I’m not a doctor and I don’t pay one on TV. But I know what it’s like to run a small business. So let me ask you vets something.
When you're sitting with a family in their living room, next to their dog, do you feel like you're competing against corporate giants?
If you aren’t, then you’re one of the lucky ones.
If you are, I believe you're in a winning position. Here's why that's not going to change.
The corporate model has an identity problem
Corporate is coming to our living rooms, but here’s the thing. They have investors and shareholders to answer to. They demand scale, volume, and, of course, shareholder returns.
The thing is, volume-based medicine and grief are oil and water. They don’t mix.
Because shareholders want returns. That means scheduling efficiency. It means time pressure. That means the next appointment is always waiting.
Families, however, value an unhurried pace. Feeling truly heard. Having time to prepare. And most of all, a real connection with their doctor.
Notice anything? Every single one of those things is at odds with a model that values throughput.
You can put a franchised vet in someone's living room. But if they're on a centralized scheduling system, with a corporate protocol governing their next appointment, it’s an architecture optimized for efficiency.
That benefits the independent vet.
You are not selling a procedure
This is the reframe that matters, so I want you to sit with it.
You are not selling a medical service. You are offering your own brand of sustained, loving support at the threshold of loss.
Those are completely different things. And only one of them can be franchised.
You were there for the first phone call. You came at the right time, you spent the time you needed to, and you followed up.
That continuity carries weight and a level of authenticity that no call center or intake coordinator can ever touch.
When you spend two hours with a family (not because the protocol says so, but because that's what they need), you're practicing a kind of medicine that has no corporate equivalent, and families feel that.
The human hospice movement figured this out decades ago. Dame Cicely Saunders coined the concept of "total pain" — the idea that suffering at the end of life is physical, emotional, social, and spiritual all at once. She built the hospice movement because hospitals couldn't give dying people what they actually needed.
Not more technology. More humanity. Care moved from institution to home. From protocol to presence.
You're working in that same tradition. Venture capital can try to systemize this, but at the end of the day, the investors are there tapping their watches, looking for ROI, and a corporation can never be you.
So how do you own this positioning?
Stop competing on features. Longer appointments, better sedation protocols, lower prices, resist that temptation. Your differentiation is not a list of features.
It's something simpler. And more powerful. Because you answer to your families. Not to investors.
No standard operating procedure determines how long you stay. No call center stands between you and the family. No quarterly revenue targets shape the way you walk in and out of someone's home.
You don't need to name competitors or take shots at anyone. You just stand in authenticity about what you offer. The vets inside corporate systems are often great clinicians doing their best, but they're doing so within constraints they didn't design.
Your advantage? You design your own constraints. Or better yet, you remove them.
This work demands presence, not throughput. Continuity, not rotation. A willingness to sit in grief without looking at the clock or optimizing it away.
That's not a business inefficiency. Being you is your superpower.
Something giant firms will be hard-pressed to scale, buy, or replicate any time soon.
