For several years, much of the conversation in veterinary medicine has centered around one challenge: keeping up with demand. Practices were overwhelmed, appointment books were full, teams were stretched thin, and many hospitals were trying to figure out how to accommodate everyone who wanted to come through their doors. Today, that conversation sounds very different.
I have the unique opportunity to see veterinary medicine from several perspectives. I personally consult with veterinary practices, work alongside our clients at Tapir, and spend a significant part of my year traveling and speaking with veterinary professionals throughout the United States, Canada, and abroad. Increasingly, I’m hearing similar concerns wherever I go: new-client numbers are down, there are more openings on the schedule, clients are stretching the time between visits, and overall transactions aren’t where they used to be.
This certainly isn’t happening to every practice, nor is it happening equally in every market. But I’m seeing and hearing it frequently enough that I believe the veterinary and broader animal health industry needs to pay close attention. More importantly, I don’t think our response can be to simply wait and hope appointment volume returns.
Revenue Can Hide a Visit Problem
One of the first things I encourage practices to do is look beyond revenue. Revenue is obviously an important measure of the health of a business, but in an environment where fees have increased, revenue alone doesn’t tell us what is happening with client behavior.
A practice can increase revenue while simultaneously seeing fewer patients and transactions. If the average client transaction increases enough, the top-line number can look healthy even as visit volume quietly moves in the opposite direction. That matters because every visit represents more than the revenue generated that day. It creates opportunities for preventive care, diagnostics, dentistry, parasite prevention, follow-up care, nutritional conversations, medication purchases, and future visits. It is also another opportunity to strengthen the relationship between the client and the practice.
When I work with a veterinary practice, I want to understand much more than whether revenue is up or down. What is happening to total visits? Are new-client numbers increasing or decreasing? How frequently are active patients visiting? How many patients are approaching the point of becoming lapsed, and how many have already lapsed? Those numbers can tell a very different story from revenue alone.
Pet Owners Haven’t Stopped Loving Their Pets
It would be easy to look at declining veterinary visits and conclude that pet owners simply don’t value veterinary medicine as much as they once did. I don’t believe that tells the whole story.
Pet owners are making decisions in a very different economic and consumer environment. They’re paying closer attention to what things cost, researching more before making decisions, comparing options, reading reviews, and looking for reassurance that what they’re spending is worthwhile. At the same time, the number of places where they can find information about their pet’s health has exploded. Google is still enormously important, but today a pet owner may also turn to ChatGPT or another AI platform before they ever visit a veterinary practice’s website.
Their expectations have changed in other ways, too. Veterinary practices aren’t only being compared with the hospital down the street. Consumers subconsciously compare their experience with us to virtually every other company they interact with. They can make a dinner reservation online, change an airline reservation from an app, order something in seconds, receive personalized updates about a delivery, and communicate with businesses without ever picking up the phone.
Then they encounter a veterinary practice that requires them to call during business hours, wait on hold, leave a voicemail, fill out information they have already provided, or wait for someone to call them back to confirm an appointment. We may not think of those things as marketing issues, but from the client’s perspective they are all part of the experience of choosing and doing business with us.
We Have to Get Better at Communicating Value
Cost is one of the most common concerns I hear when talking with veterinary teams, but I think we sometimes make the mistake of treating price and value as though they are interchangeable. They aren’t. A client can believe something is expensive and simultaneously believe it is worth every penny. If you were to ask me what the most popular conversation I’ve been having as of late is, it’s helping practices communicate and improve value.
If the first time we explain the value of veterinary care is when a client is standing in an exam room looking at an estimate, we are already behind. Their perception of value has been forming throughout every interaction they have had with us.
It started with what they found when they searched for the practice. It continued through the website, online reviews, the ease of scheduling an appointment, the person who answered the phone, communication before the visit, the appearance of the hospital, the way a technician explained a recommendation, the conversation with the veterinarian, and what happened after they went home.
Every one of those interactions can add to or subtract from perceived value. When visits are abundant, practices may be able to overlook some of these details. When every visit becomes harder to earn, they become much more important.
Our Existing Clients Are Our Biggest Growth Opportunity
When a practice tells me it needs more visits, the natural reaction is often to immediately start talking about attracting new clients. Sometimes that is exactly what we need to do, and there are practices where new-client acquisition absolutely needs to be the priority. But one of my first questions is usually much simpler: What are we doing with the clients you already have?
