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Judy Morgan DVM talks with Jason Barnard about building success in a niche industry.
Judy Morgan DVM is an entrepreneur, Holistic Veterinarian, and owner of Dr. Judy Morgan’s Naturally Healthy Pets. Judy discusses her journey in creating a niche within the veterinary industry, focusing on holistic and traditional Chinese veterinary medicine.
Judy explains how social media, particularly Facebook initially, played a crucial role in spreading her message and building her brand. With her daughter managing the operations of Naturally Healthy Pets, they’ve doubled the business each year. Starting from a garage-based startup, she grew her business into a multi-million dollar e-commerce platform while maintaining unwavering integrity.
Judy also shares her passion for making a difference in the lives of pets and people, highlighting the valuable legacy she’s building. She wraps up the episode by emphasizing the importance of ensuring the legacy of a business by being selective about partnerships and commitments.
What you’ll learn from Judy Morgan DVM
- 00:00 Judy Morgan DVM and Jason Barnard
- 01:13 Judy Morgan DVM’s Brand SERP
- 02:02 Judy Morgan DVM’s Corporate Brand SERP
- 02:31 Why Does Judy Morgan DVM Say That if She Managed Her Personal Brand Online, Nothing Would Get Done?
- 03:15 What is Judy Morgan DVM’s Specialty?
- 03:40 When was Judy Morgan DVM Featured in a National Veterinary Publication?
- 04:16 Why Did Judy Morgan DVM End up Buying Her Business Partner’s Shares?
- 05:23 What Was the Key Factor That Made Judy Morgan DVM’s Business Stand Out?
- 05:27 What Prompted Judy Morgan DVM to Write her First Book in 2014?
- 06:21 What PR Strategies Did Judy Morgan DVM Use to Sell Her First Book?
- 06:40 How Much Did Judy Morgan DVM Initially Charge When She Was Asked by a Dog Trainer About Her Fee?
- 08:20 What Book is Best for the Person New to Holistic Pet Medicine?
- 08:42 What Initiative Can Drive More People to an E-commerce Website or an Educational Platform?
- 09:42 What Are the Advantages of Having a Young COO?
- 11:04 What Strategies Can You Use to Get People to Discover Your Book?
- 12:11 What Platform is Better for Searching for Things Because There is No Censorship Issue?
- 12:26 Why is Holistic Medicine Often Ignored or Overlooked on Platforms Like Facebook?
- 15:48 What is One of the Most Important Things to Do When Growing Your Business in a Niche Market?
- 15:55 How Does Radical Honesty Help Entrepreneurs Build Stronger Audience Connections?
- 16:12 How Do Industry Practices in Veterinary Medicine Impact Pet Health and Safety?
- 16:39 How Does Transparent Consumer Education Build Long-Term Trust in Your Industry?
- 17:32 How Do You Demonstrate Authentic Passion for Your Business?
- 18:51 What Sacrifices Do Successful Leaders Make to Build a Meaningful Business Legacy?
- 20:15 Why Does a Business Leader Need to Be Selective About Interview and Podcast Requests?
This episode was recorded live on video February 4th 2025
Links to pieces of content relevant to this topic:
https://www.inc.com/profile/naturally-healthy-pets
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vAgbmxoiVS4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8h6VnuH9JLY
Judy Morgan DVM
Transcript from Building Success in a Niche Industry – Fastlane Founders with Judy Morgan DVM
[00:00:00] Narrator: Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard. Each week, Jason sits down with successful entrepreneurs, CEOs and executives and get them to share how they mastered the delicate balance between rapid growth and enduring success in the business world. How can we quickly build a profitable business that stands the test of time and becomes our legacy. A legacy we’re proud of. Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard.
[00:00:31] Jason Barnard: Hi, everybody and welcome to another Fastlane Founders and Legacy. I’m Jason Barnard and I’m here with a quick hello and we’re good to go. Welcome to the show, Dr. Judy Morgan.
[00:00:45] Judy Morgan: That’s very nice. Thank you.
