This is Dr. Karras’s story.
How to sell a veterinary practice at the right time, to the right buyer, for the right price is the question Dr. Athena Karras had been carrying for almost three years before she finally picked up the phone. When the right time came, she called CGK Business Sales. Athena ran a $4.2M revenue, $1.1M EBITDA general small-animal hospital with an integrated emergency wing on East Main Street in Hendersonville, Tennessee, in the Sumner County corridor north of Nashville. Twenty-six W-2 employees moved through the building each week: four doctors, eight vet techs, six assistants, four front-desk client-service staff, and four administrative and billing staff. The practice ran 60 percent on general small-animal medicine, 25 percent on the emergency and urgent-care wing she had built in 2018, and 15 percent on dental and soft-tissue surgical work. Six thousand eight hundred active client households across Hendersonville, Gallatin, Goodlettsville, and Mount Juliet were on the recall and reminder system, with most clients within a twenty-five-minute drive of the practice. Athena was 51. She had founded the practice in 2008 in a leased Main Street suite after eight years as an associate veterinarian, and over eighteen years she had grown it into a 4-vet AVMA and AAHA-accredited hospital with three procedure tables, IDEXX in-house diagnostics, digital dental radiography, and an after-hours emergency wing. Her husband Yannis had retired from Vanderbilt’s classical languages department in 2025 after twenty-eight years and they wanted to spend extended summers in Greece with extended family. Their daughter Sophia was finishing PA school at Vanderbilt and their son Demetrios was studying philosophy at Sewanee, neither was going to take the practice. The veterinary consolidation thesis had been live for more than a decade and PE-backed vet consolidators had been calling firms in her revenue band more aggressively over the prior twenty-four months. She came to us in early 2025 because she did not know who else to talk to about how to sell a veterinary practice at this size, with this 4-vet bench depth, this AAHA accreditation, and this emergency-wing footprint, in a market where the buyer pool reshuffled around vet consolidator acquisition theses that did not exist a decade ago. This page is what happened next, and what could happen for you. Athena is a composite, not a single real CGK seller, but the patterns and details are pulled from real veterinary engagements.
The night before Athena called us.
Most owners who decide to sell a veterinary practice have been carrying the question quietly for two or three years before they reach for the phone. Athena was no different. She was 51. For eighteen years she had been the senior clinician on every complex case the hospital saw, the medical director who hired and retained every doctor and tech who walked through the door, the after-hours decision-maker on cases the emergency wing escalated to her even after she built the wing in 2018, the AAHA-accreditation lead who had pulled the hospital through two re-accreditation cycles, and the operations principal who had migrated the practice through a Cornerstone (IDEXX) practice management upgrade and brought IDEXX in-house diagnostics, digital dental radiography, and a modern three-table surgical suite into the building. The practice did $4.2 million in annual revenue, $1.1 million in EBITDA at vet-typical 26 percent margins, and twenty-six W-2 employees including three associate doctors (Dr. Marcus Tate DVM, Dr. Lily Park DVM, and Dr. Caleb Brennan DVM) plus eight licensed vet techs, six vet assistants, four front-desk client-service staff, and four administrative and billing staff. The hospital served 6,800 active client households across Hendersonville, Gallatin, Goodlettsville, Mount Juliet, and the rest of the Sumner County corridor north of Nashville. The practice ran on Cornerstone for practice management and was a fully accredited AAHA hospital, one of roughly 12 to 15 percent of US veterinary hospitals to hold that accreditation through the American Animal Hospital Association. Client retention was running at 91 percent against an industry average closer to 75 percent, average visits per active client were running at 2.4 a year, the emergency wing was running open until 11pm Sunday through Thursday and 24 hours Friday and Saturday, and the dental and soft-tissue surgical book was booking five weeks forward.
