Private Equity in Vet Med: Lessons of 2025 (#505)

Two worlds divided by a single fracture. On one side, vocation, trust, and continuity. On the other, scale, control, and extraction. What breaks in between is not efficiency, but care.

This is the lesson-set that doesn’t appear in pitch decks or exit memos, but it’s written all over 2025.

Veterinary Medicine Is Not Infinitely Scalable

Private equity (PE) entered veterinary medicine assuming it behaved like other service industries: standardize processes, centralize decision-making, increase throughput, and margins would follow.

What became clear is that:

Clinical judgment does not scale like logistics or retail.

• Every patient is different.

• Every client relationship is personal.

• Every adverse outcome carries reputational, ethical, and emotional weight.

Vet Med resists the frictionless replication that PE relies on.

Veterinarians Are Not Replaceable Operators

A core PE assumption is that labor can be optimized, substituted, or churned without collapsing value.

Veterinary medicine broke that model.

Burnout, moral distress, and attrition didn’t just affect staffing. These factors directly eroded enterprise value.

Clinics with strong Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization (EBITDA) projections faltered when senior veterinarians left, taking trust, continuity, and referral networks with them.

In short:

You can buy a clinic.

You cannot buy a vocation.

Trust Is the True Asset and It Depreciates Fast

PE models often treat goodwill as a line item amortized over time.

Veterinary medicine taught a harsher lesson: trust is fragile, local, and easily lost.

• Clients notice turnover.

• Clients sense rushed consultations.

• Clients recognize when recommendations feel financial rather than medical.

Once trust erodes, volume doesn’t compensate, it accelerates decline.

Margin Pressure Has Ethical Consequences

Unlike many industries, veterinary medicine operates at the intersection of:

• Medical uncertainty,

• Emotional vulnerability, and

• Financial asymmetry.

When growth targets quietly influence clinical decisions, veterinarians feel it first, and clients eventually do too.

This creates:

• Moral injury in clinicians,

• Reputational risk in brands, and

• Regulatory attention where none previously existed

2025 showed that ethics is not a soft variable.

It is a financial one.

Consolidation Triggered the Scrutiny PE Assumed Would Never Come

For years, veterinary medicine flew under the regulatory radar.

Consolidation changed that.

As ownership concentration increased, so did questions about:

• Transparency,

• Pricing power,

• Conflicts of interest, and

• Professional independence.

What PE learned the hard way:

Scale attracts attention.

Attention invites regulation.

Exit Is Harder Than Entry

Perhaps the most sobering realization of 2025 is this:

Buying veterinary assets was easier than selling them.

• Valuation multiples contracted,

• Buyers demanded proof of cultural stability, not just cash flow,

• Initial Public Offering (IPO) timelines stretched, and

• Secondary PE buyers became selective, not eager.

Veterinary medicine proved to be a longer, messier, more human investment than anticipated.

The Lesson Beneath the Lesson

Private equity did not fail in veterinary medicine.

But it did discover a boundary it cannot easily cross.

Veterinary medicine is built on:

• Continuity,

• Conscience, and

• Credibility earned over years.

These do not compound quarterly.

And that, ultimately, is what PE learned the hard way in 2025.

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