[00:00:48] Jason Barnard: Welcome. Now, from what I understand, you’re a holistic veterinarian.
[00:00:53] Judy Morgan: Yes, I am.
[00:00:54] Jason Barnard: But you’re going to talk to us about creating a niche within an industry, educating the people or the users or the audience or the clients within that industry that this offer exists. Holistic veterinary services and building a business out of it.
[00:01:08] Judy Morgan: Yes.
[00:01:09] Jason Barnard: Brilliant. But before we get into that, I’m going to present you with how Google perceives you. And this is Google’s Knowledge Panel for you. It doesn’t say you’re a veterinary service provider or a holistic veterinary surgeon. It says author. And that’s because you’ve written books and it’s focusing on the books. So it perceives you to be an author potentially with a topical authority within veterinary services. And that’s something we’re seeing more and more.
The thing at the top, you see there is AI. And Google’s generating AI to explain or to give us an overview of who you are with the photos with the dog, which is delightful, and some information about you. Normally speaking, we would see some facts there on the right hand side. But Google hasn’t understood you well enough to give facts about you, such as your date of birth, a description, who your spouse is, and your social media profiles. But I found this, which I thought was super interesting, which is that your company has a really good Knowledge Panel, and it’s a Corporate Knowledge Panel with reviews and the social media. And Google’s really understood your company, which carries partially at least your name. So have you done any work managing your personal brand online in Google and in AI?
[00:02:27] Judy Morgan: I’m not responsible for that. We have a whole team of other people. If you leave it up to me, nothing gets done with any of that because I’m old enough that tech is not my thing. And that is part of the amazing growth that we’ve seen in the last few years is getting people on board that know more about those metrics and how to get our brand more well known.
[00:02:53] Jason Barnard: Right. Yeah. Which is the sign of a great CEO, is somebody who knows what their limitations are and finds the people who know how to do it and let them get on with their job, which is something I’m learning.
[00:03:03] Judy Morgan: Absolutely.
[00:03:05] Jason Barnard: So holistic veterinary services is something you created or did it exist before and you’re simply the leader in the field?
[00:03:13] Judy Morgan: It’s existed. So my specialty is actually traditional Chinese veterinary medicine. So we’re talking about acupuncture. It’s been around for 3,000 years. It just didn’t get into the veterinary space in America until probably in the 1980s, 1990s. I didn’t get into this holistic space until the mid-1990s. Before that, I was practicing traditional medicine, and I was actually featured on a national veterinary publication back in the late 1990s as doing this weird thing, this holistic medicine that nobody knew about, nobody heard anything about.
And so it. It did open a lot of doors because, you know, first I became locally well known because I was doing something different.
[00:04:04] Jason Barnard: Yeah.
[00:04:05] Judy Morgan: Which of course, you get the haters who say, this is voodoo. But actually, my business partner at the time, we ended up. I bought out his share of our practice. It was a. We had two, and I bought out his share because he said, I don’t understand the black magic voodoo that you were doing, and I don’t think I want to be a part of it. And I said, that’s awesome. No problem.
Because I don’t want to keep doing what we’ve been doing with this traditional medicine. And so we parted on friendly terms. Of course, it cost me a million dollars to buy out his share, but we parted on friendly terms, and our practices were only five miles apart, and we practiced that close to each other, sharing clients back and forth for many years. And it worked out just fine because we both had different things that we offered.
[00:04:51] Jason Barnard: Right. Well, that’s kind of. For me, there’s a kind of parallel between that and what we do, which is black voodoo magic is what people think we do by controlling Google and AI algorithms to represent the way you want. They think, how is that possible? And the other thing is that a lot of people push it away, thinking, I’m really comfortable with what I already know. I don’t want to try anything new and different when. When you start to grow the business. Am I right in understanding you did a lot of PR?
[00:05:21] Judy Morgan: Oh, tons of people. Well, what really made my business pop was writing a book.
[00:05:27] Jason Barnard: Right.
