Creative Entrepreneurship #148

Ben Shaw:

The Managing a small business, and particularly a complicated one, I think is really interesting. I think that it also creates lots of opportunities for companies like ours to figure out how they can partner with these small business owners to help them be more successful.

Andrea King:

You have to be passionate if you're going to start your own business. If you aren't passionate about it in the beginning, you don't stand a chance for five years later.

Ben Shaw:

bank

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

this is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and podcast show number 148, Creative Entrepreneurship, airing for the first time on Sunday, July 13, 2014. As a radio show host and wellness editor for Maine Magazine, I have had many fascinating conversations with our state's creative and business leaders. This has provided me with an education that most physicians cannot access. I have especially enjoyed interacting with entrepreneurs such as Ben Shah of Vets First Choice and Andrea King of Aristelle, each of whom are today's guests. From them, I've learned that doing things differently is both possible and sustainable. This is a great lesson for those of us who hope to move forward successfully within the medical field, and I hope that this will prove to be a great lesson for those of you who are listening today. Thank you for joining us.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I always enjoy spending time with people who are doing unique things in the state of Maine and are doing unique things that benefit people in a bigger way. Today we'll be speaking Today we are speaking with Ben Shah, the CEO and co founder of Vets First Choice and

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

is someone who exemplifies the entrepreneur spirit

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

that is growing here in Maine. Ben is the focus of an article in Maine Magazine by Susan Conley, so I encourage people who want to learn more about Ben Shaw also to read her article. Thanks so much for coming in here and talking to us today.

Ben Shaw:

Thanks for having me.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So Vets First Choice is Interesting in some ways because it grew out of something that David Shaw, who I believe you know quite well, was doing in his own life with idexx.

Ben Shaw:

Right. And so idexx has been a great local success in working with veterinarians around the world to provide tools and capabilities to help veterinarians be better practitioners. And we saw a great opportunity to do to the front office of veterinary medicine what I think idexx has really supported veterinarians with in the back office of veterinary medicine.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

One of the things that I'm fascinated by in this topic is having been in my own medical practice, doing my own thing, and being a small, small practice doctor and then becoming an employed physician, I know what it takes to run an office. And it's not just about being a doctor. There's a whole business behind it. And I think this is something that veterinarians probably do better than doctors in some ways.

Ben Shaw:

Well, I think it's a lot. And to be an office based practitioner in a cash pay situation where when you bring your patients in for such a broad range of services, veterinarians are really broad practitioners. And so keeping up with scheduling, keeping up with appointments, keeping up with just the bookkeeping and managing a viable small business is a huge amount of work. And you add onto that the complexity of providing the suite of medical services and surgical services that they provide is really astonishing.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Why veterinarians? I mean, it seems as though we've had so much of a focus on healthcare providers and health and we're all talking about the health system needing reform, but there was a market and your father saw it and you've seen even a more specific part of this market. But where did that come from?

Ben Shaw:

I think these office based practitioners have really complex business requirements. And the fact that there are so many, there's 25,000 veterinary practices in the United States. And so it's hard to access the market. You can't approach a few large hospitals and grab a big share. But also the needs, the patient dynamics are so different from human health care. It's unclear that a lot of the tools and technologies and medications and protocols that get developed on the human side make sense or translate well into veterinary medicine. But veterinary medicine itself over the last 25 years has really exploded and become a lot more sophisticated. Some of that is following the humanization of pets trend that pets are living longer, pets are aging, and veterinarians and their partners are developing better protocols to manage pet care. I think that there is a great opportunity now to help veterinarians who have really been successful in managing their business, do a better job of communicating with their pet owner clients, how to engage them when they're not in the practice. And veterinarians have lagged other human healthcare markets in terms of using Internet based technologies to help manage their practice.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Your company has really exploded. People have really taken to it. You are in markets all over the United States and I'm assuming internationally as well. Why is this the case? Why have you been able to be so successful?

Ben Shaw:

So we were not the first mover in our market, but we saw an opportunity to partner with veterinarians in a way that allowed them to be more successful in meeting changed pet owner expectations. And that value proposition has resonated. We've been fortunate to attract huge subscription from veterinarians. We now have over 10,000 veterinary practices in the United States subscribed to our service. I think that with that momentum and with that value proposition, we've been able to attract the right team, the right level of partner support. But it's been a really exciting time. The company is just now finishing its fourth year since being founded and in a lot of ways, the real growth and the real expansion opportunities are yet to come.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So you're now partnered with 40% of all the veterinarians in the United States. How are you going to get the other 60%?

