From Wildlife Dreams to Cardiology Expertise

Max: You are one of the top veterinarian cardiologists in your field.

Laurent: I was able to create an online teaching program. Having additional income streams is very interesting and I’m very happy that at this point I’m able to match my active income through these courses. If you would have told me 10 years ago you’re going to make money online talking about hearts and dogs and cats I’d be like sure mate. My major goal and my main goal still is to reach as many people as possible to especially in countries that don’t have access to specialty medicine.

Max: All right Lauren, thank you very much for joining me here. It’s a pleasure to be talking to you. I know you have a busy schedule. So first of all, you’re just about to hop on a flight to India. Can you tell me more about that?

Laurent: Yeah, so tomorrow I’m going to India because they’re building a hospital there in Mumbai and they kindly invited me to go and help them and build their team, educate or lecture their local veterinarians. So it’s an exciting trip for sure.

Max: So happy I’ve personally never been to India, but anyways, let’s backtrack you real quick. So you are one of the top veterinarian cardiologists in your field, is that right?

Laurent: So I’m a European specialist in Veterinary Cardiology and I think they’re a bit over 100 in the whole of Europe and I think on top of my head there are around 250 to 350 in America. So yes I’m one of the let’s say 500 cardiologist in the world with this diploma.

Max: That is crazy. What made you pick that? Did you know ahead of time you want to be veterinarian and a cardiologist for veterinary, or how did you specialize? I’d be curious.

Laurent: It’s a very good question. So basically as soon as I was able to walk and talk I knew I was going to be or I wanted to be a veterinarian. But then initially my plan was to work with Wildlife so I moved to South Africa after graduating for a couple of months. Then I had to come back or I came back to Belgium to and found a job maternity cover in a small practice. Then I noticed that I really like Cardiology so I just sent an email to every single specialist in Europe to give me tips. One of them was so kind to reply and offer me or suggested to apply for a position there, got a position and then worked myself up until I got the opportunity to do the specialty program which is called a residency and I passed my exam two years ago.

Max: Damn, and now you’re crushing it. That’s super duper interesting.

Building the Online Teaching Empire

Max: In this regard, you joined our program I think four months ago something like that?

Laurent: Correct.

Max: And what we’ve basically done is we’ve taken your offline expertise and we’ve helped you create an online expertise from that. Can you talk a little bit more about that process that we helped you with?

Laurent: Yes. So I’ve been fortunate enough last year to be invited to multiple places abroad to lecture but it wasn’t really, I wasn’t able to combine it anymore with my quote unquote daily job and I wanted to help people as much as possible whilst generating an additional income. So I reached out to you guys, you guys gave me very valuable advice and was able to well create an online teaching program which has been very successful, fingers crossed so far, and generate that passive income.

Max: That’s insane. Yeah, I mean you know, that’s we always call this like the typical client journey. Like someone comes in has an offline expertise but the point about offline is like in your case, you have to travel a lot, you have to physically be somewhere and we just talked off camera couple minutes ago about that too. It’s like and then you do it online and all of a sudden it frees up everything and it does the same thing and it’s just great what technology really does. It brings people together and it allows you to reach people all around the globe without having to physically be there and that’s really, really cool.

Laurent: And for me it’s just insane what some people are willing to pay for and how you can make a passive income because if you would have told me 10 years ago you’re going to make money online talking about hearts and dogs and cats I’d be like, sure man what’s your point now, the same but yeah apparently it is possible.

Max: In regards to you know you being a veterinarian, so of course for you, your reputation is very important so what we did not want to do is have you be all over social media or anything like that so we want to of course make sure that your reputation stays exactly the same but then at the same time that you can transition a lot into the online space. So how exactly are you getting your clients? How have we helped you on what platform to do that?

Laurent: Yeah. So over the last couple of years I’ve noticed that for me, LinkedIn is my most, is a social media platform that coincides or aligns the most with my vision and that way it’s a professional platform but still open enough to have fairly casual conversation. So over the years, I’ve been posting quite a bit on there especially on my Wildlife work that I do on the site and the research in wildlife and that generates quite some traction. So what I usually do now is I purely post the advertisement of a course online on LinkedIn because again it’s like you said I want people to realize that this is not too commercial but this is really focused on helping them as much as possible. And I’ve been advertising courses that individualize the training of each participant which is fairly unique. Therefore I only allow a certain number of people usually around a dozen per course for eight consecutive weeks and they have access to Specialists like myself or there’s one running on Diagnostic Imaging and ECC at the moment with fellow Specialists and people call, contact me via a PM on LinkedIn or through an email address that’s put on there as well.

