Maximizing Practice Value Without Losing Control

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In this episode, Art Wiederman interviews  Chip Fichtner, Co-Founder & Principal at Large Practice Sales, the leading brokerage firm representing dentists in DSO transactions. Chip breaks down the growing trend of Invisible DSOs—silent partners who invest in dental practices while allowing doctors to maintain their brand, autonomy, and leadership. Discover how these partnerships can lead to millions in upfront cash, improved operations, and even higher ongoing income than traditional ownership. Learn the top concerns dentists have, how to avoid common mistakes, and why a competitive bidding process is key to maximizing your practice’s value. If you’re even thinking about transitioning your practice, this is essential listening.

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Transcript:

Hello, everyone. And on behalf of Belmont Publishing and Decisions in Dentistry Magazine, welcome to this interview.

Today, I’m interviewing Chip Fichtner, the cofounder and, CEO of Large Practice Sales.

Large Practice Sales is the largest brokerage firm in the United States, that represents dentists taking them to market, to, consolidate with, different DSOs. Welcome today, Chip. How are you doing?

I’m doing great, Art. How are you?

I am good. You and I have talked about this subject before. You’re so knowledgeable about this. I wanna cover some things on today’s conversation that we might not have covered previously.

I know that, you know, when doctors are thinking about transitioning their practices, and going the the the DSO route, I know that you guys have coined the, the the the phrase and the process of, an invisible DSO, which we’ve talked about. But I I know that doctors have concerns about, you know, invisible DSO partnerships.

Tell tell our listeners what you think are the, you know, maybe number one or top couple of concerns that doctors have about IDSO partnerships.

Sure. Absolutely.

Well, first, let’s define the difference between an Invisible DSO and a traditional DSO.

Invisible DSOs differ significantly from traditional DSOs. In a traditional DSO, you are typically going to sell a hundred hundred percent of your practice, for some amount of cash upfront, and you’re gonna continue to work for that group or your practice for a relatively short period of time.

And they are going to typically micromanage your practice and homogenize it to fit their corporate standard. They may change the name of the practice. They may tell you who to hire, who to fire, and what products to use, and what procedures to perform, and what payers to take. And there’s nothing wrong with that because the DSOs give you a relatively short term exit. Now they may require you to work for one, two, or three years, but it’s it’s oftentimes a a transition plan similar to selling to another doctor.

Whereas the Invisible DSOs are very different in that they are gonna become your silent partner by buying anywhere between fifty one and eighty percent of your practice for cash upfront.

You’re gonna retain ownership and continue to lead the practice with your brand, your team, your strategy, and most importantly, full autonomy. They are not gonna tell you who to hire, who to fire, how to set your schedule, what products or labs to use. They are there to become your silent partner and utilize their resources to hopefully help you grow bigger, better, faster, and, more profitably.

Because with an Invisible DSO, when you become their partner, you get to access their resources, which may include some of the Invisible DSOs, for instance, have thirty full time employees that all they do is recruiting for their partner practices.

And others may have twenty or thirty employees that all they do is, drive new patients into their partner practices.

And pretty much all of them are gonna take over some of the administrative burdens by taking over banking, accounting, payroll, benefits, benefits administration, compliance, tax, legal, and IT support. And the two most important items is they’re gonna take over vendor and payer negotiations.

So the Invisible DSOs is your silent partner, are not telling you what to do or how to do it, but they’re typically paying twenty five percent less for supplies than you are, fifty percent less on implants than you are, forty percent less on name brand clear aligners than you are, and they’re providing better team benefits at a typically ten percent lower cost than you are. And so those those are all, attributes of size. So the Invisible DSOs range in size from a couple of dozen practices to seven hundred and fifty or more practices across the country.

And the Invisible DSOs, in my view today, one of the most valuable things that they add is because of their size, they’re getting reimbursed from insurance payers at higher rates than independent dentists are, including your friends at BD. I won’t name them.

But the Invisible DSO Let’s let’s not let’s not name names.

But, I I know Yeah.

We’re not gonna name and but, you know, so so size gives them certain leverage, but the the key to an Invisible DSO partnership is that it is a partnership.

And what they’re banking on is that you, as an owner, will make owner like decisions so they don’t need to homogenize your practice, and they don’t need to micromanage your practice, and they don’t need to change the name of the practice or tell you what to do or how to do it because they’re only gonna invest in you if you were successful.