Veterinary practices spend enormous amounts of money, time, and energy acquiring clients and surprisingly little time examining whether they are successfully keeping them. We celebrate a new client walking through the door, but there is rarely a similar alarm when an established client quietly stops coming.
Reminder systems are a great example. Nearly every practice has some type of reminder technology, but having reminder software and having a client-retention strategy are two very different things. Too often, practices turn on the default settings, send a handful of generic messages, and assume the technology is doing its job.
Technology becomes much more powerful when we combine it with intentional communication, appropriate frequency, automation, segmentation, branding, and measurement. Before spending another dollar trying to convince a stranger to become a client, I want practices to understand how many people who already know and trust them are quietly drifting away.
How Pet Owners Find Veterinary Care Is Changing
For years, veterinary digital marketing was relatively straightforward. You needed a good website, strong Google visibility, a well-managed Google Business Profile, positive reviews, useful content, and perhaps Google Ads to compete for high-intent searches. Those things remain incredibly important, but the way people discover businesses and information is becoming more fragmented.
AI is now becoming part of that journey. Pet owners can ask ChatGPT and other AI platforms about symptoms, preventive care, veterinary services, costs, specialists, and even which veterinary practices they should consider in their area. That means the work we have traditionally thought of as SEO is evolving alongside consumer behavior.
This is why I believe SEO and Answer Engine Optimization, or AEO, increasingly belong in the same conversation. A veterinary website can no longer simply exist as an online brochure. It needs to clearly communicate who the practice is, where it is located, what it does, who it serves, what expertise it has, and why it may be a credible answer to the questions pet owners are asking.
That isn’t about chasing an AI trend or abandoning Google for the next shiny object. It is about recognizing that discovery behavior is changing and making sure our practices are visible wherever those decisions are increasingly being made.
Convenience Is Part of Veterinary Client Experience
One of my favorite exercises with practices is to ask a deceptively simple question: How easy are you to do business with?
Can a client book an appointment online? Can they complete forms before arriving? Can they text the practice? Can they refill a medication without calling? Do they receive useful reminders when their pet needs care? Can they quickly understand what they need to do next? If they visit your website after the practice closes, can they accomplish anything, or does virtually every path end with “call us”?
None of this is meant to replace the human relationship that makes veterinary medicine special. I would argue the opposite. Good technology should remove unnecessary transactional work so our people have more time for the interactions that actually require people.
I don’t need a human being to manually confirm that my appointment is Tuesday at 2:00 p.m. I do need a compassionate person when I’m scared about my pet. I don’t necessarily need someone to take my basic information over the phone. I may desperately need someone to help me understand what the veterinarian just told me.
Technology should handle what technology does well so veterinary professionals have more time to do what humans do extraordinarily well.
We Can’t Market Our Way Out of Every Problem
This is particularly important for me to say as someone who owns a veterinary marketing company: marketing is not always the answer.
If your schedule is unnecessarily difficult to navigate, fix it. If clients repeatedly complain about the same part of their experience, investigate it. If your phones aren’t being answered, understand why. If clients routinely leave without understanding recommendations, work on communication. If your reminder system isn’t producing results, optimize it. If your online reputation is hurting you, address the experience behind the reviews before pouring money into advertising that sends thousands more people to read them.
On the other hand, if you have capacity, deliver an excellent experience, retain clients well, and people simply cannot find you, then we probably do have a marketing problem.
Sustainable veterinary growth happens when marketing and operations work together. Driving more people through the front door doesn’t solve a problem if just as many are quietly walking out the back.
Being Busy Today Is Not a Long-Term Growth Strategy
I also want to speak directly to the practices reading this that are still bursting at the seams with business. Your appointment schedule is full. New clients are still calling. Your doctors may be booked days or weeks in advance. You might read an article about declining veterinary visits and think, “That’s simply not happening here.”
That’s fantastic. But please don’t let being busy become a reason to become complacent.
One of the dangers of sustained demand is that it can make almost any strategy look like a good one. When the phone is ringing constantly and the appointment book is full, it becomes very easy to assume that your marketing is working, your client retention is strong, your communication strategy is effective, and your client experience is exactly where it needs to be. Sometimes that’s true. Sometimes there is simply enough demand in the market to cover up problems that would become painfully obvious if that demand changed.
