Video killed the consulting star?

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Can Ruff the veterinary practice manager get leadership and management training online? Worth a try. Most great business consultants want to figure out how to scale their advice. Can the sometimes-pricey experience that their clients get when they visit for a few days at a time and build an ongoing relationship for advice be translated into a book or a series of books or a series of videos or taught and disseminated by other “junior” teachers?

Aspire Vet's Randy Hall-a veteran of Pfizer sales and an executive coach and Fortune 500 leadership educator-is trying the online course route with a veterinarian's help and some funding from AAHA.

Who else packaged up their smarts?

• Fetch dvm360 conference regular Dr. Dave Nicol at https://vetx.thinkific.com/courses/leaders.
• Practice management gurus Mark Opperman and Sheila Grosdidier with their book at IndustryMatter.com.
• YouTube maven and Uncharted Veterinary Conference founder Dr. Andy Roark (also with Dr. Nicol) at  http://drandyroark.com/let-dr-andy-roark-train-your-team/.

His company partner, Julie Reck, DVM, was so thrilled with his coaching work she paid for his expertise to help not just her, but other team members at her practice. Now, the hope is that practice owners, practice managers and other leaders in veterinary hospitals will pay $129 a month ($109 for AAHA members) to watch the company's inspiring and polished online leadership and management videos, all of which are approved by the Veterinary Hospital Managers Association for CVPM credit. The courses include quizzes and materials to make sure you can actually put what you learn into practice. It's a cheaper way to grow as a leader, if it works for you, than flying out an executive coach to visit with you once a quarter.

Current courses include:

• “Attracting and hiring exceptional talent”
• “Stop the drama! Eliminating conflict in your practice”
• “Mastering difficult client conversations”
• ”Developing a vision to create the practice you want”
•  “Managing your practice, leading your team”

Hey, wait, we do that!

Hall's courses sound an awful lot like the practice management and leadership content dvm360.com provides. Here's some stuff you might be interested in if you want to dip your toe into the subjects before diving into a class:

• Your checklist for hiring a veterinary associate
•  dvm360 Leadership Challenge: Toxic teams
•  Conversation tree: When the client says “I can't afford that”
•  Drawing your veterinary practice's road map
•  Building a kinder, stronger, veterinary leader

And if you really do like the face-to-face learning, you can always visit us for the latest leadership approaches and inspirational management approaches at a Fetch dvm360 conference.

Hall told us at the conference he's got a smartphone pic of a whiteboard with more than 100 more ideas for upcoming courses, so he says he thinks he's got a solid pipeline.

There's a free 30-day trial, and you can also check out some of Hall's podcasts and blog posts on the website to get a feel if his approach is the right fit for you.

A few other companies we were curious about from VMX and WVC

• Bingle Vet Clinics unveiled a new franchise for entrepreneurial future practice owners looking for a different business model for their hospital. Pay Bingle $39,500 and an ongoing 6 percent cut, and you get all the Houston practices' manuals, procedures and practice management approach.
• Looking for locum doctors? Looking for locum work? You can try out DVMschdlr. Anything's worth a try during this associate shortage, right?
•  Instinct is a digital workflow-organizing software built for critical-care settings as well as busy, outpatient environments. It's snazzy-looking and carefully merges operations from the front desk, to outpatient visits, to inpatient treatment sheets, to boarding, to real-time and automatic invoice auditing. A very passionate veterinary technician, who joined the company after seeing the software in action, explained many of the software's core functions, unique approach and bells and whistles to us. Her excellent explanation makes us think this is something to be seen, not read about. If you're curious about new workflow solutions, you should set up a demo.