the line I realized that building a record and creating a new album and launching it into the world felt a lot like starting a company. And it sort of scratched the same itch for me. So I got involved in the venture capital side and some startups in Nashville and have been involved in a few, found my way into human healthcare and specifically human healthcare technology and compliance. And from there, that’s when I got a chance to meet my two partners today. And we’ve been on the vet verified journey for the last three years now. But I’ve done all kinds of different things. There’s a season I worked for Red Bull season, I was in the music industry, all kinds of different stuff.

Joe Zuccarello (02:15):
Isn’t it interesting? I mean, I ask people all the time, what got you to the pet industry? And they’re like, well, a lot of accidental things. I mean, I don’t know that there’s really anything accidental, but not everybody falls into the pet industry or if you’re like, I am, you started as a 13-year-old dog bather, right? And you’re like, this is just a temporary summer gig. And here I am 40 years later.

David Servodidio (02:36):
Yeah, yeah, no doubt, no doubt.

Joe Zuccarello (02:39):
Well, I hope what you’ve found in the pet industry is just how exciting and really how much opportunity there still is in the pet industry and PET being one of those industries where people take incredible care of their pets.

Joe Zuccarello (02:55):
And that’s why I think in anything, and especially in the pet services space, pet products as well, but certainly the pet services space just caters to that, right? People love their animals, they love their pets of all different shapes and sizes, but they love them so much that they want them to be healthy, they want them to be cared for while they’re absent from the pet owners, from the pet parents for a brief period of time. And that’s why I’m so excited to bring what it is that you and your partners have created to my listener, my viewer audience, because I think to many of them, you’re just going to blow their mind. You’re just going to absolutely blow their mind today. And for all of you that are out there that might have heard of that verify, you’ve got a front row seat, you’re going to learn from David today, you’re going to learn what inspired them, what caused this really cool new, purposeful, innovative disruption to even take shape. Let’s just hop into that. Right? So David, rewind time. Rewind time to you’re following whatever path you are following and looking at pet. What inspired you to even start a company like Vet Verify?

David Servodidio (04:07):
Great question. I’d say this whole thing started because I am a pet parent, got two dogs that I love, one that escapes frequently, but we have success tracking ’em down. And the problem that we stumbled on for y’all listening is it’s incredibly simple. It’s almost ridiculously simple, but solving it was complicated. But the problem is I need to go to family vacation. It’s, I’m boarding a flight tomorrow. So to do that, I’m dropping my dogs off at the pet resort the day before and I walk into the pet resort and all of a sudden I’m caught in the middle of this transaction of the pet resort needing the most current up-to-date vaccine records from my vet clinic who doesn’t use a whole lot of technology. Somehow it ended up with me printing out a PDF at home and driving it across the street to get it from one vet clinic to the vet clinic to the resort, just so I could go on family vacation.

David Servodidio (05:16):
And it was this head scratching moment of first of all, surely some company has solved this problem. This can’t be how the whole world operates in the pet care ecosystem was the first thought we had. And the second thought we had is, this is where I think our background plays into it is my partners and I we’re all working in the human healthcare compliance industry and specifically building large scale verification pipelines. So think like claims verification for a Blue Cross Blue Shield Tennessee insurer as an example. Every time you submit a claim that has to get validated for accuracy that the prescribing physician’s license is up to date and in good standing, things like that, anti-fraud protection. And so we were doing building these products and helping on the human side of healthcare. And then we had this light bulb moment to be like, well, it looks like the solve here on the pet side is a verification pipeline. It’s how do we build securely the ability to verify records automatically behind the scenes when a consumer initiates a transaction. So at one point in time, just maybe a really simple example, at one point in time if you were buying a house or buying a car, you are showing up to the bank with a stack of paper to verify your employment and income history. And now that all happens instantaneously behind the scenes to do an instant credit.

Joe Zuccarello (06:43):
I just bought a truck a few months ago and remarkably fast.

David Servodidio (06:47):
It is remarkably fast now it’s not a dissimilar problem. And what we see is other industries have solved this with third party verification technology, and we had the ability and really the opportunity to jump in and help engineer that for the pet care economy. And it’s one of those things that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. So once we started doing some discovery and realize, hey, there’s really no company yet that has taken this on with the same point of view that I think we have, we just said, let’s jump right in and build that. So that’s the background of how we got to this moment in time.

Joe Zuccarello (07:24):
Wow. What’s amazing about that is you saw parallel industry or you saw an industry with a parallel use a parallel solution.

