“The Unwind”: A Thought Experiment
Author’s Note
I wrote this story because I care deeply about our industry. I’ve spent years working with the people who hold it together: the veterinarians, the technicians, the managers, the reps, the manufacturers, and the distributors. I’ve seen firsthand the incredible innovation happening in veterinary medicine and it’s been a humbling experience. I’ve also seen the growing strain on teams, systems, and clinic culture as consolidation reshapes not just how veterinary care is delivered, but also who controls the terms of how it is delivered.
The story that follows is entirely fictional.
There is no New England Veterinary Group (NEVG), no Yale Animal Care, and no collapse like this has occurred in the veterinary sector. And to be clear, I’m not saying it will.
This story doesn’t predict an outcome. It explores a theoretical one based on the financial mechanics of roll-up strategies, labor market realities, and tightening macroeconomic conditions. This isn’t a hit piece on private equity or a prediction. It’s a thought experiment. Let’s ask: what if we stretched the current trajectory too far? What might it look like if the conditions shifted suddenly, or the pressure points gave way?
I find stories like this to be useful. Not to scare, but to surface conversations we aren’t having enough of. My goal isn’t to provoke panic or to criticize the private equity model or any other consolidation or rollup model. This story is to encourage reflection, accountability, and maybe a little more humility in how we think about growth, risk, and the future of veterinary medicine
The Email
Megan Lane wasn’t the type to panic. She was steady and stoic. Megan was an RVT and a CVPM, and the kind of practice manager every overworked veterinarian relied on. The northeast regional ops director called her when they needed something handled discreetly and efficiently. She’d been with Yale Animal Care in New Haven, Connecticut for seventeen years — long enough to see the place evolve from a five-person clinic with paper records to a modern general practice with digital imaging, cloud-based PIMS, and biweekly performance dashboards.
By the time New England Veterinary Group (NEVG) acquired the clinic in 2024, Megan had already seen her fair share of transitions. The change in ownership came with the usual promises: centralized HR, bulk purchasing power, better benefits, higher staff satisfaction, and capital investment for the clinic infrastructure. And at first, it delivered. Salaries ticked upward. Brand new equipment was installed. The phones were rerouted to a shared call center to free up front desk time. Megan adapted, like she always did. For a few years, things moved forward and NEVG continued to grow.
But on Monday, April 8th, 2028, the email in Megan’s inbox brought on a sense of panic that she hadn’t felt in years.
It was from NEVG’s legal department.
The subject line read: “Immediate Operations Suspension: Urgent.”
The body of the email read:
Dear Clinical Management,
Effective immediately, all clinical operations at NEVG facilities are to be suspended for a minimum of 72 hours due to a critical corporate liquidity event. All appointments scheduled for today and the remainder of the week must be canceled.
Staff currently on site should remain present for debriefing and controlled shutdown procedures, under the direction of the practice manager or lead DVM. No further patient intake is permitted as of this notice. Controlled substances must be inventoried, secured, and documented per DEA policy.
Payroll obligations and benefits continuity are under review and will be addressed in a separate communication from HR within 48 hours. Additional instructions regarding the status of your clinic, patient communications, and staff support resources will follow.
We understand this situation is unexpected and deeply disruptive. We are working urgently to resolve it.
Sincerely,
NEVG Management
Megan blinked at the screen. Then she checked the sender address again. The domain was legitimate and not a phishing or scam attempt. She picked up her phone and dialed her regional manager. The call went straight to voicemail. Slack had been quiet all weekend, which wasn’t unusual. But when she refreshed it, the entire workspace had disappeared.
She turned in her chair and looked through the blinds at her team. The Monday shift was in full swing as she saw two techs prepping for dentals, the lead vet reviewing films, three patients already in rooms. Phones were ringing. It looked like every other Monday. Until it didn’t.
Megan stood up, walked into the treatment area, and said, as calmly as she could: “We need to stop everything. Right now.”
Hindsight is 20/20
The unraveling of NEVG hadn’t come out of nowhere. Like most collapses, the warnings had been easy to ignore until they weren’t. After all, in 2008, no one thought a few shuttered mortgage lenders were the opening act of a full-blown housing crisis. But they were.
The first sign that something was wrong came three weeks earlier when their Covetrus purchase order didn’t arrive. Megan logged into the portal and saw a status she hadn’t seen before: “hold pending credit approval.” She reached out to their rep, who sounded uncomfortable. “It’s probably just a back-end thing,” he said. “I’ll escalate it.” The order arrived three days late, half complete.