Why owners decide to sell a veterinary practice
Athena’s eighteen years of on-call had compounded into the kind of accumulated burnout that quietly tells a fifty-one-year-old hospital owner that the pace she had set at thirty-three was not the pace she could keep at sixty. The emergency wing she had built in 2018 had absorbed most of the after-hours coverage, and the wing’s rotating doctor schedule had taken the worst nights off her plate, but she still got the call when a case needed an owner-vet decision, and the cumulative weight of eighteen years of those calls did not lift just because the wing was open. Her husband Yannis, a Vanderbilt University classical languages professor for twenty-eight years, had retired in 2025 and was spending most mornings reading Plutarch on the back porch and asking which week they might leave for Athens. Their daughter Sophia was finishing PA school at Vanderbilt and their son Demetrios was studying philosophy at Sewanee, neither was going to take the practice, and Athena had spent the prior winter realizing the next ten years of her life would be defined by what she chose to do with them rather than by what the hospital required of her. The bigger pressure was the consolidation thesis: the veterinary M&A market had been live for more than a decade and the calls from PE-backed vet consolidator platforms had been getting more frequent over the prior twenty-four months. Three peer practices in the Nashville north metro had been acquired by vet consolidator platforms in 2024 and 2025, with the buyer pool actively shopping for AAHA-accredited multi-doctor practices with strong emergency-wing or dental-and-surgical exposure. Athena had been approached fourteen times in the prior eighteen months: nine times by PE-backed vet consolidator platforms in the platform-and-bolt-on phase, three times by larger top-tier consolidators with national footprints, and twice by regional vet practice management groups building Tennessee-and-Kentucky footprints under family-office or operator-CEO capital rather than PE financing. Athena did not know what her hospital was actually worth at $4.2 million revenue, $1.1 million EBITDA, with the AAHA accreditation and the emergency wing. She did not know whether the buyers calling her were the right buyers for her three associate doctors, her eight techs, or her broader twenty-six-person bench. She did not know whether her AAHA accreditation, her emergency wing, her IDEXX diagnostics build, or her 91 percent client retention were value drivers or table stakes. She did not have a single peer in her life who had ever sold a veterinary practice at this size and bench depth.
That is the night she found CGK and submitted the form. We called her back at 8:39 the next morning, while Athena was at the Hendersonville hospital between the morning surgical board and the day’s first dental case.
The conversation we had on the first call.
The first call was 51 minutes. We did most of the listening.
Owners who think about how to sell a veterinary practice in their early-fifties, like Athena, usually carry the same handful of pressures into the first call. Athena talked about her three associate doctors and the way each one carried a different kind of book (Dr. Tate had been with the practice nine years and was the second-chair on most surgical cases, Dr. Park had joined six years ago and had built her own following on cat-and-exotic-friendly small-animal medicine, and Dr. Brennan had joined four years ago and was the medical lead on the emergency wing rotation). She talked about her eight licensed techs and the trauma-and-anesthesia depth they had built across surgical and emergency cases, where the four longest-tenured techs each ran their own anesthesia case-load alongside the doctors. She talked about her 91 percent client retention and the way the Hendersonville and Gallatin demographic had built itself into a structural moat around the practice over eighteen years, where multi-generational client families now brought third pets through the same doors their parents had brought first pets through in 2008. She talked about the AAHA accreditation and the way the standards (anesthesia monitoring, surgical protocols, pain management, dental radiography, controlled-substance handling, continuing-education hour minimums) shaped almost every operational decision she made. She talked about the emergency wing she had built in 2018, the staffing and revenue and margin economics of that wing, and the way it had made the hospital a destination for after-hours small-animal cases across the Sumner County corridor. She talked about the staffing question (associate veterinarians were getting harder to recruit at her revenue band, and licensed vet techs were a tighter labor market in 2025 than at any prior point in her career). We asked about the hospital the way you would ask if you were trying to understand it, not the way you would ask if you were trying to win the engagement. What we were listening for was not just the financials. We were listening for whether Athena was actually ready to sell, what she was working toward, and whether her expectations on price were grounded in what the veterinary market would actually support.
At the end of that call, we set up a working session: an in-person conversation where one of our Managing Directors would walk Athena through our valuation model and tell her honestly what her hospital was likely to command. We did not promise her a written report. Written valuations involve substantially more work, and we charge for those when a seller actually needs one for estate planning, a partner buyout, a divorce, or another documentary purpose. The walkthrough was free because Athena was clearly thinking seriously about how to sell a veterinary practice, the way someone thinks about it before they actually do it. Whether that ends up being in a year, five years, or longer, we make the same call.
The valuation session was the following Wednesday at 7:15 a.m. at the Hendersonville hospital, before the daily 8:00 a.m. clinical huddle and after Athena had finished her morning rounds with the techs.
Athena was not ready to sell a veterinary practice yet. She went home and waited eight months.