So in that model, the number one fear of doctors is, yeah, I hear that’s what they’re gonna do, but do I really get to retain full autonomy? Do I really get to retain full autonomy? Do I really get to make all the decisions in my practice? And the answer is, if you choose wisely, yes.

Now there are over a thousand Invisible DSOs in the US today, and they’ve been around for thirty five years. This is not a new concept.

And, unfortunately, we consider less than a hundred of those qualified to bid on our clients.

The other nine hundred are on what we call the blacklist.

The blacklist are the groups that don’t get to bid on our clients.

And the good news is our clients will have five, six, eight, ten, and last year, our record was eighteen qualified bidders for a big practice in Florida.

But, you know, the the key is that the doctors are gonna retain full autonomy, so things aren’t gonna change a whole lot. They’re not gonna piss off your team members, and they’re not gonna tell you what to do or how to do it. But they’re only gonna invest in you because you have been successful with your own unique formula that they don’t wanna break.

Chip, the one the one thing that I’m seeing in doctors, partnering with these invisible DSOs is, like you said, is many of them are, you know, PPO, contracted practices. And and what I’m seeing and what I’m hearing is some of these doctors are actually, even after getting fifty, sixty, seventy percent cash upfront, they’re making more money as a salary working in the practice and profit sharing than they were making as an owner, and they’ve cashed out maybe, you know, two thirds or three quarters. I mean, you see that too. Right?

Yeah. Absolutely.

You know, in, in our transactions, the doctors are getting millions of dollars of cash upfront at long term capital gains tax rates of twenty percent federal maximum.

Yep. And they’re continuing to be owners, and they’re getting to benefit from the resources of that larger partner. And those resources are are pretty broad, and you’re gonna ultimately choose your partner based on the culture. You’re gonna choose your partner based on the resources they have that are helpful to your practice.

And and that’s why we urge every doctor that you should have multiple bidders because you don’t really know why each of these are different from each other, and that’s what our process brings to the party. As you get to look at all of your options, not just the one or two that contacted you directly because that’s that is, frankly, frankly our biggest competition.

Yeah. And and this is why doctors, when you do this, if you I shouldn’t say if. When you get a call from one of these invisible DSOs who’s identified you and they wanna do a deal with you without working with somebody like Chip and his team who knows the good players and the blacklisted players, just don’t sign a letter of intent. Just don’t don’t do it because they’re gonna make you a deal, Chip, that’s gonna be probably significant lower than if you’re involved. Right?

Yeah. I mean, that’s the value of a bidding contest. I mean Yeah. In a bidding contest, you’re gonna have multiple bidders eager to become your bride or groom, and, they tend to compete with each other. And so we we ultimately get, far higher values for our clients than clients could get by themselves. And that’s just the nature of a bidding process. But the real benefit is you get to look at all your options because they’re all very different.

And and the good news, doctors, is that, you know, in any business negotiation, as Chip, who’s a master negotiator knows, you have to act in where you have leverage. And if you have, you know, only one party that you’ve signed a letter of intent with,

you don’t have a lot of leverage.

But if you’ve got ten or fifteen or what did you say, eighteen bidders on one of these, you you control all the cards. You have all the leverage. I mean, it’s just it just makes all the sense in the world. So, Chip, one of the other questions we get a lot is when is the right time for a doctor, to consider an invisible DSO partnership?

Well, I’m prejudiced. So I believe that every doctor, no matter how old they are, no matter how big they are, or no matter how they are how close they are to retirement, every doctor should understand the potential value of their practice in an Invisible DSO partnership. And it may not be the right time for you. It may not be the right fit for you. There there may never be the right time for you. But the reality is, in our process, if you qualify, we’re gonna give you a free practice evaluation so that you can understand what your practice could be worth in one of these transactions. And sometimes doctors are shocked.

You know, in, you know, in a typical doctor to doctor transaction, a practice may be worth somewhere between seventy and a hundred percent of collections.

And just in the third quarter of last year, we did almost two hundred million dollars of transactions.

And out of those, over a hundred and fifty million were done at over three times collections.

Invisible DSO values are are are much higher than a sale to a traditional DSO or to a doctor, and part of that’s because they want you to commit to continue to lead your practice typically for a minimum of three years. The five years is kind of the magic number.