Joe Zuccarello (07:35):
I mean, listen, I’ve been on the services side for decades and yes, my team would have to call at the pet resorts, we’d have to call and we’d have to get verifications from a veterinarian. And we were always dive bombing into their day. I mean, the receptionist at the veterinarian, they have clients, right? They’ve got patients lined up out the door, whatever, they’re busy doing other things. It’s got to be one of the last things they want to hear is, Hey, this is Joe from X, Y, Z pet resort. I need to verify vaccination records

David Servodidio (08:13):
Exactly,

Joe Zuccarello (08:14):
Because I’m not the only pet resort that’s calling that day. In fact, that might not even be the only time I call that day.

David Servodidio (08:20):
That’s exactly right. Which is exactly what we realized really fast is so I called my sister-in-law, the first person I called when we had this idea, I called my sister-in-law who is a veterinarian. She owns her own practice. And I gave her a call and just was like, Hey, how many times a day is the phone ringing at your clinic? And it’s not your clients, it is other companies that are just looking for vaccine records. And her response was like 15, 20, sometimes more, 25, 30 times a day.

David Servodidio (08:51):
And what we found very quickly is that that scaled, it scaled, no matter which clinic we talked to, it was very consistent about 20 phone calls a day coming in from companies looking for vaccine records and they’ve got no tools other than sort of badger the pet owner in the middle or pick up the phone and call and deal with all the frustration you’ve dealt with of being put on hold and talking to the receptionist. And it’s just an annoying problem for everybody. And so the idea is a simple one, and the problem is a simple one. The solution was rather complicated in order once you get into it, but the premise is really simple. When you book an appointment at your groomer, your vaccine records should just go there automatically. That should be a consumer experience that you should be entitled to, and we believe that that’s true.

Joe Zuccarello (09:45):
Well, okay, so I’m a big fan of Simon Sinek. I follow Simon, his work a lot, his books and his TED talk and everything. And when he talks about why I’m a big fan of the people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. And in the pet care space, in the pet care space, the pet parent is not buying our ability to make sure that the pet’s vaccinations are up to date. To your point, it puts the customer, the pet owner in the middle of this bottleneck and that is not serving the pet parent like we can or should serve them. So what other whys? I mean the moment I met you and I met your partners, I mean I was hooked because I’ve lived this world. I’ve lived this basic both as a pet resort leader, an operations leader in the industry in high volume situations, but also as a pet owner, as a pet parent. So what other whys existed for you when you and your partners contemplated leaning into this solution?

David Servodidio (11:05):
Well, really I love that question. For us, we’re on this mission to help people with their pets live just fuller, freer lives, and there’s so many ways to interpret that. That’s such a big broad thing, but for us, it is to make, we essentially came to this point of view in this conclusion very early on in our journey, which is a little different than where I think most companies have been before in the pet care economy, which is I’m convinced at this point that most pet owners, most pet owners don’t want more access to their pet’s medical records. If you need them, you can get them. What I’m convinced of is that people want their records to be accessible by the places they want to go with their dog and they want to be able to take their dog more places. They want to be able to have more things in their life, be pet friendly.

David Servodidio (12:00):
And so the wise actually turn into normal everyday consumer experiences. So the obvious ones are, my gosh, pet resort or the grooming salon. These are two obvious ones that people go to all the time. Some of the non-obvious ones that we interact with pretty frequently are apartment complexes. I want to live in a specific apartment building. That apartment building needs to verify that my dog is up to date on vaccinations before I move in for community safety. And so it becomes an obstacle for me to even move into the place I want to move. We have a coworking space in an office building on using Vet Verify. They want to have a pet friendly working environment in order to do so. They’ve got to verify that this dog is up to date on vaccines before they come in the front doors of the building. And so it ends up being just when you look at the touch points of a pet parent’s life, where they go, where they want to go, the places that they live, work choose to be, are required to be.

David Servodidio (13:06):
All of these different places require data to be accessible. And right now, I mean to no fault of their own, but right now that is sort of locked and buried in the EMR system that the vet clinic chooses to use. And thus you have this incoming stream of people just calling the front desk of the vet clinic saying, Hey, I need access to this for this compliance reason or this pet owners moving into the apartment. I need to verify X, Y, Z. But it really comes down to the why is how do we help people just live more fuller, freer lives with their pets? And when you look at that, it becomes a data problem to solve

Joe Zuccarello (13:46):
Well, and that’s I think how the vaccinations are managed today. It is a very closed environment.

