KPI tracking:
The numbers needed to understand your practice
After years of looking through profit and loss sheets for dozens of practices, two things stand out.
One, there are so many different metrics we could use to measure how efficient and successful our businesses are.
Two, so many practices keep track of so little of what they could be doing, and as a result they’re under informed on what they need to do to improve.
Now, we’re not saying that knowing how to set up a moving annual total will improve your clients’ experience in your practice. Not directly anyway.
But the data you gather tells you a story about what you’re doing well and where you can grow. In turn, that informs where you need to focus your finite resources.
And that will dictate what you’re communicating to your clients.
So actually, we are saying that knowing how to set up a moving annual total will improve your clients’ experience in your practice!
Fortunately, we have a ton of experience helping practices to set up comprehensive business accounts, and we’d love to share those lessons with you.
You can book a call to chat with us at the bottom of this page, but in the meantime read on for an overview of some of the important data points we believe every practice should be keeping track of every month.
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Client numbers and the size of your practice
It goes without saying that you need to know how many clients and pets you have on your books – and we’re pretty sure you will do.
But the more interesting question is, how many clients are enough?
You could be facetious and say there’s no such thing as too many clients and we’d admire your ambition.
But realistically there are limits established by the number of FTE vets you have, and the size and location of your practice.
For example, we see that practices turnover an average of £5000 per square meter of floor space – so if your site is too small, you may be putting a ceiling on how much you can grow.
For client numbers, a rough benchmark to aim for is 800 active clients per FTE vet – if you run 15 minute consults. If you’re at 20 minute consults that figure is 600, assuming you’re taking advantage of that extra time to work cases up. We find that a practice sees 1.55 active patients per active client.
If you’re above those numbers, consider hiring a new vet. If you’re below it, get a marketing expert on the phone!
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Celebrating Stellar Vets on stage at SPVS Congress after their well-deserved win in the leadership and management category — recognising visionary leadership, strategic planning and innovative practice development.
​Make sure your health plan is healthy itself!
If you’ve chatted with our team or explored our website, you’ll know that health plans are central to our vision for practice marketing. We thoroughly believe they should be central to your practice too.
We have loads of ideas for how you can make your plan hum. But even if you follow every one of those ideas to the letter, you need to know if they’re working.
Knowing how many pets you have on plan, the split between different plan options and numbers of cats and dogs are starter level data points you’ll want to be following.
Here are a few deeper considerations.
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What percentage of your pets are on your plan? We find that roughly 30% is a good number to aim for if you’re just getting started with your plan, but we know practices with upwards of 60%.
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How many cancellations are you getting every month? As a rule of thumb, anything between 1.3 and 1.7% is normal churn, whereas if you’re running at over 2% for three months or more, you need to work out why.
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And finally, what percentage of your monthly turnover is made up by plan revenue? Once you start seeing a chunky slice of your turnover being produced by steady recurring direct debits, you’ll start to understand just why we’re such fans.
We’re not just marketing specialists, we’re business consultants too, with years of experience working with veterinary practices big and small, successful and still searching for answers.
If you’d like to tap into that river of knowledge, book a chat with us below.
Vet practice marketing
To us it's personal
If you’re eager to improve your practice’s marketing but you’re unsure where to start, I’m taking on new clients for the next quarter! Book an initial discovery below!