In conversation with: Richard Stone

Working to support over 100-hospital teams from Texas to Michigan, Richard’s role is to help regional and local medical leaders deliver on BluePearl’s promise of exceptional pet care.

How do you implement change in your business? Through research and experiments. I’ve recently adopted the Design Thinking methodology through the Mars Petcare Trailblazer program, and now use it with my teams. Since then, we’ve been using the process to improve our efficiency and productivity work streams. The focus is to enhance our service and increase the number of pets we can help. Access to care is a huge topic, and doing things the way we did yesterday won’t get us where we’re going tomorrow.

What do you see as the power of experimentation? Experimentation is all about learning and doing this as quickly as possible. We continuously challenge ourselves to reduce timelines, from months to weeks and where possible, even days. We have 10 live pilots on the go right now. It’s transformed our way of thinking.

If we learn and we fail, that’s ok because we’ve learned. That’s useful for the next time.

Why is it important to engage with veterinary caregivers as part of the process? By encouraging our teams to regularly listen and gather feedback from our Associates, they understand what it was like on the ground and what is going on in veterinary hospitals. This allows them to identify the challenges they are facing and then look at solutions. Without this insight, we were making changes based on assumptions and that means you’re in danger of creating something in a vacuum and solving the wrong problems.

What impact has this had on BluePearl? Historically, we would tend to try and perfect the solution prior to rolling it out. Now, we focus on starting small, rapidly testing a hypothesis and capturing accurate learnings. We’ve been focusing on enhancing the onboarding experience for BluePearl Associates and recently ran a small-scale, iterative pilot with one hospital. With each iteration, we’re gathering more information and modifying things as we go. We’ll be launching a larger-scale pilot to 25 hospitals over the next 7 months, and by the end of 2024, this will be rolled out to 75% of BluePearl hospitals.

What are you listening to? I’ve recently started listening to ‘A Bit of Optimism’ by Simon Sinek — it challenges my way of thinking..

Finish this sentence: If I had a magic wand… I would lock it up. No doubt, a magic wand sounds amazing! Yet, everything is so connected, I bet each wave of the wand comes with unintended consequences worth thinking about.

Interviewed by: Rosie Wynne