Ben Shaw:

Well, so we've been expanding our sales force. Just this past week, we welcomed 10 new field sales team members in training in our offices. And so it's a really exciting time as we build a national field sales organization that's able to really partner with veterinarians and help them think about. Not really. If they need our service, they absolutely do. But how to incorporate the role of vets first choice into what they're doing. So what is its role in the business? Is it a segment of their patients that are looking for the convenience of online ordering and home delivery? Is it that they want to outsource major product categories to us? And so these account managers are almost business consultants. And so more than just signing up more practices, it's really creating a deeper relationship with veterinarians that are already using our service.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

In addition to having relationships with veterinarians, you also have to have relationships with the manufacturers and you have to have relationships with pet owners themselves. What are some of the similarities and differences that you're seeing? How can you build upon what you've already learned?

Ben Shaw:

So on the manufacturer side, we're a very regulated business. We're licensed pharmacy in 50 states and we have certain high standards that we have to adhere to. After all, we're dispensing prescription medications by mail, you know, by mail to pet owners. And so we're fortunate to have all 75 of the major veterinary drug companies and nutrition businesses like Purina and Hills and IAMs who have partnered with us to really see that this is, this presents a major future future of veterinary dispensing. The ability to have cloud based technology services that can support practitioners and avoid the need to over inventory too much product in their practice. But at the end of the day, the pet owner engagement and the pet owner experience is what's most critical. And so our team has really focused on making Vets First Choice a terrific experience for pet owners that they can't imagine life before. Vets First Choice. The convenience of having your diets and your medications shipped straight to your house and to have timely reminders about when Fluffy needs her medications and to do it in partnership with your veterinarian is really powerful. And so we continue to focus on ways to make Vets First Choice or allow Vets First Choice to provide a much better pet owner experience. Knowing that we have all the important infrastructure in place with manufacturers, regulators and even our interaction with veterinarians to make sure that we're doing that in a really high quality manner.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Do you see any possible lessons for humans and human medications and human interactions with their providers?

Ben Shaw:

You know, I think we're still at a point where we're able to adopt a lot of successful models from human healthcare and to incorporate them into veterinary medicine around disease management protocols or around the way in which we measure compliance or medication compliance, how successfully patients are staying on therapy. But in a cash pay environment, you start to recognize quickly what pet owners value, how much they're willing to spend for against diagnosis and how much they're willing to spend for treatment. And I'm sure that there are lessons to be learned there. When you actually have to put down your credit card and pay for your drugs that full retail value, you start to appreciate the cost of care.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

It also seems as though if you are going to invest in a pet, then you might be more interested in making sure that that pet is healthier just in general. So maybe you'll be more careful about your pet's weight than perhaps you are about your own weight.

Ben Shaw:

There are a lot of studies that link how well you're taking care of your own health to the quality of care you provide to your pet. And there's also other data that shows people are often more willing to take better care of their pet family members than they are themselves. But I think that absolutely, I think that diet and exercise and just overall healthy l probably bodes well for the whole family household.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Do you have pets?

Ben Shaw:

So we have seven five and one year old children who would love to have a dog and we just don't know if it's a safe environment for a dog to join our household right at this moment. But we love pets. And I think part of the attraction of so many of the folks who've joined the Vets First Choice team has been to be who are really passionate dog owners, really passionate pet lovers, but has been part. This is a very community driven market, very local and people are really connected to their local shelter organizations, local animal welfare organizations, local veterinary practices. A lot of our former staff worked in veterinary medicine as practice managers or veterinary technicians. And so clearly this group has deep roots in the pet market and in veterinary medicine.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Veterinary medicine is interesting in that there are subspecialists now, there are cat subspecialists, dog subspecialists, large animal. But in Maine, most veterinarians are still, or many veterinarians are still practicing the full range. That must be an interesting challenge for veterinarians.

Ben Shaw:

It's one of my favorite parts of the business is just stepping back and looking at managing a veterinary practice and the caseloads, the patients that come in and the complexity of and the range of medical services and products that are being dispensed day to day and the breadth of knowledge requires by the veterinary staff to be able to meet that client demand. Running across orthopedics and orthopedic surgery to pediatrics and geriatric care and oncology and dentistry and cardiology. It's really staggering. Or keeping up on infectious disease and local sort of weather conditions that might cause different risk factors. So I think that that's a real phenomenon. And one of the things that we most like working with veterinarians is just they are very smart, very resourceful, have very complex businesses. But there are growing specialists and a lot of practices have brought in specialists. And there's a great relationship that has developed between specialists and the referring general practitioners. And here locally there are some really outstanding specialists in the southern Maine market who have been really successful and who are partnered with Vets First Choice as well.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Is part of your respect for these individuals linked to your own entrepreneurial ideals?