[00:05:27] Judy Morgan: I wrote my first book in 2014, and I sort of wrote it just kind of on a dare. It was a Facebook social media group who kept asking a bunch of questions about Cavalier King Charles spaniels, which is the breed that I happen to love. And my answers were different from everyone else’s. And they knew I was a veterinarian, and they’re like, what are you talking about? And so they. They said, well, you know, you should write all this down somewhere so that we don’t. You don’t have to keep answering the same questions over and over. And I said, maybe I’ll write a book. And I did.
And silly me, I thought, you write a book, everybody just buys it. Uh, no. You. Yeah, there’s a lot of PR that goes in, especially when you self publish. You need to be out there pushing and getting people to buy it and understand that otherwise you’re gonna sell 20 copies to your friends, and that’s that. So that was really what started the push. But amaz, at that time, I owned two veterinary hospitals, and in trying to push that book, you know, doing public appearances 60 times a year, selling books in the back of the room, standing in front of pet stores in the rain, in the cold, you’re trying to get people to buy a $20 book. But all of that.
Then I started getting asked to speak. And the first time I was asked to speak, I was like, okay. And I said, well? And she said, well, we’ll pay you. What is your fee? And I’m like, I don’t know, a hundred dollars? And she was like, are you out of your mind? Like, you’re the expert. You need to know how to charge for yourself. So the very first person, she was a dog trainer who hired me to speak. She got 100 people to show up to this thing, and she paid me a few thousand dollars, which I was shocked. I was like, wow, you can actually charge money now? I charge a lot.
But so it was. Other people helped me along the way as well with things that I didn’t know how to do. But by publishing that book and pushing that to sell the book, it brought so much more attention to my clinics, which brought many more clients to my clinics. I had people literally driving seven and eight hours each way to come to my clinics. And so it was. It was just that push and getting. Getting myself out there that just made a huge difference.
[00:07:40] Jason Barnard: Right. Well, the next question is, you’ve written a lot of books. Is each subsequent.
[00:07:44] Judy Morgan: My ninth.
[00:07:45] Jason Barnard: Your ninth. Right. Okay. Is there a law of diminishing returns with Books?
[00:07:49] Judy Morgan: No, my. Oh, gosh, nine, eight, seven, sixth book, I think it was, is my bestseller. It’s. And actually one that I wrote in 2017 still sells incredibly well. It’s a cookbook for dogs using traditional Chinese veterinary medicine, food therapy. But I just updated that one a couple of months ago it came out. And so now that the one from 2017 will come of fall to the back, but the new one will take over and do well. The.
The one that has done the best. Usually I write things that are for the educated, holistically minded pet owner, but the one that has done the best that came out in 23 is the one that is more basic. It was written for the person new to holistic medicine. Like, they don’t even know that they don’t know what they don’t know. And so that one has gone crazy. And I actually have a gentleman who owns, he sells dog park facilities and he loves this book because he owns like 2,000 dog parks. And so he’s trying to educate people. So he buys those books by the truckload and gives them out at these huge events where he has thousands of people.
So. And the ninth book that I just finished last week, it’s in public getting published, I wrote it for him for people who are going to dog parks. And, you know, it’s a smaller kind of more basic version, but it’s so that they can be handed out by the truckload to educate more people, which drives more people to my ecommerce site and to my educational platform. And so my goal, I’ve sold my veterinary clinics in 2020 and retired from clinical practice. And that’s when my Naturally Healthy Pets ecommerce and education site really took over. But not only did I sell my clinics. In January of 2020, my daughter took over as COO of Naturally Healthy Pets. And she’s a millennial. And so she understands social media, she understands metrics, she’s.
She’s a systems engineer, so she understands all of that stuff. And this business that we have now, the Naturally Healthy Pets, started in my garage with my husband and I, and we were literally just selling a few of the natural health products that I was using in my clinics. And because people were traveling so far, we were having to ship them products all the time. So we started this little tiny website store for people to be able to. To buy products. So my daughter took over in 2020 and has doubled the business every year. She’s gone nuts and.
[00:10:33] Jason Barnard: Well, yeah, which is brilliant, but coming back to how you created the space is it’s not just books. You’ve published nine books in, what is it, eight years. So it’s a book.
