Welcome to Veterinary Events and CE in 2021 and Beyond - Episode 1, Featuring Christina Zoccoli and Dan Read of US Vet Shows

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Webinar Wednesdays with GeniusVets. This season, we're going to be talking about a whole new set of questions, veterinary events, and CE in 2021 and beyond. It has been an awful long time since we've been able to get out, get together, certainly for any sort of big events, and as somebody who loves getting together with lots and lots of people, I'm really looking forward to it. So, over the next several weeks, we're going to be interviewing some of the most influential people in the world of veterinary events. We are going to be having CEOs and heads of companies that put on every major event in the veterinary industry, and, today, we are absolutely blessed to have with us the good folks at CloserStill Media, who are running five vet shows here in the United States. We have joining us today Christina Zoccoli and Dan Read.

 

 

I want to make sure that our audience has a good background, and so to save you two from having to brag about yourselves for too long, I'm going to go ahead and read through your bios really quick.

Christina, we'll start with you. Christina Zoccoli is the Group Event Director, leading all of the US vet shows for CloserStill Media. Christina's career in trade shows began in 2006, working on some of the largest events in the US, including JCK, the PGA Merchandise Show, and the National Hardware Show. She joined CloserStill Media in 2019 as the Event Director of New York Vet. In 2020, she took on a new role as the Group Event Director overseeing all of the US events in the vet portfolio. Christina is always discovering new ways to deliver high-quality, class-defining events for America's veterinary professionals and suppliers.

 

Christina, I know you have so much to just dive in and tell us all about. It's shaping up to be different than it was before. Am I right in at least assuming that?

Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I think everything will be different. And Dan Read. Dan leads CloserStill Media's activity across the US, including the vet shows. CloserStill serves a variety of communities, including animal health, human health, enterprise technology and learning, and HR technology. An Englishman in New York, Dan has led a variety of events and media organizations across the world. A true believer in success being driven by the quality of service and value to your community, Dan has the honor of leading a team of unique individuals that care deeply about the markets they serve.

 

It's just a really exciting space and something that, frankly, hasn't changed too dramatically in quite a long time, and, now, we've certainly been thrust into nothing but change over the past year, so going to be very interesting as this comes out on the other side. I'd like to start off by asking you guys a couple of things as far as how you've just personally as humans dealt with this over the past year. Christina, I'll start with you? What's something interesting that you learned about yourself over the past year since lockdowns, getting cut off from everybody, social distancing, having to adapt? What have you learned about yourself?

I've learned that I hate to cook, I hate to clean. No, in all seriousness, probably ... It's a super random fact, but I learned that I can't read unless I'm in absolute silence, and I mean no dishwasher, no washing machine, certainly no loud neighbors, dog barking, nothing, like pin drop silence or I can't read, and it's so frustrating because I love reading. I blasted through so many novels, but, usually, at 11:00 at night because that's when it's quietest.

 

Dan, let me ask you, there's so much time over the last year being shut in, time to work on pretty much whatever you want but potentially to work on yourself. In what ways have you improved yourself over the past year?

I think it's fair to say by the state of my home office that it isn't my interior design skills because I still haven't found the time to do anything with that very white, very bare back wall. Honestly, for me, I've spent the best part of 15 years on an airplane and, I think it's fair to say, haven't spent enough time valuing real friends and family, really dedicated to working. Obviously, our family at work is a real family, and we've got great friends, but it's really easy to skip those conversations with friends and family, particularly across the world, when my family is strewn all over the place and particularly on different contents. So actually taking that time to make time, to have real conversations with people, just not fleeting things about the weather and what you had for dinner, that's meant a lot to me, and to be able to do that and actually not be on an airplane has been great.

It's amazing how technology is changing. I've lived abroad for nearly 20 years at points in different parts of the world, and it's great that technology allows us to connect with people who are far away, be you two hours or seven hours. It's absolutely fantastic.

 

Before we really get into the meat of this conversation and about the events, your organization, CloserStill, does so much for the veterinary industry, beyond the veterinary industry as well. But for the veterinary industry, why we don't we start with just a broad overview of your different offerings, just to make sure our audience has the full picture? Dan, you want to talk about that?

