It wasn’t that long ago that having a dental practice for decades and then selling it was the golden parachute to a very comfortable retirement. Those days are gone, and they’re not coming back.
Back in “the day,” it was common for practices to sell for two to three times collections or even more. Today, with the rise of corporate dentistry and more practicing dentists than at any time in U.S. history, you’ll be lucky to get 80 percent of collections at sale.
In fact, as of November 2016, according to one dental financial group, general dental practices went for just 69.87 percent of collections when sold. Rounding up, if your practice brings in $1.6 million annually, you’d likely receive $1.26 million… before taxes.
If your retirement plan includes a huge windfall from selling your practice, you’d better rethink things. It sounds like a bad joke, but it’s not – a million dollars doesn’t go as far as it used to.
The Solution: Make More Money NOW
The best thing you can do to ensure a comfortable retirement is to increase your year-over-year earnings. That will accomplish two important goals – allowing you to grow your retirement accounts, and increasing the ultimate value of your practice at sale.
That’s easy to say, but not so easy to do. Dentists today are awash in patients, which sounds like a success formula. The problem is that most dentists are experiencing a huge influx of patients that want the minimum amount of dentistry at the lowest cost.
That leaves dentists working too hard for too long for too little. And even though the ergonomics of providing dental care have improved, dentists’ necks and backs are still at risk. The more time you spent hunched over patients, the greater the likelihood of experiencing injury that may make practicing dentistry difficult or even impossible.
The Best Kind of Dental Practice
Dentistry is too good a profession to be practiced as a volume business. You’re a skilled, advanced-degree professional, not a factory worker who uses machines to crank out thousands of identical items.
A certain number of routine exams and drill-and-fills are pretty much unavoidable, but they don’t have to and shouldn’t be most of what you do. To increase your earnings while working less, you need patients who represent much higher average case value to your practice.
The better patients in your market have the ability and willingness to pay for fee-for-service dentistry… provided you give them reasons to choose you and only you to solve their dental problems. A low-price approach to promoting your practice isn’t going to bring you patients who can pay $10 – 15 thousand for elective dentistry. That approach just makes you look like all the other dentists out there.
See What’s Possible For Your Practice
SmartBox provides a steady stream of better dental patients so our doctors can focus on doing what makes them money – seeing those patients and solving their dental problems. We can do the same for your practice.
Get started by reserving your free, completely personalized Patient Attraction Roadmap
. Use the Roadmap however you wish.
Your retirement may be a long way in the future, but the time to safeguard your practice’s value is now.
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