Articles

In Greek mythology, the story of Icarus illustrates the folly of aiming too high.

In May 2000, a relatively unknown chef called Anthony Bourdain decided that he was going to change careers and not run kitchens in New York City anymore. As a final goodbye to his previous career, he wrote a book revealing some things that he felt restaurant patrons should know. The book was called “Kitchen Confidential”; it would become a worldwide best seller and launch his second career as a famous food and travel journalist.

We're really proud of our newest National Account Manager, Lisa Singh, who was recently asked to chat with Jesse Green on his hugely popular - and our favourite - podcast, the Savvy Dentist. Lisa spoke to Jesse about what makes a practice valuable, as well as the future of practice sales, the role of marketing in dentistry, what corporates are looking for in a practice and how to prepare your practice for sale. 

I had become tired of managing the practice, the red tape, the bureaucracy. I wasn’t ready to retire completely, I just wanted to slow down. My daughter was pregnant, and I knew I’d want to be able to spend time with my grandchild. I love my camping and fishing and wanted to do more of it. I had been in Italy on holiday. I came back on the Saturday, ready to go back to work on Monday, and I realised that I didn’t want this anymore. I rang up my financial advisor on the Sunday, and on the Monday I called Simon Palmer at Practice Sale Search.

Dental practice sales involve large sums of money changing hands. Hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars that usually need to be financed by a bank or other lending institution. There are a lot of misconceptions out there about the ease with which a dentist can borrow funds for the purposes of buying a dental practice. Misconceptions that have led to many buyers being overconfident about their proposals and to many solid deals falling apart after much time and effort and thousands of dollars in legal bills. With this in mind, it is important that buyers and sellers alike both have a solid understanding of what is involved in dental practice finance. Understanding how a financier looks at a buyer, vendor and practice, and what deals they will and won’t lend for, can save a lot of wasted time, energy and expense along the way.

The immediate transition was so much easier because Simon had found the right buyer. It makes a huge difference to know that your patients are in safe hands and you can genuinely be confident in recommending your successor... People think of retirement as the end, but for me it has been the start of a new journey. Once I had sold, my head was in a completely new space.

“Putting all your eggs in one basket” is a well-known metaphor for a situation where someone is depending completely on just one idea, plan, or person, to the extent that they have no other option if things go wrong. There is no “Plan B”. It is usually used to describe someone who is being overly confident with a singular path and engaging in unnecessarily risky behaviour. The inference being, that if all of your eggs were in one container, and that container was damaged, you might lose all of your eggs in one quick and painful moment.

 When you’ve bought a practice off another dentist, it will always be a little nerve-racking to step into the old owner’s shoes. Both the patients and staff are used to one way of doing things and, as the new owner, you’re bound to have new ideas. It feels like all eyes are on you, to see if you are going to do things differently. At this stressful time, one of the hardest tests that a buying dentist will face is if they start seeing the existing patient base and see:

A few years ago I went to the US on a holiday and I picked up a bug while I was away. After nearly dying, I woke up having spent six days on a ventilator. It took a long time before I could even walk. That was a big wake-up call for me. I decided I didn’t want to continue building up the practice. I wanted to sell and concentrate on getting healthy again and doing other projects that I was passionate about.

Thrilled to be asked for comment on this important topic.