Then came the payroll delay. Deposits were usually made on Thursdays, but nothing hit their accounts until late Friday night. The HR team said it was a “processing delay related to vendor migration.” That same week, their CE request forms were taken offline “for revision.” New hiring was paused and the clinic’s regional performance call was canceled. Megan noticed something she couldn’t quite place; something subtle.
No marketing emails.
No vendor promotions.
No new announcements.
NEVG had always been data-heavy. Every week brought a dashboard: cost per procedure, revenue per FTE DVM, labor utilization by shift. Megan didn’t love the spreadsheets, but she respected them. Over time, though, she noticed the goals creeping higher while support and communication thinned. Turnover was rising, but hiring was slow. The second CSR position had quietly been eliminated while overnight RVT who left in February still hadn’t been replaced.
When the hospital’s new practice management software went live in January, it came with centralized inventory controls. Routine items began to require pre-authorization and when the issue was brought up at a monthly all-hands meeting, management conveniently fell back on “Supply chain optimization,”. Megan saw through their facade and knew that this was a new era of micromanagement. Then in March, they were told to delay routine reorders unless inventory was at “less than 10% remaining.”
The Machine That Wouldn’t Stop
New England Veterinary Group(NEVG) had been one of the fastest-growing veterinary consolidators in the country. Launched in 2021 by a mid-sized private equity firm out of Boston, its model was familiar: acquire profitable, New England based independent hospitals at modest to high EBITDA multiples, install centralized infrastructure, boost margins through operational synergies and pricing power, and eventually sell the bundled platform to a larger firm or take it public.
At its peak, NEVG owned more than 55 hospitals across six states. Most were general practices but some were speciality/surgical, and a significant number of them were previously owned by veterinarians nearing retirement. The acquisition pitches were polished. “Keep your name. Keep your team. Focus on medicine while we focus on you.”
The early years were easy — valuations were reasonable, capital was cheap, and the market was hungry.
By 2025, the ground began to shift. Inflation lingered beyond what was expected, and the Federal Reserve chose not to lower rates but instead raised the federal funds rate by 50 basis points over a 6 month period. NEVG’s financing was structured almost entirely around variable rate debt, and what had once been manageable leverage became suffocating. Annual debt servicing costs jumped by more than 60% over eighteen months. Cash flow tightened. Every new hire, supply order, and expense no matter big or small became a line item for finance to review.
NEVG tried to maintain appearances. Internal management spoke of “disciplined growth” and “strategic efficiency.” But behind the scenes, the staff could feel the screws tightening. Requisitions were delayed while raises and bonuses were postponed even though performance targets had been exceeded. Techs left in droves as they became tired of being told to “do more with less.”
By late 2027, NEVG was floating payments to multiple distributors. More than one vendor changed their terms from net-60 to “payable on order.” Some suppliers began holding back shipments. Clinic staff were told to ration routine items, and when one clinic ran out of heartworm tests in February, the response from management was: “See if another location site has extras. If they do, send someone to pick them up.”
By March 2028, NEVG’s debt covenants were under review. They had missed a performance threshold by less than half a percent. The banks and lenders pulled the revolver. Payroll was due in ten days and a choice had to be made.
That choice was to shut it all down.
Shut it down fast.
Shut it down quietly.
Shut it down absolutely.
The Fallout
The collapse of NEVG happened in a matter or days. 48 hours after Megan received the email from NEVG management, more than 40% of the consolidator’s hospitals had permanently closed. Some staff learned through official HR emails while others didn’t receive anything at all. It was chaos: locked doors, disconnected email accounts, unanswered phones. All corporate communications went dark. Internal portals returned 404 errors. What had been a living, breathing network of practices and professionals turned ghostly in a matter of hours.
While trying to do their best to soften the blow to customers and their pets, some staff stayed late to call clients to explain the situation while others simply walked out. Unfilled prescriptions and pending lab results went unresolved. Patients awaiting surgery or diagnostics were told to “contact local alternatives”, but the problem was that in some of the rural areas of Vermont and New Hampshire, there weren’t any “local alternatives.”
NEVG owed millions in outstanding invoices to vendors and distributors. Credit teams across the industry scrambled to reassess exposure with every large group carrying similar debt structures. Several vendors paused inventory shipments to other consolidators pending credit reevaluation while others raised prices to hedge risk.
