Benjamin Franklin once said that by “failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail”. This has become a common saying and the importance of preparation cannot be overstated particularly when you’re preparing to sell your dental practice.
“Running a dental practice is a full -time job”, says Lis Hughes of Frank Taylor & Associates, “and a very varied one too. Naturally there’s the clinical side, but you are also running a business, training, recruiting, developing your team, to say nothing of keeping up to date with latest developments in treatment, technology, and legislation. If you then add the task of selling the practice into that mix, a task that understandably you may well not feel comfortable delegating, then you can see how suddenly it becomes more than a full-time job, and clearly that’s not sustainable.
“However, it doesn’t have to be like that, there is a solution. A great piece of advice is to always ensure you are prepared for the sale of your practice, odd though it may sound, even from day one. A lot of this means ensuring all documentation required by the CQC is kept current. Like any task, it’s more manageable if you keep on top of it and stay up to date, rather than leaving things to drift and allowing the paperwork to become out of date. Setting aside a small amount of time each month to review this can save hours of work in the future, many practice owners invest in software to assist them in maintaining their compliance with CQC and it is cost effective in both time and managing the stress of not being compliant!
“It’s understandable that a lot of due diligence work needs to go into a practice sale, for both the seller and the buyer it could well be the most important financial decision of their lives, so being prepared for this can ease the process enormously. Understanding how and when you need to update your documentation, for example when purchasing new equipment, renewing an insurance policy can really speed things up.
“That said, the process needn’t be daunting or excessively bureaucratic, it’s really just a case of thinking ahead and making sure everything is in the right place. FTA produce a guide that can act as your roadmap, more details of which can be found here.