Max: Amazing! So they’re actually even coming to you and you don’t have to outreach or anything like that?

Laurent: No, it’s like you said you guys found a perfect balance on helping me to establish this program and to get it out there whilst really focusing on the professional side of the story.

Matching Active Income Through Passive Streams

Max: Awesome! Super happy for you, of course, in this regard. Now you mentioned earlier that it’s basically passive income so you’ve largely automated everything?

Laurent: Yes, for the vast majority everything is automated at this point. At the beginning, there were a few pitfalls and I was doing the majority myself but then I, in consideration at my coach Roberto, I was able to automate quite a lot of stuff, which saved me a lot of time and time is a very valuable asset, I guess. So that’s why I was able to automate the vast majority of things.

Max: Nice, and you mentioned our coach Roberto, he’s your one-on-one coach. He’s helped you with a lot, also want to give big props there. I remember when I hired him, I really loved his background as an ex-professional gamer. I don’t if you know that, and I’m like, okay, he’s a hard worker, I can tell. He’s been with our team now for a very, very long time, helping out our clients together with me, one-on-onc, it’s very beautiful.

Max: Anyways, so without having to share detailed numbers or anything like that in terms of like income of the passive income that you now have online, how does that match your regular income that you have as a veterinarian?

Laurent: Yeah, so of course we’ve only been doing it for a few months now but my goal is to, with my passive income to match my active income and so far we’re able to do that. So I’m very happy that I was able to do that because you never know what’s going to happen eventually with the economical circumstances and everything. So I think having additional income streams is very interesting and I’m very happy that at this point I’m able to match my active income through these courses.

Max: That’s amazing of course and that’s the power of the courses you know like on one hand you give a lot of value to a lot of people especially if it’s something hypers specialized like yours and on the other hand it helps you, you don’t have to invest as much time in it. It’s a win-win for everybody so to speak, right?

Laurent: Exactly. Because the, my major goal and my main goal still is to reach as many people as possible, to especially in countries that don’t have access to Specialty medicine. For example, in the first course that I gave, there was room for 12 people and we had nine different nationalities and we had someone following from the Philippines at 4:00 in the morning, India 2:00 in the morning, a lot of people from the UAE, 11:00 to midnight. So it just goes to show that people really want access to Specialty medicine.

Wild Adventures and Professional Insights

Max: That’s incredible and again like yeah, I remember when I was in Tokyo last year, I stayed there for a month and for me it was 2 a.m., some of my US clients it was afternoon, the Europeans was, it was evening. And it was so cool to see everyone there with the different backgrounds, for some it’s daylight in the back and stuff like that, it’s really cool. Now in regards to you going through our program, what was kind of like the biggest lessons for you personally? I’d be curious like where you said this is something you had no idea about that the program helped you with?

Laurent: Yeah, it’s something that you mentioned during one of the live sessions, is that the second course that we were promoting didn’t take off initially as fast as the Cardiology course that I was lecturing. But for example, you made very, two very good points in that first of all maybe the following, all the followers that I have on LinkedIn are more interested in a specific subject namely, Cardiology. And the second one was that you can’t fish too much in the same pond over and over again, which is a very valuable advice. This is all new to me so that was very valuable insight that you gave me. So yeah those things are very interesting plus how to engage people, you guys did great research on which platform is the best how many posts you have to do every week, even the tone of your posts, everything was checked and double checked by Roberto so very, very valuable advice.

Max: That’s always awesome, always awesome to hear. I appreciate that. Now when you, you’re someone that took their expertise offline completely online and you’re obviously profiting very well from it and your clients do so as well, what do you recommend for, you know, fellow doctors, fellow Specialists such as yours that are not leveraging the power of the internet yet, maybe because they don’t have experience with it, maybe they don’t believe in its advantages, like what, what would you say there?

Laurent: So, my major Pitfall in the beginning was actually to take that first step and that case, that of course we’re medical professionals so you don’t want to give the impression that everything is commercial which is, which is the case because of course you want to help people that don’t have access to Specialty medicine. So if you’re out there and you are a medical professional and you have a niche that people want to know more about, I can tell you now in hindsight, it is possible to find that fine line in my opinion to help people find your purpose, find your goal and create a passive income out of it, so it is possible in my opinion.

