Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of Vet Chat, and I think it's probably safe to say that I am more excited about this episode and the ramifications of this episode than I have been about anything that we've recorded so far, so far. I'm delighted to be joined by Oke Olazu, who is the CEO of Bought by Many. Oki, it's, it's great to be having a conversation with you.

I just wonder if you could just tell us, for everyone who has been in the vet profession for, for a long time, you know, obviously bought by many are a relatively new company, I wonder if you could just tell us a little bit, you know, about. Yeah, no, no problem at all. I, I joined the business about 4 years ago, and the business has been going for about 7 years, so in, in, in, I was gonna say in dog years, in business years, we're, we're, we're a new business and .

We kind of, the, the, the original genesis of the idea of Bough by Many was about communities of people trying to access insurance and trying to make it easier for to group communities together to access insurance at a better price. That was kinda, that was kind of it, and one of the, one of the types of insurance. That we focused on was around pet insurance.

And, you know, the great thing about pet insurance is that it's fairly easy to build communities or communities of, you know, particular breed owners was really popular and I think you'd know how that works, you know, pugs or or or things like that, and get them and try to get those, those deals as well. . So we kind of did that for a while, and then we just realised, amongst other things, it might be cyclists who would like to cycle abroad or or or or people who'd like to travel in certain types of cars or whatever like that.

So community-based insurance. And then, about 4 years ago, at the time I joined, we got the opportunity to start creating our own insurance cos we used to pass these communities on to other insurance companies, to cover, and we wanted to cover, we wanted to have our own customers. We, we kind of really believed that we could do something a bit better in insurance, really take insurance to the next level.

And, and we kind of decided that pet insurance was the, was the category that we would focus on to do that because it's such an emotion for an insurance product, it's such an emotional one. It's one where people really get to protect something they absolutely truly love. And, and cos we wanted to create a business that was different to everyone else, that people could actually love as an insurer.

Business, we thought pet insurance was the right, the right sector for us. So, yeah, about 3 years ago, we started, started writing our own pet insurance, and as I said, you know, we wanted to be an insurance business that customers loved and because they love their pets and we helped protect their pets along with the vet community, it was a great, it seemed like a great thing for us to do, and in that, we now protect and insure more than 200,000 pets from a standing start three years ago. So it's a really great.

Story of growth for our business. Yeah, I think it's it's all, I always find it entertaining every time I speak to you, the, the number is just going higher and higher, and I think that probably shows the speed at which people are adapting and changing their behaviours. But I think one thing, and you know, I will, I will caveat this at this point and say I actually switched my dogs to being insured we bought by many last year.

But I just wonder, you know, if I take myself out of that step, what, what about you guys? Is different, because of course, to most people you would look at insurance as a, as a general topic and think it's quite dull, it's quite droll, and you know people sort of it's a necessary evil in their lives, but, but what have you done to make. The question, and, and, I won't caveat mine, but, I, I worked in insurance, big insurance companies, before I joined B by Man, and actually fell out of love with insurance because it felt like insurance was, was, was built in many ways, not to support a customer, right?

Too many loopholes, too many things that made it difficult to understand what you actually had. To then use it when you needed it. And what attracted me back to the insurance sector was, was this opportunity to build, an insurance business that, that, that customers would love.

And, from, from, from our perspective, what that meant was we needed to go out and talk to consumers, to customers and say, what is it that you pretty much hate about pet insurance? Right, what don't you like, right? And then find out what those things were and then we'll make them better.

And so customers were, we, cos cos we were around. Communities, we were able to build communities, and just asking this question. And so we had like 36,000 responses, literally at that scale, to things that people didn't like about insurance.

And so we decided to build an insurance company that, that didn't do those things, and that, that's never been done before, so what that could be at a, a product level, you know, where people said something like, you know, I get insurance. And then I don't use it and I feel a bit cheated. So we created the first and only money back policy whereby if you don't claim on it, you get 20% of your money back, you know, because that's the direct thing that customers did.

You know, I don't like the fact that it goes up in price, so we created the first and only fixed for life policy that does not increase in price ever, right? And these things weren't done just because people didn't build products to suit what customers needed. So we literally took all the pain points to the things that people hate about pet insurance in particular, and fixed them, right?

And it sounds like the simplest thing in the world, doesn't it? But actually, people weren't doing that, companies weren't doing that, and we did. And we aligned it to a, a, a customer experience that we wanted to be the best, not just in insurance, the best out there.

Completely, you know, we set a huge ambition on getting advocates for our business cos we knew that that would grow our business as well. So, you know, we built one of the easiest quoting and by processes and one of the easiest claiming processes because we knew that that would make customers advocates for our business. We're a truly customer centric, customer focused business.

