Do
- Reconcile your records first. Practice management software, bookkeeping and tax returns will differ. Understand why, and document it, before a buyer asks.
- Know your doctor production by individual. It drives the valuation and it is the first thing a buyer models.
- Decide what you need the sale to produce, in your own life, before you learn what the practice is worth. Those are different questions and answering them in the wrong order distorts both.
- Get a defendable valuation from someone whose analysis you can inspect.
- Engage a transactional attorney with veterinary experience, and do it early rather than after a letter of intent is signed.
Don't
- Do not negotiate directly with a buyer who approached you. You have no way to test whether their number is a good one, and their job is to acquire the practice as economically as they can.
- Do not make abrupt changes to staffing, pricing or hours in the months before going to market. Buyers underwrite the trailing twelve months and anomalies invite discounting.
- Do not defer maintenance or let equipment lapse to improve the near-term numbers. Diligence finds it and it costs more in trust than it gained in earnings.
- Do not tell your team before there is a plan for when and how. The sequence is part of the transaction, not an afterthought to it.
- Do not try to run the process yourself while also running the practice. The owners who lose the most value are almost always the ones who tried to do both.
The one worth repeating
The most expensive single mistake we see is an owner responding directly to the group that wrote to them, and negotiating alone. Not because those buyers are dishonest, but because a negotiation with one interested party and no alternative is not a negotiation. It is an acceptance.