Articles

Great to see this great article in Bite magazine that we are quoted in

Excited to be featured in the ADA NSW podcast this month.

There is a paradoxical relationship that dental practice owners have with their last few years of ownership. They usually know when they are within a few years of selling. Yet strangely, they behave as if their practice value is set in stone, start to relax, and let a career worth of work be seriously compromised by fatigue, decreasing the practice’s performance, right before it is about to be appraised. For practice owners like this, history can judge the last few years of ownership harshly!

The main difference between being a dentist working in a practice and being a dentist owning a practice is the paperwork! The bottom line is you when you own a practice – you have to make everything great. In the past two years, since I sold, I have noticed I’ll often wake up really happy, for no reason! I feel like I really have time for me now. I’ve started exercising and walking most mornings, and am having so much fun with my free time. I worked for the guy who bought my practice for nearly two years. He had his own way of doing things, of working, but it was amicable all the way through. When he was making changes I was happy to let it happen. I was ready to let it go, much to everyone’s surprise.

Selling my practice has opened the doors to scuba diving, sailing, holidays. We take quite a few 12-day trips, which I manage by moving my days around. This year we spent time on a houseboat in France....

We were thilled to be part of our favourite podcast, The Savvy Dentist! Simon spoke to Dr Jesse Green about all things practice sales, from preparing your practice for sale to knowing when it's time to sell and planning your exit strategies. Click here to listen to it

There were a few reasons. When you own a business, you put your heart and soul into it. You think about it 24 hours-a-day. You could be sitting in a café on a Sunday, and still be thinking about what you can do in your business – you never switch off. I came to a point when I felt I had achieved everything that I wanted to achieve in my practice. I still loved dentistry but I didn’t want to wait until I was no longer doing good dentistry to retire, so I decided that it was time to pass it on. I always wanted to retire while I was still healthy, so that I could see what else was out there and travel and have active holidays.

Many people think that that the purchase of a dental practice is solely a financial transaction, and that the highest dollar offer will always win the day.

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.