Over the last 30 years, we have helped thousands of practitioners make decisions about moving and starting up practices. The process can be exciting and daunting at the same time. What are you planning?
Scenario 1: You have been associating for a while and it’s time for you to go out on your own and you don’t want to buy an existing practice. You prefer to make a practice to suit you and set it up exactly how it would work best for you. The question is, then, whether to go “full bore” and build the ultimate practice or whether to build a starter practice that you upgrade from one day?
Scenario 2: You already have one or more practices and you want to start up another one. The question is, how many do you want to ultimately own and why?
Scenario 3: You have outgrown your existing location and are losing pots of money by not having enough room to expand. It’s now time to find a bigger space and build your dream practice. The question is, what should your dream practice include in order to give you max value when it comes time to sell?
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS:
Actually, the above questions mostly provoke more thoughts and questions, and therefore you need to ask yourself these and then work out the answers.
Scenario 1:
- Where do you ultimately want to live and raise a family? This could determine where you want to buy or build a practice as you probably don’t want to spend valuable family time driving an hour each way to and from work. Vice versa, you might find an awesome practice for sale somewhere else and then you have to decide if you would like to live there for years.
- Do you want to be somewhat near where you are practising now (but outside the distance specified in your non-competition agreement) so that your patients will move to your new practice?
- How much funding can you qualify for to set up a new location? This may dictate the size of your practice, location of it, quality of equipment and cabinetry and so on.
- It is equally important to arrange a huge LOC to use to pay staff, bills, loan payments and your personal basics until the practice is making enough to cover all this. Using credit cards to live on until you have more cash than bills per month so you can take home some can become a living nightmare.
Scenario 2:
- How far away from your other locations will your new location be?
- Should each location be a stand alone or should you have a common name and a central reception, etc.?
- Why not have just one really big location where you can easily supervise it and have one overhead?
- Can you attract enough associates to where you are located?
Scenario 3:
- Make sure the new location you choose has enough space to accommodate what you already have and room for even more expansion.
- Does the new location have better exposure?
- How do the layout and flow lines work? Number of footsteps at a minimum?
- Is there space for additional services that you could offer?
These are not all the questions there could be … just some to get you started in the right direction.
There are no exact, cookie-cutter answers to all of these questions. The decisions are personal to you as the owner.
May we recommend ourselves as experienced mentors to make the process a lot easier as we have seen all the things that can go wrong and right and therefore prevent some costly errors.
