“People perceive that we’re a bigger company now. And it’s still just the five of us.”
Amy Ma · VetCircle
Amy Ma started VetCircle five years ago with her business partner Monty, after watching corporate groups buy up veterinary clinics across Canada. The practices that stayed independent got none of the management support the corporates built for their own. Owners were selling clinics they did not want to sell, worn down by the business side of the job. Amy went door to door with a small plant that said grow with us, sat with owners, and heard the same thing at every stop: they were figuring it out alone. Twenty of them signed up. Then word spread and the phone started ringing daily. VetCircle now supports around 300 practices with a team of five.
The challenge
VetCircle gives members five things: management and HR support, group rebates and discounts, equipment procurement, continuing education and wet labs, and in-hospital support. Delivered by five people, that meant Amy and her team were the product.
Every answer was bespoke and sent directly to one clinic as a phone call, an email, or a template. The community lived on a dormant platform with no mobile app and no notifications. Before Heartbeat, the VetCircle platform had tons of valuable resources, but only 25% of members opened it at all. Instead, practice managers called Amy and her team, and sending them all back to the platform to dig for information was getting tedious.
Once they crossed the 100-member mark, this became a significant bottleneck for the five-person company.
“When we hit about a hundred members, I realized this is unmanageable.”
Why she chose Heartbeat
Amy poked around Heartbeat for a couple of months before she booked a call. VetCircle does not make revenue on the dashboard itself, so the return had to be clear. The branded app is what piqued her interest. Members would search VetCircle and find VetCircle, rather than a login on someone else’s platform. The app and the dashboard were live in under two weeks.
Heartbeat gave VetCircle:
- A searchable resource dashboard: practice managers pull up a template or an SOP mid-shift instead of calling the hotline
- Scheduled onboarding: an email, then an in-app prompt, then a direct message, so a new member actually watches the first walkthrough
- Aliases for private members: a clinic can ask about an HR or money problem without the practice down the street knowing who asked
- Webinars and continuing education: in the same place as the documents they refer to
- A rewards and discounts program: browsable by members instead of relayed by email
- Pinned placement for paid services: the in-clinic team is visible to members who want more hands-on help, which was hard to advertise before
“We created the app and the dashboard in two weeks or less. I was probably the bottleneck.”
A branded VetCircle app at a fraction of the cost
Amy had priced up building one herself first. She spoke to developers, and it got complicated quickly. Every piece needs designing, and then someone has to keep it current as phones and operating systems move underneath it. With a team of five and a support hotline to answer, that was not going to happen.
Heartbeat built it instead. VetCircle handed over its brand guide and the images it wanted members to see, and the VetCircle app went into the App Store under VetCircle Inc. There is almost no Heartbeat branding in it, and the monthly mail from Apple and Google about store requirements is somebody else’s job now.
“We created the app and the dashboard in two weeks or less. I was probably the bottleneck.”
The part Amy did not plan for was what it did for sales. A clinic that searches for VetCircle and finds a real app in the store reads the company as bigger than five people, and signs up faster because of it. The app is also how the resources get used. Practice managers are on their feet all day, so they open it like a glossary and search for what they need between appointments.
Resource use went from 25% to 80%
The old platform sent one email that said join the VetCircle community, and that was the whole onboarding. If Amy did not walk a member through it personally, they either worked it out alone or never opened it.
On Heartbeat, the sequence is scheduled. The member gets the email, logs in, looks around for a minute, and gets a prompt asking whether they have watched the intro video. If they close the prompt, a direct message from Liza asks the same thing. This improved dashboard usage among VetCircle’s retirement-age members from 25% to 80%.
110 practices to 300 in a year
Before Heartbeat, VetCircle had around 110 member practices. A year after the app launched, membership passed 300, and none of that growth required Amy to be in more places at once. The plan for this year is another 150 practices.
The in-clinic assessment is still what makes VetCircle different. The team has run about 200 of them, where they observe a practice for a few hours to uncover problems and opportunities the owner might not be aware of. The difference now is how those assessments are packaged as learnings for other members. Patterns that show up across those visits become a template or a webinar on the Heartbeat dashboard that every member can reach, instead of a custom document for one clinic.
The community answers itself
The change Amy notices most is who replies first. A member posts a question and another member, one VetCircle walked through the same problem six months ago, answers with the template attached before the team gets there.
Retention was strong before Heartbeat, and it is stronger now. Amy believes the community is the reason. Members don’t want to leave, because then they lose contact with all their helpful peers.
Her advice to anyone weighing the same jump is to book the call instead of reading more reviews. If the app is the part you want, that is where to start.
“Everything you’ve read about Heartbeat is true. It’s definitely a no-brainer.”
