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Thinking of selling one day? Start with your exit timeline

October 6, 2026

A Roberts Advisory series for veterinary practice owners

By Roberts Advisory for Vet Space Ireland

Most owners imagine the sale of their practice as a single event: a decision, a handshake, a cheque. In reality it is far more like a journey with several stages, and the whole process takes longer than people expect. That is not a reason to worry. It is a reason to start thinking early, because the single most useful planning habit we can offer is a simple one: work backwards from when you want to be out.

The date that matters most

Begin with a question that has nothing to do with buyers or valuations: by roughly when would you like to have fully stepped away from the practice? Not sold, but genuinely finished, walking out the door for the last time with your life’s work behind you.

That date is your anchor. Everything else works back from it. And when you do the arithmetic, most owners are surprised by how early the planning really needs to begin.

Working back through the stages

Let us walk the journey in reverse, from that final day back to today.

You will probably stay on for a while after completion. It is very common for a seller to remain involved in the practice for a period after the sale completes, helping with the handover, reassuring clients and staff, and keeping continuity in the clinical side. That transition period is often measured in a couple of years rather than months. So the day you “sell” is usually not the day you leave.

The deal process itself takes time. From the point you decide to go to market to the day the transaction actually completes, a well-run process still takes the best part of a year. There are stages that cannot be rushed: preparing the ground, engaging with interested parties, meeting them, agreeing terms, and working through the detailed checks and legal steps at the end. Each has its own rhythm.

And good preparation comes before any of that. Before a practice ever goes to market, there is work worth doing to present it at its best: getting the numbers in order, tidying up loose ends, and making the business less dependent on any one person. This is where a lot of the eventual value is either protected or lost, and it is not an overnight job.

Add those three stages together and the timeline stretches further than most people assume. From “I think I might sell in a few years” to “I have fully stepped away” can easily run to five or six years. That is not a warning. It is simply the shape of the process.

Why starting early pays off

None of this means you should rush. It means the opposite: the earlier you start thinking, the more of that timeline works in your favour rather than against you.

An owner who begins early can choose their moment, rather than being forced to sell under time pressure because a retirement date, a health issue or simple fatigue has crept up on them. Selling in a hurry rarely produces the best outcome; decisions made against the clock tend to be poorer decisions.

Starting early also means you can present the practice when it is at its strongest, ideally while it is still growing and there is a clear runway for the next owner. A business with momentum and a future is a far more attractive proposition than one that has quietly plateaued while its owner waited a year or two too long.

The sale is about you, not just the business

There is one more part of the timeline that owners often overlook, and it has nothing to do with numbers. Selling a practice is an emotional decision as much as a commercial one. You are detaching yourself from something that has shaped your working life, your identity and often your friendships. That deserves time and thought in its own right.

Owners who give themselves room to get comfortable with the idea, to picture what life looks like afterwards and to decide what they actually want from the next chapter, tend to approach the whole process with a steadier hand. Those who leave it to the last minute can find the emotional weight arrives all at once, at exactly the moment they need a clear head.

A simple exercise to try

You do not need an adviser, a valuation or a spreadsheet to take the first step. You just need a quiet half hour and an honest answer to one question: when would I like to be out?

Pencil in that date. Then count backwards, roughly, through a transition period, a deal process and a stretch of preparation. Wherever that lands is, approximately, when the thinking should begin. For a lot of owners, the answer to “when should I start?” turns out to be “sooner than I thought” – and quite possibly now.

That is the entire point of planning early: not to hurry you towards the exit, but to make sure that when you get there, you arrive on your own terms.

Roberts Advisory is Vet Space Ireland’s Horizons Partner and works with veterinary practice owners across Ireland on exit planning, business readiness and the sale of their clinic. We are always happy to talk to owners at any stage, whether a sale is years away or already on the table. Reach out to us at hello@robertsadvisory.ie.

Article written by Roberts Advisory for Vet Space Ireland. To contribute to the Vet Space Journal, appear on the podcast, or get involved with VSI, contact inspire@vetspaceireland.ie or visit vetspaceireland.ie.

Everyone Has a Story

September 24, 2026

WORKPLACE WELLBEING | SUICIDE PREVENTION MONTH

Michelle Maguire, Founder, Vet Space Ireland

In 2023, at 39 years old, I was diagnosed as autistic and with combined type ADHD. For almost a decade before that, I had been treated for anxiety and depression I didn’t have. I used to joke that I always believed the men in the white coats would come for me one day. Turns out I wasn’t far off, they just took their time and brought a diagnostic assessment instead of a straitjacket.

