CareVet chooses Ideals to save time when acquiring new hospitals

Overview

Founded in 2018, CareVet is a fast-growing network of veterinary hospitals covering well over 30 US states. Based in St Louis, their growth strategy focuses on acquiring and streamlining the management of hospitals nationwide.

In 2020, with their acquisition pipeline increasing exponentially, they needed to speed up the pace of their deals and realized that their existing provider would not be able to cope.

The company moved their projects to Ideals and the added efficiency of the VDR features provided the speed they were looking for – “It’s very easy to upload and move things around the platform; renaming them, renumbering, and reorganizing, it is huge.”

Using the VDR, CareVet soon acquired 50 hospitals, and went on to assimilate 53 more in 2022. The company now manages 180 hospitals with over 1,600 employees nationwide.

Context

Co-founded by CEO Greg Siwak and Dr. Kent Thornberry, CareVet brings existing veterinary practices under one umbrella, offering them centralized procurement, finance, HR, marketing, payroll, health, wellness, and accounting services.

The main value to their 180-strong network is that membership of the group frees up time and money spent on non-client-facing roles, so the hospitals can concentrate on treating animals. After they join, the acquired businesses continue to trade under their name but benefit from the group’s backroom services and industry-leading benefits package.

In 2020, with their holistic approach proving very attractive, CareVet needed to increase efficiency when processing the rising numbers of companies applying to join the group.

Key Challenges

The company wanted to provide interested companies with a central document depository where any veterinarian practice seeking to join the network could upload their application documents.

The applicant’s confidential data needed to be made available to the CareVet teams in stages, with sales, finance, and legal assessing eligibility and negotiating terms, then integration, payroll, and HR completing the integration flow.

What they were looking for was a secure virtual environment that would provide them with:

• Separate folders for each company applying.
• Regular reports to keep the team abreast of new documents.
• A dashboard to monitor who accessed the folder and when.
• Different permission levels to facilitate the flow of information between staff, sellers, and third-party insurers.

After testing out the platform, it was the VDR security protocols that reassured them that Ideals was the right choice – “we could easily see who had access, and when. It was secure enough to make our sellers feel very comfortable,” concluded Britni Harper, Manager of Finance, Acquisitions & Integration.

Solution

From their very first project, CareVet’s team realized how easy it was to add different folders and create the right permission levels. They were able to efficiently handle new applicants, all at different stages of joining the group.

The data collection phase could be accomplished much more efficiently; using Ideals to process all their acquisitions, CareVet could:

• Set up a folder for each new applicant within a single data room.
• Allocate separated logins to give the seller’s team access to their unique folder.
• Run a variety of reports and get them as email without needing to access the VDR.

“We have sellers uploading data all the time, and we can really keep an eye on it, be really in the know, without having to comb through every single folder we’re working on; being able to see how much room every file is taking up is very helpful,” affirms Britni – “I also love the email push reports. I get them once a day.”

In addition to the functionalities that saved so much time, Britni was especially impressed by the customer support, “I always tell sellers that the customer service is great. If you call them, a person answers within a couple of rings, and they will help you right away.”

The Future

In the two years since CareVet first used Ideals, they almost doubled their facilities investments, acquiring more than 100 new hospitals, which puts them firmly on track to achieve the goals in their five-year plan.

Today they have 18 administrators and 680 users accessing different files within the data room. 

Britni is sure they will continue to use Ideals for prospective acquisitions because of the added efficiency and security that comes from it, including how easy it is to upload data, and the various granular reports that “get delivered right to your inbox, which is crazy helpful!”