Articles

A few years before I sold my practice I became involved in charity work with Karen refugees, through Effective Aid International in Thailand, after reading about it in the ADA journal. I decided to move to Thailand after I sold my dental practice. I have a house and a new wife there in a country town called Phetchabun, in central Thailand. It is very affordable to retire in Thailand at an early age.

I took four months off after I sold. I took all four of my kids to Europe to see my family and have a holiday for a month, and then went to Cuba and Mexico with my best friend. After I came back I went back to work, but only doing 18 hours a week. I love being a dentist more than ever, now that I don’t have the stress of ownership. It has reignited my passion for dentistry. My stress level is zero and my work/life balance is very good. Taking control of my life like this has been very empowering.

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....

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

My practice sold quickly – quicker than I thought. Within two months we had two keen buyers, and I ended up selling to a dentist who bought it six weeks after seeing it. While I was happy with my decision to sell, and the process of selling, saying goodbye was very difficult. I was heartbroken when I walked out of my practice for the last time – but it turned to be an easy adjustment. I was able to let go of it straight away. The hardest part was to get used to not having a regular income.