🚰 Revenue Leaks Draining Your Practice? How To Fix Them

For the last five years, you didn’t need to think too hard about new clients. Demand outpaced capacity, your appointment book filled itself, and the phone rang whether you answered it well or not. That era is over. Visits are down across the board, the time between appointments is stretching, and practices that never had to compete are discovering that their front door has been not only squeaking but also quietly leaking revenue for years.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: it costs almost nothing to fix most revenue leaks, just recognition, commitment and a sense of urgency. In a week you could be on the way to repairing the things that are sending your revenue elsewhere. The practices moving now on revenue optimisation tactics are pulling ahead, and the gap is already opening. If this is you, you have great crystal ball gazing skills. If not, this is the week to start…

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The Phone Is Ringing. Nobody’s Answering.

Between 24% and 28% of all calls to the average veterinary practice go unanswered. Not because your team doesn’t care. Not because they’re incompetent. Because they’re busy, the desk is backed up, and there are only so many hands. The problem isn’t the people, it’s the system, and right now that system is costing you more than you think.

Here’s the number that should stop you cold: 85% of new callers who don’t get an answer won’t call back. They don’t leave a voicemail. They don’t try again later. They call the practice down the road. For a typical three-doctor hospital, that’s a conservative $100,000 in lost revenue every year, sitting in a pile of unanswered calls that nobody is tracking.

The fix starts with knowing what you’re actually missing. Most practice management systems and phone platforms can pull missed call data. If yours can, run that report today. If you don’t know where to find it, ask your front desk team, they almost certainly know exactly when the phones go unanswered and why.

For the calls that fall through during the 8am rush, the lunch hour, and after closing, AI call-handling tools are now a practical and affordable option. These aren’t robotic phone trees that frustrate callers. The better platforms answer in plain conversational language, book directly into your scheduling system, collect new client details, and handle routine questions about hours, services and directions. One clinic reduced missed calls from 25% to under 2% after implementation. Your front desk team doesn’t get replaced, they get backup, and they get to spend less time on hold callbacks and more time on the clients standing in front of them.

We had no idea how many calls we were missing until we actually looked at the data. It was genuinely uncomfortable. We sorted the after-hours coverage first and within a month we could see the difference in new bookings – Sarah M, Practice Manager, Ohio

Your Website Is Working Against You

When a potential new client finds your practice, the first thing they do before calling, before booking, before even reading your reviews, is look at your website. What they find in the first ten seconds and two clicks will decide whether they go any further. For a lot of practices, that first impression is quietly doing a lot of damage.

Think about what a new client actually needs to feel confident enough to book. They want to know you handle their type of pet. They want to see who the vets are, not just names in a list but real people with photos and a line or two about why they do this work. They want confirmation that the practice is active, current, and competent. An outdated site with stock photos, no team page, a contact form that vanishes into a void, and a copyright date from 2018 at the bottom of the page signals none of those things.

The good news is that a website trust audit takes an afternoon, not a budget. Go through your site with the eyes of someone who has never heard of you. Can you find the services offered in under two clicks? Is there a real photo of the team, and are those people still actually working there? Does the contact form work, and does it generate an acknowledgement when submitted? Is there a short video, even a simple phone-shot walkthrough of the practice or a welcome from the lead vet? Are there visible links to your Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn pages? And is the site usable on a phone? Nearly 70% of local service searches happen on mobile, and a site that requires pinching and scrolling loses people before they’ve read a word.

You don’t need a full rebuild next week, though you may want one next month. The good news is that build times and costs are way down since 2018, and even a modest refresh can make a significant difference. For now, fix what’s broken and fill what’s missing. A current team photo, an updated services page, working social links, and a contact form that confirms receipt can meaningfully change how a new client reads your practice before they’ve spoken to a single person on your team.

I finally looked at our website on my phone while sitting in the car park one morning. I was embarrassed. The contact form didn’t work, half the team photos were people who’d left, and it took me four clicks to find our opening hours. We fixed it in a weekend. – Dr. Janelle K, Practice Owner, Texas

If They Can’t Book at 10pm, They’ll Book Somewhere They Can

Around 40% of appointment decisions happen outside business hours. That’s the pet owner sitting on the couch at 10pm, phone in hand, thinking about the lump they noticed on their dog’s side that morning, or the overdue vaccinations they’ve been meaning to sort. They’re ready to act right now. If your practice doesn’t have online booking, that moment passes, and more often than not, it passes to a competitor who does.

This isn’t about replacing the phone call or removing the personal touch from your front desk. Practices that have added online booking consistently report that call volumes actually become more manageable, not because fewer people are reaching out, but because the people who prefer to self-serve are no longer clogging the phone lines. Your team gets to spend more time on the clients who genuinely need to talk to someone.