I had always felt different, but I couldn’t explain how or why. When I came off hormonal birth control in my early 30s, my symptoms got so much worse that I genuinely believed I had early onset dementia. I sat in front of doctor after doctor describing what felt like my brain falling apart, and every time I was told the same thing: it’s stress.

It wasn’t stress. Or it wasn’t only stress. I burned out three times in my career, badly enough that each one took a long time to recover from. The first time, in 2019, , I went through what I believed at the time was a nervous breakdown, what I now know as autistic burnout.

A vet I met during a client visit looked at me and asked if I was okay. I couldn’t lie. I told her the truth, that I’d had a nervous breakdown, and that I was doing okay now. She told me the same thing had happened to her two years before, and she gave me the resources that had helped her get through it.

That conversation is the reason Vet Space Ireland exists. In that moment I realised that everyone has a story, and that most of us are carrying it alone because nobody talks about it. I built VSI to be the place where those conversations could happen out loud instead of in a car park after a client visit.

I didn’t know I was neurodivergent when I founded VSI. That understanding came four years later. But looking back, it explains a great deal about why I burned out the way I did, why I masked so hard for so long, and why the label of “anxiety and depression” never quite fit what I was actually experiencing.

September is Suicide Prevention Month, and it felt like the right time to put real numbers behind the conversations VSI has been having since 2019, and to bring in a layer that doesn’t get talked about nearly enough in our profession: neurodivergence.

The Irish picture

The only Irish-specific data we have comes from a 2021 survey of 747 vets and vet nurses, commissioned by the Veterinary Council of Ireland and carried out by the National Suicide Research Foundation. The findings were stark. Over 42% of respondents scored in the abnormal range for anxiety, with a further 23% borderline. Nearly 16% were in the abnormal range for depression.

Just over 12% of respondents reported having self-harmed, rising to a quarter of veterinary nurses. Just over 5% reported having attempted suicide at some point, again far higher among veterinary nurses (just over 10%) than vets in managerial roles (under 1%).

Interestingly, that 5% figure was actually lower than the 11% attempted suicide rate found in a nationally representative study of the general Irish population using the same question. That doesn’t mean our profession is doing fine. It means the picture is more complicated than “vets are worse off,” and it underlines just how little Irish-specific data we actually have to work with. There is no Irish data at all on suicide deaths within the veterinary profession, only these self-reported survey figures.

How we compare: UK and US

Internationally, the picture is more established, and considerably more concerning, for both vets and veterinary nurses. In the UK, veterinary surgeons have long been found to die by suicide at three to four times the rate of the general population, a finding repeated across multiple studies over more than a decade. There is no equivalent mortality data for veterinary nurses in the UK, but the picture from survey data is just as troubling. A recent survey of the veterinary nursing profession found that 70% of respondents had personally experienced a mental health concern, only half had received professional support for it, and 96% agreed that bullying and incivility was a serious problem in the profession. The RCVS’s 2024 Survey of the Professions also found that 29% of veterinary nurses reported a mental or physical health condition with a substantial, long-term effect on daily life, compared to 17% of vets.

In the US, a Centers for Disease Control study tracking veterinarian deaths from 1979 to 2015 found male vets were 2.1 times and female vets 3.5 times more likely to die by suicide than the general population. That female figure is particularly striking, because in the general population men are usually at greater suicide risk than women. Something about veterinary work appears to erase that gap entirely.

Neurodivergence: the layer we don’t talk about

This is where my own story connects most directly to the data.

A 2024 survey by the British Veterinary Association found that 13% of vets identify as neurodivergent, rising to a quarter among younger vets. Of those, nearly a quarter said their workplace was not supportive of neurodivergent staff. Separate UK research on autistic veterinary surgeons found their mental health and working conditions scored significantly below both the general veterinary population and the wider UK workforce.

The wider evidence on autism and suicide is sobering. One UK study of coroners’ records found evidence of autism in almost 11% of people who died by suicide, compared to an expected prevalence of just over 1% in the general population. Up to 15% of people hospitalised after a suicide attempt in the UK have an autism diagnosis, despite autistic people making up only around 1 to 2% of the population.

