Once upon a time, buying a dental practice was a rite of passage that almost all dentist graduates went through after a few short years in the workforce. In more recent years however, statistics have shown that being an employee/contractor/non-owner dentist for life is a growing choice for dental graduates. There are many reasons that people give for this trend, including:
There comes a time for most successful practice owners when they get to a level of comfort with their first practice, and start to contemplate starting or buying a second practice.
Retirement is often thought of as an event, a date on the calendar, a threshold that you cross one day into a new phase of life. Making a person’s profession or retirement an “all in or all out” proposition like this makes it a big deal. It means that people looking at retirement need to:
“Acting like an ostrich with its head in the sand” has become a well-known metaphor for human avoidance behaviour. It is used describe a person who intentionally ignores facts, hoping that simply denying the existence of a problem will make it go away.
For many contracted dentists, their planned path to ownership involves the buy-in or buy-out of the practice they are already working in. It should be the ideal buy-in scenario… They have effectively taken the practice for the equivalent of a test drive and know it inside-out, so the purchase involves far less risk than buying any other practice. They already know, hopefully get on with, and are accepted by patients and staff; they know the quality of the equipment, and there is a mutual respect with the vendor.