David Servodidio (13:55):
Yes,

Joe Zuccarello (13:56):
I mean it is very closed. Do you think it’s because there’s a certain amount of gatekeeping of that information or fear of sharing that information, whether the fear of sharing that information is on the pet parent side or the veterinarian side or a pet care provider side, does some of that come into play and how does that verify plan on getting past that?

David Servodidio (14:25):
Great question. So I’d say yes, I think on the vet clinic side in particular, vet clinics, for better or for worse, I think in several cases we were new to the pet care world, so you don’t know what you don’t know when you jump into an industry and we’ve been able to stumble our way through a couple of negative perceptions by association of like, Hey, this bad company 10 years ago did this thing and it burned the bridge and I don’t trust anybody again. So there’s some of that that exists in the veterinary world for sure. Vet clinics I think are a little skittish because there’s this fear of, Hey, where are my clients going to go? Are you going to steal my clients on the vaccination side? I think as that is naturally going away as folks are using vet clinics more transactionally than ever before.

David Servodidio (15:21):
And so if you’re a pet parent, you need veterinary care, but you want to do other things that are nonclinical with your pet. And so the consumer choice is driving, people care a lot more about their resort typically than they do about which vet clinic they need for a specific vaccine. One of those things you just have to get the other one you’re choosing because it’s an environment for the pet that’s living with you. And so there’s some of that for sure. For us, what we try to incentivize is right now what we observed is vet clinics, their front desks are just kind of dishing out 20, 30 times a day. They’re just hit and send on medical notes and records to whatever company’s requesting without really tracking any of where it’s going. And so some of the value that we’re providing back to the veterinary group specifically is a know where this is going so you can track and approve, right?

David Servodidio (16:21):
Like, hey, if you want to approve all the service providers but don’t necessarily want to approve a clinic down the street from being able to see patient transfers or whatever that might be, you can have some gatekeeping a bit. We manage a little bit of what that looks like. The other thing is revenue leakage. So as you can imagine, the way that we work with a service provider is we’re checking an upcoming service provider’s calendar, and we’re verifying at this point we’re doing about 25,000 vaccine record verifications a day, and there’s a percentage of those. It’s pretty consistently about 20% that these are appointments on the calendar and the vaccines are out of date, they are expired. And so what happens in that moment is Vet Verify sort of sits on this piece of information that, okay, I know Joe has an upcoming appointment in four weeks at this groomer, his dog’s rabies is expired and I know Joe’s Home Clinic, and so what do we feel like is the right thing for Vet Verify to do? And so we actually proactively try to work with the clinic that is your home clinic to get you back in time because what we see is that if the closer you get to that date and you haven’t gone to the vet yet, the more likely it is that you scramble and you go to a walk-in clinic,

Joe Zuccarello (17:47):
The more desperate I’m going to be, the

David Servodidio (17:48):
More desperate you’re going to be.

Joe Zuccarello (17:50):
And

David Servodidio (17:50):
So some of our value to the vet clinic is just like, Hey, you can prevent some revenue leakage and all of that frustration for a pet owner of trying to find, I mentioned I live in Nashville, I know the walk-in clinic in Nashville that everybody goes because they can’t get to their vet in time. And so you can prevent all of that chaos if you just enable some of the access. So it kind of goes both ways. It’s saying, Hey, vet clinics, we can create a better experience for you, but you’ve got to participate to actually get some value, and if you don’t participate, you really don’t get the value. Then we encourage folks to go to participate in clinics.

Joe Zuccarello (18:32):
So for veterinarians, right, because I’m sure that I’ve got listeners out there that either work or are veterinarians work for or are veterinarians for the veterinarian, it’s really, it’s a win-win, right? Yeah. So veterinarians probably have that in-house system that they could send out vaccination reminders and postcards and I mean, I get all of it in my mailbox for my little dog, but what you’re saying is when there’s it a pending appointment tied to that, the clock’s ticking. That’s exactly right. The clock is ticking toward a potential desperate situation

Joe Zuccarello (19:10):
And putting that pet parent, again, if we’re all banding together on a services provision side for that pet parent and that pet’s health and wellbeing, let’s head that off at the past and over serve that pet parent. So you’ve got that to your point, you don’t end up with a potential defection, even if it’s temporary of that client seeking an alternative, which could ultimately turn into a permanent transcript, that person gets exposure somewhere else. That person could say, I like it better over at this animos, but I’m going to start coming over to this one. Right?

David Servodidio (19:43):
That’s exactly right.

Joe Zuccarello (19:44):
I mean, same thing goes in lodging and daycare and grooming. They only have to be happy one time and the chances of you losing them forever, the lifetime value of a customer is very important.

