20 Aug 2025
Before Richard Sanderson even qualified as a veterinary surgeon, he understood the value of good customer service. So, when he set up Sanderson Vet in 2018, he created a practice with the needs of its clients at its core, as VBJ discovered when we paid a visit to Peninsula Vet Referrals last month…
Staff: full-time vets 6 • registered veterinary nurses 15 • practice administrators 4
Fees: initial consult £47 • follow-up £42
When Richard Sanderson launched his own business, he did so with little money, very few resources and barely any space. Having saved £45,000 capital working as a locum, Richard started out as a mobile vet with just an operating theatre located in a small building tucked among a row of shops in Pensby on the outskirts of Heswall.
But from those humble beginnings, Sanderson Vet has grown and grown and now offers a full range of first opinion services and a busy multi-discipline referral service, while a 24-hour hospital site opened under the Peninsula Vet Referrals brand in 2022. The business now employs a team of more than 40 and, tellingly, the roster includes no less than five patient care advisors. This is clearly a business that understands the importance of looking after people, something Richard learned years before his career as a vet began.
He said: “My dad was a safety officer at Wolves FC and when I was at vet school in Liverpool, he suggested a job stewarding at Liverpool FC on match days. Working in that environment really instilled the importance of looking after people and so when I found a lady lost outside the ground as she’d lost her car, I offered to find it for her.
“So, she gave me her keys and I found her car, a rather fancy Range Rover, and took the lady to her vehicle and thought no more of it. But the next week I was called into the manager’s office where I found manager and club captain, along with the lady I had helped and her husband, who turned out to be Liverpool’s star midfielder [and now boss of Real Madrid] Xabi Alonso.
“Suffice to say they were very pleased with how I looked after Mr Alonso’s wife, and I was given a new – much better paid – job in the executive lounge, which effectively paid for me to go through vet school.
“So, I knew the value of going that extra mile and so when I opened, looking after people was always going be central its success.”
And successful it has been, with Sanderson Vet and, more particularly, Peninsula Vet Referrals, attracting clients from across the country while the business as a whole now turns over more than £3.5 million per year.
But it was never Richard’s plan to take over the world. Having started work as a farm animal vet, Richard then took a job at a very busy small animal practice, where he got the opportunity to perform a lot of surgery under cost-constrained conditions. A soft tissue surgeon by trade, he then went on to work at Chestergates, where he was able to cut his teeth with more complex surgeries, an experience that meant when the time came to open his own practice, he was confident of handling most things that came his way.
This approach clearly suited local pet owners who wanted a practice that could handle as much as possible in-house. This meant that, even in the early days, the practice was carrying out complicated surgeries such as hip replacements, adrenalectomy’s and thoracotomy surgeries.
Richard added: “Within a couple of years the first opinion side had expanded at the site in Pensby, but we were seeing more and more referrals and had even taken a few referrals for craniotomy brain surgery. And really that’s when it started to feel like the referral side of things needed to be under a separate entity. Because my attitude is perhaps a bit more old-school, I felt my practice should be able to handle most things and because we were charging a lot less to do it, our reputation began to grow.
“We have always catered for those pet owners who maybe couldn’t afford to take their pet to a referral centre to see a specialist with a big reputation – so they came to me as we were offering affordable, middle-ground. And in 2022 we went for it and opened Peninsula Vet Referrals in a purpose-built (3,500sq ft) hospital just behind the original first opinion site.”
The GP practice now occupies 1,700sq ft and boasts three consult rooms, separate dog and cat waiting areas, kennels, isolation, prep room and theatre. The admin office is two doors up as Richard wanted these functions taken away from the main clinic, while the clinicians’ offices and a large CPD space are located upstairs. Two doors further down, another former retail unit houses the main reception for the referral business and behind this sits the purpose-built referral hospital itself, which cost approximately £1,000,000 to build.
This two-storey building boasts a large operating theatre, dental suite for referral dentistry, CT, scopes, x-ray, cattery, kennels and a fully equipped lab.
