CUSTOMER STORY ·
Novel Vet
How Novel Vet Triples Veterinary Output With a Technician-Led Model on Vetspire
Novel Vet opened in Burlington, Ontario on April 11, 2025 with eight people on staff, and within eighteen months it had grown to thirty, with revenue climbing from zero to $2.5 million in the first year and $4 million to $5 million projected for the next.
What Dr. Brendon Laing, co-founder and Chief Veterinary Officer, set out to build was a clinic where the quality of the care and the cost of the care did not have to trade against each other.
The cost of veterinary care has outpaced inflation by 2x over the last five to ten years. Novel Vet's answer was to rethink the shape of the visit itself. A membership replaces the examination fee and gives clients unlimited access to the medical team.
Veterinary technicians lead most appointments, while veterinarians oversee from the treatment area. Clients get the same time with a trained medical professional and save an average of 10% to 40% on their bill. The practice, meanwhile, gets three times the veterinary output.
"Novel Vet is a unique experiment of what veterinary medicine can be. We set out to do things a little bit differently."
— Dr. Brendon Laing, Co-founder and Chief Veterinary Officer, Novel Vet
To keep an operating model like that running successfully, you need a platform that keeps up with it. Brendon has been using Vetspire since 2018, and Novel Vet has run on it since the day it opened.
Novel Vet is the newest chapter in a relationship that goes back to 2018. Every clinic Brendon has opened or taken on since then has ended up running on Vetspire, and each move has been straightforward enough that it never became a reason to hesitate.
- First clinic moved onto Vetspire in 2018. Brendon moved his first clinic onto Vetspire from his original platform, Avimark. Vetspire gave him two things the platforms he had worked with before had not: a user friendly interface his team could actually read, and a powerful open API he knew he would want to grow into.
- All roads lead back to Vetspire. When he opened his third practice, Brendon thought he would try something different and went with ezyVet. He regretted it almost immediately and moved that clinic onto Vetspire as well.
- A new operating model, built with Vetspire at the core. By 2025 Brendon was designing a clinic from the ground up around speed and efficiency, and Novel Vet launched on April 11, 2025 with Vetspire at the centre of it.
Part of what has made each of those moves so seamless is how quickly teams pick the platform up.
"I gave the team a grand total of zero hours of training, and they did great."
— Dr. Brendon Laing, Co-founder and Chief Veterinary Officer, Novel Vet
That held true across every conversion, and it holds for locums too. Relief veterinarians who come in for a single shift are working in the platform the same day, without anyone having to stop and teach them.
Building an Operating Model Software Could Keep Up With
Care Costs Rising Faster Than Families Can Follow
Over the last five to ten years the cost of veterinary care has outpaced inflation by 2x, and for a lot of households that has started to turn pet ownership into something closer to a luxury than a given. Brendon's view is that the bond between people and their animals is too important to be priced that way, which is why Novel Vet was designed around a third position: the same quality of care and the same time with a trained medical professional, at a price more families can carry.
"Cost of care has outpaced inflation by 2x over the last five to ten years, and it's becoming unsustainable for a lot of pet owners. Pet ownership is becoming more of a luxury item as opposed to a right."
— Dr. Brendon Laing, Co-founder and Chief Veterinary Officer, Novel Vet
Getting there meant rethinking who leads the appointment, and that only works if scheduling, records, and clinical oversight hold together without friction.
Too Many Systems, Each One Solving a Problem and Adding Another
Most practices end up running the day across a stack of separate tools, with client communications in one place, the medical record in another, and online scheduling bought from a third party and bolted on top. Every one of them is brought in to solve something real, and every one of them quietly adds work of its own, because someone still has to carry information from one system into the next. At the pace Novel Vet moves, that kind of friction compounds quickly.
"If you can find a piece of technology that increases your ability to communicate with customers and decreases the workload on your staff, that's a net win."
— Dr. Brendon Laing, Co-founder and Chief Veterinary Officer, Novel Vet
Six Visits an Hour, and the Records That Come With Them
With Novel Vet's operating model, the location sees around 60 patients a day with appointments running 30 minutes, and a single veterinarian oversees three registered veterinary technicians at six visits an hour. That means reading and signing off on records written by other people all day long, while roughly 35 new clients arrive every week, most of them carrying histories from a previous practice that can run to hundreds of pages.
Care at Novel Vet is also designed to move between people, so a pet is unlikely to see the same technician twice or have the same veterinarian overseeing it, which makes it all the more important that whatever happened at the last visit is legible to whoever picks it up next.
One Platform at the Heart of the Clinic
Brendon's advice to anyone shopping for a practice management system is to set the promises aside and look at what a platform actually fixes on day one.
"Focus on one to three pain points that a different PIMS can solve for immediately. Everyone right now is going to be promising the moon, because they feel like they can create anything. What matters is what you can solve for today."
— Dr. Brendon Laing, Co-founder and Chief Veterinary Officer, Novel Vet
Vetspire has been solving his since the beginning.