For reps in New England, it was a different kind of shock. Many had built their books around NEVG’s purchasing scale and had invested years developing relationships with NEVG clinics, onboarding products, conducting trainings, and pushing new technologies into the field. All of this was gone in less than a week.
Quiet conversations started happening in conference rooms and hotel bars at conferences and shows: “How exposed are you to debt-backed consolidators?”
In Facebook groups, the news spread rapidly and the whispers turned into warnings. “How many groups are in the same position?” someone posted. “What happens if this isn’t the only one?”
Meanwhile, competitors watched nervously. Some tried to downplay the collapse and label it as a result of “isolated mismanagement” and “poor integration strategy”, but they knew that NEVG hadn’t failed because of one bad quarter or a rogue executive. NEVG failed because the math had stopped working and the system had been overbuilt on assumptions that debt would always stay cheap, staffing would stay manageable, and that exits would always be there. When those assumptions broke, there was no cushion left and NEVG fell hard.
Nearly 600 professionals were displaced including veterinarians, techs, client service reps, practice managers, and other roles. While some displaced team members found employment in other hospitals, others were not so lucky. Multiple NEVG hospitals had been in underserved rural areas in northern New England where nearby alternatives were scarce or already overwhelmed. One Vermont county lost its only veterinary provider. With no other options, animal control officers were left handling cases in that county. Graduating vet techs from affiliated programs suddenly saw internship offers rescinded. Clients began showing up to emergency clinics with half-explained case histories and no way to retrieve imaging files from NEVG’s PACS storage.
For the staff let go, there was a new kind of trauma: not just burnout from clinical work, but emotional whiplash from being told for years that they were part of something bigger, more sustainable, more evolved, and then watching it vanish overnight. Some moved on. Others left the industry altogether. They were too exhausted, too disoriented, or just too focused on getting through the month.The veterinary profession had spent decades fighting to be seen as essential, credible, and trusted.
The general public didn’t differentiate between NEVG and the rest of the corporate ecosystem. To clients, it was simple: “the vet clinic closed” and with that closure, trust eroded not just in NEVG, but in the idea that veterinary medicine could be safely consolidated at scale.
Across New England, independent clinics saw a surge in patients and resumes. This was expected. What was not expected was the undercurrent of suspicion with pet owners asking, “Are you one of those big chains too?”
Some saw opportunity in the wreckage as new alliances were formed. A handful of displaced NEVG doctors launched their own practices within months, and a group of former techs organized a mobile relief team. Distributors began piloting independent clinic loyalty programs. Investors started quietly looking into alternative models like cooperatives, hybrid ownership structures, and DVM-led buyouts.
But beneath it all, a quiet unease had set in.
If NEVG could collapse, what other consolidators were sitting on the same edge?
Postscript
This story is obviously fiction, but every element inside it is drawn from real dynamics unfolding in our industry right now.
I want to be crystal clear: I’m not forecasting a collapse nor am I speculating that this will happen. I’m saying that if it were to happen, this is how it could look.
I stepped away from my usual blog format to write this story because I care deeply for this industry. I’ve sat across from vendors chasing overdue payments they know they might never see and have listened to practice managers trying to hold clinics together with less than half the staff they need. I’ve spoken with distributor sales reps who’ve had accounts frozen without warning, and some who lost entire territories overnight.
Hardest of all? I’ve heard veterinarians quietly admit that they’re not even sure who they work for anymore.
To be clear, the rise of consolidation and private equity has brought real benefits: access to capital, broader infrastructure, shared services, smoother transitions for retiring owners. This fictional story isn’t about painting corporate ownership as a villain because there are some excellent corporate groups and consolidators doing tremendous work in this space.
What worries me is the assumption that the system will always hold. That labor will stabilize. That debt will be serviceable. That cash flow will always outpace the cost of capital. That culture can be rebuilt after efficiency is prioritized.
If this story does anything, I hope it encourages a pause or at least just a moment to step back and ask:
• What assumptions are we making about scale and sustainability?
• What would happen if capital markets froze again….even temporarily? How would this effect our industry?
• Are we reinvesting in the people who actually deliver care, or just building systems around them?
• Are our current incentives aligned with long-term clinical success? Or just exit velocity?
The truth is that no industry is immune to overreach. Not human health. Not animal health.
Unlike finance or real estate, this is a profession built on relationships, continuity, and on trust between pet parents and the people who care for them. When that trust is eroded in the name of growth, the damage doesn’t stop at the balance sheet.
