When a dentist is thinking about selling their practice, the focus of discussions with their spouses and advisers is usually on financial questions, like: “How much money will I need in order to retire?”. While this is discussed in detail over spreadsheets, with projections and budgets, a more secret, internal question is often plaguing the dentist late at night. Internally, many will be equally concerned with: “What am I if I am not a dentist?” and “What am I going to do with my time?”.
After several decades of turning up to work at their own practice, many dentists simply don’t know themselves without their tools anymore. So much of their lives has been tied up with being a dentist and a practice owner in the community that they can’t picture themselves without those titles. For a dentist in this mindset, selling the practice isn’t just a financial decision, or one based on lifestyle, It is a decision with implications that run much deeper. It is about losing part of their identity and trading the somewhat predictable nature of their current lives for one without form yet.
Many dentists have fearfully described selling their business as being like stepping into a void. They start to catastrophise about what life will be like on the other side of the transaction, and imagine the worst possible scenarios to justify their trepidation. They start to think about the new owner pushing them out the door and into retirement before they are ready. They think about clinical and ethical compromises to beloved staff and patients under someone else’s ownership. A practice owner who has their identity caught up in the practice and thinks their way into these possibilities may find it difficult (if not impossible) to push ahead with a transaction, even if financially it makes sense.
It is important for these dentists to realise that most of the things that they are worried will happen post sale are extremely unlikely, and their probability can be mitigated by a good broker. Most buyers of dental practices:
- Would love for the vendor to stay post sale and phase out of practice over time, at a rate that they are comfortable with. This would make the sale far less risky for them, as it would mean greater patient retention.
- Will treat your team well, because they will appreciate that a good, stable team that works well together is extremely hard to come by.
- Wouldn’t dream of introducing clinical compromises.
The truth of the matter is that the sale of your practice shouldn’t mean the end of being a dentist. If anything, the opposite should be true. Rather than being concerned about a loss of identity post sale, I think most dentists would do well to look at it as regaining their identity as dentists.
Post-sale, most practice owners find that their job description has contracted to just being a dentist. They don’t have to manage staff, HR and recruitment. They don’t have to be a master of marketing. They don’t need to worry about whether the bills are paid, or equipment maintained. All they need to worry about is being a good clinical dentist.
Many ex-owners have confided in us that, once the burdens of ownership were lifted off their shoulders, they regained a passion and love for being a dentist, which had been lost or diminished over the years by the many other responsibilities involved in running their practice. Looking back, the happiest day of their professional lives was when they became a dentist again, instead of being a dentist and a practice owner.
For more articles like this one please click below:
- If I am not a dentist - Who am I?
- Retirement: able, but not ready.
- Leaving a Perfect Legacy: Putting the cart Before the Horse