Yeah, no, absolutely. I think when we look at CloserStill as a whole, I think it's really important for us to zero in on the fact that the company was launched around 2007 and our first event was for the veterinary industry in the UK, based in London. Actually, the veterinary industry and serving this community was the genesis of the entire organization. People that remain within the company now and helped found it who had a deep knowledge, love, and understanding of the industry via their networks of friends and family realized that maybe there was something new and different that could be offered to the veterinary community in the UK. That's since subsequently expanded, not just in the veterinary space but in lots and lots of different communities that we serve in human health and enterprise technology and learning and HR technology.

So looking at the veterinary side, we've gone from the single London vet show, which was, again, our flagship event and remains our flagship event, to five events here in the United States, a veterinary event in Germany, in France, also in Asia as well, really understanding that whilst it's a global community of people who want to better animal health, it's also a very local issue, and making sure that we bring quality events to each individual audience, be they in-country or, in this case, in the United States, particularly in regions of the country that we can bring this model to.

 

From our perspective, what we do in marketing, that's really the perspective we have to come from. It's connecting pet owners with their local veterinarian and making sure that the information they're getting is coming from that local vet. Google's building all their algorithms to really understand that people want a local provider and they want to get their information from a local provider, but you're stepping back and delivering it all over the world. Other than some pretty obvious differences when you move from country to country, here in the United States, what kind of regional differences do you find yourself dealing with and catering to?

I think if you take not just the veterinary industry but just the events space, you've also got transportation as one thing. We also have to think of logistics, people coming in, different things like airlift, making sure people can get to where they want to go to, and also having an attractive place to go. We're here talking over Zoom and talking during a pandemic where live events haven't taken place, and, actually, we're all looking forward to in-person events coming back, and we've got to make sure that people are going to places they want to go to because we're human first before we're veterinarians or event professionals or whatever. We're only human, and there are certain human traits that we want to make sure that we're catering to and giving people a time they're going to enjoy and really embrace the experiences we deliver.

So I think when you look at regional, we're very, very lucky around the world with our activity in that, yes, we're very local or regional in our approach to each particular event but also we have access to this global knowledge base, be it, for our speakers, we can bring in some real global, heavy-hitter speakers that are leaders in their particular discipline or some of the people that are most admired around the world, and we can access them and do access them and bring them to the United States or vice versa and take people across the pond over to the UK or Germany or France. So there are different things. For example, the event we have in Texas has a little more large animal and an equine content than we do, say, in New York, it is a good example.

 

What we've seen with a lot of the event companies, first of all, it is your business model to be putting on these events, to be bringing in the people primarily for the CE, and then you have the event sponsors and vendors that come to support that because they want to get in front of the veterinary professionals. There's your business model right there. You're trying to create that experience, dealing with a ton of logistics, but of getting those crowds together, and, all of a sudden, your industry was hit the hardest. Events, shut down, done, so a lot of pivoting to using Zoom and using online platforms and trying to create virtual events, and a myriad of platforms have sprung up, everything from delivering these full-on avatar experiences like you're walking around in some Sim City recreation of a trade show floor to platforms that are very much just variety rooms. People can go in, and they're giving different types of presentations over a format like this. Can you tell me, over the last year, how has your organization leaned into online CE to fill that demand?

Well, it's leaning into online generally and understanding the difference and nuance, David. I think one of the things that we're very lucky with it and I feel as an organization we've really benefited from is being a professional event organizer, that we do this tens or hundreds of times around the world all the time. We're really lucky that we can learn from our colleagues and we're able to access a resource internally and also via event industry associations, for example, the best way to do things, and that will help us when we return to in-person events later in the year in terms of things like health and safety protocols, that we can lean on these huge resources.

We were really quick to embrace online is different to in-person, and you should never, ever, ever try and replicate something in a different environment. We took that position really, really early, that we weren't going to try and pretend to have a trade show because a trade show is a trade show or a conference is a conference. Getting online CE is great and we can do that, and we can do that in a way that's best for online. So we didn't want to put a square peg into a round hole and try and replicate an experience that, frankly, just wouldn't be good enough because you cannot replicate it. When you're in front of someone in person, you're in front of someone in person. When you're not, guess what, you're not. So we really admired those differences and leaned into them.