The valuation session showed Athena that her hospital was worth meaningfully more than she had been hoping in some areas and meaningfully less in others, which is how these conversations usually go. The AAHA accreditation, the emergency-wing footprint, the 91 percent client retention rate, the 2.4 visits per active client per year, the four-doctor bench depth, and the IDEXX diagnostics build were all premium-multiple drivers a sophisticated vet consolidator buyer would pay up for. Two issues, though, were dragging the number down. The first was associate-doctor depth across the workflows Athena personally carried. Dr. Tate, Dr. Park, and Dr. Brennan were each genuinely strong, but none had been formally credentialed across the soft-tissue surgical workflows Athena ran (mass removals on geriatric patients, cruciate ligament repair, foreign-body retrievals, complex dental extractions under anesthesia), and a sophisticated vet consolidator’s diligence team was going to underwrite the loss-of-Athena-clinical-production scenario aggressively. The second was the Cornerstone reporting hygiene. Athena had migrated to Cornerstone five years earlier and the data lineage was clean, but the hospital had not been pulling buyer-grade reports out of Cornerstone on average client transaction value, visits per active client per year, client-retention by tenure cohort, doctor-by-doctor production trends, emergency-wing margin separation from the general medicine book, dental and surgical service-line gross margins, or IDEXX diagnostic utilization rates. The vet consolidator buyer pool, especially the PE-backed platforms, paid premium multiples for documented operating metrics because those metrics translate directly into the financial models consolidators run on the hospitals they acquire.
We told Athena honestly: she could go to market now and accept the discount, or she could spend six to nine months credentialing the three associates into the soft-tissue surgical workflows and the complex dental work, formally documenting the practice operating metrics into a fifty-page diligence-grade report (average client transaction value, visits per active client by tenure cohort, client-retention by tenure cohort, doctor-by-doctor production by service line, emergency-wing margin separation from general medicine, dental-and-surgical service-line gross margins, IDEXX in-house diagnostic utilization rates, anesthesia-monitored surgical case logs aligned with AAHA standards), packaging the emergency wing as a clean diligence asset (after-hours staffing schedules, after-hours revenue and margin economics, after-hours doctor and tech rotation, the way the wing referred cases back into the general medicine book the next day), and tightening the AAHA-accreditation documentation so the standards-by-standards story could be inspected. We said the second path would likely command a meaningfully better number from a wider range of buyers, especially the patient-capital vet consolidators and the regional vet practice management groups that pay premiums for diligence-clean veterinary practices with documented AAHA accreditation, emergency-wing economics, and multi-doctor bench depth.
This is the part most brokers skip. Most brokers would have signed Athena that day, taken her to market, and made the commission whether or not the deal was the best one for her. We told her to wait, even though it meant we did not get paid for eight months and might never get paid at all if she changed her mind.
Athena went home and waited. She spent the next eight months credentialing the three associates into the soft-tissue surgical workflows and the complex dental work, packaging the operating metrics into a diligence-ready report with doctor-by-doctor production by service line, formalizing the Cornerstone data hygiene into a packageable diligence asset, and tightening the AAHA-accreditation documentation across all the standards areas. She read up on veterinary consolidation through resources from the American Veterinary Medical Association and the American Animal Hospital Association while she watched consolidator transaction news through the trade press. She called us back in late 2025 and said she was ready to sell a veterinary practice that was finally in the shape it needed to be in.
What we did when Athena came back.
What it takes to sell a veterinary practice properly
When an owner is ready to sell a veterinary practice with CGK, the speed of the on-ramp surprises them. We took Athena’s hospital to market in just over four weeks once she got us her updated financials, the fifty-page operating metrics report, the doctor-by-doctor production data by service line with five years of trailing trends, the Cornerstone client-retention and visits-per-client reports by tenure cohort, the emergency-wing after-hours staffing-and-revenue economics broken out from the general medicine book, the AAHA-accreditation documentation by standards area, the soft-tissue surgical and complex dental case logs aligned with AAHA standards, the IDEXX in-house diagnostic utilization reports, the lease terms and equipment depreciation schedule for the East Main Street facility, and the full P&L breakouts across general small-animal medicine, the emergency wing, and the dental-and-surgical book. The blind teaser went out to 41 buyers we had pre-qualified, a focused funnel because the vet consolidator buyer pool is concentrated and the highest-quality buyers actively shop the veterinary space. Buyers fell across five buckets we routinely use to think about how to sell a veterinary practice: PE-backed vet consolidator platforms in the platform-and-bolt-on phase (the most active band of consolidators on practices in the $3M to $10M revenue range), top-tier vet consolidators with national footprints and long-hold strategic theses (Pathway Vet Alliance, NVA / National Veterinary Associates, Mars Petcare’s BluePearl, AmeriVet, VetCor, VCA Animal Hospitals and adjacent platforms), regional vet practice management groups building state-and-regional platforms under family-office or operator-CEO capital with no PE backing, individual veterinarian-buyers using SBA-leveraged or personal capital, and a small set of strategic acquirers from adjacent veterinary verticals (dedicated emergency-and-specialty hospitals looking to integrate general medicine into their referral funnels, dental-and-surgical specialty platforms looking to internalize general-medicine capacity). Each bucket prices the same hospital differently, and most of them are members of trade groups like the International Business Brokers Association and the M&A Source, both of which CGK actively participates in.
