The Most Important Question When Selling Your Dental Practice:

Not just doctors who have been in practice for 25 or 35 years. These are doctors who are in their late thirties and forties looking at the opportunities to sell their practice. They want to take equity off the table and possibly use it to gain freedom.

That's what it's all about. Freedom. While you're in the midst of owning, operating, managing a business or practice, there's a lot to do. That’s part of what we have to do in life. We have to create enough income, active income to produce the lifestyle and future wealth needed to buy back time later in life.

It's all about TIME in the end. 

How much time do you have today for what you want? What about tomorrow? Next week? Next year?

If you haven’t noticed, your most precious resource (TIME) is not under your control if you’re obligated to be at work to make a high income. Many feel guilty if they’re not working hard enough and that’s why I think there's such an enormous amount of people at all ages considering selling their business or practice.

Here's the problem – what happens when all that cash is burning a hole in your pocket?

There are so many considerations to look at in that decision of selling your dental practice or business.

Legal counsel, tax counsel, negotiations. Doing due diligence on the person/company or DSO to whom you might be selling to. Looking at the obligations after you sell the practice? Do you want a clear sale (just walking away) or do you intend to stay on to be a producer in the practice even though you may or may not still have some or all of the control? The list goes on…

But there’s an important element a lot of people miss… What to do with the equity? Whether you sell the entire practice or only a part of it, what are you going to do with that money? 

In your hands, what you do with it is going to be critical to your future regardless if you’re in your thirties, forties, fifties, or sixties.

How you’re going to make that money work for you is paramount. As long as that equity has been tied up in your business you've been the one at the wheel, running the engine. You've been putting in the work to make use of it, the market value of the practice is the measuring stick of how well you’ve done. 

Now you have to take that equity and put it somewhere else without you day-in and day-out driving it to produce. It’s a scary place to be for those who are new to making your money work without you.

Do you now put that capital in the stock market? That is fraught with uncertainty in today’s economy. Do you go out and try to invest it in Bitcoin or crypto? Maybe a little piece of it, but that’s not a game you want to play with all of the money you’ve worked so hard for over so many years. That’s not the game for someone who wants long-term sustainability.

What about real estate?

Real estate has always been good… until we go through a down market. Then what do you do?

Almost every high income earner understands that real estate should have a part in any sophisticated investor’s portfolio. The question is, how? 

Many of us have forgotten just how much of a price we paid to master the clinical skills that built our practices. To sell your practice is to take all of the equity those skills created, and move that equity into a brand new field – the business of investing. A field that very few of us have any experience or education in. Moreover, we are doing this at a stage of life in which the stakes are much higher. We no longer have the luxury of time on our side. We have less time to recover from setbacks and mistakes. 

Real estate done right is a vehicle for cash flow, wealth preservation and legacy. Having a plan, a pathway and a guide is essential to avoiding the pitfalls that could decimate a lifetime of hard work. 

What is your plan for sustaining wealth and creating cash flow after selling your dental practice?

In Freedom Founders, we dedicate a lot of focus, time and energy to this very question. We have people with tax and legal experience. People with experience in negotiations and performing due diligence on both sides of the practice sale. I am not a practice broker, but through the last decade of working with hundreds of practitioners, I have personally helped many, many navigate the sale of their practice. 

But the biggest piece we bring to the table is a clear plan/pathway for what happens after the practice sale – a plan to keep you in control of the equity you are taking off the table. 

We don't tell you what to do. We don't make those choices for you. We help educate you, show you the possibilities, open up the door. We help you see the big picture so you can be discerning about what you want to do and what you can do.

We help you maintain a sense of autonomy vs abdicating the fruits of your labor to the groupthink of institutional models – or a financial advisor or money manager who has never dealt with creating business equity but has financial products to sell with the guise of securing the entrepreneur’s financial future. 

Selling your dental practice or business is a critical step in one's life. Do it right and it can give you all the freedom of time you've always wanted. Do it wrong, and it can set you back many, many years.

My advice – don’t do it alone.