Max: Yeah, 100%. I mean it clearly is, it works for you. Now what does your day-to-day life look like? Just out of curiosity because you’re still doing what you’ve done before but on top of that you have this online thing going on so what are you doing on a regular day?

Laurent: Yeah, so usually I get up quite early to get stuff done, study or work on own projects before I go to my quote unquote daily job. I work at a busy referral center in the UK where I treat heart problems in cats and dogs on a daily base for four to four and a half days a week. Then during weekend days or off days, I usually spend time on my own projects which includes the online teaching business. I do quite a lot of work in Wildlife so for example yesterday I went to a zoo to scan African wild dogs. Two weeks ago, was in Greece to do a bunch of, bunch of chimps because they’re very sensitive for heart disease. Then the week before, I was in Turkey lecturing people on site. Those are my major, that’s how the vast majority of my days and week, weeks look like.

Max: Damn, so it really is just like flying in and out, checking out the animals?

Laurent: Yeah, yeah. So currently it’s quite busy that’s why I try to switch or swift a little bit towards the online stuff because it has to be sustainable and like we said during the conversation before, people might have to, have might have a bit of a romantic view of traveling all the time whilst it can be fairly exhausting to be honest.

Max: Yeah 100%. I mean honestly just out of curiosity, when you said like you check in the hearts of chimps, do they, they probably need to be uh what is it called, they probably need to have anesthesia or something like that, I guess?

Laurent: Yes, so it’s a very good question. So the vast majority of great apes which are bonab urens gorillas and chimpanzees have to be sedated or anesthetized for their general health check. I had one gorilla waking up on me which was a bit scary but there are there are zoos out there that are training their great apes to be scanned consciously so they come against the fence while I scan them with my Pro consciously. So I’m happy to send you a video privately at some point, but more and more zoos are training their great apes to be scanned consciously.

Max: Okay, so about that gorilla that woke up. Walk me through that. I mean, so he’s lying there, whatever, 250 kilos, I guess?

Laurent: Yeah, so he’s a, he was a silver bad gorilla. And he was bitten by his brother over for the leadership in the group and so the surgeon had to come and to suture up his wounds and clean his wounds and we wanted to catch two birds with one stone because older males are predisposed for heart disease. So as soon as you have an older great ape that is male, it is really strongly recommended that you scan his heart. So I was there with a colleague but because this is all very sensitive, these are high valuable species, everything has to happen behind the scene, under the most serene circumstance. And whilst we were lifting this silverback gorilla on the table for his scan, we didn’t know but his ET tube, which is an endotracheal tube, which is a tube in your windpipe to give you gas anesthesia, got disconnected and we didn’t see it. So I was scanning this gorilla between a concrete wall and a Silverback Gorilla of 160 kilograms and I’m checking my screen and I feel this thumb against my arm and I look over and the gorilla starts sitting up.

Max: Oh no.

Laurent: But luckily we were, we were very lucky because the zoo vet was extremely experienced, so he just said that everybody had to remain calm, he had, he gave an extra dose of anesthesia, attached the ET tube again and then the gorilla went to sleep again and I just want to stress this is an exception. I’ve been doing this for seven years and I only had an animal waking up twice on me including this Silver Black gorilla. So usually it’s under the best possible circumstances but as in human medicine, you can always have a complication.

Max: That’s stuff for nightmares right there.

Laurent: Yeah, my life flashing by, that’s for sure.

Future Vision and Helping Animals Worldwide

Max: Jesus. I mean yeah, Laurent, you’re living an awesome life. You’re living a crazy, adventurous life and you know I’m happy to be part of your journey, at least a little bit, helping you out with the online part of things. What’s the future? How do you see yourself the next two to three years?

Laurent: So in the big lines, the future that I want to have is to have liberty of what I choose or can cherry-pick and invest my time in. And it’s gonna sound mellow but it’s still the child’s dream of helping as many animals as possible. Of course, I’m not going to lie about it that I want to get a certain comfort out of it as well, a certain satisfaction and gratitude out of it as well, but that’s still the bottom line.

Max: Beautiful. Well, you know, let’s keep crushing. Let’s keep pushing. I wish you all the best on your endeavors and all that. Of course, stay in touch and all that and keep helping you with that.

Laurent: Thank you very much for everything. See you.

Max: Cheers, mate.