Joe Zuccarello (19:55):
So you’ve got that revenue protection, I guess, and then you’ve got the revenue savings, or I’m sorry, the expense savings of that receptionist not being blown up multiple times per day by answering those phone calls. Imagine what you could either repurpose or reallocate that receptionist time to doing or alleviate yourself of a certain number of minutes, hours, weeks, months, years. I mean you’re talking tens of thousands of dollars maybe more exactly in a whole year. And again, that’s the result. The dollars always follow the performance. So the performance is serving the pet parent better. So on the pet resort or the pet service providers perspective, it’s sort of just, it’s a mirrored saying really. I mean it’s a mirror, but it’s the same saving all of that time imposing an inconvenience on the pet about they show up and it’s so easy. It’s so easy for both the pet services provider, the lodging, daycare, grooming provider to say, we told you or what we called think about all we called your veterinarian, and they told us also, that wasn’t the only phone call. We got to hang up and we got to call the pet parent and say, you need this. And then we might even check, some of us are diligent enough that we check maybe two or three days in advance, so we call the pet parent again

Joe Zuccarello (21:22):
Or we call the veterinarian again to get it. And if they’ve not been updated, only call the pet parent again. Oh my gosh. I know this vortex that you get caught up in and it’s crazy and pet parent to your point, sometimes, sometimes it’s a spur of the moment trip. Sometimes it’s a tragedy that happens in a family and that pet parent’s got to get out of town quickly, but at the very least, let’s say they’re planning on going to the biggest amusement park. They’re going to the mouse land, right in Florida, and their head is not in rabies Distemper parvo board of town. Their head is drop the dog off. We love our boarding facility, our lodging facility, but we’ve got a flight to catch.

David Servodidio (22:05):
Yeah,

Joe Zuccarello (22:06):
Wow. Talk about blowing up their day. They

David Servodidio (22:09):
And we see it all time. Yeah, we see it. We see it all the time. It happens constantly. It’s such a frustration.

Joe Zuccarello (22:15):
Nobody’s figured out. Okay, so let’s talk about, okay, so we can’t lose ’em here, David. We can’t lose them in what it actually does. So give us the 30,000 foot Cliff notes version of what it does and why, just what it does. What does that, excuse me, tongue twister. What does Vet Verify actually do? How does it work?

David Servodidio (22:41):
I’ll tell you how. So this is how it works. We’re a vaccine verification company. So what we do is we have, there’s two sides. There is the who has the data, which in this example we’re talking about vet clinics, and so it’s how does it work with a vet clinic then how does it work with a company that needs data on a recurring basis? So a pet resort or a groomer as an example, I’ll start on the vet clinic side. So on the vet clinic side, we partner with the technology systems that they use. And so we’re able to essentially sync in a couple of clicks of a button, we can sync a veterinary practice to the vet verified network, and that means their vaccine records, not all of their medical history and notes. We believe deeply in making sure that there are some things that need to be gate kept and organized at a vet practice that is vet practices own proprietary data.

David Servodidio (23:36):
And we don’t touch any of that stuff. So all we do is we sync vaccine records into the Vet Verify network. And so at this point, we’re about one in three clinics in the United States are instantly connected to Vet Verify, and I’ll explain kind of like health insurance, like in network or out of network, what happens when a clinic is using Verify what happens when the clinic is not using Verify. But on the resort side, how it works is the happy path is we partner and we integrate with the CRM system that you use. And so we work with all the common ones that you likely are using like a Ginger or a Kennel Connection or a Mogo or whomever it might be. So we work with your CRM plugin and then we are proactively monitoring your reservation calendar on a rolling 30 day basis.

David Servodidio (24:25):
So at any given point, we are looking out 30 days and we’re daily verifying. So every day we’re running a check on looking at the next 30 days to see if appointments have new appointments that were scheduled, appointments that have come off or have been moved. And so we’re constantly evaluating what’s your next 30 days look like for every appointment in your next 30 days. We are then verifying that there’s a vaccine record on file in your CRM that meets your facility specific requirements. So we go down to the specific facility and say, if this pet resort requires six month board atella and this pet resort requires a 12 month board atella, that is enough of a difference for us to process the results through that lens depending on when the expiration dates are. So we go down to that level and even service type.

