Ask George - Ready to Grow vs Ready to Shrink: How to Buy a Dental Practice
Shared Practices | Your Dental Roadmap through Practice Ownership
Dr. George Hariri | Shared Practices Network
4.9 • 559 Ratings
🗓️ 5 May 2025
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode of Ask George, Richard Low and Dr. George Hariri reveal how to buy a dental practice correctly to avoid acquiring a "ready to shrink" clinic. Too many buyers rely solely on financial profit and loss statements without evaluating the true health of the active patient base, resulting in massive post-acquisition revenue drops. A prime example discussed is a doctor who bought a $690,000 practice with only one day of hygiene per week, causing collections to plummet to $310,000 in the first year.
If you are wondering how to buy a dental practice that ensures sustainable dental practice growth, you must implement rigorous due diligence. Here is your blueprint to ensure you buy a "ready to grow" clinic rather than an overvalued lemon:
- Start with Your Vision: Never acquire an office without a clear understanding of your long-term goals and how the specific practice aligns with that vision.
- Audit the Patient Base: Go beyond tax returns by remoting into the practice management software to count actual cleanings and hygiene days. A healthy clinic should service around 800 active patients per four days of hygiene.
- Evaluate the Procedure Mix: Look at the three-to-four surface filling to crown ratio to determine if the seller's production is highly specialized or overly aggressive. Buying dentistry you cannot replicate will instantly devalue the asset.
- Exercise Strategic Patience: Knowing exactly how to buy a dental practice dictates that waiting an extra year for the right off-market opportunity is vastly superior to rushing into the wrong purchase and setting your career back multiple years.
Ready to take the next step in your dental practice journey? Visit https://sharedpractices.com to learn more about our Buyer Representation and Coaching services, designed to help dentists buy, grow, and optimize profitable practices. You can also use our Free Look to evaluate dental practice opportunities with real data before making a decision. For daily Dental Moneyball insights, strategy tips, and updates, follow us across our social channels.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the shared practices podcast. I have with me today, George, of Ask George, of Dr. George |
| 0:09.1 | of everything that we've ever podcasted about. George, how are you doing today? Good. This was a |
| 0:14.4 | funny episode because we're both fired up about the same thing, which is kind of odd. You know, |
| 0:18.6 | we both normally don't have kind of a bone to pick with the same type of thing, but I think it just really goes to show the importance of the topic today. So today we are talking about buyer's representation and, you know, how to make sure that you are well represented in the process of a transaction, buying a practice. And yeah, I think that this is just a very near and dear to my hard topic. |
| 0:42.8 | Yeah, and I'm pissed about it, which is very surprising. Like you said, like I don't typically get upset. I've been pretty play nice in the sandbox with other people in the space who do things. |
| 0:49.2 | And unfortunately, I've seen some people enter into ownership and have these really hard conversation, |
| 0:55.5 | like multiple doctors I've talked with in the past couple months who bought incorrectly. |
| 1:03.2 | And like, this is the whole thing we've been talking about for eight. |
| 1:06.3 | Like the reason I started shared practices was the thought was, if you buy right, this one decision can change |
| 1:13.7 | the trajectory of the rest of your life. And if you buy wrong, this can make you more miserable |
| 1:19.4 | than any asset you ever purchase. And therefore, maybe you should do some homework and find someone |
| 1:27.0 | who can really guide you through this and do it the |
| 1:30.0 | right way and understand the implications of the cascade effect of buying right. And I've just seen |
| 1:36.5 | people not arm themselves with tools, not hire people, or even worse, which is why I'm pissed, |
| 1:43.0 | hire someone and still buy a lemon, still |
| 1:45.7 | buy a practice that sucks. And so that's why I'm fired up. I'm just mad, like, |
| 1:50.5 | viscerally angry. So this is good, George. I'm going to just real quick, not to be a promotional |
| 1:55.8 | thing, but just real quick talk about like why we believe, why we have such strong conviction |
| 1:59.8 | on this one. We have |
| 2:01.0 | a course coming up, pathway to ownership. We teach this idea in that course of buying a ready to |
| 2:06.2 | grow practice, like a practice that is you buy it and it grows post acquisition. And then we have |
| 2:11.5 | a service called buyer's representation services where we really dig deep into offices to make |
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