[00:10:45] Judy Morgan: There’s 10 years. It was a book a year for the first four. And then I got in a lot of other things for a couple of years and then came out with three in one year. So they’re kind of churning now.
[00:10:59] Jason Barnard: Right? But that’s not your only strategy for getting the word out there.
[00:11:02] Judy Morgan: No, no, social media. I started on Facebook because that’s my generation. And so I started out, it was that one little Cavalier King Charles spaniel group which had 300 people in it, that I, you know, really started the ball rolling. But then I started finding all these other breed sites, all these veterinary sites, all these more natural holistic sites, and I just started answering a lot of questions that people were asking. So at the time, one of my clinics was very slow, so I had all this extra time downtime. I was bored, and I was like, well, I’m just gonna toodle around on Facebook and get people to know who I am. And so I just started answering questions on other holistic sites, on other veterinarian sites. And people were like, who is this person and what is she doing? And we had established our website.
So when people looked me up, I was like, oh, look, she’s got a website. Oh, look, she’s got a clinic. And know our social media for our clinics was growing. Then I hired a friend who helped to get me on Pinterest and Instagram and a lot of the other social media. Our focus for this year is really growing our YouTube because we have found that YouTube is. Is a lot, a lot better for people to search for things. There’s no censorship, which has been an issue. Like, we have been ghosted.
Holistic. Holistic medicine has been really ghosted at times. And right now we’re finding that on some platforms, like my Facebook page has 165,000 followers. We’ll put up a really good post and get three likes. And it’s like, okay, that one was hidden. Like, we. We know when they’re hidden. And then we’ll put something else up that’ll, you know, have thousands of shares.
And it’s so you don’t know what. What days and what things are going to get. Get shut down. We think that that’s going to get better with the changes that have just been instituted, we’re hoping, but YouTube does. Does not do that. So we’re really focusing on growing there. There’s a huge holistic community there, but we are on pretty much every social media channel. And so that’s one of the things we have.
We have a graphic arts person that all she does is our graphics. We have one who only does reels. We have one who only does YouTube. We have one who only does our lives and our podcast. And we’ve also reached out in the holistic community. So we do a ton of interviews with other people who have pretty decent sized platforms. So if I do an interview with someone who has a hundred thousand on their social media platforms, that’s a hundred thousand new faces. Some of them are going to be the same.
And we work with people worldwide. It’s not, you know, just, just my friends and family where we are searching out, you know, those top level people.
[00:14:02] Jason Barnard: Sure, brilliant. I, I notice here in your Knowledge Panel for your company or your ecommerce website that you’ve got for social channels, I rarely see Pinterest in a Knowledge Panel, so obviously a Pinterest strategy is really working. How do you distinguish between Dr. Judy Morgan’s Naturally Healthy Pets and Dr. Judy Morgan DYM?
[00:14:25] Judy Morgan: You know, we don’t really push Dr. Judy Morgan DVM. We have, that’s how it started because I was working with a book, somebody that helped me with my books and branding and all that kind of stuff and they said, look, nobody is gonna hire your book to speak. They are hiring Judy Morgan DVM to speak. So we branded me and then we started this company, Naturally Healthy Pets and changed it to Dr. Judy Morgan’s Naturally Healthy Pets so that we’re using my brand name recognition but really trying to grow the Naturally Healthy Pets part of it because at some point I’m supposed to be retired right now, which is really hysterical. At some point I actually will retire. And so we need the brand to continue even if I am not doing videos every day or doing, you know, the speaking every day or the writing.
And so we’ve actually brought my daughter along. She’s very well recognized at this point. She does a lot of the interviews and a lot of the videos. People love her. They know she’s not a veterinarian, but she worked in my veterinary clinic since she was seven years old and she knows as much about it as I do at this point. And she’s a really good researcher and so she’s very trusted. And one of the big things with growing whatever your niche is, is getting people to like you and trust you.
[00:15:52] Jason Barnard: So it’s know, like and trust yet again.
