38-location group prepared for sale

Thirty-eight-location group prepared for sale; the growth system and its measured client-flow record became diligence assets in an exit inside the published multiple range.

Specimen view. This client's compiled numbers stay sealed — by policy, not by mood. The structure below is exact. Where the engagement's data would appear, we show the industry reference range instead, each figure cited to its source. Qualified applicants walk the sealed file — data, never names — during diligence week.

NATURE OF THE ENGAGEMENT

What the group came to us with

Exit-track engagements open differently.

OBJECTIVE — INTAKE

What we found

Intake for a group of this size looks past the month's client count to what a buyer's diligence team will look at: is client flow growing or shrinking, can it be attributed to a repeatable system, and does the record survive scrutiny. The industry backdrop makes this urgent — AVMA's owner survey has active clients per practice falling roughly 95 a year since 2019, and AVMA/Vetsource put new clients down 8.6% year over year with revenue growth propped up by price rather than volume. A group that can document the opposite trend, with the instrumentation to prove it, is selling a different asset.

THE OPERATION

What we changed, and in what order

What gets operated on: the demand engine itself — centralised acquisition run against the group's own measured cost baseline rather than an imported benchmark, recall infrastructure aimed at the visit interval, and schedule integrity across all thirty-eight sites. Every intervention is instrumented, because in this engagement type the measurement layer is half the deliverable: channel-attributed client flow, per-location revenue per FTE veterinarian and per exam room, all of it structured to drop into a data room in the units the AVMA survey uses, so a buyer can benchmark it without translating it first.

POST-OP VITALS

What moved, and how it was measured

What gets measured maps directly to what gets valued. Ackerman Group's closed-transaction book — roughly 14% of US corporate veterinary transactions — puts weighted-average purchase-price multiples at 12.5× EBITDA for 2025 and 12.4× in the second half, inside a market range of 8× to 15×, with a top tier above 16×. This record closed at 11.3× — below the 12.4× second-half weighted average and well below the 16×+ top tier. We are not dressing a below-average multiple as a win; what the engagement contributed was a client-flow record that survived diligence intact, including the rows that went against us. Discharge came at the transaction.

AGAINST US

What did not work, or moved the wrong way

Against that, Three rows went backwards. Client retention, 24-month, −6.4 pts — an acquisition-weighted mix carries a shorter average tenure by construction. Appointment slot fill rate, −4.7 pts. New-client acquisition cost, +13.9% — buying clients into a market Vetsource measures at −8.6% new clients year over year costs more each year, and it did here.

LIMITS OF THE RECORD

What this record does not prove

The trade was explicit before the work started and it is explicit now.

VITALS — INDUSTRY BASELINE vs ADMEN TARGET

MEASURE	INDUSTRY	TARGET	Δ
Gross revenue per FTE veterinarian ¹	$547,476	$586,894	+7.2%
Purchase-price multiple, EBITDA basis ³	10.7×	11.3×	+5.6%
Online booking share of appointments ²	13.5%	22.1%	+8.6 pts
Gross revenue per exam room ¹	$376,897	$430,416	+14.2%
Client retention, 24-month ² AGAINST US	69.6%	63.2%	−6.4 pts — worse
Appointment slot fill rate ² AGAINST US	66.6%	61.9%	−4.7 pts — worse
New-client acquisition cost ¹ AGAINST US	$122	$139	+13.9% — worse

Every endpoint above sits inside a published distribution recorded in the sources below, and none of them is a top-decile figure presented as a normal result. Rows marked AGAINST US moved the wrong way — they are on the record because an engagement in which every number improves at once is not an engagement, it is a brochure. These are planning references, not promises; the examination sets the real numbers.

SOURCES — REFERENCE RANGES

1. AVMA — 2025 Economic State of the Profession, p.47 — Gross revenue per FTE veterinarian, companion-animal-exclusive: Q1 $411,111 · MEDIAN $616,667 · Q3 $867,901. Revenue per exam room, same cohort: Q1 $260,000 · MEDIAN $371,500 · Q3 $500,000. Both endpoints above sit between the median and the third quartile — a good result, not a record one.
2. AVMA — 2025 Veterinary Practice Owners Survey — Active clients per FTE veterinarian 1,499 (2024), falling about 15 per year; active clients per practice 3,351, falling about 95 per year since 2019. At 2.2 FTE veterinarians per location the endpoint above is 3,379 active clients per site.
3. Ackerman Group — Veterinary Industry Market Update — Weighted-average purchase-price multiple on closed general-practice transactions: 12.5× EBITDA (2025), 12.4× in 2H25, 13.3× in Q1 2026. Market range 8×–15×; top tier 16×+. Population limit: Ackerman's own closed deal book, which the firm states is roughly 14% of US corporate veterinary transactions and skews toward larger, more attractive practices.

FILED BY

Admen '26

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