Essential Takeaways
- Successful sellers start learning long before they start selling.
- Starting early doesn’t mean committing. It means preserving your options.
- Familiarity is not comprehension. The ‘illusion of knowing’ catches more sellers off guard than almost anything else.
- Active engagement with the subject matter — not passive awareness — is what separates prepared sellers from reactive ones.
- The transition process is learnable. The owners who treat it that way arrive with a significant advantage.
What do they say about early birds and worms? After working with hundreds of veterinary practice owners through their transition process, a pattern emerges that is too consistent to ignore.
The sellers who feel the most confident — the ones who make faster decisions, ask sharper questions, and navigate the inevitable surprises without losing their footing — are almost never the ones who waited until they were ready to sell before they started paying attention.
Not by raising their hand. Not by announcing anything to anyone. But by quietly, deliberately paying attention — reading, attending webinars, asking questions in private conversations — long before they were ready to call themselves “sellers”. By the time they sat across from a buyer’s representative or reviewed a Letter of Intent, they had already developed something that cannot be manufactured in the middle of a transaction: a working mental model of how this process actually unfolds.
That, more than timing, more than market conditions, more than the practice’s financials alone, is the one thing the most successful sellers we have ever worked with all have in common.
What Research Tells Us About Preparation
This isn’t intuition. There is a substantial body of academic research on how humans learn and perform under pressure — and its implications for practice owners are direct.
Decades of work in educational psychology has established a clear distinction between passive exposure and active learning. Robert Bjork’s research on desirable difficulties shows that reading something once, or sitting through a presentation without engaging with the material, creates a weak and unreliable memory trace. Active engagement — asking questions, connecting new information to what you already know, testing your own understanding — produces something meaningfully different: durable comprehension that is available when you need it under pressure. John Hattie’s Visible Learning synthesis — a meta-analysis spanning hundreds of studies — reinforces the same conclusion: how students engage with material matters as much as what they are taught.
One well-documented phenomenon — the illusion of knowing — describes the gap between feeling familiar with something and actually understanding it. Many practice owners believe they have a reasonable grasp of what a sale involves — until an LOI arrives and they encounter, for the first time, concepts like earnout structures, EBITDA normalization variances, DVM retention incentives, or TopCo equity classes. Familiarity and comprehension are not the same thing.
The research is consistent on another point as well: performance under stress degrades most sharply for people who are encountering material for the first time. Sellers who have already wrestled with the concepts — even imperfectly — have a cognitive foundation to build on when it matters.
Why Practice Owners Often Start Later Than They Should
There is something specific about veterinary medicine that makes this harder. Ownership is tied to identity in this profession in a way that differs from other industries. The practice is often the result of decades of clinical expertise, personal sacrifice, and genuine care for the community it serves.
Admitting — even privately — that the end of that chapter is worth thinking about can feel like a betrayal of something. It is not. But the feeling is real, and it keeps many owners from engaging with the subject until circumstances make the conversation unavoidable.
The cost of that delay is not emotional. It is strategic. Owners who begin learning only when they are emotionally ready to sell are learning under pressure, in real time, while simultaneously managing their practice, their staff, and a transaction process designed by parties who do this every day. The asymmetry of information in that situation is significant.
By contrast, owners who have spent even a year quietly building their understanding of the market, buyer behavior, valuation mechanics, and deal structure arrive at the process with a foundation that changes the entire dynamic.
What Active Learning Looks Like in This Context
It does not require declaring intent. It does not require a conversation with a broker, a signed engagement agreement, or any formal step toward a transaction.
It looks like reading a quarterly market report and actually thinking through what the data means for a practice like yours. It looks like attending a webinar — even without asking a question out loud — and letting the material work on you over time. It looks like reading an article about how buyers evaluate DVM retention risk and connecting it to the staffing dynamics in your own hospital. It looks like asking a trusted advisor a question you have been carrying around for months.
Each of those acts is an instance of active engagement. Each one builds toward something cumulative: a mental model that makes the eventual process navigable rather than overwhelming.
The Practical Implication
If you are a practice owner who is anywhere within five years of a potential transition — even a loosely considered one — the single most valuable thing you can do right now is not to have lunch with that persistent buyer rep or sending your financials to one. Those steps have their time.
The most valuable thing you can do is start treating this as a subject worth learning. Not urgently. Not publicly. Just deliberately.
The owners who do that consistently arrive at the process better informed, less reactive, and more in control of the outcome than the ones who wait for readiness to announce itself. Readiness, it turns out, is built. It does not appear on its own.
Written by:
Win Lippincott works with veterinary practice owners on the decisions that shape their practices—both today and down the road. Much of his work involves helping owners strengthen performance, improve decision-making, and build healthier, more valuable businesses long before a sale is even considered.
When owners do begin thinking about a transition, Win helps them understand valuation, buyer behavior, and what actually matters in a sale process. His perspective comes from working side by side with owners and seeing how practices evolve over time, not just from observing transactions at the finish line.
He writes to make complex topics easier to understand, so owners can focus on running better practices now and making confident, informed decisions when the time comes. You can find him presenting on stage or walking the floor at VMX, WVC, AAHA Con, Insightful.vet, etc.
Win welcomes thoughtful questions and conversations—connect on LinkedIn or reach out through the Ackerman Group contact page.