Ben Shaw:

You know, I think absolutely. Managing a small business, and particularly a complicated one, I think is really interesting. But I, I think that it also creates lots of opportunities for companies like ours to Figure out how they can partner with these small business owners to help them be more successful. And one of the things that's fun about vets first choice is we have so many ideas and opportunities and services we can provide to support veterinarians as customers, but also to help them be more successful in offering a broader, bigger array of pet owner services. And so it's really just, we've just really gotten started with pharmacy services, but have a great opportunity to support them with overall practice management.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Did you think you were going to be working in the veterinary field when you started out?

Ben Shaw:

You know, we've looked at. I think that sometimes derivatives of previous experiences end up guiding you. And I think that IDEX clearly IDEX laboratories has had such a terrific success in animal health. It may not be that surprising that as a derivative of idexx's experiences that there were opportunities to work with veterinarians or work with pet owners in ways that are outside of idexx's core expertise, which is really in diagnostics and laboratory services. And when you start providing patient facing services, that's a really different kind of opportunity. And so our team is an interesting hybrid between folks who have come from veterinary medicine and animal health and folks who have come from E commerce and direct marketing and consumer facing services, which is really a different kind of expertise. And so I guess I'm not terribly surprised that locally, at least here in Portland, Maine, there is such a terrific wealth of knowledge and experience between L.L. bean and IDEXX and other organizations on both veterinary medicine and in direct marketing and E commerce.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You graduated from BATES with a triple major in biology, political science and environmental studies. That's an interesting pulling together of fields, especially the political science. Why did you make that choice?

Ben Shaw:

You know, I think BATES is a terrific liberal arts education and some of that could just be my own indecision and having just a broad general intellectual curiosity. I think that BATES provide an opportunity to pursue a lot of really interesting topics. And in some cases they did come together. My senior thesis was really looking at how Maine could better support its nonprofit biomedical research community with facility funding, which was some combination of bringing together, from a political science point of view, really bringing together state and federal resources to support some really successful and outstanding nonprofit biomedical organizations like Jackson Laboratory or Bigelow Labs or, or Mount Desert Island Biological. In fact, the state has gone to become very supportive of those organizations and the return on that has been really significant for the state of Maine. I was interested in that convergence, how policy is supporting our biomedical research community. Or healthcare community?

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Have you continued on with that interest in any way? Have you done any work more on the national scene with lobbying or other sorts of connections?

Ben Shaw:

You know, we have been really active in a lot of different activities, but not just in health care and in biomedical programs, in environmental programs. And I think that there are terrific opportunities to bring teams together to solve really interesting problems. And I think that while vet's first choice happens to be a for profit organization, I don't think that there's a huge difference in launching social ventures that have similarly compelling missions and a need to bring organizations and stakeholders together to solve interesting problems. And we look forward to opportunities to be part of projects like that.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, tell me about some of these interesting projects.

Ben Shaw:

Well, here in Maine, I had an opportunity to be part of the founding of Maine Huts and Trails here in Western Mountains and creating a concept to both protect and conserve large scale sections of the western mountains, but to build hut and trail systems that allowed access into some really beautiful wilderness areas. But the utilization and the stay, you know, members or subscribers, plus the fees for staying at the huts in effect pay for and cover the costs of managing some of Maine's most beautiful wilderness areas. And so I think that's a pretty it's an interesting social venture whose mission it is to conserve and protect some beautiful parts of Maine, but to very much take bring together stakeholders, communities, government, both mostly state resources to create a service offering. And it has elements of for profit or sort of a company operating. It has to provide great services and it has to deliver surplus. But it's very much a non profit mission. And so at Blackpoint Group, which is a firm that I'm affiliated with, we've had opportunities to support lots of interesting social ventures like Maine Hudson Trails.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

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[Unidentified voice]:

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Dr. Lisa Belisle:

you also spent some time at Jackson Laboratories. What were some of the lessons you took away from that experience?

