Ensunet helps PE-backed veterinary health system grow from three locations… to eleven

IT support from initial tech strategy through implementation helps local enterprise go national—and quadruple in size—in just 17 months

There’s a lot more than meets the eye at a veterinary specialty hospital. Supporting all of the doctors and support staff are layers of technology: everything from email and phone systems to scanning and storage of medical image files.

So when a regional veterinary health system, backed by a private equity (PE) group and operating three locations, sought to expand, they reached out to Ensunet.

The project wasn’t that wide-ranging at the outset; the client’s CFO initially engaged Ensunet solely to map out the technology strategy for their ERP (enterprise resource planning) platform and transition their on-premises data storage to a cloud-based solution. These were sorely needed at the time; to put things in perspective, this future nationwide veterinary powerhouse was still running local copies of QuickBooks.

As part of this initial engagement, Ensunet drafted and ran the RFPs (requests for proposals), thus vetting, screening, and negotiating with multiple vendors in order to secure the best-value solution for our client, based on the vendors’ capabilities, pricing, and timing to implement.

History repeats itself

Based on our standout performance with the tech-roadmap/ERP project, the client expanded Ensunet’s role, as they sought to expand their own footprint. In other words, they tapped Ensunet for our core value-add: IT support in the hyper-specialized world of mergers and acquisitions or M&A.

“It’s a familiar pattern by now,” notes Ensunet Founder and CEO Paul Robinson. “A client brings us in for a crucial yet modest-scale project, and once we hit it out of the park—as we always do—they naturally tap us for ongoing IT planning and implementation as they acquire more businesses.”

And that’s exactly what happened here. Just nine months after initially engaging Ensunet, the client asked us to help in their bold acquisition of not one, but three additional hospitals on the other side of the country. The transition needed to be seamless, since lives (furry ones, at that) were at stake.

A two-phase approach

Ensunet helped with the sign-to-close phase of this acquisition, helping with the drafting of key portions of the Letter of Intent (LOI) to acquire, and managing the tech side of the crucial TSA or Transition Services Agreement, during which time Ensunet would help the newly-acquired facilities and people (and even vendors) to seamlessly disengage from the previous owner’s systems, and migrate to those of the new parent company.

Thus the second phase of this engagement: Post-close value-creation. “That’s our specialty at Ensunet,” notes Robinson. “Acquirers want to maximize deal value from Day One; we help them do just that.”

The disparate systems and technologies supported by Ensunet during this phase is wide-ranging, and includes:

• The ERP—in this case, the RFP winner was Sage Intacct
• Cloud-based data warehouse, which provided executives with real-time business intelligence (BI) analytics
• The time-and-expense (T&E) system
• All-new automation for the Accounts Payable or AP system—a huge time- and expense-saver across the enterprise
• Implementation and migration to Office 365
• Wireless network, including seamless hand-off from the old networks to the new ones
• File-share transfers to the AWS cloud (including those medical-image scans noted earlier)
• Transitioning all phone systems from the old to the new
• Cybersecurity focus to mitigate risks

Just the beginning

Given the success of these first two acquisitions (Ensunet had provided our client with an Interim CIO to manage the project), the client geared up for even more. They soon added another two locations—again, geographically distant—with more than 250 employees to support.

By this time, the platform which Ensunet had developed—and the proven roadmap for standing up new infrastructure, streamlining IT processes, and leveraging cloud-based systems to reduce costs amid growth—helped the client to keep successfully growing via acquisition.

In all, Ensunet played a vital role in helping this client grow from three veterinary hospitals to eleven, in four states, effectively quadrupling in size, in less than two years.

San Diego-based Ensunet Technology Group is a specialist in IT for mergers and acquisitions, with billions of dollars in supported acquisition activity—from pre-merger IT due diligence through post-merger integration or PMI—to our credit. If you’re looking to maximize deal value through the power of IT, contact us for a complimentary consultation with one of our friendly subject-matter experts.