Ted Sprinkle

He buys the practice. He leaves the soul.

Most people who buy hundreds of small businesses arrive with a playbook and a label maker. Ted Sprinkle arrives with questions. His company, Encore Vet Group, acquires successful community animal hospitals - and then, by design, mostly leaves them alone. "Our client is the veterinarian practice owner and the team onsite," he says, which is a strange thing to hear from the person signing the check.

That sentence is the whole thesis. Sprinkle has spent the back half of a long career convinced that a veterinary practice is not a set of assets. It is a set of people who happen to share a building, a logo, and a way of treating a frightened dog at 7pm. Standardize them and you get scale. Standardize them too hard and you lose the thing you paid for.

So when Encore buys a hospital, the owners are told something counterintuitive: keep owning it. Keep getting up in the morning caring about the place like the deed is still in your name. The resources arrive - training, management, buying power, a wider community - but the culture stays put. By late 2025 that approach had grown Encore to roughly 2,200 employees.

A career that rhymes

Here is the part that gives it away: Sprinkle has done this before. Twice. He founded Healthy Pet Corp. in the mid-1990s, one of the earliest veterinarian-led consolidators in the country, grew it to 24 practices and around $30 million in revenue, and sold it to VCA in 2007. Then he built Pet Partners. Then, in 2018, he built Encore. Three companies, three decades, one idea that refused to go out of style.

What makes the repetition interesting is that he keeps testing the same belief and keeps getting the same answer. After personally touring more than 500 veterinary hospitals, he landed on a line he repeats like a mantra: a practice is only as successful as its people. It is the kind of thing that sounds like a poster until you realize he reorganized an entire acquisition strategy around it.

From horses to checkups to checkbooks

Sprinkle did not start in boardrooms. A Cornell man - Class of '66, then the College of Veterinary Medicine, DVM in 1969 with four awards for excellence in small animal medicine and surgery - he spent two decades in practice. Early on he became a pioneer in bringing sophisticated medicine and surgery to companion horses, building one of the largest equine practices in the Eastern United States.

Then, in 1987, a left turn. He stepped away from day-to-day clinical work to become CEO and President of Nedlaw Stable, Inc., a thoroughbred operation he grew from startup to national prominence, leading a team that raised and invested more than $10 million to buy, develop and race horses. It is a useful detail for understanding him: the man who now tells veterinarians to bet on their people once literally bet on horses, and learned the difference between the animal and the team around it.

Why he made a vet school his partner

In 2019, Encore became the first corporate sponsor of Cornell's Center for Veterinary Business and Entrepreneurship - a three-year commitment to fund business curriculum for veterinary students. Sprinkle had long argued that vet school teaches you to heal an animal and leaves you helpless in front of a balance sheet. "With the new opportunity that came up with the CVBE, I felt it was something we just had to do," he said. He was, in effect, trying to give the next generation the class he never got.

It also fit the deeper motive behind Encore. The company was founded in 2018 not as a pure financial play but in response to a real ache in the profession: veterinarians burning out, financially strained, leaving the field they trained for. Sprinkle's read was that the fix had to be structural, not a pep talk. Give practices a way to stay independent in spirit while gaining the support that keeps their teams whole.

The handoff

Encore has always been a family affair - Sprinkle co-founded it with his son Lance and partner Bo Iler, and the father-and-son pair built the philosophy together. Lance puts the alternative bluntly: "One is to act like a cookie cutter and push processes and systems down to our hospitals and let them benefit from them. But we knew that the really awesome veterinary hospitals are the ones that retain their people." In late 2025, Ted handed Lance the keys, stepping from CEO to executive chairman as his son became president and CEO.

It is a tidy ending and also not an ending. Sprinkle is expected to stay close to the work he likes best - sitting across from a practice owner, listening, building the slow reciprocal trust that he insists is the actual product. "I believe that a good animal hospital partnership is defined by patience, a lot of listening and learning, and a reciprocal development of trust," he says. "While every hospital I've worked with may seem the same on the surface, experience has taught me they're all culturally different. That makes this very fun."

Forty years in, the work still strikes him as fun. That, more than any revenue number, is the tell.

The contrarian inside a boom

To appreciate what Sprinkle has been doing, picture the industry around him. Veterinary medicine spent the last two decades being discovered by capital. Consolidators multiplied, private equity arrived, and thousands of independent hospitals were folded into national brands. The standard model is efficiency: centralize purchasing, harmonize software, push best practices down from headquarters. It works on a spreadsheet. It also, often, hollows out the exact local character that made a hospital worth buying.

Sprinkle has been swimming against that current since before the current existed. When he started Healthy Pet in the mid-1990s, the idea of a veterinarian-led consolidator was close to novel. He has said he was responsible for much of the vision behind it - not just buying practices, but designing a way for them to keep their identity. Decades later, with Encore, the same instinct shows up in the language he uses. He does not call the hospitals "locations" or "units." He calls the owner and the onsite team his client. The acquisition is framed as a service rendered to the people he just bought out, not a conquest of them.

That reframing matters most at the human level. The reason Encore exists at all, by Sprinkle and his partners' own account, is that too many veterinarians were leaving the profession - worn down by burnout, financial strain and compensation that never matched the training. Their bet is that loyalty is manufactured by investment: grow your people and they stay, keep them engaged and happy and the pets and the clients feel it downstream. It is a flywheel that starts with the staff room rather than the income statement.

What the partnership actually feels like

Strip away the corporate vocabulary and Sprinkle's method is almost old-fashioned. He shows up. He listens. He resists the urge to fix a hospital before he understands it. "A good animal hospital partnership is defined by patience, a lot of listening and learning, and a reciprocal development of trust," he says - and the operative word is reciprocal. The owner has to trust Encore not to gut the place; Encore has to trust the owner to keep running it like an owner. Neither half works without the other.

It is a slow product to sell, which is probably why so few competitors sell it. Patience does not scale neatly. But Sprinkle has the luxury of a long track record and a longer view. He built three companies on the same conviction and watched it hold up each time. When the person buying your life's work tells you the goal is to keep your fingerprints on it, and he has the receipts to prove he means it, the conversation changes.

His commitment to the work outlasted his title. In handing Encore to Lance, Sprinkle did not retire so much as narrow his focus to the part he loves most - the room, the owner, the long build of trust. "We built Encore Vet Group with you in mind," he wrote to the veterinarians he hoped to reach. "Our commitment is to bring like-minded veterinary leaders together in a community that champions positive culture and high-quality medicine." It is a sentence aimed squarely at a tired practice owner wondering whether selling means surrendering. Sprinkle's whole career is the argument that it does not have to.