Husband and wife Dan and Kirsty Forster have been working in the veterinary industry for the last decade. Two years ago they left their jobs to set up their own business, the now multi-award winning Mobile Vet. They’re based at a hub in Newport and the team are on the road each day with their mobile operating theatre and 4×4 “first response” unit. They offer a domestic pet service for registered clients across the Isle of Wight.
“We are fairly unique in the UK because we can effectively perform operations on the doorstep,” Dan explains. “That’s our niche. Most of our clients want mobile home visits. Some people love the idea that the vet comes to their house, and for others it might be that their cat gets so stressed that they’d rather pay an extra £10 to avoid a stressful journey. Our aim with our service was to stop animals getting stressed but the reality is that we get a whole mix of people from different demographics and areas using us. We didn’t want to be an expensive premium service. We wanted to be an affordable service where you’re not really paying a lot more than any other surgery would charge.”
Dan is a vet surgeon and Kirsty is a veterinary nurse. They’d been working together at practices on the Island before Kirsty had the idea to go mobile.
“We weren’t happy in our jobs and we knew we worked well together,” Dan explains. “We wanted to have more control about how we ran a business, putting the animals at the core of what we wanted to do. We considered setting up a premise somewhere but we didn’t really like the idea of doing the same thing as everybody else. We looked into the option of having a mobile facility. It’s quite common in America and the more we looked into it, the more feasible it seemed.”
They launched the Mobile Vet in May 2013 with the purchase of their specifically designed vehicle. They quickly took on a part-time vet and a second vehicle. After a year in business they added a second nurse and at the end of 2014 they brought in a receptionist too. Dan and Kirsty are now celebrating the Mobile Vet’s second anniversary with the opening of their new surgery at the Pet Centre on Watergate Road in Newport. Their new hub is kitted out with operating facilities, an x-ray room, a consult room, laboratories and a reception area. The investment in their new premises is already paying off because it’s brought a new focus to the way that the company operates.
“The main issue with our business model is that it’s very time inefficient,” Dan says. “Vets are very expensive to employ and you have to be very organised with where you are going. There are days when we’re pinging from Freshwater to Ryde and back again because urgent visits come in. Then there are days when we might do half a dozen visits in Shorwell. It depends on when the animals are sick and that’s why we needed a receptionist who was on the ball to book things in. Now we have the central base it pulls in some of that lost time and it balances out a little bit. The geographical barrier of the Isle of Wight does actually work for us because we’re centrally based and we can get anywhere within half an hour. It’s been the ideal place to launch the business model. As we get more clients we can start to build up clusters too.”
Pulling in customers hasn’t been a problem and the Mobile Vet’s books are currently full. They’ve achieved this with very little marketing, largely by recommendation and word of mouth. Their website helps, with clients discovering the business and then registering on-line.
“The first year would have been a lot harder if we weren’t getting the bookings and people weren’t using it,” Dan says. “We’d have been thinking that our home and our family life was all on the line. We were very fortunate that we had so much work. We were working from 8am until 7pm and then doing admin until midnight sometimes. We needed to get the business up and running. We’d just had a baby daughter and it was quite difficult to be working full time, relying on both sets of parents. As we started to struggle we brought in another vet, a receptionist and another vehicle. We’re still moving with that momentum now.”
Dan and Kirsty are learning as they go. They’re ambitious but they have carefully adapted their operations to suit their growing customer base. They aren’t afraid of hard work and the rewards have been satisfying.
“It has been exhausting but for the right reasons. We’ve proved that it’s a profitable business model. Franchises like Vets4pets and Pet Doctors are basically taking over the veterinary industry now. The industry is losing small independents so for us to show that you can be successful is quite satisfying. When we started, we threw caution to the wind a bit and we had zero support from anyone except for our families. I wouldn’t say that we’ve made any friends within the industry by starting a new business. At the same time we now have a lot of very satisfied clients and a lot of animals that have really benefited. There are people who, because they are elderly or disabled or couldn’t drive, had been told they couldn’t have an animal. Now they’re registered with us they are able to have a pet.”
Recognition has come from outside sources too. The Mobile Vet has picked up two major national awards in their first two years. They were named UK Best B2C (Business to Consumer) Start-Up at the inaugural Ready for Business Awards in 2013. They also picked up an Everline Future 50 Award, where they were described as “challenging existing chains of vets,” at a ceremony designed to highlight “Britain’s most disruptive new businesses.” Locally Dan and Kirsty were also presented with the Young Entrepreneur trophy at the IW Chamber Of Commerce Awards in November last year.
“There is this idea that veterinary surgeons make terrible business owners because they only want to do clinical work,” Dan says. “I was always interested in the running of the business, and not just the clinical aspect. Winning the awards tells us that this is a very good business above everything else. We’re not being judged on anything to do with the veterinary industry. Winning a Chamber award was very satisfying too, proving that we did this for the right reasons. People within the veterinary industry told us that we shouldn’t do it and that it wouldn’t work but they were wrong.”
After two years in business the future looks very strong. The books are now full and they’ve actually been closed for the last three months, without a waiting list, due to high volume of demand. They may re-open during the summer. Perhaps the most telling example of the Mobile Vet’s business confidence is that Dan and Kirsty are having their first holiday after two years of hard graft. Although the idea of a mobile veterinary service was fairly unique when Dan and Kirsty started up, I ask Dan if there are any similar businesses out there in 2015.
“There are now!” he laughs. “I think we paved the way to show that the business model is viable. It’s definitely a market that vets are starting to look at, now they’ve identified that people want that convenience. There are new mobile businesses popping up on a monthly basis around the UK now. For us, setting up this sort of service was always going to be a ‘spend a lot of money and cross your fingers’ thing. It has worked here, and it turns out to have been revolutionary. I’m very proud.”
First published in the June 2015 issue of Island Business magazine.