David Servodidio (25:17):
So as an example, if I’m running a pet resort and I have both boarding stays and grooming appointments, but I have different vaccine requirements for boarding versus grooming, we look at the specific service type to make sure the vaccine record actually applies to what the pet needs when it’s coming in the front door. We then initiate verifications for anything that’s missing. So I mentioned there’s about, at any point in time, if you’re listening to this and you look at your calendar, there’s about 20% of your schedule on average, that is what we would call at risk. These are appointments that you have no vaccine record for yet. The one you have has something that’s missing or expired that is required by your facility. So in those cases, we trigger an outreach to the clinic. We first dip into our vet verified network, it’s about 25 million pets, and we say, if this is one of those pets, we can instantly push back a result right into your CRM.

David Servodidio (26:19):
If the clinic is not connected or your specific PET is not part of the vet verified network, then we manually reach out to the clinic on your behalf and we’re proactively doing this 30 days in advance so that we’re sending a couple of emails to the clinic, we are getting the vaccine records, we’re verifying them, turning them into data, pushing it back into your CRM anyway. So really it doesn’t matter a ton to you whether the pet is part of the network or not. It’s more of an efficiency thing for us. We’re reaching out anyway regardless across every single one of your pets to then essentially deliver, you take that 20% and get it down to as close to zero as possible. There are scenarios where if we go out and verify a pets vaccine, my gosh, everything’s missing. This person has not gone back to the vet. And so in those

Joe Zuccarello (27:12):
Cases, I was going to be my next question, what happens when it’s not

David Servodidio (27:16):
There? What happened was not there. So that in that case, we’re alerting you daily. If there’s anything new that we’ve discovered, we try to do it about seven to 10 days in advance of the appointment. We’re saying, Hey, next, what’s today? Monday, next Monday, Joe’s coming in, we verify Joe’s records, everything’s expired. He does not have an appointment at the clinic. We’re going to leave that to, you can make your business decision based on that. We don’t cancel appointments, we don’t do anything like that. We’re just passing along data and intelligence so that you, you’re running a pet resort. You can make the business decision that you need to based on the information that you have, but we’re alerting essentially that 20%, we’re probably getting down to two or 3%, but we’re giving that back to you and saying like, Hey, vet Verify doesn’t have a bus that we drive people to the vet in to get their vaccines. We stop short right there. And so up until that moment, we’re passing you back that information to say, Hey, here’s a couple of pet parents that they just have not gone back to the vet in time. So you can send out whatever communication you want to manage that proactively. So I hope that in a nutshell, that’s how it works. So we’re constantly think of us just in the background. We’re just processing vaccine records and getting them into your system of record as

Joe Zuccarello (28:35):
Think about that, just do the math. I mean, if you’re a pet care facility out there, groomer, a lodging facility, daycare facility, all of those, right?

David Servodidio (28:46):
Yeah,

Joe Zuccarello (28:46):
Just do the map. Just watch your staff observe one day, just have your staff take a pen, take a pen and a post-it and just make a ticker. Just keep a count of how many times in a day or in a week they’re reaching out for vaccination records or when they enter a new customer’s file in the system, we’re always getting new customers so they enter in a new pad or a new pet to the family or a new pet to the facility or both. And how many times are they minus that information that they’ve got to call or reach out for that information and then put some dollars and cents behind it? I mean, that’s a tremendous amount of money, a tremendous amount of money that can be saved by employing a solution like verify. So I’m not a techie.

Joe Zuccarello (29:38):
I love the solution. I mean, I don’t know how apps work on my phone. I didn’t program all of those, but I’m a benefactor of that. So I mean, I would really greatly on an operation side really appreciate that. But when you get to looking at these pet businesses, what have you learned in the journey so far? Any surprises along the way that, I mean, I’m sure it continues to shape and evolve and all of those, it probably doesn’t even look identical now than what it did three years ago when the idea was hatched. So what surprises along the way? Can you remember

David Servodidio (30:20):
Surprises along the way? Great question. Oh man, there’s so many. I’ll try to keep it to a few couple of surprises along the way is I don’t know how many people that are listening to this have been to both a veterinary conference and a services conference at pet services conference, but I was pretty floored by the number of dollars that floods into one side and what I would call just the general absence of dollars that floods into the other. And so I looked at pet services as being so influential, and yet from a technology standpoint, still so emerging. And so as I’ve looked at the industry and just gone back and forth, it amazes me that not more companies are in the same two spaces. We’re talking about the same pets

David Servodidio (31:10):
That are going to the same companies sometimes in the same day or week, and yet it just looks different from an optic standpoint. So I’m pretty bullish on pet services as sort of just being the influence that they are. I’ll give you an example of why I mentioned we do about 25 today. We’re doing about 25,000 vaccine verifications today. There is just no evidence that we can see that when folks go to the vet, it is because their pets vaccines expire those things. It’s not the reason why people go to the vet. People go to the vet because they have appointment at a resort or a groomer. They have a moment where they need to prove their pet is up to date and therefore they’re at the vet within seven days of whatever that appointment is. That human behavior is human behavior. When somebody sends us a reminder, but there’s no enforcement or there’s no reason why, if my dog, Bruce, if his Borella vaccine expires tomorrow, there’s no reason I need to go back to the vet with any sort of urgency to get an updated Borella booster until I know it’s time to go to the resort.

