Corporate Greed (Part 2): What Might Scott Galloway say? (#450)

There aren’t many marketing professors who become household names, fewer still who manage to turn balance sheets and antitrust policy into compelling storytelling.

Scott Galloway, NYU Stern professor, serial entrepreneur, podcaster, columnist, and now commentator on masculinity, has somehow done exactly that.

At a moment when tech feels untouchable, politics feels tribal, and a lot of young people feel lost, Galloway has positioned himself as a kind of blunt, data-driven uncle: part market analyst, part social critic, part motivator, and part scold.

You don’t have to agree with Scott Galloway to recognize that he has become one of the more influential voices in the conversation about power and inequality, and what a good life might look like in a digital economy.

What Scott Galloway Might Say About the Corporatization of Vet Med

If you put Scott Galloway on a stage with a whiteboard and asked him about the corporate takeover of veterinary medicine, he probably wouldn’t start with puppies and kittens.

He’d start with math. He might say:

Find a sector with emotional dependence, price inelasticity, and regulatory chaos.

Now ask: how long until private equity shows up?

To be clear: Galloway hasn’t (yet) done a full No Mercy / No Malice post on veterinary medicine.

What follows is an informed thought experiment. It is:

What Scott Galloway might say, based on his published views on healthcare, consolidation, and private equity.

1. The Private Equity Playbook Comes to the Exam Room

Galloway has been blunt about why investors love healthcare:high ROI, recurring revenue, and customers who can’t walk away when something or someone they love is sick.

Now translate that to veterinary care:

• Households increasingly see pets as family.

• Demand is emotionally inelastic: when the dog can’t walk, you don’t bargain-hunt; you borrow.

• Fragmented, privately-owned practices make roll-ups easy.

• Regulation is lighter than in human medicine, but the emotional stakes are just as high.

  
  

This is exactly the kind of industry Galloway describes when he talks about private equity rolling through healthcare, HVAC, dentistry, and other unsexy but essential services:

Lots of small operators, predictable cash flows,

and room to raise prices after consolidation.

So, his opening thesis on corporatized vet med might be:

Veterinary medicine is healthcare plus emotion, minus regulation.

If you’re a fund manager, that’s not a profession; that’s an opportunity.

2. Market Power: From Love to Leverage

In his writings on U.S. healthcare, Galloway has argued that the problem isn’t doctors, it’s the system: a dense layer of intermediaries, opaque pricing, and captured regulators.

He’s called for nationalized or heavily socialized medicine because, in his view, the current model is a transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to the rich.

Veterinary medicine is different. No Medicare. No employer-based insurance requirement.

However, the logic of consolidation is familiar:

• Roll-up.

• Buy dozens or hundreds of independent clinics.

• Rebrand / re-organize.

• Centralize purchasing, HR, and pricing.

• Raise  Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) :

• Push higher-margin diagnostics and procedures.

• Introduce wellness plans and membership schemes.

• Optimize fees using data across the whole network.

• Exit.

• Sell the platform to a bigger fund or strategic buyer at a higher multiple.

If this sounds harsh, Galloway has said almost exactly this about other PE-infused sectors, from nursing homes to Hollywood.

Consolidation plus financial engineering often means fewer competitors, higher prices, and pressure to reduce staff (i.e. lean staffing).

Applied to vet med, Galloway would likely warn:

Once you have enough clinics under one roof, your job shifts from

“take care of animals’ to ‘optimize revenue per pet household.’

That’s not evil. It’s math.

But math can become evil when nobody in the room is paid to say no.

3. Who Wins and Who Loses

In classic Galloway style, he’d sketch a simple 2x2 of winners and losers.

• Winners.

• Private equity funds and corporate owners.

• They get an asset class with strong cash flows, pricing power, and a built-in growth story (pet humanization, longer lifespans, advanced treatments).

• Selling practice owners (some of them).

• Older owners with no succession plan can get life-changing liquidity. In his language: They’ve converted illiquid sweat into a wire transfer.

• Upper-tier executives in the chains.

• Stock options, performance bonuses, and the chance to run a large platform, not just a single clinic.

• Losers.

• Young veterinarians and nurses.

• Galloway has repeatedly pointed out that when private equity moves into healthcare, efficiencies often mean higher workload and thinner staffing. In vet med that likely looks like:

• More appointments per hour.

• Tighter quotas on diagnostics and procedures.

• Less control over clinical decisions.

• Independent clinics trying to compete.

• Consolidated groups can negotiate better supplier terms, spend more on digital marketing, and undercut on some prices while cross-subsidizing elsewhere.

• Classic winner-take-most dynamics he’s described in tech and education.