Ben Shaw:

Jackson Laboratories is a really special organization in the state of Maine, and for me it was just really fun to be around such talent and folks who are pursuing understanding the basic biological basis of disease and health. I was really impressed with the organization's ability to use some of its intellectual capital as well as some of the tools that they had developed in the ordinary course of their research and made those services available to other people, universities, biotech and pharmaceutical companies to support the program. In that sense, it's really a much more expanded and leveraged organization. In some cases, those services result in fees back to Jackson Laboratory that are used to reinvest in facilities and development. Up in Bar Harbor, Maine is one of is a really spiritual space where Jackson Laboratory has built a beautiful campus and is really furthering the basic understanding of health and disease and starting to find ways to translate basic understanding into a clinical context. And so a really great organization and I really admired the way that they were able to use this social mission to support other organizations to fund its core mission.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

When I spent time at Jackson Lab last summer, one of the things that they talked about was because they were losing some of their traditional funding sources, they were being called to look for funding in places that required them to learn how to communicate between fields, learn how to communicate with other people who are doing slightly different things or even the same thing in other institutions, but also learn how to communicate with consumers. That's been an interesting shift where it used to be that science and knowledge were sort of its own thing, and then the consumer information and education was its own thing of crossover. Now is that something that you've found with your company?

Ben Shaw:

I think so. I mean, I think that it's complex and it's hard to do, but I think one of the things that Vets First Choice has been able to do well has been to bring together a lot of stakeholders into imagining a better way to operate and to imagine a better way that we could do business to create more value for everyone in the process. For manufacturers, our services translate to significant improvements in medication compliance, which is pet owners remembering, pets remembering to take their medications, but also recognizing that we're removing a lot of friction and a lot of inefficiency in the supply of products into veterinary practices and dispensing, and that we're able to do it at a much higher quality of compliance with regulation, which continues to get harder and harder. Not just pharmacy regulation, but also credit card security and transactional security and patient privacy. I think that this is a really exciting time as technology and tools have made possible more successful collaboration. But it's still a lot of work to bring together a very diverse group of stakeholders and to help them imagine and then execute a better way of operating, whether it's at Vets First Choice and in managing pharmacy services or Jackson Laboratories, in terms of imagining different ways that collaborators and principal investigators can collaborate on similar projects.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

In the past, it may have been possible for people to be very focused on sort of ideas or very focused on emotions, or very focused on social connections. You had your academics, you had your practitioners, and it seems like now to be an entrepreneur, you actually have to be able to speak to the head, speak to the heart, speak to the family, speak to the community. Would you agree with that?

Ben Shaw:

You know, I do. I think that it's so hard to launch new ideas and to launch new businesses and you have to be authentic. You have to believe in what you're doing. And I think that others have to come along and sort of agree with that. So I think that, yeah, I think if what you're describing is a really authentic approach and into believing and having conviction that there's an opportunity to be smarter, to be better, to create value for customers and for their clients than I say yes. I think it's really hard. Bad ideas and. Or ideas that aren't totally well thought through. There's enough friction in the process of getting a new idea off the ground that it won't take long before bad ideas get weeded out.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And at the same time, if you have an idea, even if it's a good idea, if you can't communicate it well, or if it doesn't speak, speak to somebody's emotional reality, then that won't get off the ground either.

Ben Shaw:

I think that's right. And so finding those connection points, what really drives it, there's no question for Vets First Choice we are Very disruptive. We're changing the way drugs are distributed in veterinary medicine and we're enabling veterinarians to carry less inventory and to have more dispensing opportunities. And, and so traditional channels of distribution of drugs are under real pressure. I imagine it's a little bit of the feeling of blockbuster Netflix or other examples of where entire ways in which consumers are digesting content or media or e commerce are changing. And that can be uncomfortable. But I think that in this case the improvements and the efficiency gains in the quality gains are so powerful for pet owners and veterinarians and manufacturers that it's the right decision.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, in addition to having this company, which from what I understand has grown 8,500% since 2010 when it was initiated, and having your three children in the Cape Elizabeth school system, what do you like to do for free time? Do you have free time, I guess is one question.

Ben Shaw:

No, I think hopefully it's work hard, play hard. And so we have a lot of fun. We ski up at Sugarloaf, we like to windsurf and kiteboard. And so we find lots of opportunities to take a break from the action. And I think that the growth is continues, the growth of the company continues to be really rapid. Of course, when you start from a small start point, the numbers can get to be pretty big. But we've just finished a really successful first quarter. We're still about 3x prior year and so I expect that growth will continue and I think I just hope to continue to find time to be inspired by not just for profit programs, but some of there's a lot of really interesting social mission work in and around southern Maine and look forward to finding more time to be part of some of those initiatives.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Ben, how do people find out about vets first choice?

