While our dental consultants are not practice brokers, we are able to work as advisors to doctors considering selling their practice in a few years and doctors considering purchasing a practice and using Mosaic’s services for the transition management.
What Mosaic’s Dental Practice consultants can do for the selling doctor:
- View the office and equipment, run the current numbers and help the dentist understand how those numbers may translate regarding a sale
- Advise what to update, and even more importantly, what not to update
- Help grow the practice production to make it a more attractive purchase
- Assist with finding good professionals to broker the sale and work in conjunction with Mosaic’s consultants to facilitate the transition
What Mosaic’s Dental Practice consultants can do for the selling doctor:
- View the entire practice and advise on its current and potential profitability
- Create a budget of actual costs included in the purchase such as marketing and equipment and software updates
- Review what marketing can and cannot do for the practice
- Assist with finding good people to work with for equipment, IT and marketing
A Quick 10 Point Plan for Looking at a Practice Purchase
Just about every time you ask a dentist why he or she is looking at a practice purchase versus starting a new practice, you’ll hear “it already has patients” so it feels like a safer bet. While there’s no doubt that having patients is a good thing, we’ve created a really quick way to look at those patients based on other factors to get a better preliminary handle on the viability of the practice. This simple tool is certainly not designed to replace a good professional practice evaluation, but rather to be used as a jumping off point to decide if a practice evaluation is even worth scheduling.
Let’s start by giving the practice 10 points for the fact that it has current patients. Now we subtract 1 point for ever negative factor we see. These negative factors can include the following:
- A bad location with lack of visibility, declining neighborhood or no growth
- An extremely unattractive building or office space with factors such as a basement location or a musty smell
- Old equipment that will need complete replacing
- Lack of room for needed technology
- Old computer (or no computer) systems that will need complete replacing
- A physical chart count that doesn’t even come close to matching computer reports or stated active patient numbers
- A doctor who refuses to have the practice professionally evaluated and insists his accountant can give you all the information you need
- A doctor who refuses to let you do a physical chart count or bring in an advisor to assist you in your evaluation
- For orthodontics – most active patients have already paid in full for their treatment
If, as a perspective buyer subtracts points, we get down to only 5 points left from the original 10, we’d suggest considering very seriously whether to even proceed any further. If we get down to 2 point, we suggest walking very quickly in the opposite direction. Having patients is great, but sometimes the cost is just way too high.
For more information call Mosaic Management Professionals at (303) 872-7580 to discuss our complimentary evaluation.