David Servodidio (32:20):
There’s just not our dogs. I have my partner, Tim says this, which I love, which is just our dogs are not outside playing with raccoons. They are on our couches, they’re in our houses. And so kennel cough, it’s like the reason you would get a vaccine kennel cough is because you’re going to the kennel. It is not because you’re outside playing with a hundred other dogs on a regular basis. And so the influence that services have on when people go to the vet and being able to associate, we talk to service providers all the time that I drive so much business to the vet clinic because we’re telling them they need a board of vaccine and thus we’re pushing them to the clinic. That sort of relationship dynamic was something that surprised me quite a bit. The second thing I’d say is it’s been really fun over the last three years to see the number of new technology that’s sort of come into the pet services space.

David Servodidio (33:19):
There’s a lot of new CRMs, a lot of cool tech partners. It’s really fun to see. It feels like when you talk to a resort or you talk to a groomer, everybody’s in tech shopping mode, which is fun to see. There’s this excitement and buzz around like, okay, we’re getting some attention. There are some new entrants, there’s some new great technology. Let me evaluate what technology I’m using at my current facility and make sure I’ve got the best tools that are going to work for me. So what we see is everybody’s kind of shopping at the moment. There’s a lot of companies that have come in a lot of big raises. There’s a lot of cash coming in over the last even just 12 months and a lot of great innovation. And so we see a lot of folks just taking that as a moment to be like, I’ve used X, Y, Z platform for the last five years. Lemme make sure it’s the right one for the next five years, which is fun. It’s fun to, we’re clearly on the cusp of some innovative pathways on the technology side of the market. So those are two that stick out just the power that pet has.

Joe Zuccarello (34:22):
The first one, I know that pet parents, this is obviously a pain point for pet parents because it is for me, and I mean I’m in the industry, but if it’s also a pain point for the service providers, well then everybody’s got a certain amount of infliction, this pain infliction that’s happening to them. And because we’re a scrappy industry with people, with scrappy people participating in our industry, I know that one part of the veterinary leakage risk of losing that customer is that some pet services providers have taken it upon themselves to say, well, we can give those vaccines,

David Servodidio (35:06):
Yes,

Joe Zuccarello (35:08):
We can just cut the veterinarian out completely and we can do board atella here. We can do the distemper cocktail. We can do, right? I’m not saying I’m condoning that, but I know that sometimes when we have a certain amount of pain, sometimes scrappy, resourceful people, we’ll find the wrong solution. They’ll find the wrong pain reliever. So this to me is such an ideal pain reliever for that. I’m sorry. And the second part is I see veterinary services at some point becoming more mobile. I mean, grooming is, grooming is becoming more and more popular, having it done in your driveway. I can see more and more of that happening from veterinary side of the business as well. So I think we’re going to continue to see that ever more reason. I mean, for the mobile veterinarian or the mobile groomer, you don’t want to pull up in somebody’s driveway, especially for the mobile groomer, it’s a wasted trip.

David Servodidio (36:09):
Yep.

Joe Zuccarello (36:10):
Brick and mortar, you’re turning that customer away to go down. Maybe even in the same strip center, there’s a veterinarian that happens to be conveniently located in the same strip center who will take all of the walk-ins to your point, but when you’re in somebody’s driveway, you’re out of luck. And then you’re one person in one driveway with one dog in one van,

Joe Zuccarello (36:32):
In an isolated situation like that. So the risk of business, the risk of safety, the risk of customer service and customer loyalty is greatly alleviated. Tell me a little bit about your team. So obviously I don’t know that maybe it’s just David and your two co-founders sitting there doing all the code work. I don’t know, but when you say 25,000 vaccination records a day, I’m guessing that’s just scratching the surface. It is. You’re still a younger company, but it sounds like a whole lot of techno auto magic kind of of Yeah. Tell me about your