Peninsula Vet Referrals now offers referrals in internal medicine, dentistry, oncology, neurology, orthopaedics and soft tissue surgery with Richard still keeping his hand in across the board.
He said: “And I still think in the vet world the very best clinicians have the ability not to necessarily do everything, but to understand across a breadth of the discipline. So, I’m kind of the link between our departments and I now don’t really see myself as a soft tissue surgeon like I used to as I do some spinal surgery, I’ve done some craniotomies, and I help out in the medicine department when our specialist – Rebecca Littler – is on holiday. It might seem like a slightly old-fashioned approach, but that’s how it used to be.”
One of the Richard’s guiding principles is that good veterinary care should not just be for those with deep pockets, and he has developed his practice to ensure the team is able to provide the very best for all its clients.
This is reflected in the pricing. Last month, the practice successfully dealt with a dog with lymphoma for just £2,500 when, according to the client, the lowest quote from other specialist centres had been £7,000. Another case involved a diaphragmatic hernia which had been estimated elsewhere at £8,000 but was resolved for just £1,900 at Peninsula Vet Referrals.
Such competitive pricing has begun to attract clients from across the UK, but Richard and his team still make money on those margins, as he explained.
“We are able to charge those sorts of prices because of the efficiencies we can get and that is due to the way we are set up.
“We’re not going to say we’re the very best orthopaedic surgeons in the world, and that’s everything/all that we are, but what we are going to have is really good, advanced practitioners in orthopaedics with huge experience, and someone like Tom [Gilding] brings that. And then we’re going to have really experienced, really well qualified diplomate medics in other disciplines, so we’ve kind of brought together what I think is the very best of the quality of referral work and the very best of the efficiency of the GP work, and then created this entity that is the stalk of a really good quality first opinion practice, which can do everything, right through to the dedicated referral service with the some of the best clinicians – it is all just very cohesive.”
The fact the referral vets and the first opinion vets share an office in the admin building has also created an excellent synergy within the practice and provides a perfect environment for developing new skills in a supportive clinical environment.
Another operational synergy exists between the referral business and the out-of-hours service, which, for many practices, can be something of a loss leader.
But the volume of referral cases that require hospitalisation around the clock means the out-of-hours service – which Sanderson Vet also provides to other practices – is effectively subsidised by the referral arm.
This has proved popular with clients who value continuity of care and good value, something they don’t always get from the specialist out-of-hours providers. What all this means is that Sanderson Vet and Peninsula Vet Referrals are able to provide the kind of wraparound care and continuity that many clients want.
Richard said: “In the old days, and I’m talking 16 years ago when I first qualified, your local vet did everything from a broken leg through to your dog with vomiting, and that was your vet who looked after you.
“And it was only in the exceptional circumstance where something was incredibly complicated that you got referred. And then what I saw happening over the past 10 years was this sort of wheel and spoke system the corporates were trying to set up, which was everything should be referred if it’s beyond a cough or a single bout of vomiting.
“And I don’t think the clients want that. I think clients still want their local vet to do as much as they can. So, our original aspiration was, if we want to set up a first opinion clinic whereby if your dog fractures their leg, you don’t have to go anywhere, and if the dog needs hospitalising, you don’t have to go anywhere. And that was why the mantra – better quality care at an affordable level and the very best care coupled with the very best customer service – and our client base seems to really value that.”
And it is hard to argue with that as Sanderson Vet has just been voted Best UK Vet 2025 at the national BestUKVets Awards after receiving the most four and five-star online reviews during the past 12 months.
But despite this success, the practice is not standing still, and Richard has more plans to continue investing, even if the financial returns are not always spectacular.
He said: “My next big thing is to get MRI, that’s the next big thing we want to install. It’s the only thing we don’t have, even if it’s a piece of equipment that I don’t think we will ever make pay for itself. I don’t think we’ll ever make it profitable, but it will make a difference to a small number of cases, and it will mean we can provide an even more complete service for our clients.
“Money has never been a big driver for me and as long as we’re turning over enough money to keep delivering the highest level of care and keep investing in kit, I’m good.”