Everything in One Place
With Vetspire at the heart of Brendon's operations, his staff can email or text a client and have that exchange land in the medical record automatically. Everything the team needs lives in one system, with no third party app to open and nothing to copy and paste between windows. Every message sits in the record, so the whole household gets the same information and the team doesn't have to repeat the same call twice.
Because every message sits in the record, whoever picks up a case next can see exactly what the client was told, which matters at a clinic where a pet rarely sees the same team member twice.
Vetspire being cloud based also gives Brendon full visibility into any of his clinics from any place at any time, which is worth real hours to him given the roughly three hours a day he spends driving between locations. It does the same for his medical team, who are not tied to a terminal in the building to finish their records.
"It's the operational system of the clinic. You need a PIMS at the heart of what you do, for every aspect of the job, from scheduling appointments to completing them, to completing the medical records, reporting the diagnostics, running the analytics."
— Dr. Brendon Laing, Co-founder and Chief Veterinary Officer, Novel Vet
AI Built Into the Platform, Not Added On Top
When AI scribes started appearing, Brendon could see that running one alongside the practice management system would recreate the problem clinics already know well, another disconnected tool with information being carried in and out of it by hand. That is a large part of why Vetspire fits the way it does, because the AI scribe and the rest of the AI suite are built into the product itself rather than bolted onto the side of it.
With Vetspire's AI suite, every appointment at Novel Vet is transcribed so the registered veterinary technician can review the record and pass it to the overseeing veterinarian without rebuilding it from scratch.
The clinical assistant summarises the patient and answers questions against that summary, which is what allows care to move between people without anything getting lost on the way.
And when a new client arrives carrying hundreds of pages of history from a previous practice, the AI PDF summarizer ingests the file so the team can question the record rather than read it, which is often the difference between a 30 minute appointment that works and one that runs out of time.
"In a startup where we get 35 new clients a week, being able to go through pages and pages and pages of previous medical records and have the ability to Q&A against them is super helpful. Our appointments are 30 minutes, so any minute of savings is helpful."
— Dr. Brendon Laing, Co-founder and Chief Veterinary Officer, Novel Vet
For Brendon, that integration is not a nice-to-have but a condition of keeping pace with where the profession is heading.
"AI adoption has been the fastest change in the industry that we've seen in a long time. Finding a PIMS that is AI forward is really important, and Vetspire is definitely one of those."
— Dr. Brendon Laing, Co-founder and Chief Veterinary Officer, Novel Vet
Open Access to the Clinic's Own Data
The other thing that drew Brendon to Vetspire in 2018, long before he had a use for it, was the open API. Practices on Vetspire have access to their own data, which means a group that wants to query it, report on it differently, or connect a tool of its own choosing is able to do that rather than wait for the platform to get there first. Third party vendors come through API agreements and vetting, so that access stays governed and practice data stays protected.
For a clinic built around an operating model nobody else is running, that has mattered.
Novel Vet has been able to shape the platform around the way it works instead of the other way around.
An Operating Model That Holds at Speed
Zero to $2.5 Million in Year One
Novel Vet opened with eight people and realised on the first day that it needed more, and it has been hiring ever since, reaching thirty staff inside eighteen months. Revenue followed the same curve, going from zero to $2.5 million in the first year with $4 million to $5 million projected for the next. Clients, meanwhile, save an average of 10% to 40% on their vet bill, with no reduction in the quality of the care they receive.
Documentation That Keeps Pace With the Schedule
At six visits an hour per veterinarian, the operating model only works if records are finished alongside the appointments rather than piling up behind them, and AI inside the record is what makes that possible.
"It's instrumental. If we didn't have that, we'd have to throttle our model. For sure we'd have to add in more blocks for medical record time, whereas we don't currently do that."
— Dr. Brendon Laing, Co-founder and Chief Veterinary Officer, Novel Vet
At Novel Vet's volume even small savings compound quickly, and the AI scribe on its own hands the clinic back around an hour a day before any of the other AI features are counted.
"At Novel Vet we're seeing 60 patients a day. If it's a minute per record, that's an hour a day of someone's time. For us, the scale of our operation makes it matter."
— Dr. Brendon Laing, Co-founder and Chief Veterinary Officer, Novel Vet
Appointments Captured Outside Clinic Hours
Novel Vet is open twelve hours a day, every day of the year, and online scheduling picks up what falls outside even that, with appointments booked every week in the hours the doors are closed. A worried owner at ten at night can hold a morning slot straight away, which means the pet is seen by the team that already knows it and already has its history.
Looking Ahead
Novel Vet is still early and still growing, and Brendon and his team keep finding new things to do with the platform underneath them. Eight years in, the two companies are still building together.
Building a Practice Model Your Software Can't Keep Up With?
Novel Vet runs six visits an hour per veterinarian, with technicians leading appointments and records finished on time. Book a demo to see what Vetspire could support in your practice.