 

Can you tell me, what are some differences that you've noticed in the online model versus the live model in terms of number of people starting and completing courses, engagement and feedback and sentiment from attendees now that you have had the chance to do a few of these?

Obviously, the big ones are if you're online, you have the opportunity to open a browser and close a browser and if you're in an on-site event, it's awkward to leave a classroom if a speaker is speaking. We do track people, as far as CE goes, because in order to get CE, you have to be on for X amount of minutes. So we do track people, and, sure, there are people that are not paying attention and they close their browser and they reopen it. As far as that goes, I think the biggest difference that I've seen as far as the CE is on-site those rooms have a maximum occupancy, so the people in there, that's it. So if we can fit 1200 people in a classroom, they'll complete the class, but it's 1200 people, and the ones that don't get in have to find another class, where our online event, we saw some in March, the one we just did, where there were over 2000 people in a classroom. So on-site we have more restrictions to how many people can complete certain CE courses, and online we don't have that restriction, so that's probably one of the bigger differences there.

 

I do want to ask you also, the other thing that you mentioned, it's so much easier to just click out of a Zoom than it is to, say, get up in the middle of when someone is presenting onstage and walk out, feel awkward and rude about that. That's an interesting thing. I know that we have some courses out there that we've gotten RACE CE credentialed on and that sort of stuff, and we've delivered CE speeches a bunch of times. Do you guys deliver that or do you certify that yourselves as an organization, or do you lean on an organization like RACE?

We lean on RACE.

 

Use RACE for all your CE. That in itself, just having to go back in any steps that you were delivering live and having to re-certify it, that alone, what a nightmare. That takes a year just like that task. That's a nightmare of a task to do. What would you say, Christina, are some of the most intriguing benefits of that virtual CE model, beyond just being able to get more people in the class? What about from an experience perspective?

By far, the thing that blew me away the most was the engagement within the session. We prerecorded a lot of our sessions, and then we played them live the day of the event, and the speaker was online the entire time of the session. So, a lot of the times, the speaker would welcome everybody to the session, and it was like from that point on the attendees felt connected to the speaker. They felt like they were in a room with just them and this speaker. From the first slide to the last slide, attendees were able to ask any question they wanted at any point. It could be slide two, it could be slide 12, it didn't matter, and the speaker would answer their question.

So you had tens of hundreds of questions and conversations going because it not only engaged the Q&A, but it also started engaging the community as a whole because you had one practice saying one of their experiences, whether it be good or bad, and another practice joining in and saying, "Well, this is what we did," then the speaker would join in and say, "Well, how about if you tried this." Where on-site most times you have to wait until the end of the presentation to ask all your questions, and sometimes a speaker can get to all of them, and sometimes they can't, in this format, what we have seen is just an ongoing conversation for the entire hour. It's really fascinating to watch. Not only does the chat go so fast you can't even keep up with it, but it's really amazing to watch the community just engage together. That's probably the most intriguing thing I've found.

And it's great feedback for the speakers, too, because it's really difficult in an in-person environment, especially when you've got 1200 people in a room. You're past the questions. Not many people put their hands up for the roving mic, right? We're all human, we're a little bit shy sometimes, whereas the utilization of technology means people can, on the fly, interact and ask those questions. So, actually, it's allowed things to be more interactive, more like a classroom than a presentation. You're raising your hand constantly and consistently.

 

Dan, let me ask you this. With the growth of virtual CE and easy access to a variety of options, what really sets your organization apart from other CE providers?

I would never criticize anyone and say we were better or worse. We're certainly different from counterparts, and Christina and her team on events do an incredible job. I think everyone, during this time, is more used to delivering in-person solutions for CE. I empathize with each and every one of them because they've had a tough year. In-person event providers, we're not the worst-hit industry in the world, but we're pretty close to the top. So I would never criticize anyone's efforts to try and alter what they've been able to do, alter what they've been doing in order to serve a community. At the end of the day, yes, of course, we are businesses, whether you're an association, a community, or professional event organizers like ourselves. We are a business. Of course, we keep a number of people employed. But, ultimately, we're there trying to help educate and drive learning in a community of essential workers during this time.