Ben Shaw:

So you know we have 160 veterinary practices in the state of Maine and so chances are we may be providing pharmacy services through your veterinarian, but you can go to vetsfirstchoice.com and see if your veterinarian is subscribed to our service and if they're not, we can sign them up. But I think pet owners will find that we provide great quality products, a huge assortment, great prices, but in partnership with your veterinarian and so try free auto ship of therapeutic dog food for a couple months delivered to your door and see if that's something worth staying with and try again. So vetsfirstchoice.com well, if you're a pet

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

owner out there, I encourage you to do what Ben has suggested, which is try that free auto ship of dog food or somehow just look into the company more because it sounds like a really interesting idea and an idea that really whose time has come. We've been speaking with Ben Shah, the CEO and co founder of Vets First Choice Entrepreneur here in the great state of Maine. And you can read more about Ben in Maine Magazine in the article by Susan Connolly. Thanks so much for coming in today.

Ben Shaw:

Thank you very much.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

As a physician and small business owner, I rely on Marcie Booth from Booth, Maine to help me with my own business and to help me live my own life fully. Here are a few thoughts from Marcy.

[Unidentified voice]:

When was the last time you took a break from what you were doing, from the work that was piled up on your desk and just looked up? I know that during the course of my days I often forget to take a moment or two to just breathe, look up at the sky and dream. Terrible that I have to remind myself to breathe. But when I do, I feel energized because in those moments I'm able to let go of the daily grind and think more about what I want to accomplish, how I want my business to grow. Sometimes those are the aha moments. If we all took a few moments out each day to stop what we were doing and dream a little about our business futures, not only would we feel a great sense of calm, but we may come to realize that these dreams can in fact, come true. I'm Marcie Booth. Let's talk about the changes you need. Boothmaine.com

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Dr. Lisa Radio Hour, we have the great pleasure to have with us Andrea King, who is the owner of Aristelle in Portland, Maine and Burlington, Vermont. Andrea is also the subject of a profile that we wrote for Old Port Magazine, the initial Old Port magazine, which came out in June, and I hope everybody who's listening takes a moment to read it. This is Andrea King from Aristelle. Thanks so much for coming in.

Andrea King:

Thanks for having me, Lisa.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Andrea, you have a really interesting story. First, tell us what is Aristell?

Andrea King:

So while it's obviously a bra fitting and fine lingerie store, I really see it more as a service store. So the whole point is to provide women with an opportunity to get fitted to Find the right bra size in a really welcoming environment. So our goal is to just be able to serve women of all ages, sizes, shapes, by offering a lot of different bra sizes.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You did not start out in the bra field. You started out pretty far away from the bra field, actually.

Andrea King:

Yeah, yeah, quite. It's been a long journey to retail. So, yeah, worked in international development with the World bank. Spent time working in almost 50 countries, Asia and South America. The last group of countries was Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Working in London, but always knew I wanted to have my own business. And so when I moved to Vermont, you know, looked at a couple of different things, nothing really grabbed me. And yeah, after talking to a couple of people, including my mom, who was working at a lingerie store in Canada, and she would just tell me these amazing stories about, you know, just changing women's lives really, like fundamentally having women say, wow, I can't believe that I'm actually comfortable in my body or, you know, this is, you know, changing the way I feel about myself. So those kind of stories. And I said, well, that sounds really fun. So, yeah, jumped in there with two feet.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So, Andrea, you're originally from Newfoundland and then went all over the world and ended up with a store in Portland. But tell me about growing up in Newfoundland and what that was like.

Andrea King:

So it's pretty remote. It's the most eastern point in Canada. Just again, I'll give you perspective. It's a four hour flight to London, England. So it's really way out there in the ocean. So it's pretty unique in the way that you're right on the ocean. You're very isolated from a lot of other things. It's not like you could drive to the next big city because to get to Halifax would be a two day drive, including a big long boat ride. So pretty out there. A lot of nature, hiking, fishing. We had a cabin, you know, an hour from the city where we would go do great hikes and fishing and canoeing and camping and that kind of stuff. But what's nice about it too, because you're so far away, it has to kind of have its own city feel, you know, so there's a great music scene and interesting theater because nobody can go to the closest big city. So it has its own vibe that way. Interestingly though, they have a really great French immersion program. So I actually did school up until grade eight, all in French. So it's. I guess that's maybe just because it's in Canada that it had that offering. Yeah. And so I Lived there till I was 21 and haven't lived there since. I'd love to go back. We go back often, but I still can't picture living there.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Your father is a university, teaches courses at university in Newfoundland, but also does a lot of work in the entrepreneurial field. And this has influenced the decisions that you've made in your education and now what you're doing for work.