David Servodidio (37:12):
Team a little bit. We’ve got an incredible team. Gosh, so the three of us that started it all those years ago are myself and my partner, Tim Ridgeway, a partner, Chris Lynn. And so the three of us’ we’re a really good trio. We make a really good team of three. And so Chris in particular oversees a lot of our data architecture around how do we think of it like the circuit board, how do we make sure there’s a lot of fluffies in the world, how do we make sure it’s this fluffy at this clinic with these vaccines, all that type of algorithm and matching is where Chris Lynn thrives as a,

Joe Zuccarello (37:52):
That takes a certain type of brain, I’m just saying, takes

David Servodidio (37:55):
A certain type of brain and that is Chris Lynn. So the three of us are the partners, and then we’ve got a support team that’s behind that. There’s two folks in particular if you’re listening to this that you probably have come across. We have a GM on either side of our market, so we have Connor Guptill is our GM on the veterinary side of the market. He worked at what was the fastest growing PIM system or EMR system on the veterinary side in Shepherd, and he’s just been fantastic to go build out these large scale veterinary partnerships. And on the other side we’ve got Casey Schafer, who Casey was most recently, the former CEO of Ginger, which is one of our partners. And he’s just been incredible at helping us envision how do we position ourselves appropriately within the services world. So that sort of core team of five overseas quite a bit. And then beyond that, we have some incredible engineers, just amazing talent, some product folks that make it all happen. In total, we’re about 15 folks when you add it all up, which is we, we’ve grown pretty fast from that small team of three, but we’ve got the right people in the right

Joe Zuccarello (39:15):
Seats. That’s really cool. I’ve often said, listen, the company is built on people. I mean, that’s what we focus on a paragon. And when I’m introducing myself, I say I have the honor of leading an incredible team of pet grooming skills educators, because really that’s my job is to make sure that they’re all pointed in the right direction and deliver on a vision. And that our vision is our why is helping others achieve their success. So that’s why I think I gravitate, I can align so well with what you’re doing at Vet Verify because what you’re trying to do is ensure the success and the wellbeing of all of the people that are involved. Saving money, making money, saving time, efficiency, pet health, wellbeing. I mean, I’ll share a quick story. It was based on one of your surprises in the industry and last May for anybody that knows me closely, last May, I had to have spinal surgery. I blew out a death probably this 52-year-old, at that time, 51-year-old acting like a 21-year-old, probably did something, lifted something too heavy. But through that journey, I had to go from orthopedic specialists to primary care, orthopedic specialists, x-ray technicians, MRI, eventually to the surgeon. And what was amazing to me is they would pull up my file and it was there,

Joe Zuccarello (40:35):
And I remember a day of having to carry the little CD from one provider to the next, or they would’ve to call and they’d have to get my records. I mean, there for a long time I would laugh because I’d be like, there’s somebody calling on a vaccination record.

Joe Zuccarello (40:50):
But it was just so seamless and for me, the patient, it was just such peace of mind. So that’s what you’re garnering, that’s what you’re selling as this sort of peace of mind. And that’s what all of our pet care service providers out there are also selling. I oftentimes will stand up in front of large groups and say, what kind of industry are we in? And we’re in customer service, we’re in pet care, we’re in this, no, we’re selling trust. We’re selling peace of mind, and we got you. We’re going to take care of that little fuzzy family member. Here’s why you’re gone for whether it be an hour or a week or a month, we’ve got you and we’ve done all this housekeeping, all of this thoughtful, mindful things in the back end of making sure that you’re only going to need to play your part. You’re not going to play our part, you’re not going to play the veterinarian’s part, you’re going to play your part, which is the pet parents part. So I just think that’s really awesome. So as we’re getting close to wrapping up our time together, so I am Joe Zuccarello. I’m in the outskirts of suburban metro St. Louis area, and maybe St. Louis isn’t a good example. Maybe pick a town, pick a city anywhere.

Joe Zuccarello (41:59):
Okay, so I’m listening to this. I own a pet care facility, grooming, boarding daycare, doesn’t matter, but I own a pet care facility. What am I doing with now this concept of Vet Verify? What do I do with this? Now I’m listening to this podcast, I’m watching the podcast, I’m sold. How do I get it?