Ireland does have one genuinely Irish data point here, and it matters. A study of 136 Irish adults with ADHD, led by researchers at UCD alongside the National Clinical Programme for ADHD in Adults and ADHD Ireland, found that 20% had attempted suicide, and a further 61% had experienced suicidal ideation.

What we don’t have is any Irish research at all on neurodivergence specifically within the veterinary profession. Given that an estimated 1 in 7 people are neurodivergent, and that veterinary medicine tends to attract people who thrive on deep focus, technical precision and strong attachment to animals, it seems very likely our profession has a meaningfully higher proportion of neurodivergent professionals than the general population. We simply don’t have the data to know for certain, or to know what support is actually needed.

For me, undiagnosed neurodivergence looked like a decade of being told I had anxiety and depression, three burnouts, and a genuine fear that something was seriously wrong with my brain, when what was actually wrong was that nobody had asked the right question. I don’t think my story is unusual. I think it’s just rarely told.

The gaps we need to close

Two things stand out clearly from researching this piece. Ireland has no vet-specific suicide mortality data, likely because our veterinary population is too small for the kind of statistical breakdown the UK and US have managed with far larger workforces. And Ireland has no neurodivergence research within veterinary medicine at all.

Both of these are fixable. They need funding, they need researchers willing to take them on, and they need our professional bodies to prioritise asking the questions. Until then, we are relying on international data and personal stories to fill in what should be known facts about our own profession.

Vet Space Ireland has contacted the Central Statistics Office to ask whether occupation-specific suicide mortality data exists for the veterinary profession here, and if not, what it would take to establish it. We will share what we learn.

Why I’m sharing this

It is genuinely terrifying for me to write about my own situation this openly. Putting my diagnosis, my burnouts and my breakdown into a journal article that colleagues, clients and people I’ve worked with for years will read is not something that comes easily to me.

I’m doing it anyway because I know what it meant to hear a vet tell me she’d been through the same thing. A diagnosis was never the finish line for me, it was the first step. The work continues every single day. I take medication every day, not to feel better, but simply to function, to exist in this world in a way that lets me get through an ordinary day. That’s not a failure. It’s what managing this looks like, and I think people need to hear that too, not just the moment of diagnosis.

If sharing this means even one person reading it feels less alone tonight, it was worth the fear of writing it.

Supports available

If anything in this piece resonates with you, please reach out. You are not alone, and there is no shame in needing support.

Vetlife/IVBF Helpline: 1800 145 145, free and confidential, 24 hours a day
Vet Support Ireland: confidential peer listening and support for all veterinary professionals
RCVS Mind Matters Initiative: mental health resources and training for the veterinary professions
ADHD Ireland: support and information for adults with ADHD
Samaritans: 116 123, free, 24 hours a day, for anyone in distress

Everyone has a story. Mine happened to start with a vet client asking if I was okay, and me finally telling the truth. I hope this piece is that same question, asked to you.

If you are experiencing thoughts of suicide or self-harm, please contact Vetlife on 1800 145 145 or the Samaritans on 116 123. Both are free, confidential, and available 24 hours a day.

Shepherds of One Health: Building a Sustainable Veterinary Profession in Ireland

September 16, 2026

PODCAST FOLLOW-UP

VSI Journal | Guest: Níamh Ní Bhroin, founder and chairperson, Veterinary Sustainability Network Ireland (VSNI) | Hosted by Michelle Maguire and Evelyn Coleman | Recorded at Lemon 7 Studio, Cork

Sustainability and veterinary medicine do not sound, on first hearing, like natural partners. But for Níamh Ní Bhroin, a small animal vet and founder and chairperson of the Veterinary Sustainability Network Ireland (VSNI), the two are inseparable. Joining hosts Michelle Maguire and Evelyn Coleman in the Lemon 7 studio, Níamh set out why she believes vets are uniquely placed to lead on climate and environmental action, how VSNI came to exist, and what practices can start doing this week.

From burnout to the bigger picture

Níamh’s veterinary path began in UCD in 2013, graduating in 2018 and building a career in small animal practice, including several years with Village Vets in Dublin, where she completed her certificate in small animal medicine. A move to Cashel, Co. Tipperary, followed, along with further work in Cork and completion of her advanced practitioner status. A nine-month locum position at an advanced-practitioner-led small animal hospital in the UK, complete with full ICU and CT capability, looked on paper like a dream role.

