How private equity consolidators can unlock exponential growth.

Private equity groups operating as consolidators have reshaped many healthcare service verticals. The roll-up playbook is well established — acquire a strong platform company, integrate additional smaller practices, centralize administration, streamline operations and extract value through scale. Once operational efficiency is achieved, focus often turns to organic revenue growth from the existing patient or customer base. This model works well and will continue to deliver meaningful ROI.

But many consolidators may be leaving a major opportunity untapped — attracting new patients and customers at scale, complementing revenue optimization from existing patients.

Operational excellence and revenue optimization are foundational, but demand generation is increasingly the differentiator between a roll-up that thrives and one that plateaus. In a competitive landscape, providers must do more than run efficiently — they must grow smarter, attracting new patients while delivering more services to existing ones.

Private equity teams can integrate strategies that support both organic growth as well as new patient acquisition across their portfolio companies.

A unified CRM is far more than an administrative tool, it is the nerve center for growth across a consolidated portfolio. Many practices, even high-performing ones, operate with fragmented or outdated systems, making it difficult to see the full picture of patient behavior and value. Without visibility, growth initiatives are guesswork, and campaigns often fail to deliver predictable results.

Centralizing patient outreach information across locations helps to streamline operations while providing actionable insights into behaviors, referral patterns and engagement. This sets the stage for precision marketing, informed business decisions and measurable ROI. A CRM is not merely a database — it is the backbone of a scalable growth program supporting both existing and new patients alike.

Consolidation often emphasizes operational, process and financial efficiency, while messaging and communications are treated as secondary concerns. Yet in consumer-facing healthcare services, clarity and consistency in communication can directly influence whether a patient chooses one practice over another. Without a coordinated messaging strategy, marketing efforts may be fragmented and collective equity diluted.

A portfolio-wide communications framework ensures every practice speaks with a unified voice, reinforcing trust, credibility and recognition in the marketplace. It also allows local tailoring while maintaining overall messaging integrity, creating a cohesive network that resonates with patients.

A unified framework ensures —

• Consistent value proposition across all practices
• Standardized patient education content across channels (email, SMS, social, web)
• Clear and compliant messaging for promotions, reminders and care follow-ups
• Stronger community presence and increasing awareness of service options

The framework doesn’t require every practice to look identical nor even be the same brand — but it should ensure every practice sounds and operates like part of a well-run, cohesive and trustworthy network. After all this collective approach, and the resulting value, will become an important lever for higher multiples when the time comes to exit.

Manual marketing and traditional outreach are no longer sufficient in today’s competitive care landscape. Marketing automation transforms engagement, enabling personalized, timely and scalable communications that would be impossible to manage manually.

For a consolidator, the advantage is exponential. Once workflows are designed and proven at one location, they can be replicated across the portfolio, driving consistent growth without proportional increases in overhead. Automation also delivers measurable insights, so leadership knows exactly what initiatives are driving results.

Marketing automation can support —

• Outreach campaigns (local SEO, targeted ads, geofencing), to help generate new interest consistently
• Lifecycle campaigns to promote new services or announce new locations available
• Reactivation campaigns to bring back dormant patients
• Real-time attribution dashboards show exactly what is and isn’t working

Once perfected, these workflows become a growth kit for all locations, scaling demand generation to drive growth beyond organic efforts.

Ultimately, the goal of a private equity consolidator is to create a business more valuable at exit than at acquisition. Operational efficiency and revenue optimization from existing patients lay the foundation, but expanding the patient base is the lever that differentiates scale and value.

Buyers increasingly value networks that demonstrate both operational discipline and a proactive, data-driven demand generation engine. By integrating new patient acquisition strategies into the operating model, PEGs create a predictable, scalable growth story that positions their holdings for a compelling business narrative and ultimately, higher valuations at exit.

Many consolidators focus heavily on extracting more revenue from existing patients, but this approach eventually hits a ceiling. Sustainable growth requires expanding the top of the funnel as well, attracting new patients and customers who become long-term revenue drivers. This is especially critical in saturated sectors like eye care along with veterinary services and equine care, where word-of-mouth has historically dominated.

A proactive acquisition strategy enables practices to reach untapped audiences, mitigate competitive pressures and introduce additional services to a broader patient base. New patient growth drives compounding revenue, greater resilience against market shifts and ultimately, a key objective — higher exit multiples.