How to Maximize Your Practice Value at Exit

Let’s face it, no dentist lives forever. While you may not be thinking about selling your practice today, there will come a time in the future to consider it. The question then becomes - how do you achieve the best value for you and your family.

One important factor to consider is who will be the buyer. Unless you have been living under a rock for the past decade, then you are surely aware of the disruptive presence of the DSO buyer. DSOs have profoundly increased the dollars paid to dentists at time of sale, often 2-4 times the amounts traditionally paid.

Other options include selling to an associate already in the practice or to a dentist outside the practice in an arm’s length transaction.

Each of those three options can be a good fit under a particular set of circumstances, and it would serve you well to understand those differences. What is essential to know is the common factor they all share is your practice’s profitability will determine your practice’s ultimate value. The roadmap is clear, no matter the eventual buyer. Increase profitability and you increase value.

There are only three ways to grow the profitability of your practice:

• Get more patients
• Increase the value of the patients by increasing the value of the services provided
• Increase the frequency of their visits over time (patient retention)

While it is important to focus on all three strategies and the sub elements within each, the second strategy is perhaps the most easily achieved because it focuses on the patients you already have and your existing new patient flow. The Sell More Implants program described on this website is a superb example of how to easily achieve greater profitability, and thus greater practice value.