It was not quite that simple. Despite loving the clinical workups, Níamh described coming home from that role every day feeling completely drained, and starting to feel disillusioned with a veterinary career she had wanted since childhood. She traced part of that disconnect back to losing touch with the love of nature and wildlife that had first drawn her into the profession, a gap she began closing by volunteering with wildlife charities in the UK, including Wildlife Aid and a rescue centre in Chichester.

That volunteering led her to Vet Sustain, the UK-based organisation founded by former vet and Sustainable-ish podcast host Jen Gale, where Níamh completed an eight-hour carbon literacy course and, later, Vet Sustain’s eighteen-month postgraduate certificate, A Sustainable Approach to Clinical Veterinary Practice. She is due to begin a further postgraduate qualification in veterinary sustainability this September.

“We all took an oath, and that oath was first do no harm. That doesn’t stop at the patient, it expands to the environment as well.”
– Evelyn Coleman, co-host Vet Space Ireland

One Health: why this is a veterinary issue

Central to Níamh’s argument is One Health, the principle that human, animal and environmental health are inseparable. She pointed out that vets sit at the intersection of all three, yet the profession has become increasingly fragmented through specialisation, often losing sight of the bigger picture in the process. Climate change, she noted, is already linked in the research to more human deaths, increased strain on hospital systems, worse air pollution and reduced quality of life, making it a health issue as much as an environmental one.

The conversation also drew a direct, practice-level example: overuse of antiparasitic treatment has been linked to declining dung beetle populations, because residues passed in treated animals’ faeces interfere with the beetles’ role in breaking down dung and supporting healthy soil. It is a small but concrete illustration of how a routine clinical decision can ripple out through the wider ecosystem.

Filling a gap: founding VSNI

When Níamh returned to Ireland partway through her Vet Sustain training, she went looking for an equivalent Irish network to plug into. She contacted UCD, where a veterinary sustainability committee was doing valuable work with students, as well as Veterinary Ireland and the Veterinary Council of Ireland. All confirmed the same thing: nothing equivalent existed yet for vets working in Irish practice.

VSNI grew directly out of that gap, launched with a small founding group of fellow volunteers from across the profession, including colleagues with backgrounds in practice networks, equine practice and animal welfare. The organisation held its first meeting around eighteen months ago and was formally incorporated as a company limited by guarantee (CLG) just over a year ago. Every hour Níamh and her fellow founders put in remains entirely voluntary.

What Irish vets actually think

VSNI’s own research backs up the need for the network. A survey of 105 members of the Irish veterinary community, carried out shortly before incorporation, found that over two thirds of respondents rated climate change and sustainability as highly important to them personally, while less than a third felt their own practice’s actions matched that level of concern, a mismatch Níamh linked to the burnout and high staff turnover already affecting the profession.

Time, not lack of knowledge, came out as the biggest barrier to action. When asked what would help most, respondents put easy-to-follow checklists and information on available grants well ahead of webinars and educational resources, a clear steer that shaped what VSNI built next.

Practical starting points

In response, VSNI has begun publishing short, practical ‘easy win’ checklists: the first on reducing greenhouse gas emissions in practice, the second, launched the week of recording, on reducing waste. Níamh was clear that these are deliberately modest starting points rather than a call to install solar panels or switch every vehicle to electric overnight. The aim is a mindset shift that practices can build on.

She pointed to a concrete example of that ripple effect: a practice owner who had been putting off installing solar panels for years told her that watching VSNI launch was the push he needed to finally go ahead. As Níamh put it, one action rarely changes the world on its own, but it can be the nudge that gets someone else moving.

Easy wins for your practice

Start with VSNI’s published checklists on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and reducing waste, both free to access on the VSNI website.
Treat sustainability as a behaviour change, not a single big investment: small, consistent tweaks build the habit that bigger changes can later sit on top of.
Consider the environmental cost of routine prescribing decisions, such as antiparasitic overuse, alongside the clinical case for them.
Look into green pension options and other everyday financial choices, which Níamh highlighted as a low-effort action with an outsized impact.
Share what you’re doing with colleagues and clients. VSNI’s tipping point theory: change tends to become mainstream once about 25% of a population adopts it.

Get involved with VSNI

Follow and share VSNI’s resources on Instagram and LinkedIn (@vsnireland) to help them reach more of the profession.
Sign up to the VSNI newsletter and consider a donation to support this entirely volunteer-run organisation; a membership platform is planned for the future.
Practices and suppliers interested in values-aligned sponsorship can get in touch directly with VSNI.
Vets who want to lead on sustainability in their own practice, from raising awareness to putting up posters, are encouraged to reach out via the VSNI website.

