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.
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“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:
Many teachers believe that the best way to engage students in a subject is by using relatable metaphors. We make sense of new information by forging connections to something we already know. In that spirit, this article on exit planning uses subject matter that engages dentists like no other….no, not clinical dentistry…GOLF!
On August 6, 2018, the “Queen of Soul” Aretha Franklin died at aged 76, after a lengthy battle with cancer. Not married, Franklin left behind four sons, aged between 48 to 63, a long-term de facto partner, an estate worth about $80 million…and no will.
When my grandfather was in his early 80s, he was driving back from his regular morning swim at a friend’s pool at 630am when the police pulled him over. They said that he had been driving erratically and they had been trying to get his attention with their sirens for a few blocks. The police took him home in the back of the police car and that was the end of his driving career. Looking back at the situation, I think the whole family was aware of the incremental degradation of his faculties over the previous few years, and perhaps there should have been an earlier intervention. It was lucky, under the circumstances, that no one was hurt by his poor driving skills in his last few years behind the wheel.
