Selling a business usually comes with a small, satisfying ceremony of surrender. The keys change hands. The documents acquire signatures. Someone congratulates someone else. Lance Sprinkle helped build a company that asks the seller to remain emotionally attached to the thing just sold. A clean exit would spoil part of the plan.
In 2018, Sprinkle co-founded Encore Vet Group with his father, veterinarian Ted Sprinkle, and Bo Iler. The business brought local veterinary practices into a larger organization. His account of its purpose put the emphasis on the people already working in those practices. The acquisition was supposed to give them support while preserving the initiative that made their businesses worth buying.
“Our job has to be to make their lives a lot easier,” he said. It is a useful sentence to hold beside an acquisition agreement. Easier for whom? The buyer has its own demands. The local leader has a familiar building, a staff, and customers who remember how things used to work. Sprinkle's answer was to keep that leader involved.
There is a pleasing awkwardness to this arrangement. A purchaser pays for control and then needs to exercise restraint. A seller gives up legal ownership and is asked to retain an owner's concern. Both parties must learn a new habit. The relationship begins precisely where the usual business story likes to end: after the deal.
A family business, with a larger balance sheet
Sprinkle arrived at Encore with experience rather than a beginner's theory. By his January 2022 appointment as president and CEO, he had spent about two decades in corporate veterinary leadership. His work covered finance, operations, and development teams. Those functions gave him a view of both the transaction and the work required to make a transaction useful.
The founding partnership also carried a family connection. Ted was Lance's father and an experienced practice-group builder; the family's earlier venture, Pet Partners, became part of Mars Petcare. Encore was another attempt at the business, with a deliberate preference for local leadership. The family name connected the founders. It did not make the organization a small enterprise.
North Castle Partners records its Encore investment in 2018. Its description of the business includes shared resources, training, financial administration, staffing, and greater profitability. That is the practical machinery behind the local-autonomy promise. Someone still has to do the accounts. Someone still has to decide whether the enterprise can afford what it wants to do.
The combination makes Sprinkle interesting as an operator. He advocated discretion inside a structure built to expand. Shared administration can remove repetitive work, but a larger organization also creates new reporting demands. The challenge is deciding which decisions benefit from being gathered together and which depend on knowing the particular people in a particular place.
- 2018Encore is founded; North Castle invests.
- 2019Acquisitions begin. Cornell partnership follows.
- 2021VetSupport joins; Encore reports 60 hospitals.
- 2022Lance becomes president and CEO in January.
The classroom comes early
Encore entered the acquisition market in 2019. One of its early initiatives was the Encore Performance Academy, a training platform for professional development. In November 2021, when Sprinkle was president, the company acquired the consulting business VetSupport. Encore reported 60 hospitals across the United States at that point. The training investment accompanied a growing network.
Sprinkle described the addition as a way to deepen the help available to teams. VetSupport brought consulting, staff training, online education, and practice-management experience. In a company assembled through acquisitions, purchasing a teaching capability is a revealing choice. It gives the organization something to offer a local manager beyond instructions and a new reporting line.
Teaching is also a more demanding commitment than praise. It requires time away from ordinary work, people capable of explaining the material, and opportunities to use it afterward. A manager can welcome independence and still need help with a difficult conversation. Autonomy without preparation is a rather expensive way to leave someone guessing.
The business-training interest reached outside Encore. In December 2019, the company became the first corporate partner of Cornell's Center for Veterinary Business and Entrepreneurship. Its three-year sponsorship supported business curricula and postgraduate executive education. Ted championed the partnership. In the company Lance helped establish, business education was becoming part of the operating approach, rather than an occasional extra.
Relationships
Day-to-day judgment
Training
Business resources
What a promotion looks like from the other end
A smaller career inside the Encore network makes this approach easier to picture. Connor Menges began at Hollin Hall Animal Hospital as an assistant in 2013. After time away, he returned in 2019. Hollin Hall partnered with Encore in late 2021. When its previous owner retired, Menges began taking on management duties in July 2022.
He became associate practice manager the following month and practice manager in early 2023. He credited his colleagues and Encore's support, including mentorship from Rob Paisley. He used the company's Practice Manager Bootcamp and other training resources. His account identified a familiar difficulty: learning to lead people who had previously been his peers.
