A Roberts Advisory series for veterinary practice owners
By Roberts Advisory | 4th August 2026
If you own a veterinary practice, you have spent years, or possibly decades, building something with your name on it. You have carried the late calls, the staffing headaches, the quiet worry about cash flow in a slow month, and the pride of a waiting room full of clients who trust you. And then one day, whether by plan or by a phone call you did not expect, the question arrives: would you ever think about selling?
For almost every owner, selling the practice is a thing they will do exactly once. That single fact sits at the heart of everything we want to share in this series, because it changes the odds in a way most owners only realise afterwards.
A game you’re playing for the first time
Think about what happens when an approach comes in. On one side of the table is you: an excellent clinician and a capable business owner, but someone selling a practice for the first and only time in your life. On the other side is a buyer who may complete a deal like yours every few weeks. They have a team of finance and legal people. They have seen every kind of practice, every set of accounts, every negotiating position. They do this for a living.
It is a little like sitting down to a game of chess having played a few friendly matches, opposite someone who plays at a professional level. You might be sharp, and you might do well. But the person across from you knows the openings, the middle game and the endgame in a way you simply cannot after one sitting. That is not a criticism of you. It is just the reality of experience against inexperience, and it is the single biggest imbalance in any business sale.
Your accountant and solicitor are excellent – and this is a different job
When we make this point, owners often say, reasonably, that they already have a trusted accountant and a good solicitor. So they do, and those relationships matter enormously.
But it is worth being clear about what those advisers do brilliantly, and what sits outside their day-to-day. Your accountant prepares your accounts and manages your tax. Your solicitor handles your conveyancing and your legal affairs. They are very good at those things. Negotiating and controlling the sale of a business against a professional buyer, though, is a different discipline again, and for most general practices it is not something their working week is built around. A sale is a specialist, one-off event, and it rewards those people who do it repeatedly.
There is also a quieter point about objectivity. An adviser who has known you for twenty years, who is a friend as much as a professional, can find it genuinely hard to deliver an uncomfortable message at a tense moment. Sometimes the most valuable thing in a deal is someone whose only job is to look after your side of the table, and who has no hesitation about telling you the hard thing when it needs to be said.
What it means to have someone in your corner
So what does a dedicated adviser actually change? Three things stand out, and none of them is about magic.
The first is simple experience. Someone who has been through many of these processes knows what tends to happen next, where the pressure points are, and what “normal” looks like, so that you are not reading every move as a crisis or a windfall.
The second is that a sale is a project, and it lands on top of a working life you still have to lead. While you are negotiating, you are also running a clinic, seeing patients and managing a team. Requests for information and documents can arrive from every direction and at every hour. Having one person hold all of that, and act as the single point of contact, keeps the process calm and keeps you doing the job you actually trained for.
The third is pace. Time is the quiet enemy of any deal. When a process drifts, energy fades, confidence erodes and good deals can fall apart for no reason other than fatigue. Someone whose job is to keep things moving, steadily and to a plan, protects the outcome as much as any clever negotiating point.
You don’t have to be selling to start thinking
Here is the part we most want owners to hear. None of this is a reason to rush towards the door. Most of the owners we talk to are not selling this year, and many are not selling for several years yet. But the owners who do best are almost always the ones who started thinking early, calmly and on their own terms, rather than the ones who were caught on the back foot by an unexpected approach.
Over the coming articles in this series, we will walk through what that looks like in practice: how to think about timing, how to get your numbers in order, how to make the business less dependent on you, and what a genuinely good outcome involves beyond the headline figure. All of it high level, none of it a hard sell.
Because the goal is not to talk you into anything. It is to make sure that if the day ever comes, you sit down to that one game of your life with someone in your corner who has played it many times before.
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
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