Andrea King:

It has, yeah. When you and I spoke, I joked about how whenever I would ask for money growing up, he would say, oh, well, I've got this great business idea. You know, as a teenager, you're thinking, well, I just want the $50 now. I want a pair of jeans, or I just want to go out for the weekend. But he would always kind of come up with these different ideas, that some of them were good, some of them were bad. But just the thought and the concept of, like, well, you can easily make money or, you know, you should try to think of interesting ideas of ways to make money, was always kind of there in my relationship with him, and

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

also the idea of selling this concept, whatever it was. I think you told me that one of these ideas was bike tours for people who came to Newfoundland. Another one was baby food made out of fish. Mm. So not only do you come up with these ideas, but somehow you have to convince other people that they are worth investing in, I guess.

Andrea King:

Yeah, absolutely. And actually, that probably should have been what I'd said to him was, okay, well, give me the $50 to start the business.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So now that you've done Aristelle and you have these two stores, and I know that you have plans for many more stores, I think you said you wanted to have 10 stores by the time you were 40.

Andrea King:

Yep, that's the idea.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Yep.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And you have five years left.

Andrea King:

Five years ago. Yeah. And I don't think I'm gonna open any this year with the new baby.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Yeah.

Andrea King:

So that would put some pressure on the later years, but that should be easier.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

But tell me what your father thinks about the path, where your path has gone.

Andrea King:

I would say before. Before opening the store, he would ask really good kind of business questions of whether it made business sense and whether the concept would work and was nice and challenging in that way to kind of help me work out any kinks in the first store. And then as soon as that was open, he's so on board with kind of brainstorming how to make it grow, different marketing ideas. And so he's a really great sounding board to bounce ideas off of and discuss kind of the best way to expand.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And your brother also has some entrepreneurial instincts as well, from what you've told me.

Andrea King:

So I have two brothers and my younger brother, actually he's the president of Enactus for Memorial University in Newfoundland. And this is a group that does social entrepreneurship projects. And they just actually last week won the national competition and so they're going to the international competition in Beijing in October. So, yeah, he's really, really active in it. They've got a project working with disadvantaged people in Haiti on making ties and then they're actually importing them to Canada and selling them. So some really interesting projects, but very focused on, yeah, actually making them sustainable business models.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So I love talking with people who are entrepreneurs because it is a very different way of looking at the world, I think, than has been my training as a doctor. We tend to be trained in a very kind of sequential way. Entrepreneurs have to have that sequential way of dealing with things because there are certainly numbers involved and a whole business aspect to it. You also have to maintain this creativity. You have to be able to look outside of what currently exists and you have to have the passion to kind of keep moving in that direction. How do you maintain both a thinking business y logical sequential mind, but also have the openness to be expansive and have the passion to keep on doing these things?

Andrea King:

I love that question. Interestingly so, when I studied entrepreneurship at London Business School, we would always talk about what makes a good entrepreneur. And until you just asked me that question, I don't think I'd ever actually seen myself like, oh, I'm an entrepreneur. Obviously I am. I've started this company. But I'd never actually thought about it in that way. I mean, I love number crunching. I'm a bit of an Excel geek, so I can get a lot of pleasure of kind of going into the cash flow and looking at if you change this number, what happens to the bottom line and to the sales projections and looking at inventory and open to buy six months later. So I can get into that and I really enjoy it. But my past experience of being involved in strategic direction of a bank, kind of, that might sound boring, but that has a lot of creativity because you can kind of go, okay, well in three years, where do we want to be? And figuring out how to get there with the day to day, that's kind of. I think that's really, really exciting to see how that can actually happen. And then I guess most of the creativity comes from the advertising. Like that's where you get to Be really fun and come up with interesting ideas and. And the part that makes me excited, I guess, on the creativity side is doing something different. So most underwear stores, I guess most retail stores actually just use kind of their very attractive 20 year old models. And I do that sometimes. But I really want to try to break out of that whole stereotype and use different women. So older women, curvier women, pregnant women. We even just did last month a woman who had had a double mastectomy and she's amazing and so did a whole story about her in one of our ads. So really just bringing the creativity that way of kind of how can we show our customers that this store really is for everybody? So that's really exciting. So I guess it's that combo that works.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Also, you must have had some interesting brain training when you were younger because you were originally a Russian studies and philosophy major as an undergraduate. So it seems like your brain, you've kind of trained your brain in different ways to do a variety of different tasks all simultaneously.

