Veterinary economist Matt Salois says practices cannot rely on pricing growth into 2027

Veterinary economist Matt Salois, PhD, is scheduled to present a live session on practice growth that starts from a premise most owner-DVMs have not yet accepted: the pricing lever that carried revenue in recent years is tapped out, and practices heading into 2027 will need to choose a different path.

The consensus in veterinary practice management right now is that growth is slowing because the broader economy is weak and consumers are cautious. Salois's session argues that the economy is improving, but veterinary visits remain under pressure anyway, and according to the session description, "practices cannot rely on pricing the way they have in recent years."

Why the obvious reading is incomplete

Most practices still frame their revenue problem as a demand problem: clients are not coming in, or they are trading down when they do. The natural response is to wait for the economy to recover or to raise fees again to offset the volume loss.

Salois's framework says that is backward. The broader U.S. economy is improving, but veterinary visits are still under pressure. The constraint is not consumer spending power in the abstract but something structural about how practices capture and convert demand. Pricing worked as a growth lever when visits were high and clients were less sensitive to cost. Now that visits are under pressure and consumers are cautious, another fee increase does not produce the same revenue lift it did in the past.

The three-lever model Salois will present

The session introduces what the description calls "a simple framework for thinking about growth: Capacity × Utilization × Client Value." Each term maps to a concrete operational decision.

Capacity is the practice's ability to see patients: hours open, staffing levels, exam rooms in use. A practice that is fully booked and turning away appointments has a capacity problem.

Utilization is how often existing clients come in. A practice with plenty of open slots but clients who used to visit twice a year and now visit once has a utilization problem.

Client Value is what each visit generates in revenue, not just the exam fee, but diagnostics, treatment, and product sales. A practice seeing the same number of visits but lower case averages has a client-value problem.

The framework forces a practice to diagnose which constraint it faces, rather than assuming all three levers move together. A practice that is underbooked does not fix its revenue problem by adding Saturday hours; it fixes it by getting existing clients to come in more often or by acquiring new clients. A practice that is fully booked does not fix its revenue problem by running a wellness-visit promotion; it fixes it by adding capacity or raising prices on the visits it already has.

What the session will cover, and what it will not

According to the session description, Salois "will look at what is happening in the U.S. economy, what the latest veterinary market data are telling us, and what it means for practices heading into 2027." The description says "the discussion will focus on the practical drivers behind each part of the equation, including productivity, workflow, technology, care acceptance, retention, convenience, and trust."

What the session description does not promise: hard numbers on visit trends, numeric thresholds for when a practice should pull one lever over another, or case studies of practices that applied the framework and measured the result. Without those, the framework is a useful diagnostic tool but not a decision rule. We will know after the session whether Salois provides the data that would let a practice benchmark itself.

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Our read on the shift this represents

The three-lever model is not new. It is how any service business thinks about growth. What is new is that veterinary practices are being forced to think this way. For years, pricing alone was enough. Visits were growing, clients were less price-sensitive, and an owner-DVM could grow revenue by raising fees without changing anything else about how the practice operated. That era is over, and the practices that have not yet accepted it are the ones still waiting for volume to recover on its own.

The risk in Salois's framework is that it assumes practices can move the levers. A practice that diagnoses a utilization problem, clients are not coming in often enough, still has to solve the harder part of why. Is it because the practice does not remind them, because the client does not see the value, or because the appointment experience is friction-heavy? The framework names the constraint; it does not tell you how to fix it, and most practices do not have the data infrastructure to measure whether a change in workflow or communication moved utilization.

The other risk: capacity and utilization are not independent. A practice that adds Saturday hours (capacity) but does not fill them has just increased its fixed costs without increasing revenue. A practice that runs a promotion to boost utilization (more visits per client) but does not have the staff to handle the volume will burn out the team and lose quality. The levers interact, and pulling one without thinking through the others is how practices end up with higher costs and flat revenue.

Still, the model is useful because it forces a practice to name which constraint it faces. An owner-DVM who can answer that has a better chance of spending time and money on something that will move revenue, rather than on something that sounds like good practice management but does not match the practice's bottleneck.

What this means for the associate DVM

If your practice cannot grow revenue through pricing, expect pressure to see more appointments or to increase case averages through diagnostics and treatment plans. Comp structures tied to production will make that pressure direct. The three-lever model does not change your day-to-day clinical decisions, but it does explain why the owner-DVM is focused on visit volume, no-show rates, or the percentage of wellness exams that include bloodwork. Those are all utilization and client-value levers, and they are the levers a practice pulls when pricing stops working.

The session is scheduled as a live event. The session description states the goal "is to help practices think more clearly about where growth will come from next and what they can do now to prepare for it." Whether it delivers on that depends on whether Salois provides the data and the thresholds that would let a practice act on the framework, not just understand it.

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