Twenty-eight of those buyers signed NDAs and received the full Confidential Information Memorandum. Sixteen submitted Indications of Interest after data-room review. Nine advanced to Letters of Intent. We narrowed to six for management presentations. Three re-submitted refined LOIs after the management meetings. Two went into a final-final negotiation cycle.
Athena decided between two of the top LOIs. They were materially different. One was a higher headline price from a top-tier national vet consolidator that wanted to absorb Athena’s hospital into a national network of acquired practices with a conventional escrow structure, a five-year doctor-retention earnout that hinged on production-by-doctor hitting threshold targets (a structure Athena found uncomfortable because production targets are not fully within her control once she scales back to part-time clinical), an inventory-and-protocol-harmonization mandate that would have shifted the hospital off its existing IDEXX in-house diagnostic configuration and onto the platform’s national vendor stack, and a fund-cycle long-hold horizon. The other was a slightly lower headline price from a top-tier vet consolidator with a long-hold patient-capital thesis, no five-year fund-cycle pressure, a willingness to operate the hospital under its existing brand identity and existing IDEXX in-house diagnostic configuration, a thesis around preserving local-practice identity, and a willingness to integrate Dr. Tate, Dr. Park, and Dr. Brennan along with the broader bench without rerouting anything through a national playbook. We walked Athena through what each LOI would actually deliver under realistic and pessimistic scenarios, including what the cultural continuity would look like for her three associates, her eight techs, her six assistants, and her eight-person admin and front-desk bench under each owner. The patient-capital consolidator deal was the better one for Athena. The cash position day one was meaningfully stronger when normalized for the absence of the production-by-doctor earnout, the brand-and-protocol preservation was structurally cleaner than a forced harmonization, and the cultural fit with a long-hold platform that valued preserving local-practice identity over fund-cycle exits mattered to Athena deeply. She took it.
Through the whole process, the same CGK Managing Director who had taken Athena’s first call eight months earlier was the person walking her through every conversation.
What the deal actually looked like.
How the deal looks when you sell a veterinary practice with CGK
This is the part of how to sell a veterinary practice that gets the least attention in the trade press and the most attention from owners who have actually closed a deal: the structure of the consideration package matters more than the headline number. Athena’s deal closed roughly seven months after we restarted the engagement. The buyer was a top-tier PE-backed vet consolidator with a national footprint of more than 400 acquired veterinary hospitals, capitalized at roughly $1.8 billion in pre-acquisition revenue, expanding their Tennessee footprint with Athena’s Hendersonville hospital as the Nashville-area regional anchor. The platform was structured on a long-hold patient-capital thesis (10-plus years), positioned for an eventual second-bite or strategic exit to a larger consolidator or strategic acquirer in the 2030+ window, and operated acquired practices under their original brand names rather than absorbing them into a single national identity. They acquired the hospital as a stock purchase, with the practice operating as a discrete branch under the platform’s regional operating structure, retaining its existing brand identity, its existing AAHA accreditation through the next re-accreditation cycle, its IDEXX in-house diagnostic configuration, its Cornerstone practice management system, its emergency-wing footprint, and its 91 percent client retention pattern, and integrating into the platform’s broader Tennessee operations infrastructure over the first year on central admin, billing, inventory, and HR.