• Pet owners without pricing power.

• When local competition shrinks to two or three corporate brands (often owned by the same capital behind the scenes), choice becomes an illusion.

• Prices drift up, and the only real alternative is no care.

He’d likely point to human healthcare data, where private equity ownership of nursing homes has been linked to higher mortality and lower staffing, as a cautionary tale for any medical field where margins are squeezed from the top.

4. The Most Valuable Asset in Vet Med Isn’t on the Balance Sheet

Galloway obsessively talks about intangibles: brand, trust, habit.

In The Four, he framed big tech’s power in terms of deep psychological hooks, not just market share.

Veterinary medicine’s core intangible is trust:

• Clients trust that the vet is their advocate, not the shareholder’s.

• Staff trust that clinical judgment comes before quarterly targets.

When an industry corporatizes too fast, he’d argue, the most valuable asset walks out the door:

You can put the building and the machines on a spreadsheet.

You can’t put the look on a vet nurse’s face

when she realizes she’s now in the sales business.

From a Galloway lens, the risk isn’t just ethical, it’s strategic.

Break trust and you damage the brand.

Damage the brand and your asset isn’t worth its multiple when the music stops.

5. Umpires, Not Kings: What He’d Say About Regulators

Galloway’s antitrust stance is consistent: large firms can be great innovators, but when they become unregulated monopolies, you need aggressive umpires, not passive scorekeepers.

For veterinary medicine, he could argue for three fixes drawn straight from his healthcare commentary:

• Radical price transparency.

• Require clinics (corporate or independent) to publish standardized fees for common procedures.

• Ownership transparency.

• Every clinic website, invoice, and consent form should clearly disclose who ultimately owns the practice.

• If five different local clinics roll up to the same financial sponsor, the public should know.

• Sunlight on private equity outcomes.

• Just as HHS is beginning to study and publicize the impact of PE ownership in hospitals and nursing homes, he’d call for similar research and disclosure in vet med: staffing levels, outcomes, complaint rates, and price trends before/after acquisition.

  
  

Galloway would say:

We don’t need to hate private equity.

We need to stop letting it dress up as a family doctor.

6. What Should Vets and Pet Owners Do?

Galloway is a capitalist, not an anti-business crusader.

He invests in companies he thinks add value, and he’s very open about his own financial interests. So, his take on corporate vet med would probably be:

Channel the incentives, don’t just rage against them.

• For veterinarians, he might suggest:

• Get equity, not just salary. If you’re joining a corporate group, push for ownership stakes, profit-sharing, or employee stock programs.

  
  

• Consider co-ops and employee-owned models. He’s bullish on alternative structures in other industries; vet med could be ripe for the same play.

• Invest in your personal brand. In a world of roll-ups, the individual clinician’s reputation becomes a portable asset.

• For clients/pet owners, he might suggest:

• Ask who owns the clinic. Vote with your feet if transparency is poor or if every recommendation feels like an upsell.

• Support independents that behave like grown-ups. He’d be the first to say some independent practices are badly run. The answer isn’t nostalgia; it’s backing businesses that are transparent, fair on price, and humane to staff.

• For policymakers and professional bodies, he might say:

• Measure, disclose, and regulate where necessary, before the sector looks like U.S. human healthcare - highly financialized, wildly expensive, and structurally opaque.

7. The Algebra of Veterinary Care

If Galloway ended this as a No Mercy / No Malice column, he might reduce it to an equation:

Veterinary Care = (Love × Science) ÷ (Greed + Friction)

Corporate ownership can reduce friction: better tech, 24/7 tele-triage, access to advanced diagnostics.

That’s the upside.

But if greed grows faster than love and science, the denominator wins.

The profession risks becoming just another asset class where the number that matters most is the exit multiple.

And for a guy who has spent the last few years railing against what happens when financial engineering overwhelms human dignity in healthcare, it’s hard to imagine he’d watch the corporatization of veterinary medicine and say anything other than:

This is one more warning shot.

When we let people’s deepest attachments become

someone else’s quarterly trade, we shouldn’t be surprised

when trust, and eventually care, erode.

That’s the conversation he’d likely want vets, pet owners, regulators, and investors to have:

Not whether capital belongs in veterinary medicine,

but what kind of capital, under what rules,

and in service of which values.

Further Reading

No Mercy / No Malice. Scott Galloway. https://www.profgalloway.com/

Previous blog posts in this series on corporate greed

Corporate Greed (Part 1): A Marvel(lous) analogy for 2025 https://www.ricklecouteur.com/post/corporate-greed-part-1-a-marvel-lous-analogy-for-2025-448

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