ADAPT Blog

If you own a practice, you’ll eventually need an exit strategy. And it’s wise to start thinking about your preferences long before you think you’ll need to sell. After all, sometimes life happens and forces you to act sooner. 

It can feel daunting to think about walking away from the practice you’ve spent decades building. How will your patients be cared for? What about your loyal staff? 

And what about YOU? What will you do during your retirement?

Relax. You have options — probably more than you realize! Retirement doesn’t always have to look like a 100% sale in which you hand over the keys and never look back. Today, many doctors are approaching their retirement as a years-long transition period during which they can do more of what they love — and leave behind the things they don’t prefer. That can take a lot of forms, including practicing part-time, teaching/mentoring, helping underserved populations, or making a fresh start in an entirely new-to-you practice. Your options are limited only by your imagination!

I recently joined Kelly Tanner on the Dental Handoff podcast. We spent a lot of time discussing why it’s so important to cultivate the type of practice that staff will WANT to stay in. 

After all, dentistry is about relationships. And if you want to build long-term relationships with your staff, you need to be the type of leader that inspires respect. 

So how can you “own the operatory” in a way that makes your practice a great place to work?

Kelly and I discussed this at length, including:

• Learning to “read the room,” or understand the non-verbal cues your staff (and patients!) are sending 
• Why great leaders should keep an open mind and encourage staff to share their ideas
• How to nurture the staff development that is vital to a strong, stable practice
• Ways to create an atmosphere where team members will strive to improve the practice — together

We also talked about how important it is to choose the right staff for your practice, whether you’re hiring an associate or auxiliary or looking for your successor. When you find someone who “meshes” with the staff and practice, you increase the likelihood of long-term satisfaction for all involved — doctors, staff, and patients. 

But success isn’t guaranteed when you find the right person; rather, you should also lay out an integration plan that will help the entire practice through the transition. A good integration plan will ensure that everyone is prepared so that the new team member feels confident treating patients from their very first day.  

Whether retirement is imminent or still just a dream, if you are a practice owner, it’s time to begin thinking about how you’ll eventually transition your practice. After all, sometimes life happens and you must accelerate your plans — which is much easier if you have thought about your desires in the first place!

Ultimately, your practice is worth what someone will pay for it and, most often, what a bank will underwrite a loan for. You know how great your practice is, but how do you get other dentists to see and understand how fabulous it really is? In many cases, the best place to begin is by looking at your practice through a buyer’s eyes. You want to identify, and then highlight,  what might inspire them to make an offer. 

Keep in mind that all buyers want the same thing: a financially sound practice where they can do the type of dentistry that excites them and keeps them engaged. No matter where you are in your timeline, you can start taking some steps to prepare yourself and your practice to shine for an eventual sale.

Whether you’re hoping to sell your practice ASAP or just planning ahead, you have probably thought about the person who will eventually take over. 

After all, that person will hopefully care for your patients for years to come. 

Have you considered what they want from your practice — and what you can do to make your practice more attractive to them? 

Through my work with ADA Practice Transitions™ (ADAPT), I’ve worked with hundreds of prospective buyers. Some are just out of dental school while others have been planning a purchase for years. 

When you get down to it, they all want the same thing: a financially sound practice where they can do the type of dentistry that excites them and keeps them engaged.

However, that can be a bit nebulous. So how can you demonstrate that your practice will allow a buyer to succeed? 

Think about the story that your practice tells a potential buyer. What does a buyer see or infer when they look at your practice, from the physical office to the financials? By looking through a buyer’s eyes, you can begin to identify things that need a bit of sprucing up. Consider how your practice stacks up on these 5 key attributes. 

The proposed spending bill currently making its way through legislation brings with it some big changes to capital gains tax rates. What does this bill mean for dental practice owners looking to sell?

For nearly the past decade, the top tax rate on capital gains has remained steady at 20%; however, the proposed $3.5 trillion spending bill currently making its way through Congress includes substantial changes to capital gains tax rates that would significantly affect the tax burden for someone selling their dental practice. That may influence whether and when they want to sell.

Selling a practice has always been a complex decision that generates many previously unthought-of questions for practice owners. One of the most important being: What will the tax implications be from the sale?

Maybe COVID was the last straw. Perhaps you’re tired of spending sunny days at the office rather than on the golf course. Maybe a health concern now makes practicing difficult, or even impossible.

No matter what the reason, you’re ready to retire ASAP, but you don’t want to leave your patients in the lurch.

And you don’t quite want to sell, not yet. You might need the health insurance until you qualify for Medicare. Or maybe you still want to consult and train your replacement, but simply can’t do the hands-on work any longer.

As dentists begin their practice transitions, nearly all have the same question on their minds: how long do you think this is going to take?

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.

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.

We hear lots of questions about managing staff during practice transitions, so we made it the focus of last week’s ADA Practice Transitions Coffee Talk webinar.

Dr. Betsy Shapiro, ADA Director of Practice Management and the ADA Center for Professional Success, joined ADAPT’s Dr. Suzanne Ebert, Vice President of Dental Practice & Relationship Management, for this hour-long conversation. The two shared their experiences with managing staff through their own practice transitions, as well as lessons learned from working with other dentists.