Primary Reasons Why Dentists Buy Dental Practice
Deciding whether you will buy a dental practice or pursue other available dental career opportunities can be one of the biggest and most challenging decisions you'll ever make not only in your career but also in your entire life. But buying a practice is not just looking for a retiring dental practitioner and making a good offer. It is more than checking the available tools and devices (like the dental loupes, chair, and dental headlight), checking the past and present cash flow, and the patient base of the existing dental practice, among others. Before finding a dental practice to buy, you need to determine and understand first why you want and why you should buy a practice, how much you are willing to risk, and what do you want to achieve from both your dental career and business. Below are some of the reasons why dental professionals want to buy a practice.
To make a slow working pace faster
Over twenty percent of dental practice buyers have a slow working pace. They are looking for ways to keep their practice busy enough, to enhance their productivity, and to briskly increase their patient base and they think buying an existing dental practice with an established reputation and a good patient base is the best solution.
Precluding competition
Although not so common, precluding competition is one of the reasons why a dental specialist buys an existing practice. Let us say you are a dentist offering a specialized dental service to a certain area and you also have a good patient base in an underserved satellite location. The patients in the satellite location usually need to travel a few miles for treatment.
If the patient base in such location increases over time, there will be a high chance for other dental specialists to open a new clinic there. Obviously, people in the satellite location will no longer choose to travel long miles just to get to your clinic since there is already a dental office near them, resulting to a decline in your patient base. In order to curb the competition and to retain the patients, specialists usually buy an existing general dental practice in the satellite location which will serve as their second or satellite office.
Relocation
Moving to a new community is one of the primary reasons why many dentists in the United States buy a dental practice. Instead of starting your career from scratch in the new community you are planning to live at, it is more viable to buy an existing practice that already has an established reputation and brand.
Buying an existing dental practice when relocating is likewise associated with certain psychological reasons. If you are a seasoned dental care provider who is used to work and do dentistry procedures at a fast pace, you will find it difficult to adjust when all of a sudden your working pace slows down. When you start from scratch and you are new in the market, you can not expect your business to get busy right away. Most likely, there will be times when you have to wait a few minutes or hours for patients to come in most especially in the first few days or weeks of business. This will not only tremendously downshift your work pace, it will likewise keep you worried about your new generated debt.