hey it's dr amanda with straight smile solutions streetsmouthsolutions.com and let's talk about
what your options are if you're looking to buy a dental practice in existing dental practice
that happens to already have existing ortho whether your experience with ortho or you're
not experienced with ortho what are your options and how does this affect the purchaser's agreement
and often the broker they're going to gloss over this a little bit you know so i want to
tell you the truth from the standpoint not only of an orthodontist but also
the truth from the standpoint of a general dentist buying a practice why do i know both
because my husband's a general dentist and he has purchase options or almost purchase options
of offices and we work independently you know he's in a different area than i am so i don't
i don't i don't work in his offices we just do better when we don't work in the same offices
so he'll buy and he doesn't he knows how to do ortho so he doesn't need my help but in any case
there have been several times where he's looked at practices that look like amazing opportunities
that had existing ortho components you know within the practice and you know i've taught him what
to look at and whatnot and he's like he will tell me look i've really dodged some major bullets you
know and and he's actually cancelled agreements just because of the status of the ortho that were
orientum so i'm going to go ahead and just take you through the options and what things you need
to look at so what are your options if there's an existing ortho component i mean obviously first
thing for you if you are the you know considering to purchase this office is you know if you're a
general dentist or a pediatric dentist you know what are your skills do you know ortho really
really well would be the first question if you don't do you want to learn it if you're really
not interested in learning it well then that makes life a little bit easy right you don't want that
it is okay to purchase an existing office and not just take the general dental component of
it and you can put that in a purchaser agreement now will the broker like that no because it's more
work for them but you can do that that's your right you can say i'm not purchasing any of
this specialty work i'm those those patients who have active specialty work we're going to have to
you know either the general dentist who sold it is going to have to arrange for them to transfer to a
you know orthodontist ahead of time and have their work completed and that's on them
to figure that out um and we'll go over that a little bit more
or you know the general dentist will have to stay and finish the cases and we'll go over
that a little bit more on how that works um obviously if you're considering taking it all
it makes it a little bit smoother but you really need to do your due diligence and check out those
cases now what you don't want to do is just take their word for it you want to actually shadow
the the dentist on the orthodox and and see what type of worth is happening there
and or you can actually require the dentist to take progress records you know but it's going
to take a few months to do that on every single ortho patient you get a list of the ortho patients
require progress records and initial records on every patient so you can you know in your
off time you review the cases review the notes if you do not know ortho backwards and forwards
you really need to work with an orthodontist you know there's there's orthodontists like me who
will come in and help you with this part of it you could be hired for that or you might have a
friend who's an orthodontist who can sit down with you on a saturday and go through these um but it's
time consuming and it's tedious but you have to i can tell you you have to look at every single
case you can't just spot check because there's a lot of bombs that could be hidden in there
and it all it takes is one bomb you know and then that's going to be a very expensive mistake
so you gotta really check every little thing out um so we kind of went over that so there's just
so many so many variables you need to consider and i know this is going to get a little bit
overwhelming so let's talk about each particular scenario so let's talk about what if you want
to keep the patients well that's going to make things way easier if you can keep the patients
um but you're also accepting that you're going to finish the patient so like i said you have to
actually audit them all now one thing that we do our family does when my husband wants to purchase
a practice is he has made a decision he doesn't purchase any fixed cases he's not interested in
doing it he's learned how to do it he doesn't like it he thinks it's just not sustainable
not productive i mean and it can be if you set things up right but that's just not him so if
there's fixed cases those have to be transferred out for him ahead of time and it's not him that's
going to be dealing with it before he even closes on the practice they have to you know fully
it has to be that they're going to arrange for the patient to be transferred to an orthodontist and
it is the cost of the seller to make sure that has been you know you know finished and they're
not going to even start you know finish or i can't even think of the right words or and someone who's
done this would know this better than me but you know if this isn't done then what could happen is
that it can actually take away from the price of the practice so for example if there's 25
fixed cases that we're going for five thousand dollars each if needed that can be subtracted
from the value of the practice so i mean there's things like that that could happen so then it's
it's not the new doctor who's buying it that is going to negotiate this it's the old doctor
on his letterhead in his name that has to negotiate transferring them to another orthodox
that's usually the best way even though that seller is going to have to lose money on that
you know but that's on him and his good will to figure this out that way the patients are not
mad at the new doctor you know what i mean because they're getting taken care of by
an orthodontist and orthodontist office now what happens if the seller says oh i'll just come one
day a month and finish the cases up well that's a really great goodwill thing and i love that idea
and in theory that works well but it never does work well and again i've been on the
flip side where i've been told to come in one day a week or even my husband has
left an office as an associate or an owner where he had to finish the cases up and you know he
wanted to have the goodwill but he can't be there five days a week he could only give them one maybe
a half day a month or one day a month because he's working someplace else and you know yeah
sure he tries to be as flexible as possible and have evening and weekend hours but there's always
half dozen patients who can't come in on that day and they're unsatisfied
and now what happens right so again this has to be negotiated ahead of time so i know i'm making this
incredibly complicated but these are all things you have to think about and then you got to think
about the staff you know is your staff trained do they know how to handle this you know who's going
to invest in training the staff so in any case hopefully it didn't overwhelm you with all that so
many things to think about um if you took anything away from this it's just you know proceed with
caution if you're buying an existing case that has ortho especially if you're not qualified to do it
um it's better to have that solved ahead of time unless you're very confident you can do it if
you think you can do it you need to audit every single case and i can tell you that the brokers
and the sellers are not going to like this so you know but you do because it can be an
extremely expensive mistake and a liability if you have cases that weren't done right
now again for us what are we comfortable with well we we are cool if all the cases are invisalign
comprehensive in general we're fine with it you know unless there's all extraction cases
or something because we feel pretty confident with a five year that we can finish the cases
now if there's a bunch of goes and lights and expresses or then that's a huge red flag for us
because we know that we're gonna have to spend a lot more money to finish these cases potentially
also things to keep in mind who's purchasing the retainers how does that work you know what's their
warranty program is this going to be a liability for us later where we're spending more money than
we're making so all right tons of things to keep into account so basically what i wanted to get at
is that if you don't know what you're doing have an orthodontist to help you out
to help you sort through this make sure you're making a good decision make holding your hand
making sure you're not stepping in anything um if you don't have a really good friend that's
an orthodontist there are plenty of us out there who would be glad to help you out for a small fee
all right thanks so much and i'm glad to talk to anyone if you have a practice in
just a scenario there's no cost just to have a conversation if we're not looking at records
you can go to street smile solutions click on contact and schedule a free session i'm
glad to talk to you about your opportunity confidentially all right thanks so much