Being busy can hide a surprising amount of leakage. Clients may be leaving, but enough new ones are replacing them that nobody notices. Your reminder strategy may be underperforming, but there isn’t enough capacity to feel the lost visits. Your website may be slipping in Google rankings, but referrals are still keeping the schedule full. Your online reviews may be trending in the wrong direction, but there are enough clients coming through the door that it doesn’t feel urgent. You may even be losing visibility with the next generation of pet owners while continuing to benefit from the loyalty and reputation you built with the previous one.
That is why I believe the best time to work on growth is often when you don’t desperately need it.
When a practice waits until the schedule has openings everywhere, new-client numbers have fallen, or revenue has started declining, the conversation changes. Suddenly, every initiative needs to produce an immediate result. There is pressure to fix SEO quickly, generate reviews quickly, reactivate clients quickly, launch advertising quickly, and fill appointments quickly. Unfortunately, some of the strongest drivers of sustainable growth, including reputation, organic search visibility, client loyalty, brand awareness, and community trust, are built over time. You cannot flip a switch and manufacture years of momentum overnight.
There is another important reason busy practices should continue marketing: growth does not always have to mean adding more appointments.
If your schedule is already full, your strategy can become more selective. Maybe the goal is attracting the types of clients who are the best fit for your practice. Maybe it is increasing utilization of a service where you have capacity. Maybe it is shifting demand toward a doctor whose schedule has room. Maybe it is strengthening preventive-care compliance, improving retention, building your reputation, recruiting your next veterinarian, or increasing awareness of services clients don’t realize you offer. Growth can mean improving the quality and sustainability of demand, not simply creating more of it.
And eventually, circumstances change. A new competitor opens. A corporate group acquires several hospitals around you and dramatically increases its marketing spend. A longtime veterinarian retires. A new doctor joins and suddenly needs a full schedule. Consumer spending changes. A major employer leaves your community. Google changes. AI changes how people discover businesses. The clients who have been loyal to you for 15 years move, age, or eventually no longer have pets.
None of those possibilities mean we should operate from fear. They mean we should operate with foresight.
Some of the strongest practices I work with aren’t investing in marketing because they are struggling. They’re investing because they never want to reach the point where they have to market from a position of desperation. They use the good years to strengthen retention, improve their client experience, build their brand, grow their online authority, develop their teams, and make sure the next generation of pet owners knows who they are.
If you’re fortunate enough to be bursting at the seams today, celebrate it. You earned it. Just don’t mistake a full appointment book for a guarantee about tomorrow.
Complacency rarely feels dangerous when business is good. That’s exactly why it can be.
This Is an Opportunity for Veterinary Practices Willing to Adapt
Despite the concerns I’m hearing about declining visits, I don’t look at the current environment and feel pessimistic about veterinary medicine. I actually think this period presents an enormous opportunity for practices willing to become more intentional about how they operate, communicate, retain clients, demonstrate value, and market themselves.
For several years, extraordinary demand allowed weaknesses in client retention, marketing, technology, communication, and the overall client experience to hide in plain sight. If the phone was ringing faster than the team could answer it, there wasn’t much motivation to ask why someone else never called. If appointments were booked weeks in advance, we didn’t necessarily notice the patient who never came back.
When demand changes, those weaknesses become easier to see. But so do the opportunities.
Practices should know their numbers beyond revenue. They should understand why clients stay and why they leave. They should communicate value before a client ever has to question price. They should make it easy for people to do business with them, invest in the people responsible for delivering the client experience, and pay attention to how consumers are finding veterinary information today rather than assuming yesterday’s marketing strategy will continue working indefinitely.
After more than two decades working in veterinary medicine, I’ve been fortunate to see this profession from a lot of different angles. Today, whether I’m consulting directly with a practice, talking strategy with one of our clients at Tapir, or meeting veterinary professionals while speaking throughout the United States, Canada, and abroad, I keep coming back to the same conclusion: we cannot control every economic or consumer trend affecting veterinary medicine, but we have tremendous control over how we respond to them.
The practices that recognize that distinction and act on it now will be far better positioned for whatever comes next.
Eric D. Garcia is a veterinary industry consultant, international public speaker, and veterinary marketing strategist who works with veterinary practices and animal health organizations around the world. He is the co-founder of Tapir, a veterinary-exclusive marketing and technology company focused on helping practices grow through smarter marketing, technology, client communication, SEO, and AI search strategy.
