When Should You Start Planning Your Practice Sale?

What does a practice transition broker actually do — and when should you call one?

Most practice owners will sell exactly one practice in their lives. The buyer across the table may be backed by people who buy practices every month. That asymmetry — one career-defining transaction versus institutional repetition — is the whole reason transition professionals exist. Yet many owners can’t say precisely what one does, and most call far too late to get full value from the answer.

So here’s the job description, drawn from our Dentelligentsia conversation with Cameron Elrod, President and Owner of DDSmatch Michigan, who has run the Michigan territory of the national transitions firm for eight years — and grew up in dentistry, the son and brother of dentists, with 25 years at Patterson Dental before this.

The job: manufacture a market

Left alone, a practice sale is one conversation: an owner and whichever buyer happened to appear — often a corporate group that appeared on purpose. A transitions firm replaces that single conversation with a market. Elrod’s process starts with an independent third-party valuation (not a number invented by the person paid on the sale price), then full outreach to the real universe of buyers, then structured competition. In metro Detroit, he told us, “we can generally get anywhere from five to fifteen letters of intent on a project” — with back-to-back buyer interviews so the seller compares offers side by side.

Competition changes outcomes. His best story: a seller whose whole market saw the deal ended up with more than double the original valuation. Owners who skip the fee to save money, Elrod’s version: “There’s no telling what they left on the table.”

Money isn’t the only axis. For sellers who care about their staff, their patients, their building, or staying on part-time, the market approach works there too: “For every descriptive item a seller gives us about their ideal exit, there’s a buyer out there that wants that same thing from them.”

The other job: the binder

The less famous half of the work is preparation — what Elrod frames as estate planning for the practice. His Practice Optimizer workup builds what he calls the break-glass-in-case-of-emergency binder: current practice valuation, real estate valuation, estate review, and a gap analysis against your retirement number. “Your spouse knows: something happens to me, open this book, and we’re ready to go.”

The stakes are not hypothetical. “There were five dental deaths in Michigan this year, and every one of them was not prepared” — a grieving family left running a clinical business with no idea who to call, while the practice’s value evaporated by the week.

When to call: earlier than feels reasonable

“Our average client calls us the year before they’re ready to exit,” Elrod said. “If you call us too late, it’s really difficult to make an impact on the outcome. You can’t really start too early — your mid-40s is a good time.”

Mid-40s sounds absurd until you see what the runway buys. The five-year equipment rule: buy the new technology five years before you sell — you get years of production from it and a practice that shows well — not one year before, which is “like putting a pool in your backyard and expecting to recapture the total value of the pool when you sell the house.” The same runway lets you fix overhead, stabilize staff, and decide deliberately whether you’re building for value or throttling back. On that last point, Elrod is refreshingly non-judgmental: “Turning your practice into a lifestyle business — there’s nothing wrong with that plan. It’s only wrong if it’s unexpected.”

One rule for the table: everyone gets their own advocate

Elrod’s firm represents sellers only, and he’s blunt about why: “Dual representation is not healthy for the deal. Each party needs somebody that has their back.” A single intermediary paid by both sides serves neither. That principle is the architecture of a good transition — seller’s advocate, buyer’s advocate, each side’s own attorney and CPA.

We’d add the piece we see from the real estate chair: the building is often the largest asset adjacent to the deal, and the lease terms — assignment language especially — quietly set the terms of the practice sale. The real estate strategy belongs in the binder from day one, whether the plan is to sell the building, keep it as an income property, or hand a clean lease to the buyer.

Hear the full conversation with Cameron Elrod of DDSmatch Michigan on the Dentelligentsia podcast — the valuation drivers, the buyer-interview process, and the story behind the double-the-valuation sale.

And for the real estate half of your exit plan — the building, the lease, the timing — talk to us. Tenants and buyers only.

For more on our interview with Cameron Elrod, check out our article, “When Should You Start Planning Your Practice Sale? A Transitions Pro Says: Earlier Than You Think.”

And follow Cameron Elrod on Linked In or check out the DDSmatch Michigan website.