One of the questions that we get asked most often is “When should I sell my practice?” or “How will I know when it’s time to sell?”. This is an excellent question and will ultimately be a function of a number of financial, professional, tax and personal matters. Your decisions with respect to the personal and professional elements will likely be under your total control. Assuming you can afford to sell, whether or not…
Are You Getting the Right Advice?
Most dentists rely on advice from their accountants and financial advisors when it comes to speculating the value of their practices. Under most circumstances this would seem reasonable, however, sometimes this blind faith can lead to disastrous results. Let me outline two such scenarios that we have had to deal with in the last 12 months.
Scenario #1 – The Problem with Over Generalizations
We recently had a specialist who was…
The Dental Industry Association of Canada (DIAC) is an association of dental manufacturers, distributors, commercial dental laboratories and service providers committed to the highest standards of service to dental professionals in Canada, and Hill Kindy is a proud member of the team.
Our annual “Future of Dentistry Survey” is one of the most important sources of information and has recently been updated with questions that reflect the evolving dynamics of the Canadian dental profession. …
Imagine you are running a 40K marathon and you slip and fall in the first 100 yards – it is possible, if you are good enough, to get up and still win the race. Now imagine that you are winning the race but you slip and fall in the last 100 yards – in this case, it is much less likely that you could get up and still win the race. The point being…
Knowing how many active patients a practice has is a very important metric for most buyers and correspondingly should be an important metric for most sellers. Most sellers and certainly most buyers would agree, yet this is an area fraught with misunderstanding and confusion. The reason for this is pretty simple – there is no authoritative definition for an “active patient.” I have seen active patients defined as patients with a booked recall appointment,…
During your career you are going to need to interact with a number of professionals. You will need an accountant, at some stage a couple of different lawyers, if you are smart probably a practice management consultant and, if you are really smart, a good financial planner. These professionals come in all flavours: really good, good, so-so and terrible. Picking the right flavour will contribute in a huge way to the success of your…
Greed is probably the most effective deal killer of them all. It doesn’t matter whether you are the buyer or the seller; if you get greedy, you can pretty much count on killing any deal that you are trying to negotiate.
Both buyers and sellers want to feel good about the transaction. Such a transaction usually entails an amount of money which is material to at least one of the parties. Unless there is some overriding…
Have you ever referred a patient to a specialist? Chances are the answer is yes, and it’s very likely you referred that patient because you felt the specialist could do a better job than you. This would be pretty much the same reason that you would hire an architect as opposed to as general contractor to design your dream home. So while this all seems perfectly logical, why do dentists use their “family” lawyers…
(Disclaimer: This article is for general knowledge only and should not be considered as legal advice. We are not lawyers and as such, cannot and do not provide legal advice. If you feel that any of the following, or any matters related to the Employee/Independent Contractor relationship may apply to your situation, we encourage you to seek out proper legal counsel.)
According to many different sources, in order to be considered an independent contractor…
In theory, the value of a dental practice is more or less equal the sum of the profit for the five-year period following the purchase of the practice converted into today’s dollars. In order to assess the likelihood of being able to maintain a profit, we need to know how probable it is for that profit to be sustainable over a five-year period. Profit is revenue less expenses, so an important aspect of…