So we're trying to give something back to an industry, and I can assure you that virtual events or online events don't make anybody money, but we wanted to make sure that we were giving something back to the industry where we could, which is why we made, for example, our events completely free of charge on the veterinary side. In fact, on most sides of our businesses across the world, we actually backed up on this concept of charging for attendance because realizing that when we do have to charge, there are physical costs to in-person events, catering, venues, those just weren't there in an online environment.

Yes, platforms cost money and things like that, but we really, actually, more than anything, wanted to give something back to the industry, and we took a decision very early on to say, "Look, we have access to just rafts of education and people who are the best in the business in their particular discipline," and we worked with them really, really hard to say, "Look, we're going to give something back to the industry," and wanted to make sure we could give access to absolutely everybody, depending on their CE budget or their requirements or just their desire to learn, because this isn't just about CE credits. This is about giving people access to content they're genuinely interested in. So we said, "All right, we're not going to put a financial gate on it. We'll take a knee financially to be able to bring as many people in as we possibly can."

 

You've got WVC and you've got VMX, right, two of the biggest vet shows in the world, and a number of others that are out there. Overall, you might know the stats on this. How many events does an average, let's say, veterinary practice owner, somebody in the industry who we would consider an attendee ... Roughly how many events a year do you think they go to?

That's a great question. I think it's difficult to know because it depends on what you class as an event date, right? If you're taking the very large, truly national events or even the global events like VMX and, a slightly different angle, WVC versus something they may do at a local school or an evening one-hour type bit of educational learning, do we class that as an event? I think, honestly, it's usually no more than two, is what we see if we're talking events of scale. People are busy, and time out of practice, it's a huge deal, which is why, for example, in our events, we created the model that was very different to the more legacy model out there and made our events two days, so they're a little longer days, but understood that ultimately time is the most precious thing we've got and, hell, this last 15 to 18 months have taught us that in spades.

From that perspective, making sure that you can get all of the education you need, and CE is wildly important, but sure as hell that's not the only reason people go to events ... CE is wildly important. You can do everything. You can network with your colleagues, your peers, talk to suppliers, vendors within the industry, see things, touch things, enjoy things, and experience things, everything you can do there, everything you need to do. Instead of five days and having to take a long flight away and stay in a hotel for four nights, you can do it in two days in New York, Austin, or Chicago, wherever it may be.

 

When we were talking a little bit earlier about the virtual events and some of the huge advantages of virtual events, obviously, we're here to also talk about, hey, we're excited about getting back to live events, right? So let's talk about that a little bit. Let's build up a little excitement because we really do ... The people who are attending and who are watching this here today, we want to see face-to-face, live and in-person again. So, Dan, let me ask you this. What's your favorite thing at live events? What's your favorite thing that happens at live events?

I would probably say at the end I get to take my shoes off. My feet are usually killing me. Honestly, it's not me that does the do at events. It's Christina and her team and the guys that really craft these things for the communities they serve. I'm very proud and honored to serve that team by leading them. I think, for me, my favorite bit is I get to stand back while these guys are running around and their hair's on fire, which, honestly, I can't do because I don't have any hair. I think it's me being able to stand back and see these guys really, really striving and driving to do the best they possibly can for the community. My favorite event, very selfishly, is seeing the happiness and smiles on the face of the team that I serve, ultimately to see what a great job they've done, and that makes me incredibly happy. If they're happy, that means they've served that community. So I love seeing them do what they love doing, and that's doing great things for the people that we put these events on for.

 

Christina, I'd like to hear your take on the same question, since you're really on the ground and you're at these events. I do know, as the person who's putting on the event, your experience of the event is absolutely entirely different than that of the attendee. So I'd like to actually ask you to give me an answer for both. What's your favorite thing that happens at live events, and then what do you think is a fan favorite of attendees that happens at live events?

