Articles

Dental business partnerships or equity associateships can have huge advantages when everyone is getting along. They usually result in access to greater funds, skills, resources and an ability to share costs. However, even the most successful among them have one big downside…individual exit-planning. One partner will often lose interest, have personal issues to attend to, or just simply want to sell earlier than the other.

I watched him successfully fight this illness. He was 65 and had worked his heart out, working long hours his entire life. I was 52 and it made me look at things and evaluate how I wanted to spend the next 10 years. At the same time, I wanted to be able to be there for my parents in Perth. My mother needed to go into aged care and my father was going to put the family home on the market. My brother and sister were there, but I wanted to be there to help them. I decided that if I sold, I could have a real work-life balance. I could be there for my family and, with a good balance, might be happy to work part-time until I’m 70-75.

On June 3rd 2016 the world lost one of its most admired sports heroes, when Muhammad Ali passed away. Ali will no-doubt go down in history as an inspiring figure. As an athlete, he was an Olympic Gold Medallist and ranked by most (and most notably by himself) as boxing’s greatest of all time. As an activist, he was probably the most high-profile and well-known conscientious objector to the Vietnam War. As a sports personality, he was renowned for his eloquence, and was near-universally loved.

I’m 63 years old, and running a business these days involves a lot of paperwork. I was and am still very keen on dentistry, but I just lost the get-up-and-go for running the business. I was getting a bit over it – I had young dentists working for me who were earning a similar amount, and get to take it all home. Then I would look at my book with all these expenses. So I called Simon one day to have a conversation about selling.

When a new owner buys an existing business, the staff will often play a crucial role in ensuring a smooth transition. In many ways, the staff are more important to the owners than ever before. While the new owners are still getting to know the area, practice and patients, the staff:

When a dental practice owner is looking for ways to grow their business, they usually look in a few predictable places: advertising, marketing, new clinical services, treatment presentation. All of these can, of course, have degrees of success, depending upon how well they are executed. However, there is another avenue with a great success rate that is open to practices, that is rarely explored…a “practice merger.”

I called Practice Sale Search and said I wanted to sell. Simon came, saw and liked my practice and was excited to get started. I left all the hard work to him - whenever he or Kevin (from Practice Sale Search) rang and said they had someone to show through, I made the surgery available. The whole process was very painless.

In mid-2015, the Australian dental profession and the public-at-large were rightly outraged at the news that an unlicensed backyard dental practice had operated in Meadow Heights, Victoria for more than a decade.

Dentists often put off selling their practices because they are concerned about life after dentistry. What will they do with all those extra hours; how will they cope with leaving behind the identity that has defined them for decades?

I wasn’t really ready to retire when I put the practice on the market, thinking it might take a few years to sell. I’m 68 years of age and can’t go on practicing forever. In 6 weeks I’m off to Antarctica to do an ultra-marathon. I have always been a marathon runner, even while I was running practices, but I wanted to get into it seriously, which was hard to do with the practice.