Is your practice having amid life crisis?

Originally published in OVMA Focus Magazine March/April 2026

BY GREG TONER

Somewhere between 10 and 20 years of ownership, many veterinarians wake up to a strange feeling. The practice is still busy, the phone still rings and your appointment calendar still fills. But the excitement that once pushed you through long days has settled into something flatter, heavier and harder to name. You’re not unhappy. You’re not burned out. You’re just … stuck.

If this sounds familiar, your practice may be entering what I call its midlife crisis—a perfectly normal, predictable stage that many businesses reach, even thriving ones. This crisis doesn’t show up as a dramatic event. It shows up as a whisper: a sense that the practice doesn’t need you in the same ways that it once did.

But here’s the encouraging truth: a midlife crisis isn’t a warning sign of decline. It’s a sign of maturity and an invitation to design the next decade of your veterinary practice with intention rather than momentum.

In the early years, adrenaline and improvisation take you far. You take on every new client, build your reputation and survive with sheer willpower. You wear every hat, solve every problem and build a loyal community around you.

But eventually, success brings complexity. More clients mean more staff, and more staff mean more leadership. More services mean more structure—the practice grows up and the systems that once supported it begin to strain. You might find yourself missing the simple intensity of the early days.

That’s when owners start noticing the early signals of their practice’s midlife crisis. The symptoms are subtle but consistent: you feel disconnected from the financial performance of your practice (whether good or bad), there may be tension between team roles, or an uneasy sense that you’re carrying more tasks that feel uncomfortable. What’s really happening is that the business has outgrown its early-stage habits.

A mature practice simply cannot operate on the same informal workflows and heroic effort that sustained it in its youth. And that realization often catches owners off guard.

Common themes are: “We’re doing fine, but there are so many balls to juggle.” Or “I’m working hard, but I feel the practice could be doing better.” Or the most common: “I feel like I’m solving the same problems all the time.”

This repeating cycle is often the first true signal that the practice is at a crossroads. Not a crisis in the dramatic sense, but a turning point.

Getting pets in the door is the hardest (and first) challenge in running a practice. Once you’ve conquered that, whether formally or informally, it’s time to move on to the next challenge: systematizing what works and building processes for what’s broken.

A quick “vitals check” often confirms what the owner is sensing. Every practice owner is unique, so their practices will develop different obstacles. Looking at your practice’s financials, along with practice data, will help provide clues to those obstacles.

Is non-DVM labour growing faster than revenues? Maybe a lack of formal processes is making it hard for your team to work efficiently as your practice gets busier, causing you to backfill that inefficiency with more staff.

Are lab and dental revenues growing inconsistently as you add more veterinarians to your practice? Maybe those new vets aren’t following the same process in the exam room and flagging the same issues for follow-up, resulting in gaps in care.

Do you find that surgery days are less efficient as you add more surgery days to your week? Maybe your DVM and non-DVM staff could benefit from some additional training to help them be more confident and efficient when in surgery.

These aren’t problems. These are opportunities.

Reaching this stage means your practice is finally stable, experienced and successful enough to reinvent itself, and to reinvent your position in the practice. Where do you want to focus: appointments, surgery, administration?

A midlife crisis is the most valuable inflection point in a practice’s lifetime. It’s the moment where the business signals that it’s ready for stronger systems, better team alignment, updated service offerings, and a healthier relationship between the practice and the owner where the owner can define their role.

Practices that embrace this phase often emerge more profitable, more efficient and more enjoyable to own than they ever were in the early years. They move from reactive success to intentional success.

So, if you’re noticing the whispers of midlife in your own practice, get excited. You’re not stuck. You’re simply entering the stage where your practice asks to grow again, with clearer structure, renewed purpose and the leadership you’re now ready to provide.

We’ll continue to explore that evolution, but for now, the most important step is recognizing the transition. A midlife crisis isn’t a failure; it’s a beginning.

Greg Toner, CPA, CA, TEP, CLU, is principal at VetCPA.

Reprinted from the Ontario Veterinary Medical Association’s Focus magazine www.ovma.org