A few minutes of read-only financials and a short questionnaire surfaces what a buyer would discount your practice for — whether the cash flow still holds once a replacement-veterinarian's pay covers your floor time, how dependent the practice is on you producing, the open-doctor and staffing risk, and the deferred lab and imaging spend they'll subtract. Preview is free.
Enter two numbers for an instant Veterinary Practices ballpark. No signup — the real number comes from your books.
We answer each one from your books first — so you fix the story before a diligence team writes the number.
If you personally generate most of the production, a buyer isn't acquiring a business — they're acquiring your case load. For a solo single-doctor practice they price on SDE rather than EBITDA, normalize a replacement veterinarian's compensation against the work you do, and underwrite the risk that clients and revenue walk when you do. Owner-dependent solos are routinely lowballed or carried with longer earn-outs and retained-employment terms.
There is a structural shortage of companion-animal veterinarians, and an independent practice usually can't match the pay, benefits, and relief coverage a corporate group offers. A buyer reads an open doctor slot as capped revenue and prices the risk that an associate leaves for a consolidator. Credentialed-technician turnover compounds it. Staffing durability is one of the first things diligence tests.
In-house pharmacy and product sales are a real margin line, and online retailers have been pulling that revenue away for years. If a meaningful share of your profit rides on dispensing that a client could move to an online pharmacy, a buyer discounts the durability of that margin and looks for how much of it you've defended with auto-ship, compounding, or convenience.
A financial buyer marks maintenance capex up to the replacement level and assumes a refresh of aging in-house lab analyzers, digital radiography and ultrasound, anesthesia and dental equipment, and the surgical suite. Without a documented equipment age and replacement schedule, they assume the worst and subtract it from the cash flow they're buying.
Each lever is sized for a typical $1.2m–$1.8m-revenue companion-animal general practice, ~12–16% owner-normalized ebitda — about $250K EBITDA. Same number whether we frame it as “what a buyer discounts” or “what you keep by fixing it.”
Preventive-care / wellness plans turn episodic visits into a recurring, prepaid base, and plan clients return roughly twice as often. Pairing that with disciplined recall and a retained in-house pharmacy builds the durable, repeat layer a buyer credits in a practice that has no formal contracts — and it lifts visits in a market where overall visit counts have softened.
adds about 0.3–0.5× to your multiple · usually takes 12–18 months
Recruiting and retaining associate DVMs so you are not the only producer is the single biggest lever on the multiple. It is what moves a practice off owner-dependent SDE pricing and into the multi-doctor tier that corporate consolidators actually compete for — and in a doctor-short market, a practice that can attract and keep associates is itself the scarce asset.
adds about 0.5–0.9× to your multiple · usually takes 18–36 months
Holding drug, diagnostic, and food COGS in line, defending in-house pharmacy against online leakage, and getting accrual-grade books with the replacement-doctor normalization documented protects the price. Every buyer's team runs a quality-of-earnings pass, and a clean COGS and add-back story is what prevents a mid-diligence re-trade.
adds about 0.2–0.4× to your multiple · usually takes 6–12 months
Typical impact ranges blended from lower-middle-market transaction data, sub-$50M M&A databases, and observed consolidator pricing in the $300K–$3M EBITDA band. Directional, not a guarantee — your memo computes your actual numbers from your books.
The metrics buyers grade veterinary practices on. The diagnostic fills the “your business” column from your actual QuickBooks data.
| Metric | Veterinary Practices benchmark | Your business | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recurring / contracted revenue | ~20% of revenue | Your data | Higher is better — the top multiple lever |
| Gross margin | ~75% | Your data | Pricing and job-costing discipline |
| EBITDA margin | ~16% | Your data | What flows to the bottom line |
| Healthy customer-concentration ceiling | top customer under 15% | Your data | Above it, buyers price the risk |
| Typical industry growth | ~3% / yr | Your data | Beating it can add to your multiple |
| Typical sale multiple | 4.0–10.0× EBITDA | Your data | Where the bidding starts; the levers above move you up |
Benchmarks are blended industry composites, service businesses $1M–$10M revenue, 2026-Q1 — directional, not a precise bar. Your memo measures you against your own books. Connect QuickBooks to fill in your numbers →
The diagnostic arrives as formats you can actually use, plus a private, scoped link to share a curated package with a specific buyer — you decide, card by card, what they see.
A branded slide deck, ready to present — for the buyer meeting, the lender, or the board.
A written diagnostic that holds up with buyers, yours to edit — plain-English summary, how we rebuilt your real earnings, every add-back listed.
Live formulas, not a dead printout — the path from raw profit to your real number, plus the cash-tied-up scenarios a buyer can stress-test.
Veterinary is one of the most heavily consolidated healthcare niches, and there are two distinct buyer pools. Individual veterinarians — usually SBA-financed — buy solo and small general practices at SDE- or revenue-based prices. Corporate consolidators and private-equity platforms (Mars Veterinary Health, National Veterinary Associates, Thrive Pet Healthcare, Southern Veterinary Partners, and others) acquire multi-doctor general practices and, especially, specialty and emergency hospitals at higher normalized-EBITDA multiples, often with rollover equity and a retained contract for the selling veterinarian. The doctor shortage is the engine of that consolidation. The memo maps which pool would look at a practice your size and how each structures the deal.
Read-only, through Intuit. We never write to your books. About 5 minutes.
Just what the books can’t show — agreements, key accounts, who runs the crews.
Buyer-readiness score, normalized EBITDA, value range and top flags — instantly.
The full engine, all three deliverables, the dashboard and the buyer deal room.
Start with the free preview. Pay once — $499 — only when you want the full memo. No subscription, no per-seat pricing.
Most Veterinary Practices businesses in the $1M–$10M revenue range trade at roughly 4.0× to 10.0× normalized EBITDA, with a typical deal near 5.5×. Smaller, owner-dependent shops sit at the low end; larger, manager-run businesses with recurring revenue reach the top. Your actual number depends on your books — that's what the diagnostic computes, blending recent lower-middle-market closings, main-street marketplace sales, and academic M&A survey data.
It depends on size and buyer pool, and there are genuinely two markets. A solo, owner-operator general practice sold to an individual veterinarian is priced on SDE (roughly 2.3–3x) or as a percentage of revenue (~0.55–0.85x), because the buyer replaces the seller clinically — and for a single-doctor practice you first normalize a replacement veterinarian's compensation against the owner's own production. A clean, multi-doctor practice that a corporate group would acquire is priced on normalized EBITDA. Every figure traces back to your books, never a revenue rule-of-thumb.
Because that is the corporate / private-equity platform multiple — paid on normalized EBITDA, for multi-doctor practices (and especially specialty and emergency hospitals) that run on associate-driven production rather than the owner. An independent, owner-operated single-doctor practice does not trade there; it trades closer to 3.5–6x EBITDA, or on SDE. The multiple steps up with scale, clean financials, and the practice's ability to run without you — which is exactly what crosses it from the independent market into the corporate-bid market.
Associate-driven production so the practice survives your stepping back, multi-doctor scale, a recurring wellness-plan and bonded-client base, a specialty or emergency service mix, clean books, modern in-house diagnostics and imaging, and strong average-client-transaction and new-client growth. The diagnostic scores where you sit on each and shows what moving up would be worth.
Sixty seconds. Four numbers. No signup, no email. Just a real answer.