So my favorite is what Dan alluded to. If exhibitors are happy and attendees are happy or if, at least, they seem happy, then I know our team did everything we could to make it a great event and it probably was. Last year, not last year, 2019, at New York Vet, there was a point where you couldn't walk through the aisles. A couple of my team came running up to me and they said, "Have you seen booth whatever? Have you seen this aisle?" I was like, "Yeah, I have," and they were so excited, and that's my favorite part when the whole team knows that everything we worked on all year came together and it was all worth it. Because there are long nights and there are weekends you're working and you're traveling to competitive events and there are tons of things you don't want to do, but when you finally see that it's all worth it and you get positive feedback from an exhibitor or an attendee says, "This is a great event," that's the best part.

 

What do you want to remind people of that is a fan favorite that you know that some people are looking forward to getting back to?

You're networking with your peers. You see friends that you haven't seen in forever that you only see at events. You see past colleagues. You see people you went to school with. You see old professors. Trade shows are where you connect with everyone in your industry. It's kind of like the Cheers, the bar Cheers. It's where everyone knows your name. Yes. It's where everyone you've ever come in contact with throughout your career as a veterinarian ... This is where you all get together and you meet, and remember that that's why you do face-to-face events.

I think building on that as well is one thing events have that you're never going to get from online ... Because with online or any of the other types of these things, you have to go and get what you're looking for, right? You're searching for it. You're making an action. You don't have serendipity online in the same way, and that kind of serendipity and the happenstance and the intangibles, you get those in-person. You'll go searching for your learning online and you'll go searching for certain things online, but it won't happen to you by a little conversation that was happening over there and you go and speak to someone or the person you haven't seen for a number of years and you walk over to them or a vendor who's got an incredible new product that you didn't have to go looking for and click four times. You just happen to walk past whilst you were intending to do something entirely different, of course, but then, just due to serendipity, you find that kind of opportunity, that new idea.

 

Let me ask you as we transition ... Or, sorry, how do you expect the attendance of live events to be affected compared to pre-COVID events? What's the reality that you're really expecting? I know you've done some simulations and some projections. What are you really expecting in terms of the percentage of people that are going to come back this year?

I think in '21, late '21, we've got to expect it's certainly going to be less than we would've usually had. Of course, it is. I think anyone to suggest otherwise would be lying to someone, whether it's themself or someone else or fooling themselves. I think that's okay because we as event organizers and our counterparts in the veterinary event space and around the industry as a whole are going to do everything we possibly can, we have to do and we want to do, in order to make sure people feel safe. We're going to put every single health and safety protocol we can in. We're going to go above and beyond federal, state, or city guidelines because this is what we do best. If people aren't comfortable, we'll do everything we can to make them comfortable, but it's okay for them not to be comfortable right now. And, also, in the veterinary space, these ladies and gentlemen have been essential workers throughout this whole thing and have worked tooth and nail, and we have to appreciate that.

So, without a doubt, I think, in the short-term, we're going to see slightly reduced attendance, but that's all right, and we should do, we have to, we have capacity restrictions. So, in a way, that's also something we've got to work with, too. Longer-term, I think it's gradual. I think it's up to us as event organizers. I think one thing you said about learning is that we've always prided ourselves on not resting on our laurels and just doing the same old thing and cranking the handle. We've bought ourselves 25 new handles and 25 new cracks to turn, and we're going to do some stuff that's going to be really interesting going forward around really embracing the in-person event experience and truly understanding the difference between online experiences and in-person experiences. As I said, that's where we're really benefiting from being a professional event organizer. We've got a lot to learn, and we have learned a lot from our colleagues around the world and also our counterparts in other event organizers.

 

I've been following along as much as I can throughout the past year what you guys are doing and planning to do, and, certainly, I know you've had a lot of very thoughtful, very bright people putting their minds to work thinking about this question. What do you feel is going to be the biggest or are the biggest factors that could hold some people back from returning to live events, and how are you addressing those?

I think it could be a plethora of things. It could be their own comfort level, if they're not ready to go back to large-scale in-person gatherings. It could be travel, so if it's something that they have to drive in a car, maybe that's more comfortable than getting on a plane somewhere. It could be corporate, so we still have a lot of companies that we're hearing there are still corporate travel bans in place. So if it's down to corporate, it's really not the individual's decision. I think it'll be a variety of things that we have to manage all completely different. There's not much we can do about corporate, but individuals, like Dan said, we can try our hardest, but it will be probably one of the biggest driving forces is that comfort level.