Andrea King:

Yeah, I think a woman who works in the Vermont store is really into astrology and she would just say that's typical Capricorn. So I have no idea if it's what I studied. But yeah, I've had a broad range of study. International development as well is very different than Russian literature. And then having that business combination and

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

all of this you were doing while you were also having a personal life, you met your husband Hugh, when I believe you were working in Ottawa, is that right? And you had a overseas relationship. You went to school in London while you were getting your master's and he was still here.

Andrea King:

Right. So I think I lived in four places while we were seeing each other. I was in India and then Washington and the last place was London. Luckily he has a job that allows him to work from wherever he is, so he was able to have the flexibility to come back and forth. And I would visit there every few months as well. It worked. And luckily now we're able to live in the same city and we really like it. So that's. It's perfect. But yeah, and I think having done all of that travel, and he had done a lot of travel as well, makes it a lot easier to kind of settle and not have that travel bug as well, which is nice.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

came back to the United States is that you were pregnant. Well, you were married so obviously you wanted to come back and be with your husband. But you also were pregnant with your first child. So you're thinking about running a business, which you soon would. In a few years you're getting your master's degree, you're married and you're pregnant. That's a lot of balls in the air. And somehow from my conversations with you, you've seemed to feel pretty good about all of that. And you've done well.

Andrea King:

Yeah, I get really bored very easily, so if I don't have at least three things, I think I would get a little antsy. I don't do well with quiet vacations where I'm not doing anything. I wouldn't enjoy that. So that's just a personality thing. I like having a lot of things going on and yeah, and I opened the first store on my daughter's second birthday. So the first year I didn't do too much. I really just relaxed into being a mom because the first child is a bit scary. So you need to be able to focus.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, I would argue that the first year you also acclimating to being living in Burlington and just being I guess back on sort of firm ground. So there's that. And then the pregnancy of course leading up to the birth, the first year, you're right. But always in your mind you were doing things, you were always thinking about what the next thing was going to be. And for a while you had this interesting bank idea that was related to, which is funny because it didn't seem to be your passion. But it's still interesting.

Andrea King:

It's very interesting. And business wise it actually makes so much sense to help companies find local business partners in emerging markets because if you are an engineering firm. And you needed to build a water dam in Ethiopia, for example. You need all these environmental consultants and all these local groups and businesses in the country. So to be able to have them qualified and find good companies to work with, I mean, that's really, really important. But goodness, it was so boring. I still actually have the website and I still have this huge database of qualified firms, but I won't do anything with it. It's just not. You have to be passionate if you're gonna start your own business. If you aren't passionate about it in the beginning, you don't stand a chance for five years later.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So you, well, you got, you got married, you finished your degree, you had a. Moved back to Burlington, had a baby, and then you opened your first store last year when you were 34. This is when your daughter, your first daughter was 2. And then you opened a second store in Portland also last year, but about six months later or so. And by this time you were very pregnant with your second daughter, who was then born not so very long ago, right.

Andrea King:

February 2nd. So, yeah, I was seven months pregnant, I guess when the store in Portland opened. And our plan was to open it in the spring, but we kept coming here, you know, kind of looking around at spaces and found this perfect place on Upper Exchange and so just kind of pushed everything forward six months since we really wanted that space. And also now that I think about it, it's much easier opening a store seven months pregnant than with a three month old. So that was very wise. She's very easy to bring to the store now, but I think there's a lot involved of those first, you know, the first month before you open and the first month of being open that, yeah, it's better to do pregnant.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And it's still a lot of. It's just a lot of juggling.

Andrea King:

Yeah, it definitely is. It makes the waking up at 3am and 5am really easy because I can nurse and do ordering and think about marketing ideas. And the only problem is I might fall asleep midway through email and if I hit send, people get confused. But yeah, it's. It's a lot of juggling. But I have a really supportive husband and I have great staff and I think that's a huge part of it. I mean, I would never be able to do this by myself, especially being in two places. So having really great employees and I do things in chunks. So I'll do my marketing kind of three months at a time. So one day I'll just spend the whole day thinking of what I'll do. So then that's done. And you get very efficient. I think there's like a saying, if you want something done, give it to someone who's busy. Which is true. The busier you are, the more you're just going to get things done quickly rather than thinking about them.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And you also combine being a mother with being a business owner. The only times I've ever seen you, you've had your baby with you and she's perfectly happy and you seem very happy. And in the photos of the Old Port magazine, for the Old Port magazine article, you had both of your little girls with you. And that seems to work well for you.

