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 passed on it.
Six months later, Craig heard through the network that the buyer who did close on that practice had kept every single staff member. Patient retention through the transition was strong. The practice was doing well.
It’s the call Craig keeps having in different forms. The dentist thinks worst-case about patient attrition, but the thing they’re afraid of almost never happens. And while they’re worrying about the wrong thing, the thing that actually costs them is costing them over $1.1M in lifetime earnings.
After a couple hundred conversations, Craig has a pretty clear picture of which fears are worth taking seriously and which ones are just burning up time that could be spent finding a practice.
The most common fear he hears is losing patients and staff when the selling doctor leaves. It comes up on almost every first call. Sometimes this is a legit consideration. If a practice has staff who have been there for twenty years and are deeply loyal to the retiring owner, that is a real thing to investigate during due diligence. But more often than not it is a fear that talks people out of good practices rather than bad ones. The staff usually stay. The patients usually stay. The transition is hard, but the fear of it is almost always bigger than the reality.
At DBA we’ve crunched the numbers, and the average patient attrition number 6-months post-closing is -4.1%, a negative number. That means, on average, buyers add more patients to the practice than they lose.
The second fear he hears constantly is management experience. Most associates have spent their careers at a chairside level, and the idea of suddenly being responsible for payroll, staffing decisions, marketing and operations feels overwhelming. Craig’s answer to this one is blunt: read one book on marketing. Read one book on personnel management. Read one book on small business finances. That is genuinely all it takes to be well-equipped for the management side of running a dental practice. You are not the first person to do this. The template exists. Then, realize that the thing that prepares you for management is actually being a manager.
“Stop being so nervous about practice ownership,” he said, “and trust that those who came before you have paved the way.”
The fear Craig doesn’t hear enough about
While most dentists are worried about losing staff or not being ready to manage a business, they are not nearly worried enough about the one thing that actually costs them the most: waiting.
The data on this is clear. Today’s associates are waiting nearly five years longer to buy than the generation before them. That delay costs the average dentist well over a million dollars in career earnings. Every year you stay in an associate role instead of an ownership role is a year of the income gap compounding against you.
The fear of buying a practice and having it go wrong makes sense to a group of dentists who obsess over the small details in clinical work. But it is a much smaller risk than most people think, and it is a risk that can be managed with the right preparation and the right team. The fear of waiting and losing out on a decade of owner-level income is a risk that cannot be undone once the time has passed.
“The only thing you should actually fear,” Craig told me, “is losing out on the money by not pulling the trigger as soon as you should.”
If you want to talk through where you might be feeling some fear and what your next steps should look like, schedule a free call with our team.
