Ben Shaw has an offer for tech professionals working in major metropolitan hubs: why not ditch the big city and long commutes for a place where you can not only have a rewarding lifestyle, but also a professionally challenging career?
That's what Shaw is offering with Vets First Choice, his Portland-based tech company that has grown to 750 employees across the United States (with 150 in Portland), reached $83 million in revenue last year and raised a total of $285.8 million in funding ahead of potential plans to go public. And this has all been accomplished within the last seven years.
The industry Vets First Choice is disrupting? Veterinary care. The way the company is doing it is incredibly complex, uniting multiple business practices in animal care that would not be possible in human care because of regulations. In other words, Shaw told BostInno, Vets First Choice covers "the entire possible array of any medical challenge across species."
"It takes a lot of different kinds of expertise to do the kind of work we do."
With over 20,000 veterinary practices as customers, Vets First Choice provides cloud-based software that provides analytics to help practices identify gaps in care, as well as improve patient compliance, and a digital prescription system for selling medications. The company also runs its own accredited pharmacy service, with a high-speed commercial pharmacy in Nebraska that serves all 50 states and two specialty pharmacies.
"It takes a lot of different kinds of expertise to do the kind of work we do," Shaw, the company's CEO, said. That includes staff dedicated to tracking pharmacy regulations.
While some new ventures in Maine may have a hard time getting started, Shaw had the benefit of his father, David Shaw, who founded the publicly traded veterinary medicine company Idexx when he was five years old. After founding the private investment firm Black Point Group, Ben Shaw worked with his father and other veterans in animal care to explore what could be done to help veterinary care practices with front-office operations.
"I think Idexx has been one of the great innovations in veterinary medicine in the last 30 years," Shaw said. "I think that Vets First choice is an opportunity to bring a similar level of innovation to bear to the front office of veterinary medicine."
Shaw said companies like Idexx have helped veterinary practices figure out what happens when patients are in front of them. Vets First Choice, on the other hand, is figuring out what happens when patients aren't at practices, answering questions like whether outreach efforts are driving better health outcomes and how to keep people from turning to retailers like Walmart and online pharmacies like 1-800-PetMeds for medicine and other wellness products.
It's the threat posed by big companies that Vets First Choice is especially focused on.
"The common thread was, 'something's gotta give, we have to respond to these threats. We need to leverage new tools, new services, to respond or else it will put the future of our profession into question,'" Shaw said.
"I think there's a great opportunity for us to be a successful independent company, public or private."
While Greater Portland isn't a major tech hub, Shaw said the company has benefitted from its proximity to other successful ventures in Maine, namely his father's company Idexx, the publicly traded payments company Wex, the midcoast Maine operations of Boston-based athenahealth and the outdoor retail giant L.L. Bean. The company has made hires from all four companies that include former Idexx executive Patricia Panaia, former L.L. Bean customer planning head Trevor Hanly and former Wex executive Stephen Crowley.
Being about two hours away from Boston, Shaw admitted that Vets First Choice may have a narrower pool of talent to hire from. But the benefit is that employees who end up working get there to enjoy a higher quality of life while working on challenging problems.
Plus, "you end up with a greater sense of loyalty among teams," Shaw added.
With the company's size, the kind of executives it has been hiring and the amount of funding it has raised, Vets First Choice could eventually go public, though Shaw said it's not the only option in a market where there are other good options to create liquidity for shareholders. Regardless, he said, his goal is for Vets First Choice to remain independent.
"I think there's a great opportunity for us to be a successful independent company, public or private," Shaw said. "We have access to capital, and I think that in terms of the size of the opportunity, it's massive."
