You are selling your dental practice, you want to tell the whole world! However, there are strategic reasons to keep the sale confidential.
Dental transition experts Matt Scherer and Doug Sellan share the benefits of keeping the sale of your dental practice confidential.
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Transcript:
Matt Scherer:
Hello, everyone. My name’s Matt Scherer, and I have my colleague, Doug Sellan, with me. We are with PMA Practice Transitions, and we assist dentists in transitioning out of practice ownership in the state of Ohio and western PA. Today, our topic is why is it important to keep a sale confidential? Doug, you want to hit on this one first?
Doug Sellan:
Absolutely. I mean, the absolute goal is to preserve the confidentiality for as long as possible. The reason why is as soon as you start leaking that the practice is for sale, the value is now at risk, staff is at risk, patients are at risk. What I mean by that, staff will start to freak out and think, “Well, geez, the guy or gal is selling the practice. What about my job? What about my livelihood? What about my bills? I should look to go somewhere else.” You don’t want that to happen because they’re part of the value that’s been placed on your practice. Same thing with patients. I mean, patients are always wondering, especially if the practitioner is later in years, they may be thinking that someday he or she’s going to be leaving and maybe I should start to be looking for a new practice to go to.
Doug Sellan:
No, we want to maintain the confidentiality as long as possible, up until when the transition’s complete if at all possible, because we want to preserve the value that’s been placed on the practice.
Matt Scherer:
Yeah, and I think it’s important from a confidentiality standpoint, again, agree with you 100% on patients and staff and things like that, because once you say, “Hey, I’m for sale,” you tell one person and the whole world’s going to know, because the dental industry is that tight. But there’s a time and place, because number one, you want to find the right buyer. Once you find the right buyer and things are in motion, and certainly we would let you know when that time comes, but there’s a time and a place to let staff know, start letting patients know and things like that. But if you let it out too early and you don’t have a buyer yet, and then you start losing staff and lose patients, as Doug said, that could potentially hurt your value. It’s very important.
Matt Scherer:
Also, as a selling doctor, one of the things that we do here at PMA, and certainly I’m sure other companies do, but we have the buyer signing non-disclosure to keep that confidentiality. Yes, they can talk to their advisors, such as their accountant or attorney and/or banker, but it’s very important to have a non-disclosure in place so that the buyer doesn’t start letting his or her friends know that this practice is for sale and then, again, we’re right back to where we were at the beginning, is this thing’s out now and now you have a degradation potentially of the practice because patients are leaving and/or staff is leaving.
Doug Sellan:
I mean, I think you summed it all up there, but again, for more information about this, you should certainly reach out to a company like ours. We can go into greater detail about the confidentiality, the measures that we take into account to make sure that we maintain it, and who you should be talking to about it. Sellers become anxious and they become excited and they start unfortunately leaking information. Some of these things we can’t control, but we try to control as much as possible. At the end of the day, I think we do a really great job at it.
Matt Scherer:
Absolutely. Couldn’t agree more, Doug, thanks. If you liked this video, give us a thumbs up and certainly share it with your colleagues. You can also visit our website for more information, or certainly pick up the phone, give Doug and I a call. We’d be happy to discuss this topic further with you. Please be on the lookout for future videos. Thank you.