And I think that's one of the, the interesting things if you watch sort of fast growing. In modern businesses, you know, a lot of them really, really identify with their customer, and of course that's something that, you know, as veterinary practitioners, we get, if we're not engaging and we're not sort of building those relationships of trust with our clients, then they'll go to, you know, the veterinary practise down the road, and that's of course a competitor to us, so. You know, that sort of client relationship is, is key, but of course you guys are, are, you know, looking at relationships with the veterinary sector.

Why why is that important? It's really interesting, so we kind of came into this thing with. You know, we've got customers that heart of what we do.

Customs are the absolute key to everything that we do and we want to to make them as happy as we can do. And, and that was our primary focus. But then after a while of doing it and selling policies, you know, we knew claims was, was fundamental.

But we didn't think too much about the people at the other end of the claim, if you know what I mean. The, the sort of how the ecosystem would work, except that we wanted it to work fast, we want it to work fast and efficiently and all of that sort of stuff. But actually, the more we thought about it.

The more we thought, hang on a second, that, you know, we are literally fundamentally linked to veterinary practises. They, you know, they are, you know, a pet insurance business and a veterinary practise are fundamentally linked. We have joint customers, right?

We have absolutely joint customers. So actually, if we're all about making our customers happy, then actually we've gotta do some work with this other part of the supply chain, which is, which is vet practises to make them happy cos we actually jointly own, not own, own it's a difficult word, we jointly have the same customer. And so we started thinking about that an awful lot more and, and, and how vet practises worked and how people access them.

We used our own experiences of, of that, and we, and we have now at least 30 vet nurses that work within our claims process, you know, as, as claims adjudicators, cos we thought actually that would be the the way we get great claims experience for vets is to have vet nurses who work for us. So that sort of exposed us to, to that part of it all, and, and so we, we started to build this appreciation for how important the work that happens in the, in the veterinary practises was and how we could help. And what we wanted to find out was how can we help our colleagues in the in, in the veterinary practise to do their best work to best take care of our comp our customers.

And so kind of that thought process is what made us really think about how, how can we, how can we work better with veterinary practises. And I think that's something that I dare say for many of us, at least at some stage in our professional lives, there's been a mismatch and you know, you find yourself in a, you know, a real battle with an insurance company for a case at one stage, you know, I mean, I, I can think of countless over the years and the fact that you guys have identified the need to make that process. A little more wholesome, is nice, and what I love there, and it really does lead us into, into the crux of what we're talking about here is that that mention of, you know, the using of the vet nurses in, in this process.

And I dare say that any of us as vets in practise, and you know, those of you who who know me and listen to other episodes will know the pedestal that I put our our veterinary nursing teams on. They are very much, you know, the, the heartbeat of the practise in in every practise. And I know that bought by many have have partnered with us at the webinar vets to look at delivering something fairly epic, I think is probably the understatement of the century really.

So I just wonder, OK, actually, if you would like to tell the vet nursing community so because we, we kind of understood how important vet vet nurses were from having so many working on our claims, and actually I always love talking to the claims team cos it gives me, I've never worked in a. Practise, right, I've been, I've taken my two cats to the vet too many times, actually, I would say. And so I get that, that, that, that fleeting attraction, pretty much always with the vet nurse, right?

You know, who I meet and we talk about, you know, the treatments and, and that sort of thing. So, so I kind of had that relationship and then I, you know, spoke to the guys in our claims team, and they was full of so many stories about what it was like to be a vet nurse and things that had happened, and you kind of think, wow, this is, this is like a hell of a lot of dedication. I mean, the reason we put them in our acquaintances, cos they're so dedicated.

To, to animal welfare, you know, to, to doing their best for, for, for the animals in their care, and that was, it's quite inspirational actually. And then because we were so focused on this, we decided to create a role in our organisation that we call a vet relationship manager, but but we, we did it primarily to, to try and hire a a vet nurse that could come and work for us. We hired Sarah, Sarah James, who's been literally outstanding, and it's given our business just another angle on, on, on the whole thing and how to build.

Relationships with, with vets, it's very much like, don't do those sort of things so we don't really like that. But, but we'd really, but we'd really appreciate these sort of things, and you've probably never thought of that. And so Sarah came to see me literally it's probably weeks ago, and that's how well we've worked together on this, and said, do you know, CPD is really important to us as vet nurses, and, and we've, we've sponsored or been involved in things like Vet Fest and London Vet Show, where there's lots of CPD activities, and I know that's where lots of our vet nurses go to get their C.

So, and she said, but some of these some of these stuff's not gonna happen this year, and we know cos we, we've been involved in them, yet people are still gonna need their their, their CPD and we know how important vet nurses are. How about we work together and we, and she knew of webinar vet from her previous life as a vet nurse, and I don't know if she's spoken to you, Ben, or, and she said like, I think I've got this idea about how we could, we could, we could gift some CPD hours to, to vet nurses because in, in this COVID world, they're not gonna be able to get their CPD. And I thought, well, you know, this, this sounds amazing, right?