The headline price was approximately $7.7 million, roughly seven times trailing EBITDA, which is a premium veterinary multiple driven by the AAHA accreditation, the emergency-wing footprint, the 91 percent client retention, the four-doctor bench depth, and the dental-and-surgical service-mix exposure. About 75 percent of it came as cash at closing, funded by the platform’s PE sponsor capital plus the senior credit facility the platform draws on for acquisitions. About 8 percent was held back in escrow for 15 months to cover indemnification claims, a working-capital adjustment, and small carve-outs for any AAHA-accreditation continuity or controlled-substance documentation issues that could surface during the transition window. About 17 percent was a rollover equity stake into the platform’s holding company, structured at the holding-company level (not the practice-level operating entity), giving Athena upside exposure to the platform’s eventual long-hold exit. The rollover percentage runs higher in vet deals than in other industries (typically 15 to 20 percent versus 5 to 12 percent in many other verticals) because consolidators specifically want clinician retention and tie part of the sale value to a five-year practice-continuation arrangement that keeps the founding doctor visibly engaged with the staff and the client base through the transition. Wire hit on a Friday morning at 9:14 a.m. while Athena was at the Hendersonville hospital.
Athena stayed on as the principal Selling Doctor and clinical mentor for the platform’s combined Tennessee operations for fifteen months after closing, dropping to part-time clinical (two days a week, focused on the soft-tissue surgical work and the complex dental cases that Dr. Tate and Dr. Park were transitioning into) so she could personally introduce her three associates, her eight techs, her six assistants, and her eight-person admin and front-desk bench to the new ownership, walk through every major client family relationship in the recall system, lead the integration of two follow-on tuck-in acquisitions the platform completed in the twelve months post-close in adjacent Davidson and Wilson County markets, and shape the regional clinical mentorship strategy across the platform’s broader Tennessee footprint. After fifteen months, Athena stepped back to a quarterly clinical-advisor role that gave her room to start the extended summers in Greece with Yannis and the philanthropic work she had been thinking about with the Hendersonville Animal Welfare Society for two years.
What happened to Athena’s people and her patients.
The people-side of how to sell a veterinary practice usually weighs heavier on the principal than the financial-side, even when the financial-side is what triggers the call to a broker in the first place. Athena cared most about her three associates Dr. Tate, Dr. Park, and Dr. Brennan, the eight licensed techs who had on average eleven years of trauma-and-anesthesia case experience under her supervision, the six vet assistants who had grown into their roles through years of mentorship from the senior techs, the four front-desk client-service staff who knew most of the 6,800 client households by name and most of the patients by breed and condition, the four administrative and billing staff who had built the AAHA-grade controlled-substance and continuing-education documentation that anchored the accreditation, and the patient population itself: thousands of dogs and cats, plus the occasional rabbit and ferret and bird, that her techs and doctors could pick out by name from across the lobby. The patient-capital consolidator was a long-hold operator who would actually run the hospital under the existing brand identity rather than parachute in regional operations consultants from a fund-cycle integration playbook. That made the people part substantially cleaner than it would have been under the higher-headline-price national consolidator that wanted to harmonize the inventory stack against a national vendor list and absorb the practice into a single national identity.
The buyer kept all twenty-six W-2 employees, honored the existing pay structure across doctors, techs, assistants, front-desk client-service staff, and admin and billing, and committed to keeping Dr. Tate, Dr. Park, and Dr. Brennan in their roles with expanded scope including a pathway to junior-equity participation in the regional Tennessee operations. The credentialing work Athena had done during the wait period (elevating the three associates across the soft-tissue surgical workflows and the complex dental work) was preserved with formal stay-bonus packages tied to four-year performance windows. The eight techs were preserved with retention bonuses scaled to tenure and case-load. The Cornerstone system was retained as the practice-management system. The AAHA accreditation transferred cleanly under the new ownership through the re-accreditation cycle and the platform committed to maintaining accreditation across all of its acquired Tennessee hospitals. The IDEXX in-house diagnostic configuration was preserved and the platform committed to refreshing the equipment depreciation schedule in years three and four post-close. The emergency wing kept its existing hours (open until 11pm Sunday through Thursday, 24 hours Friday and Saturday), kept its rotating doctor and tech schedule, and kept its margin profile as a discrete reporting segment under the consolidator’s regional reporting framework rather than being absorbed into the general-medicine book.
