How to Find the Right Dental Practice Buyer
If you’re a dentist looking to sell your practice, you might be wondering how to find the right dental practice buyer. Selling a dental practice is a complex, multi-faceted process. It will require special professional attention to many technical focal areas, like terms, market evaluation, and the specific language of the deal.
Finding the right buyer, a candidate perfectly well-suited for your practice, is imperative. Finding the right buyer increases the odds that the complex dental practice transition process is as stress-free as possible. The wrong buyer increases the odds that the deal falls through or takes longer than you’d like.
The Triumphant Transition Partners team has put together their thoughts to guide you through the process of finding the right dental practice buyer. Read on to learn more!
Ways Practices Find Buyers
1. Use Your Connections
If you’re looking to sell your dental practice, using whatever connections you have might be one fruitful option. You likely know plenty of dentists and those in the industry from dental school, alumni associations, and medical conferences.
Leveraging these options can work for some dentists. This approach does tend to work best if selling to another dentist. Most dentists won’t have extensive connections to dental support organizations, so finding a buyer through your own network is best for dentist-to-dentist sales.
2. Contact a DSO Directly
Dental support organizations will field offers and inquiries around the sale of a dental practice and may even reach out directly to begin conversations with dentists. It is worth bearing in mind, however, that DSOs are incentivized to make low offers when propositioning a dentist. You likely will not get the best possible deal when contacting a dental support organization directly.
The DSO is banking on your unfamiliarity with your practice’s value and what is and isn’t a fair price. This isn’t, of course, a point of the process that you should be an expert on. You’re a dentist, after all, not an expert in business evaluation. Still, your lack of expertise in the process and lack of a clear benchmark to compare to an offer might result in a low-ball offer. Selling directly to a dental support organization without a trusted advisor to guide you through the process and transition doesn’t work well for many dentists.
Another often neglected piece of the process is finding the RIGHT DSO, not merely one that is offering the right price. Suppose you’re fielding offers from a DSO or opening conversations up directly. In that case, you could forget to carefully evaluate each buyer against what you want from the sale of your dental practice.
3. List the Practice Yourself
Listing the practice directly is undoubtedly one of the most direct ways to garner interest in your practice. However, it may not always be a suitable method for all dentists. When you list your practice yourself, the result is often a deluge of DSOs and other dentists looking to buy.
You’re likely to spend most of your time fielding these calls and offers, many of which might not align with your needs and criteria for a buyer. Listing a practice yourself might work if you’re adamant about selling that practice as quickly as possible and don’t need to maximize the deal’s value. It likely won’t be a good call for a dentist looking to find a highly-qualified buyer.
Knowing You Have the Right Buyer
Knowing that you have the right buyer is a challenging task. Unfortunately, if you don’t handle it properly, you could end up in a disadvantageous business partnership. There are many potential downsides if you sell to the wrong buyer:
1. You Might Sell at the Wrong Terms
Many dentists want to stay on and practice within their practice post-sale to a DSO. However, if you sell to the wrong dental support organization, the terms of your time post-sale may not align well with your goals. Pay specific attention to the deal terms offered, such as ownership of certain decisions, profit-sharing, and contracted time. If you don’t fully understand the terms of the transition process, you could end up with the wrong buyer.
2. You Might Sell at the Wrong Price
Without a clear understanding of your dental practice’s value, you might sell the practice for less than it’s worth. If you hope to retire, build generational wealth, or jumpstart a new business by selling your practice, anything less than the best possible deal is unacceptable.
3. You Might Surrender Key Responsibilities
The right DSO will tell you precisely what is and isn’t your responsibility through the transition process. The wrong DSO might leave you surprised. Unfortunately, the duties you might give up or assume ownership of are too important. Hiring, firing, marketing, and training are all responsibilities for which a DSO might have a set process. If it’s imperative that you retain as much ownership in critical decisions involving the practice as possible, then the wrong DSO could break your satisfaction with the transition process.
If you’re considering selling your dental practice, contact Triumphant Transition Partners for aid. By doing so, you’ll receive:
- Access to Our Private Buyer’s Network
- A Free Practice Evaluation
- Help with Screening Buyers and Navigating Letters of Intent
- Financial Documents to Aid Your Attorneys Through Negotiation
Reach Out to Your Trusted Triumphant Advisor for a Free Courtesy Consultation Today!