Hiring, or looking for locum cover?

The Vet Space Ireland Recruitment Portal brings together permanent job listings and a dedicated locum hub in one place, built for the Irish veterinary community. Practices can advertise roles or find last-minute and planned locum cover; vets, nurses and support staff can browse openings across the country and apply directly.

Browse jobs and locum cover at jobs.vetspaceireland.ie.

Sources and links

This article is a companion piece to the VSI podcast conversation with Níamh Ní Bhroin, founder and chairperson of the Veterinary Sustainability Network Ireland, recorded at Lemon 7 Studio, Cork, and hosted by Michelle Maguire and Evelyn Coleman.

VSI Podcast: shows.acast.com/the-vet-space-ireland-podcast
Veterinary Sustainability Network Ireland: vsnireland.org (Instagram and LinkedIn: @vsnireland)

© Vet Space Ireland. For the full conversation, including further detail on VSNI’s research and resources, listen to the podcast episode in full.

Where Irish veterinary is heading, and what it means if you own a practice

September 10, 2026

BUSINESS | ROBERTS ADVISORY

A Roberts Advisory series for veterinary practice owners

If you own a practice, you have probably noticed how the landscape has changed over the last few years. Maybe a clinic near you has been taken over by a group, or a colleague has sold up, or you have had the odd letter or call from a buyer you did not recognise. It is not always easy to tell whether that adds up to much, or whether it is just a few stories that happen to stick in the mind.

We spend a fair bit of our time talking to owners about exactly this, so we thought it might be useful to share how we see it. Not as a warning, and not as a nudge to sell, but just to give a clearer sense of the backdrop you are working in.

There are still plenty of independent practices

One thing worth saying early, because it often gets lost: the majority of veterinary premises in Ireland are still owned by individual vets. The groups are good at marketing and have a visible presence, so it can feel as though they are everywhere. Day to day, independent ownership is still the norm.

We mention this because owners sometimes assume they have missed the boat, or that the decision has somehow been taken out of their hands. For most people, that is just not the case. There is still time, and there is still choice.

A lot of owners are around the same stage

The other thing shaping the sector is age. A good number of practice owners are getting to the point where retirement, or at least stepping back, starts to come into view. That is normal, and nothing to worry about in itself. It does mean, though, that over the next several years a fair few owners are likely to be weighing up similar questions around the same time.

There is no prize for going first. But there is something to be said for thinking it through in your own time, rather than finding yourself part of a queue.

What we can learn from elsewhere

It is worth looking at markets where this has run further than it has here. In some of them, a large share of practices moved into group ownership fairly quickly. But that was not the end of the story. Alongside it, plenty of vets went on to set up new independent practices, because that was the way they wanted to work.

Ireland seems to be finding its own version of this, and probably a little earlier. Consolidation and new independent openings are happening at the same time. There is still appetite for starting and building independent practices here, and the market is far from full. So there is not one fixed path that everyone ends up on.

What this might mean for you

We would not want to tell you what to make of all this, because that is your call. But a few things seem worth keeping in mind.

The first is that none of this is happening overnight. You have time to think, to prepare, and to work out what you actually want, rather than reacting to whoever happens to get in touch.

The second is that a call or a letter from a buyer is not a deadline. It might tell you there is interest in practices like yours, which is handy to know, but it does not mean you have to do anything, or do it on their timetable.

The third is that the most useful question to start with is usually the simplest one: what do you actually want? Some owners want to wind down and take some risk off the table. Others care most about their team and the way the place is run, and want that looked after. Some are not thinking of going anywhere and just want to understand where they stand. All of those are perfectly reasonable, and they point in quite different directions.

A calm place to start

The point of this series is just to help you think about this sort of thing before you need to, and without any pressure. Over the coming articles we will get into the practical side: how to think about timing, getting your numbers in order, making the practice less reliant on you, and what actually makes for a good outcome beyond the headline figure.

The sector is changing, but it is a lot easier to take in your stride when you have had the chance to think about it in advance. That is really all we are hoping to help with.

Article written by Roberts Advisory for Vet Space Ireland. To contribute to the Vet Space Journal, appear on the podcast, or get involved with VSI, contact inspire@vetspaceireland.ie or visit vetspaceireland.ie.

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