Athena was at the Hendersonville hospital on a Friday morning in early fall 2026 when the wire confirmation came through. She had just finished a wellness exam on Sasha, a twelve-year-old Golden Retriever whose owner had been a client of the practice since 2009. Athena walked Sasha and her owner to the front, said goodbye, and then went into her office and closed the door and called Yannis. She said in Greek: “Έγινε” (It is done). Yannis answered, in Greek: “Σ’ αγαπώ. Πάμε για παγωτό” (I love you. Let’s go for ice cream). Athena drove home, picked Yannis up, and the two of them drove together to the family Lab Telemachus’s favorite ice cream stand off Indian Lake Boulevard with him in the back of the car. They sat on the picnic table and ate ice cream for an hour and watched the late summer light come through the maples at the edge of the parking lot, and then they drove home and made dinner together and talked about Greece in July.
What Athena told us afterward.
Why owners who sell a veterinary practice with CGK keep coming back
Most owners who sell a veterinary practice do not call the broker again in the first year. The ones who do call usually want to talk about the parts of the engagement that, in retrospect, mattered more than they realized at the time. About five months after closing, Athena called the Managing Director who had run her engagement. She said two things that the Managing Director still tells new sellers about.
The first was about the eight-month wait. She said: “Five of the buyers who had been calling me were ready to move in thirty days, and three different practice-transition consultants I talked to before you told me they could take me to market right then with the associate-credentialing question wide open and the Cornerstone operating metrics still sitting in PDF reports nobody had pulled. The reason I sold with you is that you told me the truth about how my AAHA accreditation and my emergency wing were actually being valued by vet consolidator buyers, the truth about what the loss-of-Athena-clinical-production scenario would look like in a sophisticated consolidator’s diligence, and the truth about what packaging the Cornerstone client-retention and doctor-by-doctor production metrics would buy me in LOI conversations seven months later. You told me what would happen to the price if I went out without fixing those things. I would have left more than nine hundred thousand dollars on the table.”
The second was about who she sold to. She said: “I almost signed with the higher-headline-price national consolidator because the number on the top line was bigger and the presentation was slick. The fact that you walked me through what each buyer would actually do with my associates, my techs, the IDEXX in-house diagnostic configuration I had spent a decade building, and the emergency wing I had built in 2018, what each buyer’s hold horizon would mean for the hospital three and five years out, and how a long-hold patient-capital consolidator with a brand-preservation thesis was structurally different from a fund-cycle consolidator that wanted to harmonize inventory protocols against a national playbook, is a conversation I never even thought to have until you raised it. I sold to a buyer who is going to keep this hospital the hospital that my clients walk into and recognize.”
This is what we mean when we say we sit with you in the decision, not just the transaction. Athena is one composite story, but the pattern is real. The owners we work with who decide to sell a veterinary practice usually find their way to us through versions of Athena’s situation, and the relationships start with a long listening session and a free walkthrough, not a pitch.
Ready to sell a veterinary practice? Where are you in Athena’s story?
If you are starting to think about how to sell a veterinary practice, we should talk. There is no commitment and no pressure. The first conversation is free. The valuation walkthrough that follows is free when you are seriously thinking about selling, whether that is in a year, five years, or longer. We only charge for formal written valuations, and only when you actually need one for estate planning, a partner buyout, or another documentary purpose. Submit the form and a senior CGK Managing Director will reach out within one business day.
If you are Athena at month 1: just exploring
You are not sure if you want to sell yet. The vet consolidator thesis keeps shifting, your associate-doctor bench is thinner than you would like across the workflows you personally drive, your operating metrics are strong but you have not packaged them for a buyer, eighteen years of on-call is starting to tell you something, your spouse has retired or is about to, your kids are not going to take the practice, you are curious about how a buyer would value your general-medicine versus emergency-wing versus dental-and-surgical service-mix exposure, or maybe a PE-backed vet consolidator or a top-tier national platform has been calling you. Most of our best engagements start here. Submit the form and we will schedule a working session. You walk away with a real number and a clear sense of what to do next, with no obligation to do anything.
If you are Athena at month 8: ready to go
You have done the work to clean up the hospital. The financials are tight. Your associate-credentialing is documented across the workflows you personally drive. Your operating metrics are packaged in a buyer-ready report (visits per active client, client-retention by tenure cohort, doctor-by-doctor production by service line, emergency-wing margin separation, dental-and-surgical service-line margins, IDEXX diagnostic utilization rates). Your AAHA-accreditation documentation is organized by standards area. Your Cornerstone data lineage is clean and packaged. Your facility lease and equipment schedules are mapped. Maybe a buyer is already in the conversation. You want to run a real process. Submit the form and we will be in touch within a business day to talk about timing, scope, and what your first 30 days as a CGK seller would look like.