David Servodidio (42:19):
Yeah, great question. We’ll try to make it really easy for you. Just go to vet verify.com and if you click on the button, it gets started, it’ll ask you a couple of questions and then it’ll connect you with one, I mentioned those Core five people, but it’ll connect you to one of those five people to just start a conversation. We’re still early enough, and this is still new enough in the pet care industry that we are still approaching everybody with a personal conversation to say, Hey, let me tell you a little bit about how this works and what to expect. It is behavior change. If you’ve been chasing vaccine records for 20 years and then all of a sudden some company comes along and say, Hey, we’re going to help. Right? You got to Jesus, take the wheel a little bit, right? Trust us. And so we do

Joe Zuccarello (43:05):
Do it. There’s your music industry, right?

David Servodidio (43:07):
Yeah. We educate you through on exactly what trusting the process actually looks like on this day. Here’s what your experience is going to be. So we’ll hold your hand through it, but it really comes down to let’s start a conversation. We’ll be really honest if we can help there, just based on, I’d say the thing you can do in advance is make sure your data is in somewhere, whether that’s a CRM or you’ve got your data organized to some degree, most of the people, 95% of people that we work with are using A CRM as a source of truth today. There are some folks that are using something else, but most of the, I would just say, just do a double click and where does this data live today? And if it’s accessible today, then Verify can work for you. If it’s not accessible or you’re not doing this today, then we can certainly help you start. But that’s a bit of a different starting point.

Joe Zuccarello (44:03):
Yeah. What’s interesting about that, you’re bringing a solution to them for an everyday problem. It’s very similar to what Paragon does, right? Paragon brings a solution to growing grooming professionals and overcoming staffing issues, right? That’s a common huge migraine point, headache point for grooming services providers. What Vet Verify does is, again, to your point, we got you right? Just reach out Vet verify.com, get ahold of Vet verify.com. Listen, I’m going to add one more challenge into that, David, before you contact Vet Verify, before you contact Vet Verify, spend a day, two days, whatever, maybe a week and add up those minutes that it’s taking your staff to call for vaccination records. Maybe even have a little bit of a multiplier on the times when you got to turn a customer away because they didn’t come in with their vaccination records. Yes, the onus was on them.

Joe Zuccarello (45:01):
It was their responsibility. I get it, I get it, I get it. However, imagine if that never was an issue, right? Put that dollar amount, put those number of minutes to an average of what, 15 bucks an hour, do the minutes, make it hours, put a dollar amount today and then call Vet Verify. Because when Vet Verify tells you or whoever it is, it’s how much it’s going to cost to have this done. I’m going to going to assure you, you’re spending boatloads more money in inefficiency and not only the cost of all of those ticker marks that you’re doing, it’s the opportunity cost of either saving that time or reallocating that time to spend more time with the pet parents, spend more time on cleaning your facility, whatever that is. That’s not calling for vaccination records because now there’s a solution. So David, parting words, what’s your encouragement? It’s the industry, it’s changing the industry, it’s being a disruptor. What are the parting words for people that are listening out there? What’s your encouragement for them?

David Servodidio (46:06):
Oh man. I would say encouragement is one thing I love about working in this space is just the scrappiness, the in innovativeness, the folks just pushing the industry forward. And I’d say we self-identify that way and we also, that tends to be the type of group that we work really well with that is willing to sort of, yep, I’m going to reimagine how this process works. So I would just say words of wisdom at this point. I’ve been on this journey for three years. How the industry is going to move, it’s it’s going to happen. And so our selfish aims that verify are like, Hey, we can be that company and steward that. Well, given our background and given our technology, but third party verification on this is the way that the industry’s moving. So I would recommend just getting in the driver’s seat on it and figuring out how that can help your business today and help us shape it. Because we want it to be built by the industry for the industry, not just from the idea three guys had and sort of built this thing. We wanted to make sure it works. And so I would just encourage you to lean in with us to help make sure we do this thing the right way.

Joe Zuccarello (47:21):
Well, I think that’s great, and those are really great parting words for the group. And I will tell you, if my endorsement goes just this far, right, just a centimeter, I will tell you that the moment that I heard about this solution to the listener audience, that a viewer audience out there, from the moment I heard about the solution, I was sold 100%. Absolutely sold 100% just because I know what it can do for everybody that benefits from it. So I’d encourage you, right, you’ve got my endorsement. Go to vet verify.com and check these guys out. You will not be disappointed. So David, again, thank you so much. Thank you for reshaping reinventing re-engineering this part of our industry, and I look forward to some incredible news coming up. We’ll have a follow up episode a year from now. We’ll talk about where did that 25,000 per day number climb to in just a year?

David Servodidio (48:17):
Yeah, let’s do it. Thank

Joe Zuccarello (48:17):
For being part of our podcast.

David Servodidio (48:19):
Thanks, Joe.