 

Now, we've talked a little bit about your virtual side, and you've got live events that are coming back on. You hinted that you guys are going to be doing some special stuff to make the live events even more enticing, and I really want to ask you about that. But, first, are you going to be embracing a blended model, so you're going to have live events and the virtual side going on at the same time, and what's that going to look like, blending those experiences?

We are. So what the plan is we will have both. We'll have a hybrid, so our exhibitors and our attendees can participate both virtually and on-site, depending on preference. An exhibitor, for example, can participate on-site by having a booth. They would also have an online listing, just how you saw with the listing, the profile, gathering leads that way. Or they could do it virtually, where they would have their online listing but they would also have representation on the show floor. So they would get a meter board, per se, and then their logo would be on it and then a QR code where attendees can scan to get information and the exhibitor can gather leads that way.

We want to make sure that everyone has representation both online and on-site. It's really important to make sure that both are covered. For attendees, not everyone's going to be able to fit in the theaters, so we'll have to stream the content. We'll do that the same way we did on our virtual platform. So all of the CE that's available live will be virtual as well. Hopefully, it'll all run perfectly and flawless as most events do. I can't foresee any problems.

Event organizers are like the perennial ducks or swans in a pond. Our legs are going like that, but we'll look serene just gliding over the surface or as serene as possible. I think Christina makes an important point there of we are going to have what we're doing ... The plan is to have things online and in-person at the same time, but there's also a bit of a middle ground there, too, that middle ground there being that you can be in the building but you don't have to be in the conference room. If you're not comfortable going into the whole room, we're going to create some content lounges, if you will, around where you can be in the convention hall and watch the content the same way you would but you can watch it on your phone.

So you're still there experiencing that live in-person event, but you don't have to go into the conference room if you don't want to or there may be some capacity restrictions. So we've got a three-step process of you can be fully all-in, you can be some way in, or you can still get that CE at home and interact with those suppliers and vendors that you need to.

 

Can you tell me a little bit about ... I forgot exactly who mentioned it. Dan, I think it might've been you, kind of hinted towards you guys are going to be doing some really cool, interesting maybe innovative things to try and lure more people back to the live experience. Anything that you might be willing and able to share with us about what they'll look like?

I kind of throw Christina under the bus there because she's the person that puts the magic fairy dust on events. I think, first off, one thing I'll say and then really hand it to Christina is it comes back to that point of being able to speak both languages of online and in-person and understanding the difference in the dialects, if you will, and make sure our in-person is not trying to replicate online and online isn't trying to replicate in-person and really using in-person for the things that only in-person is good for. So I'll give you an example. For the veterinary spaces, hands-on labs, right, hands-on clinical content or surgical content, in some cases, that you cannot replicate online unless you've all got VR headsets and the most whiz-bang technology that you got to spend thousands of dollars on. Things like that we're going to really lean into quite heavily, making sure we're giving people the kind of content they need. But this is definitely Christina's jam more than it is mine.

I was just going to talk about the safety protocols we're putting in place. I don't know if it's going to lure anybody, but that's really what we're going to be putting in place to make people feel more comfortable about coming back to our events, but just on, I guess, a grander scale, as Dan put it or set me up for. So everything from the SISO all secure protocols, we'll have temperature screenings and masks. Unfortunately for you, David, we will have a no handshake policy. Well, one thing I have seen and would like our show to participate in are the bracelets that say, "I'm okay with a handshake," "I'm okay with a hug," and, "Don't come near me."

 

Yeah, a little green, yellow, red.

Yeah. Exactly. But we'll do the wider aisles and prepackaged food. We'll have members of our staff certified as COVID compliance officers, so anywhere on the show floor, you'll be able to reach one of them. The hand sanitizing stations, all of the regular stuff, we're just going to have to hype it up a little bit more.

