Are You Ready to Sell?
Are You Ready to Sell
By Megan Urban, Practice Transition Advisor
Are you ready to sell your dental practice? This is always a difficult question to answer for most dentists. You may still love doing dentistry but want less stress. How is your body holding up? Do you have enough money to retire? How much is your practice worth?
Contact your transition consultant/broker and have a heart-to-heart about your practice, goals, and options. We have lots of experience to share that may be beneficial to you. We can do a complimentary quick look to give you an idea of what your practice may be worth and of course a full valuation will need to be done to determine the final value.
Once you have an idea of what you may be paid for your practice and associated real estate, you can talk with your CPA and financial planner to know what retirement looks like for you, as well as plan what to do with your sales proceeds. You may have practice or real estate debt to pay off at closing, or you may have a retirement plan you can utilize to save on taxes.
Many dentists don’t know if they want to sell their real estate with the practice. In our experience, the best person to own the space is the dentist working in it. If you happen to have a lot of rentals and enjoy that, maybe this is an option for you, but if your buyer leaves, empty dental spaces can be difficult to sell.
Sometimes dentists believe their practice is worth more than our valuation and want to stay on to increase collections that may have waned a bit due to slowing down. You can certainly do that but know that banks look at the last three years of tax returns so if you want to increase collections to increase practice value, you will need to increase and work another three years.
If you still love doing dentistry and want to sell and stay on part-time, you need to start thinking about how much you want to work and how you will build a practice that can maintain a schedule for more than one dentist. This can be done, but you need to have a plan and your transition consultant can assist with this.
Are you ready to sell? Give it some serious thought after talking with your advisors and make the decision with confidence. Contact us today!