[00:15:54] Judy Morgan: Yes, people love me because I’m no holds barred. I don’t have a filter. Like if something ticks me off, you’re all going to know. We call them my soapbox rants. And people love a good soapbox. If I’m like mad, and I get mad a lot because so many things in veterinary medicine are harming our pets. We’re using immune suppressing drugs. We are feeding horribly processed food.
It’s the same stuff that we see in the human realm. And so a new drug will come out. And I look at the drug insert and go, okay, four out of ten dogs in the trial died and they just wrote it off and got this drug approved.
Like that. You want to get me screaming. So, you know, people like the fact that I’m giving them the warnings and saying, look, if you’re going to use this, just be well informed so that you know what to watch for. And so I’ve built that trust over the years of being kind of no filter of we research things so that we know that what we’re saying is not. I mean I’ve only been threatened with a lawsuit once, so I think I’m doing pretty well.
[00:17:06] Jason Barnard: Yeah, no, no good. But then what, what you end up with the soapbox rants is lovers and haters are very little in between.
[00:17:14] Judy Morgan: Pretty much. So the haters are the very, very traditional medicine people who are like, oh no, we’ve sold 50,000 doses of that drug and we haven’t seen any reactions at all. I’m like, that’s great. Someday you will. It might be your own dog. Have fun.
You know, it’s all. And we walk the walk. All of our pets eat human grade very healthy food. We don’t use chemicals on our pets. We supply the food for all of our employees pets because we want to make sure that they’re, you know, so that every employee that works with us also knows that they’ve got to walk the walk and not just talk the talk. So it’s really having a belief and a passion for what we’re doing.
[00:18:00] Jason Barnard: And then so finally your pivot out of the company directed the company is to pass over to somebody else, in this case your daughter and transfer the name of the company so that it’s her name and not yours or not necessary?
[00:18:13] Judy Morgan: I think that, I think it will always be my name. They know she has a different last name, but they know that know were related. And it’s funny because the valuation on the company now is, is pretty high. And so, and I never dreamed that like, literally, we. If we sold, if we had two or three orders a day at. When it was in the garage, we’re like, all right, cool. You know, a little extra money. And I didn’t take a salary from the business for the first eight years, so it.
It took. Well, no, the first seven years, we just, you know, invested everything back into the company. So we’ve. We haven’t had to borrow money. We pretty much bootstrapped everything. So I would say for somebody who’s starting out, be prepared to not pay yourself for a while, but if you’re passionate about. I was lucky. I had my veterinary clinics that supported everything that we were doing, so it wasn’t like I needed to have an extra salary.
But, boy, is this making retirement, retirement a lot better. And I have this legacy that I’m leaving, which is very important. And so now that our valuation is high, I sent my daughter an email the other day, and I said, so at what point? Because I projected out, if we keep growing at the same rate, where we will be in five years. And I said, I think we should sell. And she said, and then I could actually really retire. And she said, we will never sell this business. I am passing this on to my daughter. She said, what we are doing is making a difference in the world.
We are saving the lives of animals, and that saves the lives of people who love them and being that passionate. And I agree with her. You know, it’s easy to look at the money and go, man. But I do agree with her. We are making a difference, and the integrity that we have in this company will always keep this company going. People now reach out to us all the time. They want to work with us. We don’t have to go find people to work with people, but people are begging to get their products into our.
Our center, which it’s very hard for them to get in. We’re incredibly picky for a reason because my name’s behind it. So, you know, even people who want to do interviews or get on the podcast, we get requests all the time. And so we’re very choosy about that because the reputation is really critical. So, you know, never cut corners, never sell your soul. Never, never do something that you’re like, ah, might be a little shady. It’s just not worth it.
[00:20:44] Jason Barnard: Brilliant. That’s a really great ending to the conversation. Thank you so much, Judy. You get the outro song, a quick goodbye to end the show. Thank you, Judy.
[00:20:57] Judy Morgan: Thank you.
[00:20:58] Jason Barnard: And thank you everyone for watching.
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