 

I'd really like to open it up and give you guys a few minutes to tell everybody about notable events that you've had recently and then the lineup of events that are to come and the big draw. Let them know what they should be signing up for, where they can go, what are the dates are they need to sign up for. What should they be doing right now?

Then my favorite is Vet Show @ Home. So we've now done two virtual events. We did one in October, and we just did one in March. The one we just had in March had almost 10,000 attendees. It was a phenomenal event. Like I had mentioned, a couple of our sessions had over 2000 people watching the session. We will have another one coming up in June, so everyone should sign up for that, either as a sponsor or as an attendee. It will be from June 21st to the 23rd. We're all really excited about it.

 

You had mentioned earlier virtual events, there isn't a cost for attendees. But live events still have some cost to them?

Our live events do, yes. There is still a cost.

So, yeah, Vet Show @ Home in June will be once again totally free of charge for attendees.

 

Where do they go sign up for that right now?

vetshow.com

 

Then, let's see, what's next? What's next you'd like people to do right now?

The next would be Reno. Wild West Vet in Reno, Nevada in October.

Vet Show Academy

 

Then, let's see, list out the live events that are still happening. I was very much looking forward to Austin Vet being that I'm here in Austin, Texas, but sad to learn recently that Austin Vet is getting put off. Is that correct?

Yeah. We've had to reschedule that to April of 2022, just due to the ongoing restrictions and guidelines and being able to deliver a high-quality event to the community, both the attendee side of the community and the vendor side. It was unfortunately an action we had to take due to what's still going on.

 

I do know a little bit about that, what the regulations are for an event like that in the city right here, and it was absolutely not going to be possible to have an event when I heard about that, so I thought that was actually good call. So Austin but the other four events are on?

Two more this year. There'll be two in-person events this year. Christina alluded to Wild West Vet in Reno, Nevada in early October, and then our flagship US event, which is New York Vet, taking place the first Thursday and Friday of November here in New York City. New York Vet.

 

This has been a fantastic conversation. Really, I'm super excited for the few events that are coming up, both of the live events as well as the virtual events, the blended model. GeniusVets is all in. We're in for the ride with you guys. Love what you're doing. I can really tell from both of you, a lot of altruism, a lot of true love for the community. Your organization has put your money where your mouth is and stepped forward to continue delivering value throughout this difficult time and doing it cost-free to attendees. That is huge. We're doing things like that here at GeniusVets all the time to really try and support the industry in ways we can, and when I see other organizations doing that, I have nothing but the utmost respect. So on behalf of everybody watching, thank you so much for what you've been doing in that space.

It's our pleasure. One thing I would like to add, David, too, the other thing is we're quite humble. We do what we do on behalf of the community. So if there are things you want to see at in-person events or online events, get in touch. If there are certain types of content, if there are certain other types of things you'd like to see happening and experiences you'd like to have, let us know. We can do that for you. We're not set in our ways. We're really open to making sure that we do the best we possibly can for this community. So get in touch with Christina, get in touch with me or any of the team. We're relatively approachable individuals most of the time and certainly open to new ideas. We'd absolutely love to hear from more people, whichever part of the community you are an element of.

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That about wraps up our show and our interview for today. We are all looking forward to getting back to live events. Please check out the links that we posted in chat. Now is your chance. Right now, go click on those so you can get more information about the upcoming events. Get on their newsletter. Get on their list. Keep up with what events are going on. It's going to be a great time. A lot of innovative, cool things are going to be happening.

And I'd like to remind you that if you are a veterinary practice owner or a manager, you should be going to geniusvets.com/start because, right now, we have a full-page profile that's live on our website about your practice, all your information. You got to go check it out right now, make sure that there's no incorrect information, but you can claim it for free. They're beautiful profiles. They rank at the top of Google search results. They're very valuable, but we are offering them to you absolutely free of charge. Go to geniusvets.com/start for more information about that. Please join us next week when we are going to be, again, covering this topic about veterinary events on what you should be expecting. Next week, I believe we're going to be speaking with Viticus Group about WVC, so that'll be an interesting conversation. As always, thank you so much for spending a little bit of your day with us. This is David Hall, co-founder of GeniusVets, signing off. See you next week.