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Revenue growth FY 2020 to 2022: 233%
2022 revenue: $10.18 million
In the beginning: When Richard Renschen started MD Architects in 2000, he was mostly designing surgery centers and other locations for human medicine. A few years later, he was playing soccer with a friend who was a veterinary surgeon, and he asked if Renschen could design a veterinary hospital that would be more humanlike in its sophistication.
Since then: In 2005, MD Architects designed its first animal hospital—the VCA Advanced Veterinary Care Center in Fishers at 96th Street and I-69. Today, Renschen’s firm works with at least seven national veterinary groups across the country as well as with individual clients and vets. “The industry is growing, and there’s a limited number of architects that understand veterinary medicine,” he said.
How it’s done: When designing facilities for animals, Renschen said, you have to deal with sound and odor control as well as the durability of certain products. Renschen said he learned how to design veterinary facilities by doing the work. “The projects we do today are much, much better than the jobs we did day one. So it’s just experience.”
Worldwide: MD works around the world—in Aman, Jordan; Singapore; Hong Kong and the U.K. And the business is about to grow: MD is in the process of acquiring a company on the West Coast. It also is opening a new 17,000-square-foot office at Fort Benjamin Harrison—the firm bought the building last year—and will have the whole building.
Expertise: Renschen said MD has relatively little competition—maybe five or six companies are doing the work at the same level as MD. “Any architect can design an animal hospital, but it’s not going to be as good as we can do,” he said. “They won’t understand the limitations for sound and all the specialty information that we know.” That, of course, makes staffing a challenge. “When you’re specialized, you can’t just hire another architect, and they can’t sit at a chair and start working. It takes years to build that knowledge base in the animal health care industry. People call us and hire us because we’re experts in the field. We only have so much capacity, and growth takes time.”•
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