Where to Own a Practice
If you’re in it because you love being a veterinarian and love helping patients and not necessarily in it to make the big bucks, you can really practice almost anywhere. A lot of buyers seem to want the downtown metropolitan practice thinking it’s a great place to practice since there are so many potential patients and you can live the urban lifestyle. We’ve helped doctors who absolutely wanted to be in a metropolitan area, even though the demographics made no sense whatsoever, who then started a practice and did quite well. One doctor that we helped always dreamed of owning a practice in a particular city. He went for it and is successful. And we have seen others want a practice in a certain area, and although the numbers didn’t make sense, they did it anyway and were successful.
Some of you are buying a practice because you want to make a lot of money, in which case, further analysis and discussion is needed. The failure rate for veterinarians is somewhere around .015%. If you’re buying an existing practice and the practice already has good cash flow that you’ve identified, you can purchase the practice and have success almost no matter where it is. If it’s a poor performing practice, you would need to examine if the poor performance is because of the location, the management, or something else. If you want to buy an existing practice and are looking for an opportunity to grow and have lower overhead, I would suggest looking outside of the metropolitan areas. Those areas have less competition, wages and rent are lower and it’s easier to grow those practices. And if you are considering doing a startup practice, the same rules apply. Look for a location with good demographics outside of metropolitan areas. Of course, if you absolutely want to be in a metropolitan area, don’t be afraid to go for it. Just look closely at the numbers and hire a good veterinarian practice or real estate broker to help you out.
One of the advantages of working with Omni is we have both practice brokers and real estate brokers to help you traverse the ownership trail in any way we can. Just give us a call at 877-866-6053 or email info@omnipg-vet.com and we’ll be happy to help get you started.
