Hunt Club vs Bolster for Multi-Hospital Veterinary Groups

Associate veterinarians and veterinary technicians are recruited through clinical staffing channels built specifically for that labor market, which is currently tight enough that many groups treat it as their single biggest operating constraint, and neither Hunt Club nor Bolster is built to solve that particular shortage. This search covers the CEO, COO or CFO who runs integration, finance and growth strategy across hospitals, not the clinical team delivering care inside them. Even when a DVM shortage is the pressure driving urgency around this executive hire, keep the two searches distinct so each one gets evaluated against the right criteria instead of a blended, muddled brief that ends up serving neither hiring need well. Mixing the two together also tends to produce a compensation range that fits neither market accurately.

A candidate's resume might list an impressive number of hospitals under their prior leadership, but that number says little about whether they've actually run a difficult integration: consolidating three different practice management systems into one, standardizing inventory purchasing across locations that each had their own vendor relationships, or rebuilding a shared culture after an acquisition that a hospital's long-tenured staff initially resented. Ask directly for a specific integration that went poorly at first, and how the candidate turned it around, rather than only the smooth successes that make it onto a highlight reel. The strongest candidates tend to volunteer the rough parts of an integration unprompted, since they know a founder or board evaluating them will find those details eventually anyway.

Ask candidates whether they personally ran integration work like this:

• Consolidating several different practice management systems into one shared platform across acquired hospitals.
• Standardizing inventory purchasing across locations that each had their own vendor relationships.
• Rebuilding a shared culture while preserving each hospital's local reputation and client relationships.
• Rebuilding staff trust at an acquired hospital by month three, not just closing the transaction.

A resume can list how many hospital acquisitions a candidate touched. It can't tell you whether staff at those hospitals trusted the new leadership by month three or were still quietly job hunting. A former colleague who watched that trust get rebuilt, or watched it fail to rebuild, can tell you which outcome to expect. Hunt Club's referral sourcing reaches those colleagues directly, and on an integration-heavy search like this, that detail matters more than deal count ever will.

If your integration leader departs mid-rollout across several recently acquired hospitals, waiting months for a permanent hire risks losing the momentum and staff trust that integration work depends on most heavily in its early stages. Bolster's marketplace model, spanning fractional and interim placement, can put an experienced veterinary operator into the seat quickly enough to keep integration moving while a longer, more deliberate search runs for the permanent leader behind it. That continuity matters most in the first few months after each new hospital joins the group, when staff are still forming their opinion of the parent company.

A new leader eager to show results sometimes forces identical protocols, pricing and branding across every hospital immediately after acquisition, without accounting for the local reputation and client relationships that made each hospital valuable to acquire in the first place. That approach tends to trigger client and staff attrition that erases the financial case for the acquisition. Ask candidates how they've sequenced standardization deliberately, keeping what worked locally while still building shared infrastructure underneath it, and listen for whether they can name something they deliberately chose not to standardize.

A nonexecutive hire runs $5,475 on average; an executive hire runs more than six times that, $35,879¹, and proven multi-hospital integration experience is worth paying toward the higher end for, given how directly it protects the returns on every acquisition still ahead of you. A leader who can't rebuild trust at an acquired hospital puts that return at risk in a way no operations metric catches until it's already showing up in doctor and technician turnover.