And we thought of it in a small way, but then I said, well, let's think of it bigger. Let's think a bit bigger, let's think a bit broader, right? I mean, how can we really make this have an impact on, on, on, on the community because we're businesses.

That's founded on communities and building communities, and we're keen to help build another community of, of vet nurses, who understand a bit more about insurance, about a bit more what I was doing. She's, so she went away, and you two had a good chat and you came back together with this deal where we would put together, over 100 hours of CPD. And make that available to, to the vet nurses to in order for them to keep their CPD up to date in a time when accessing CPD through the traditional methods wasn't gonna be available.

And we, I just thought it was an amazing idea, something we could do, something where we could give something back, to, to the vet community, and also get them to understand a bit more about what we do and and why we're different as a business. So, yeah, that's how we came up with, with the stuff that we're talking about. Something that, that really stood out there, what, what.

The you mentioned was the fact that they're gifting away over 100 hours of CPD. Now I'm actually going to correct him on that, because the amount that they're giving away, I actually had to peel myself off the floor, when, when we, when we came up with this, this idea, when, when Sarah and I were chatting about it. It's actually 110,000 hours of CPD, which is just unfathomable.

So for those of you who don't know, the Royal College. Recently changed the guidelines for vet nurses, specifically for this year and reduced the hour required from 15 for the year down to 11 for the year. So, so bought by many and and Sarah came across to us and just said, look, you know, we want to do something massive, to support the vet nurse community, and, and said something along the lines of, we want to do the entire annual CPD allowance for 10,000 vet nurses.

And I'm sure you can understand my reaction at the time when I was sort of giggling internally going these guys cannot be serious. But, but actually as the conversation developed, the, the real wholesome nature to that was, was something that grabbed me and actually the values of the company, and you know, again, this is a company who I've actually, Gone with for my own pet insurance and sadly out of personal experience had to utilise that policy. So, so for me it was something that I already knew as a customer, how, how that service worked, but we tend not to do things just about business, right, because we believe if we do the right things, the business kind of takes.

Care of itself, whether that, and that's worked for us with customers, right? You know, we've done the right thing for customers and the, the business has followed and we're taking exactly the same principle here. I mean, our mission statement or our purpose is to create an insurance business that customers can actually love.

And if we just replace that word with vets or vet nurses. We want to build an insurance business that vet nurses can actually love too. And that's really, that's fundamental.

And you kind of talked about the values of our business and, and so you know, values are often things that people bandy around and they they mean very little, but they mean an awful lot to us. And, and, and actually I'm just gonna talk quickly about ours because they relate exactly to this deal. We have 5 values as a business.

The number one and principal value is show we care. The second one is to do the right thing. The 3rd 1 is to work in partnership.

The 4th 1 is to dare to think big, and the 5th 1 is about being tenacious and being fast, right? And if you think about this proposal, this deal that we have put together, it represents all 5 elements of our values, right? You know, we're doing this because we care, and it's the right thing to do.

It's the right thing to do to support vet nurses at this this point in time. We work in partnership. This is the first time we've worked with you, right?

But that's what we do. We don't try and do things just on our own. We go and try and work with the best people in the, in that area to work together to do something substantial.

The fourth one you've talked about, we dare to think big. We don't think small. We think big.

Why not, why do this for, for 100? Vet nurses when we could do it for 10,000 vet nurses, right? And, and the and the fifth one is, you know, we're tenacious and we're fast.

We, we see something like this and we act quickly. We talked about it a matter of weeks ago, not months ago, weeks ago, and here we're about, we are effectively announcing this and it's something that we've together in partnership, put together in weeks. So, so hopefully you can see that this is about our values.

As much as about the commercial end of it. I think that is an awesome way to sort of sum up the, the, the arrangement and the partnership that's been brought forward with all of this. Just to give you clarity on this, this was something that hadn't even been talked about 6 weeks ago, and I think it shows just how important, The role of the vet nurse and the, you know, the, the credit that needs to be shared with vet nurses across the entire profession is to both of our organisations.

So I think that is the perfect way for us to round off this chat and say to you guys, Enjoy the quality of the CPD. And, and we hope it brings as much learning and insight to help you, to help the rest of the profession, not just for Vet Nurse Awareness Month, but for the rest of the year and the rest of your career. So I know from bought by many and from the webinar vet, this is a plain and simple thank you for everything that you do.

You are all absolutely awesome. So, OK, thank you very much for joining me. I am.

So excited to see how, how this gets taken up by the by the vet nursing community. We're really looking forward to doing this and building a great community that which we can support all our customers, pet parents and the pets themselves.