The barrier to adding online booking is lower than most practice owners assume. If your practice management system is relatively current, there’s a reasonable chance a booking widget already exists and simply hasn’t been switched on or connected to your website. That’s a conversation with your software provider, not a project. For practices where it isn’t built in, standalone platforms like Vetstoria and PetDesk integrate with most common systems and can be up and running in days rather than weeks.

One thing worth getting right from the start: control your availability. Online booking doesn’t mean open slates. You decide which appointment types can be self-booked, which time slots are available, and what information gets collected upfront. New client appointments, routine wellness visits and vaccination boosters are natural starting points. Emergencies and complex consults stay on the phone where they belong.

We put off adding online booking for two years because we thought it would create chaos. It didn’t. Within the first month our front desk said it was one of the best changes we’d made. The calls we do get now are the ones that actually need a human. – Marcus T, Practice Manager, Brisbane

Your Most Recent Review Is Older Than Your Coffee Maker

When a potential new client is choosing between two practices they’ve never visited, they’re not only reading your website copy or comparing your service lists. They’re looking at your Google reviews. Not just the star rating. The recency. A practice with 80 reviews and the most recent from 14 months ago loses to a competitor with 30 reviews and one from last week. In the mind of a new client, old reviews mean the practice has either stopped caring or stopped trying.

For most practices, clients are happy with their experience. And the happy ones never think to leave a review, unless someone asks. The right moment is right after a positive visit, while the experience is still fresh. Not three days later when a generic email lands in an inbox they barely check.

The simplest system is also the most effective. Train your front desk team to identify the visits that went well and make a friendly, direct ask before the client leaves. Not a hint. Not a business card slipped into the discharge paperwork. Something genuine: “We’d really appreciate it if you had a moment to leave us a Google review, it makes a real difference when we share them with our team.”

Five new reviews this month signals an active, thriving practice. Ten reviews from two years ago signals the opposite, regardless of what the reviews may say.

I hadn’t really thought about our reviews in a while. Once we got our review requests working again, within a few weeks we had more than enough. – Priya S, Practice Owner, New Jersey

The Growth Opportunity Lurking in Your PIMS

While visit numbers are sliding industry-wide, most practices are sitting on an asset they haven’t touched in months, sometimes years. Your practice management system contains the names, contact details and pet histories of every client who has ever walked through your door. Some of them haven’t been back in over twelve months. That list is the cheapest growth opportunity available to you right now, and it requires no advertising budget, no new technology and no outside help to act on.

Lapsed clients are not lost clients. The data suggests that visits are down partly because pet owners are stretching the time between appointments, not because they’ve abandoned veterinary care entirely. Many of them simply haven’t had a reason to come back yet. A timely, personal outreach, one that references their pet by name and acknowledges the specific care that’s overdue, is often all it takes to get them back through the door.

Most practice management systems can generate a lapsed client report in minutes. Filter for clients with no visit in the last 12 to 18 months, then segment by pet type, age and last service. A ten year old cat whose last visit was 14 months ago is a very different conversation to a two year old dog overdue for boosters. The message should reflect that. A generic “we miss you” email to your entire lapsed list will get ignored. A message that says “Mango is due for her senior wellness check and we wanted to make sure she’s doing well” will get opened.

Start with your top 50. Not the whole list, just 50. Personalise each outreach as much as your system allows, keep the tone warm and focused on the pet’s welfare rather than the appointment, and see what comes back. The response rate from a well-targeted, highly personalised lapsed client campaign well outperforms any any effort to attract brand new clients, at a fraction of the cost.

We had somehow stopped emailing lapsed clients. We started again last spring, just focused on senior pets that were overdue. Honestly the response surprised us. A lot of those owners were just waiting to be reminded. – Tonya R, Practice Manager, Manchester

Closing Thoughts…

This Is Not a Marketing Problem. It’s a Housekeeping Problem.

None of what’s covered here requires a marketing agency, a consultant, or a budget conversation with your accountant. What it requires is an honest look at the experience your practice is delivering before a client ever meets your team, and a willingness to fix the things that have been quietly leaking revenue while you were focused on everything else inside the building.

The practices pulling ahead right now are not necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets or the flashiest websites. They’re the ones who picked up the phone, ran the lapsed client report, asked for the Google review, and switched on the booking widget that was sitting dormant in their practice management system. Small moves, done this week, that compound over months. Yes, there’s a bigger conversation to be had about building additional growth proactively: new clients, new channels, new strategies. But that conversation will start from a much stronger position once the leaks are fixed. Start with these. Start this week.

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