If you are not sure where you are
Most owners are not sure. Submit the form and start with the conversation. We will figure out together where you are. We are equally happy to tell you to wait twelve months as we are to take you to market in three weeks.
Or call us directly at (888) 858-7191.
Start your own story
A senior CGK Managing Director will respond within one business day. Strictly confidential. For owners of veterinary practices doing $1.5M+ in annual revenue, including general small-animal hospitals, AAHA-accredited multi-doctor groups, hospitals with integrated emergency wings or urgent-care footprints, single-location and multi-location practices, and integrated practices with IDEXX in-house diagnostics and digital dental imaging. The first conversation and the valuation walkthrough that follows are free for any seller seriously thinking about selling, on any horizon.
Confidential. No obligation. Direct routing to a named CGK business broker, not a junior screener.
One of these eight people would lead your engagement.
When you decide to sell a veterinary practice with CGK, one named senior Managing Director stays with you from the first call through the wire transfer, just like Athena’s Managing Director stayed with her for eight months and then for the engagement that followed. Our Managing Directors come from Wall Street investment banks, hedge funds, Fortune 500 corporate finance, and operating-business leadership. Cornell MBA. U Chicago Booth MBA. CFA. CMT. Naval Academy. Goldman Sachs. Merrill Lynch. Deutsche Bank. AIG. T. Rowe Price.
What sellers say after they sell a veterinary practice (and other businesses) with CGK
I could not be happier with the experience I had selling my business with CGK. Greg did a detailed analysis of my business and helped me price and position it right for the market. After receiving multiple offers at full asking price, the rest of the process went very smoothly, and we closed in less than two months.
Hanna M.Selling my business was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and I’m incredibly grateful to have had Wes by my side throughout the process. He brought perspective, pushed when necessary, and always had my best interests in mind. His experience and strategic approach allowed me to maximize the sale price while minimizing long-term risk and obligations. If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t hesitate to choose him as my broker.
Adam NevilleDerik located multiple interested strategic buyers that produced more than one serious offer. The negotiations were tough but Greg and Derik’s experience helped us overcome. We got a great result for our employees and for the owners. We would recommend them without reservation.
Bob TaylorWe sold a business that was 47 years old and being run by second generation within a year of working with Wes. CGK has a system that attracts serious prospects to review opportunities. Wes was able to make the overwhelming feeling of selling easy and to a certain extent enjoyable. I never felt alone or in the dark throughout the entire process.
Jennifer WilliamsWe decided to sell our company in 2025. Talked to another M&A company in the Houston area. We felt very comfortable with Greg and Matthew at CGK. Could not have made a better choice. From day 1 till final closing and even after 30+ days, they have been here helping us with documents and support during the transition. Thanks can not be said enough.
Rickey ThomasInside the Blueprint, on Bloomberg TV and Fox Business News.
Athena’s husband Yannis, a recently retired Vanderbilt classics professor, was the one who first sent her a clip of CGK on Bloomberg. He had been watching the segment in their kitchen on a Saturday morning and recognized the firm name from a veterinary trade article about how to sell a veterinary practice he had clipped from Today’s Veterinary Business three months earlier and slid across the kitchen counter to her. He sent her the link with a note in Greek that read “Αθηνά, αυτή είναι η εταιρεία” (Athena, this is the firm). CGK Business Sales is featured on Inside the Blueprint, the syndicated business television series. Our episode aired on Bloomberg TV and Fox Business News. Watch the segment, then start a confidential conversation.
The CGK office Athena called was the CGK Nashville office. Yours might be one of these.
When you sell a veterinary practice with CGK, whichever office you reach, you get the entire firm. Athena worked with a CGK Managing Director based out of the firm’s Nashville office, but her deal benefited from a buyer pool we sourced firm-wide, including the patient-capital top-tier vet consolidator that ultimately won the engagement. Click any city to learn about our local presence and the named Managing Director leading that market.
Other Questions Athena and Other Veterinary Sellers Ask Us
Practical answers to what comes up before, during, and after the kind of engagement Athena went through, when you sell a veterinary practice with CGK.