That is a less tidy problem than a box on an organization chart. Yesterday's colleague has today's authority. The people remain the same; the expectations change. It takes practice to make the new relationship comfortable enough to work. The story gives Sprinkle's preference for developing local leaders a concrete setting, without turning every local achievement into the founder's personal accomplishment.
Menges did the work, with help from his team and mentor. Keeping those names in the picture matters. A leadership philosophy earns its meaning through other people's decisions. The founder can establish the conditions. The person handling the next awkward conversation has to bring them to life.
A new title, and Maggie keeps hers
The leadership handoff at Encore arrived in January 2022. Lance moved from president to president and CEO. Ted became executive chairman, with plans to remain involved in connecting practice owners to the business. Lance's appointment combined continuity with a change in responsibility: the co-founder was now taking the chief executive's seat.
“The veterinary profession is so close to my heart,” Lance said at the time. His statement pledged to continue the approach developed under Ted. There was no grand promise to reinvent the company overnight. The ambition was to keep building it while honoring the organization the founders had already set in motion.
The announcement had room for a second executive. Maggie, Lance's golden retriever, retained her company-bestowed duties as Chief Counter Surfer and Office Snuggler. The accompanying photograph showed Sprinkle with the dog. Maggie's portfolio was admirably clear, and probably required fewer spreadsheets. It was a small joke in an announcement about a consequential change.
Titles need dates. Encore's team page now names co-founder Bo Iler as president and CEO. Sprinkle's January 2022 appointment belongs to the history of the business he helped create. The durable part of this portrait is the argument he made for local responsibility, rather than treating a past announcement as an indefinitely current job description.
The introduction travels through the network
By June 2022, Sprinkle was describing another consequence of Encore's approach: referrals from existing hospitals. He said the organization had spent relatively little effort promoting itself because its reputation was bringing prospective partners into the conversation. He also spoke about mentorship and workplace culture as reasons leaders were interested in joining.
His ambition extended across three audiences: sellers, employees, and the customers of the local businesses. Those interests overlap, but they do not automatically agree. A seller may want reassurance about a legacy. An employee wants a worthwhile place to work. A customer wants the familiar business to keep doing its job. A company has to make the arrangement credible to each.
A referral has a particular social cost. Advertising can be purchased again next month. A recommendation spends the recommender's standing with someone they know. Sprinkle's account suggests he understood the appeal of growth that comes through existing relationships. It also leaves the business with a continuing obligation: the next partnership must justify the introduction.
“It’s an easy trap to fall into.”
Lance Sprinkle, on managing by the profit-and-loss statement, June 2022
There is also a court in the story
The picture of Sprinkle widens beyond Encore's offices. A 2023 Ace Pickleball Club announcement welcomed him and C. Jerome Mopsik as franchise owners planning an Albany-area club. It described both as local entrepreneurs with veterinary-business experience and an enthusiasm for pickleball. The announcement put a recreational interest beside a business partnership.
A planned club is a different kind of shared space from a practice group. The connection should not be stretched into a theory of his entire life. Still, the detail is welcome. It gives the reader a person with a local interest, a partner, and a project involving a court, rather than an executive permanently trapped beside a mission statement.
His public LinkedIn profile places him in Saratoga Springs, New York, and lists services including team building, financial accounting, strategic planning, and leadership development. The range fits the work visible in his Encore years: helping people organize the business around the work they came to do. It is a practical collection of skills, with plenty of room for an unglamorous Tuesday.
The work after the signature
Encore's current language still pairs autonomy with accountability. Its team page describes support that helps local practices solve their own challenges, alongside a preference for sharing knowledge. That pairing expresses the management problem Sprinkle discussed: preserving initiative while making a group of businesses function together. Freedom and responsibility have to arrive in the same package.
His story is most useful at that scale. The founding date, the classroom investment, the chief executive appointment, and the local promotion each mark a different piece of the arrangement. The paperwork can transfer a business in an afternoon. Turning the transfer into a workable relationship takes longer. Sprinkle built his argument around the people who would still be there the next morning.