Here is a thing that is true about veterinary medicine in the 2020s: the people are extraordinary at treating animals, and a fair number of them would rather do almost anything than manage a small business. Encore Vet Group is, essentially, a company built on that sentence.
The pitch is deceptively plain. There is a large, fragmented industry - pet care, worth tens of billions of dollars - full of beloved independent hospitals owned by veterinarians who are exhausted by payroll, leases, HR, and the slow arithmetic of running a company while also, you know, performing surgery. A lot of firms have noticed this. The standard move is to buy the practice, staple it to a national brand, centralize the decisions, and extract the efficiency. That is the consolidation playbook, and it works, mechanically, the way most roll-ups work.
Encore's move is a little different, and the difference is the whole company. It buys the practice too. But then it does something that sounds almost counterproductive for a roll-up: it leaves the clinical calls and the front-desk culture with the local team, and sells itself as business support rather than a new boss. Co-founder Ted Sprinkle, a veterinarian himself, has said the plain version out loud - "it's very hard to manage your business while also practicing veterinary medicine" - and the company's stated goal is to keep "the power of the practice in the hands of the people who work there on a daily basis."
If you have spent any time around private-equity-backed healthcare, you should find that mildly suspicious, and you would be right to interrogate it. Decentralization is easy to say and expensive to mean. The interesting question about Encore is not whether the slogan is nice - it is whether a company backed by an institutional investor can actually keep decisions at the front desk when the growth math gets demanding. That tension is the real story, and it is unresolved, which is what makes it worth watching.
The founding cast helps explain the posture. Encore was started in 2018 in Saratoga Springs, New York, by veterinarian Ted Sprinkle; his son, Lance Sprinkle; and Bo Iler, who has been in the veterinary profession for more than four decades. It is, structurally, a family business with a grown-up balance sheet - private-equity firm North Castle Partners came in that same year to fund the growth.
Ted Sprinkle is not new at this. He has now run three veterinary consolidators across three decades: Healthy Pet in the mid-1990s, Pet Partners from roughly 2003 to 2016, and now Encore. That is an unusual resume. Most founders get one attempt at a big structural idea. Sprinkle is on his third, and the accumulated lesson seems to be that the medicine was never the hard part - the people were.
In January 2022 the company handed off the top job the way family businesses eventually do: Lance Sprinkle became president and CEO, and Ted moved into the executive chairman role. The name "Encore," in that light, reads less like marketing and more like a description - a return for another act, with the next generation on stage.
Since entering the space in earnest around 2019, Encore has assembled roughly 60 hospitals and a team reported in the range of 1,900 to 2,200 people. Those are not enormous numbers by the standards of the largest consolidators, but they are not the point Encore is trying to make. The point it is trying to make is about how the 60 feel from the inside.
