You’re proud of your practice and for good reason. You have an attractive facility, a well-trained staff, newer equipment, and a solid client base making it a comprehensive, client-oriented practice. But you may have concerns that your veterinary practice profitability isn’t where you’d like it to be, or you do not see the fruits of your hard work. Current trends show many practice owners are having these feelings.
Understanding Your Practice’s Financial Health
First, we must assess your practice’s financial health. To do this, we determine the bottom-line management profitability. This is calculated after adjustments and analysis of the practice financials (from the tax return or profit and loss statements). While the analysis takes time and is thorough, at its simplest level, management profitability is the bottom line profits after all necessary expenses have been paid for by the practice.
Typically, we consider a small animal practice to be financially healthy if the bottom line profitability (after appropriate adjustments, including fair rent and fair owner salary, among others) is 14-18% of gross. You may hear this referred to as true bottom line net, true profits, earnings, or EBITDA.
In terms of actual dollars, this means that a financially healthy $1,000,000 grossing practice would have bottom-line adjusted profits of $140,000 to $180,000 (14% to 18% profitability).
What is the Current Financial Trend for Practices?
While each practice is unique, there are similarities and trends we see across practices. Unfortunately, one of the trends we are seeing is that the average practice profitability is 10-12%, with many practices in the 7-10% range.
This is a double whammy for average profitability and below-practice owners:
- You have less cash in your pocket from smaller profits each year. Instead of having $140,000-$180,000 in profits in your pocket (with the $1,000,000 grossing scenario), a current trend average practice might have around $100,000 (10% profitability). Many practices have less; 7% profitability would be $70,000.
- Your practice value is lower because the value is primarily based on the income stream. Generally speaking, a 7% profitability practice has a value of about half that of the same practice at 14% profitability.
You suspect you might have a profitability problem with your veterinary practice, but what can you do about it? Consider the following tips and pick one or two that speak to you as a starting place.
Tips for Improving Your Veterinary Practice’s Profitability
#1 Look for Discounted Fees
Pull your practice’s income by treatment (or service or product) report for last year. You then divide the annual income from that service by the quantity of that service. Compare that number to your practice’s price sheet. Is how you are “pricing” that service what you are actually “receiving”? This quick comparison can help identify areas of discounting (for missed charges see Tip #2). If you are discounting certain services, ask these questions:
- What’s the motivation behind the discounting?
- Are these intentional discounts?
- Are they your discounts or an associate’s or staff member’s?
#2 Uncover Missed Charges
I recently talked with a doctor about her increased top-line gross and increased bottom-line efficiency. I asked her what she attributed to this notable change. Had she raised prices? Increased the client base? Her answer was interesting—she hadn’t spent any more money advertising or attracting new clients. Nor was she seeing more clients per day. Rather, she was working with what she had. She hadn’t increased prices in the manner I was expecting. Rather, she had increased fee collection through a system in place to catch missed charges. She wasn’t addressing discounting, but rather unintentional, missed fees.
Have each doctor in your practice review a summary of their charges by the client at the end of the day for any services performed or products provided but missed on the final invoice. The purpose of this isn’t to then send the client a supplemental bill, but to help the doctor see if there are routine or occasional missed charges. Is it a certain type of charge, or does it vary? Maybe it was a busy Saturday morning or hectic afternoon. That’s going to happen. We’re more interested if there are routine, ongoing missed charges, and if measures can be put into place to remedy the issue. The solution might be as simple as DVM awareness.
Concerned about added time for this? This is intended to be a quick review, not a laborious new burden. How many clients would you estimate you see in a full day? Maybe 8 to 12? On the high side, 18? If a staff member runs the needed summary report for charges by the client for a single day, the charging doctor ought to be able to review this and compare mental notes in about 1-2 minutes per client. Start small—try this audit twice a week for 10 minutes each time. See if this time investment pays off.
#3 Reduce Drugs and Supplies Expenses
Take your $1,000,000 grossing, small animal practice. We like to see the total drugs, supplies, lab expenses (in-house and out), office expenses, food, and similar items in approximately 25% of the gross range. This contributes to a nice, well-balanced, veterinary practice profitability. In this scenario, the collective Cost of Goods Sold expense dollar amount is $250,000 (an average expense of $20,800/month).
Compare this to a $1,000,000 grossing small animal practice with a higher COGS expense, say at 30%. This is $300,000/year, which is an average of $25,000/month.
Practice 2 is losing $50,000 in bottom-line profits each year due to “extra” COGS expenses. Granted, there may be good reasons why your practice runs higher than the ideal 25% range, but not all practices have the right reasons. Some practices could benefit from reducing or streamlining their COGS expenses.
Work with a modest and reasonable goal, broken down by month. Could you commit to reducing your COGS expense by $1,500 a month (in this scenario)? Instead of spending $25,000 a month on average, could you reduce that to $23,500 on average a month? Reducing your expenses by $1,500 a month increases the bottom line profits in this scenario by $18,000 a year, an increase in veterinary practice profitability of 1.8%. This may seem like an insignificant increase, but it’s not—first, it’s $18,000 extra in profits in your pocket each year. Second, that $18,000 bottom line increase adds approximately $50,000 – $80,000 to the practice value. Small expense reductions can make notable impacts.
#4 Inventory Efficiency
Are you familiar with minimum and maximum inventory levels for your inventory? For example, you will always have 4 bottles of amoxicillin on the shelves but not more than 7 bottles. Then ordering is triggered accordingly. Try tracking your 10-15 biggest ticket drug/supply items. How much do you actually use those particular items, and over what time period? Then re-evaluate your computer or spreadsheet minimum and maximum levels accordingly to correspond with actual usages.
You might find you routinely keep too much of something for too long a time. Depending on your ordering frequency, monitoring actual usages of the top items and adjusting to fit can help balance inventory expenses. While this tip takes some work, notable ordering inefficiencies are often identified. Many practices’ ordering habits are on auto-pilot. It’s easy to say that we always do this, so I’m going to continue with that without additional investigation or deeper inquiry. Check and see if auto-pilot is the right course.
With this, we recommend you conduct an actual physical inventory count (or computer reconciliation with hard count) twice a year. Many practitioners do not know their current inventory level, over or underestimate the true amounts, or rely on inaccurate computer counts.
While good COGS expense and supply monitoring take time, this is one of the top two biggest expense areas in the practice (along with wages). It is also often one of the least efficient expense areas. High COGS expense is often the culprit with struggling veterinary practice profitability. Taking some steps to reveal any COGS issues can go a long way in making progress on your bottom line.
Navigating Your Practice’s Profitability with Simmons
For continued success, your practice must be financially healthy. Not only does making these changes help your practice now, but when you decide to sell in the future, you are not held back by poor financials. Contact us if you need help getting started!
