Grow a Veterinary Practice
Turnover growth and profit growth are not the same thing, and a practice can achieve a great deal of the first while going backwards on the second. Before choosing how to grow, it is worth knowing which kind of growth your practice actually needs.
What This Guide Covers
- The Four Routes
- Before You Grow, Fix the Base
- Funding Growth
The Four Routes
- Get more from existing capacity
- Pricing, service mix, missed charge recovery, plan penetration and appointment utilisation. Almost always the highest return route and almost always the one skipped, because it is less interesting than opening a second site.
- Add clinical capacity
- Another vet, another consulting room, extended hours. Adds cost immediately and revenue gradually, so the funding gap needs planning.
- Add services
- Referral level work, dentistry, physiotherapy, hydrotherapy or diagnostics brought in-house. Each is a capital decision with a utilisation requirement attached.
- Add sites
- Buying or opening a second practice. Transformational and the most likely to damage the original practice if attempted too early.
Before You Grow, Fix the Base
Growth multiplies whatever is already there. A practice with a two point margin problem opening a second site now has two of them and a management team split across both.
The sequence that works is: get reporting reliable, close the obvious margin gaps, reduce dependence on the owner, then expand. That order takes longer and it is why some practices grow profitably and others simply get bigger.
Funding Growth
Expansion consumes cash before it produces it. Whether that is funded from reserves, bank borrowing or asset finance depends on the type of growth and on how quickly it pays back. Equipment usually suits asset finance. A second site usually needs term borrowing with real headroom.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should we open a second site or buy one?
How do we know if we have room to grow in the existing practice?
Work Out Which Growth Is Worth Having
We will look at where the headroom is in your existing practice before you spend money adding more.