Andrea King:

It really does. And I think that's one of the reasons I wanted to have my own business is because you're allowed to bring your children to work as often as you want to. Whereas if I was working for somebody, I wouldn't be able to do that as easily. So I love that part that it's really up to me. I got very lucky with my new baby. She's really easygoing. If she wasn't, then it wouldn't be as easy to have her at the store all the time. And I think it's a nice business. It's mostly women and so I just feel it's a nice environment actually to have children in as well.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

This is important on a bigger level for you as well because you have two stepdaughters and two daughters and you've done a lot of work in the past on gender related issues. And it's really important to you that women feel good about themselves because even having the confidence of wearing a well fitting bra enables them to kind of go out in the world and be and have a better sense of themselves. And this is why your advertisements really reflect the broad range of women. Women, because you can be, you know, whoever you were born to be. There's a bra that fits you. You're going to feel good about yourself and that's going to enable you to approach life in a more confident way.

Andrea King:

Absolutely. That's really important to me. And that's why I see it more as it's. It's obviously a retail store, but the fact that we can empower women on that kind of a level of letting them come into a store where there's absolutely no judgment. We're able to find bras that fit them rather than trying to fit them into something that isn't the right size or shape. And yeah, trying to really promote the idea of let's Just love who you are. Even if you might want to change the way you are, but just love who you are in that moment and. And go from there is a really hard thing, I think, sometimes because we've got all these messages from society telling us all these different things. And. Yeah, being. Having two stepdaughters and two daughters that are more impressionable if you're younger and they're gonna have to grow up in this society. I'd love to have as many positive messages out there for young women as possible. So if I can influence that way that women view themselves, that would make me really happy.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

In the meantime, your store is doing very well. You're turning a profit. You've been nominated for a big international, I believe, award. It's exciting.

Andrea King:

Yeah. I mean, I think beside the fact that it's a very welcoming environment, I think what makes the business work is that there's so many women in the wrong bra size. And when they come into the store, the amount of times that we hear people say, oh, my God, I've never been this comfortable, or, wow, I can't believe that this actually fits like this. I think it blows people away so much that it's. It's almost impossible to not be successful because people realize, wow, I can actually be this comfortable in a bra. So it sells itself really well.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

My guess is that you're maybe downplaying the effort that you put into this business. But despite that, I really do encourage people to read the article in Old Port magazine and spend some time in your store here in Portland, or, if people are listening, are in Burlington to go to the Burlington store as well. It is a very welcoming place. It's also very colorful. It's very fun. It definitely makes you feel like finding something interesting and putting on your high heels and going out and hitting the town. Or you can. You have nursing bras, you have standard, I guess you have a lot of white bras. You have a lot of nude bras. You have everyday bras. So I think there's really something for everyone in your store, so I encourage people to go explore.

Andrea King:

Yeah, I think you're right. The color brings everybody in. But for the most part, people end up buying nudes and blacks because that's what you want to wear every day. But there's a lot of color in there for all those fun, fun interests.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Andrea, how do people learn more about your store? What's your website?

Andrea King:

Aristelle.com.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

well, I appreciate your coming in and talking to us today and also bringing your little one she's the youngest. John, our audio engineer, so this is the youngest interview we've ever had. She's been completely silent this whole time so people don't even know that she's here. But we really appreciate your coming in and being part of our show and really appreciate the work that you're doing and bringing well fitting bras to the world and happiness to the women of Portland and Burlington.

Andrea King:

Thank you. It's been my pleasure.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You have been listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and podcast show number 148, Creative Entrepreneurship. Our guests have included Ben Shah and Andrea King. For more information on our guests and extended interviews, visit drlisabelisle.com or read their profiles in Maine Magazine and oldport magazine. The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is downloadable for free on itunes. For a preview of each week's show, sign up for our E newsletter and like our Dr. Lisa Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter and asbountiful1 on Instagram. We love to hear from you, so please let us know what you think of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour. We welcome your suggestions for future shows. Also let our sponsors know that you have heard about them here. We are privileged that they enable us to bring the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour to you each week. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. I hope that you have enjoyed our creative entrepreneurship show. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day. May you have a bountiful life.