Earlier this year I asked a group of dental residents at some of the best programs in the country a simple question: how will you know when you’re ready to buy a practice? The answers came back, and one word showed up over and over. Feel. “When I feel ready.” “When it feels right.” “I […]
Category Archives: General
Imagine that you buy a practice and on your first day of ownership, the police come busting through the front doors with guns drawn. This is a true story of a client of mine, and that’s not even the craziest part of the story. The really crazy part happened two weeks before that, and it […]
Craig Hanks will be the first to tell you that sales is not his natural home. He knows the theory. He spent years inside DBA building the podcast, the audiobook, the blog, absorbing every principle of practice acquisition before he ever talked to a buyer. He’s warm, easy to talk to, the kind of person […]
Partway through a lecture at UNLV’s dental school last month, right before I said what I was about to say, I joked to the room that I’d probably never get invited back. Then I said it anyway, because I believed it, and because nobody warned me before I learned it the expensive way through other […]
A few weeks ago I wrote about a comment section: the 80 comments under a Utah news story I was featured in, where two dentists reached opposite verdicts on whether this profession is worth recommending to their own kids. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about that thread. Because as it turns out, the […]
In a lecture hall at UNLV earlier this month, I handed a dental resident in the front row an imaginary practice. “Here you go”, I told her. “It’s a $400,000 practice in Henderson, a turnaround. You can’t wait to get your hands on it. You’ve got a plan, you’ve got energy, and you’re going to […]
Last Thursday morning, in a lecture hall in Las Vegas, a dental resident raised her hand and asked me the best question I’ve heard in a while. I was at UNLV’s dental school, talking with their students about the financial side of buying a practice. We’d covered what banks look for, how to spot a […]
It was early on a Friday morning, and I was sitting at my kitchen table doing something I tell everyone never to do. A few days earlier, a Utah news station had run a story about independent dentists competing against corporate ownership, and I was featured in it. The piece was getting real traction, so […]
It was 4:00 PM on a Thursday. Dr. Zachary was chairside with a patient in his Poulsbo, Washington practice, about thirty minutes away from wrapping up the final appointment of the day and heading home to his wife and two young kids. Then, he heard a voice echo from the front office. “I quit. I’m […]
Craig had a dentist on the phone a few months ago who was convinced the practice he was looking at was going to fall apart the moment the selling doctor walked out the door. The staff had been there forever. The patients loved the guy. Who was going to stay for someone new? The dentist […]
