Vets don’t usually make natural businessmen and women. When I went through vet school, we were trained in all things veterinary, but no one told us we were going to be involved in business, which by necessity had to make a profit. So we just assumed that the money thing would be OK, and some of my fellow students even returned after holidays with stories of the vet, in whose practice they had just had free education, ‘ripping off the clients’ by charging extra for after hours, and charging for euthanising a pet.
There was a feeling that vets were implicitly wealthy and could afford to be generous. The reality, alas, is very different and despite the fact that some farmers, particularly of the dairy variety, still believe that vets ‘rip them off’ and are fabulously wealthy, I don’t know any vets on the Rich List, or even on the Half-Wealthy List. The truth is that we’ve all had to labour away for many years and very few of us retire with much of a nest egg as a result of purely veterinary labour.
So when Pete A and I started our own business, there was not just a gap in our knowledge of business systems. There was a black hole, a yawning chasm. And one of the biggest problems was debt collection.
In those days, everyone, regardless of whether we knew them, would charge it up, put their bill on tick, and if we were lucky, they’d pay us next month. I’m glad to say that things are a lot tidier now, but this was then and we didn’t want to off end anybody.
Unfortunately one or two of our farming clients and many of our small animal clients always abused the privilege of running accounts, and as we knew them all personally in those days, we took it as a personal affront when someone didn’t pay next month, or often for two, three or four months.
Every month our nurse/receptionist Jill would give us both a pile of unpaid bills. We used to pore through them and write appropriate small comments.
‘Please, Brian,’ or ‘We’d be grateful if you could settle this, Liz’ etc. We might even stretch to ‘Is your arm in plaster?’ but not often. Business was very tight and we wanted to remain friends with our clients. It was the strength of our business.
Now there was one farmer, a friend as well, who never paid on time. He wasn’t just late — if it was the Melbourne Cup, he wouldn’t have been there in time for the clean-up next day. And the bills weren’t insubstantial. They were important to us. This particular chap wouldn’t pay anyone else’s bill either and finally, when he was probably in some straits, he took to passing on all his bills to his accountants to pay for him. But still they were late, doubtless because our account sat on his desk with a heap of others for three months before they were given to the accountant.
After six months of one of these, in desperation, and with some attempt at humorous wrangling, I wrote in veterinarians’ scrawl across the overdue account, ‘Pay up, you dog tucker.’ Now the term ‘dog tucker’ is derogatory, meant to imply you’re not good enough to be meat for the table, but it is also used amongst friends as a form of humorous, put-down greeting. In a very rural New Zealand way.
I thought no more of it, the bill was eventually paid and the matter forgotten.
In those days before personal computers, our wives used to do all of the book-keeping work, and each month Ally would take the assembled debtors’ data to our accountants’ computer system, enter it all and produce monthly figures for GST. Chick did the same thing for creditors, producing the statements for clients, and then she and Jill would stuff them into the envelopes for mailing.
On one of these trips, Ally’s attention was drawn immediately to a familiar-looking statement, nicely framed, prominently placed on the wall of the accountants’ staff tearoom. A note pinned above it said something like ‘Model of good debt collection technique’.
There, blown up to four times its size, was a copy of the statement (all identifying features removed except the handwriting) we’d sent to our tardy friend. He’d sent it in for payment to the accountant who, highly amused, had decided to showcase it. The problem was that my writing, scruffy at the best of times, had been misread.
They thought it shocking, but amusing. Definitely not fit for the front office.
‘Pay up, you dog tucker,’ it said. But even I had to admit the ‘t’ looked awfully like an ‘f’ …