ADAPT Blog

I grew up spending my summers at my grandparents’ farm in Sidney, Illinois – population 973. (I was related to 846 of them.) So I felt quite comfortable as I drove past cornfields for the 20 miles from the interstate highway to my destination about two hours from Chicago. I was going to visit a couple of ADA Practice Transitions customers to learn why they had chosen to practice in a small Illinois town.

Eight years ago, this husband-and-wife pair of dentists purchased a practice in a small rural town. A year later, they opened a second practice in a similar town about nine miles away. They share their time between the two practices. One works three and the other four days a week to give them time to raise their two young children. Even though they are both still under 40 years old, they signed up with ADAPT to sell their practices to the right buyer. When I asked what was prompting them to sell, they said, “Have you ever heard of FIRE?”

It seems nearly every dentist knows someone with a similar story: an associate who “came into my practice, soaked up all my knowledge, then opened a practice across the street and took half my patients.”

Such experiences are why non-compete clauses have become almost standard in dental associate employment agreements. For those of you who may not know, a non-compete clause is a legally binding agreement where an employee is prevented from starting a similar business or working for a competitor for a specified period of time after leaving an employer. In dentistry, it also often includes a geographic restriction.

At ADAPT, we hear a lot about non-competes as our members consider changing jobs. These clauses – often overlooked by incoming associates during contract negotiations – can limit a dentist’s future flexibility.

I was sitting behind special mirrored glass at a research facility watching an interviewer speak with a dentist. We were doing the research for what would become ADA Practice Transitions. I watched as yet another dentist said, “I want to sell my practice to someone like me.”

This sentiment is at the heart of what we are trying to build at ADAPT: we believe that a consistent philosophy of care is critical to the longevity of a dental practice, particularly when a change of ownership occurs.

Previous interviews had taught us that we would hear that statement frequently: “I want to sell my practice to someone like me.” But we had also learned that we needed to dig a little deeper to understand what “like me” actually meant.

In April, we at ADA Practice Transitions celebrated our second anniversary. Our beginnings were modest, launching in just two states, Maine and Wisconsin. Within that first year, we expanded to six additional states. And now, by the end of our second year, we have expanded our service to all 50 states, with customers in every single one of them.

It is a human tendency to use an anniversary as a time of reflection. At ADAPT, our goal has always been to provide a better way of managing transitions for all of dentistry.

We started off with extensive research, where we often heard dentists complain how difficult it is to find a good match. No one had the scope to cast a wide net in matching sellers with buyers or owners with employees. We thought, “The ADA can do that,” and began designing the service to address those complaints.

It is astonishing how many articles, essays, and opinion pieces there are about generational differences between baby boomers and millennials. Not to mention the YouTube videos, memes, and TikToks poking fun and parodying one side or the other. My favorite is here (and I’m a boomer!).

The last thing I want to do is write yet another blog post pontificating on how the generations misunderstand one another. Instead, I want to focus on what both groups share – especially when talking about dentists working together in an office as owner and associate or transitioning a practice from one dentist to another.

DSOs are one of the most polarizing issues in the current dental economy. People seem to believe they are either “destroying dentistry as we know it” or “the best possible way to practice dentistry,” with very little room in between.

As ADA Practice Transitions (ADAPT) has expanded nationally, we hear a couple of questions over and over:

• How is ADAPT related to the American Dental Association?
• How is ADAPT different from a traditional broker?

Let’s start with ADAPT’s creation story.

Unfortunately, you probably already know the answer to the question “what does it actually cost to sell a dental practice?” – it depends.

Each sale is unique, and there are a number of factors and multiple ways of handling each aspect of the sale. All of them impact the total cost. In this post, we will review some of these factors, offer a range of costs, and talk about ways to minimize or avoid those costs.

First, I want to give an example of the lowest cost, most frictionless dental practice sale I have encountered.

I used to go to an old school barber shop with the striped pole, containers of blue Barbicide jammed with combs, and lots of kitschy sports memorabilia. I loved that barber shop. And I loved my barber because he could tell that I was there to get my haircut and not to fill him in on everything that had happened over the last six weeks. When I got in the barber chair, it was all business. Our conversation consisted of, “Same as always?” to which I responded, “Yep.” I loved that.

While doing the research that led to the development of ADA Practice Transitions, we found a common theme: Dentists who had sold their practice frequently shared that they spent too much money with a broker – and felt they did not receive commensurate value.

We developed ADA Practice Transitions to focus on philosophy of care – matching dentists with a similar approach, for a more successful result – but we also wanted to give dentists a more cost-effective option. We designed our service to deliver tremendous value in a manner that was less expensive than the other options, sometimes by a lot.