But they’re looking for doctors that are gonna stick around, lead their practice, use their resources, and grow. And growth is the key to value today. You have a shrinking practice, I can’t help you. But growing practices today are still commanding record values.

And and if you have a practice that’s big doing two, three, four, five million dollars and you’ve got multiple associates, the Invisible DSO is like that too. Right? Because they got all the providers there.

Yeah. Absolutely. And and one of the one of the myths in those businesses is that you have to have multiple offices to be attractive to an Invisible DSO, and that is just not true. So our our biggest deal last year was done at about sixty two and a half million dollars for a single office GP practice.

Our biggest deal in twenty twenty three was about forty three million dollars for a single office GP practice.

So don’t get hung up on the theory that partnership is not right for you if you only have one office because it’s it’s a function of profitability, not a function of the number of locations you have.

And that’s another thing, Chip, that you can do, because I’m sure you’ve talked to a lot of people who wanna do this, who are really excited about it. And then you look at their numbers and you go, well, your EBITDA is just not gonna get you what you’re gonna be looking for. We need to work on this practice for another year or two. Have you done that?

Yeah. We do that all the time. I mean, there are clients I signed up in the last month that I’ve been talking to for five years.

And so when we do a practice valuation, which is confidential, no risk, no obligation, we’re gonna give a doctor some of the ideas. If their EBITDA is not up to par, we’re gonna say, hey. My analyst you know? And we look at, I don’t know, twelve hundred practice financials a year.

I’m gonna be able to say to the doctor, hey, doc. You’ve got a five million dollar practice, and your EBITDA is only five hundred thousand. And here’s what we see the ways that you can get that EBITDA up to a million dollars. And then your practice all of a sudden becomes worth four million dollars or whatever the number is.

Excuse me. Eight million dollars.

But going through our evaluation process, we can give doctors some pointers on things they need to focus on. And we’ve had many doctors who took our and keep in mind, we’re not consultants, and this is no charge. But we can look at a practice, and we’re benchmarking it against other practices and say, hey. You’re a little high here. You’re a little high there, and you ought to go back to your vendor and negotiate a little bit more on the supplies because you’re out of whack there. And so our evaluation process is is not a consulting service, but it does give a doctor an idea of ways that they can improve their practice so that in the future, we’re happy to evaluate it again based on the changes that they make. And, you know, we have multiple clients that have have started this process years ago and ultimately worked on the things we suggested and ended up doing a deal that, was at a much higher value than they could have gotten originally.

That that’s right. And it’s it’s it’s really important to understand doctors that, you know, when you sell a traditional practice doctor to doctor, it’s valued at a multiple of, you know, maybe two and a quarter, two and a half times true net profit or eighty or ninety percent of revenues.

In this world that Chip lives in, it is all driven by the EBITDA, and it’s and so the higher your profit minus what you take as a salary by being the provider back in a very simplistic terms is the EBITDA. And EBITDA, you know, you calculate EBITDA and the DSO calculates EBITDA and, then we start talking. And that’s the advantage of working with someone like Chip is that, you know, they know what these practices are worth, and they have multiple bidders.

But but doctors, it’s really important that you have good profit in your practices in order to obtain the highest value. I mean, the money is out there. I know that PE’s got a bunch of money they need to be investing. I mean, deals this is not gonna dry up anytime soon. Right?

No. Absolutely not. So last year, we estimate that the Invisible DSOs forget the traditional DSOs, but the Invisible DSOs obtained close to eight billion dollars of new capital and financing. So there’s plenty of capital out there. Now the the invisible DSOs have gotten more selected. Now what’s what’s changed pretty dramatically since COVID is the number of younger doctors that are interested in these partnerships, and their interest is primarily in the fact that they can gain a partner who has capital and resources to expand their practice, to to grow the existing facility or acquire competitors.

And so of the last billion dollars of transactions we’ve done in the last twenty four months, a hundred and fifty million of that has been for doctors in their thirties.

And these thirty year old doctors are not doing it because they’re looking for retirement. They’re doing it because they go, wow. I can get a partner. I can sell them fifty one percent of my life’s work so far for cash upfront, secure my future, eliminate my risk, diversify my investment portfolio, and yet I still own forty nine percent, and I have an invisible DSO partner that’s gonna take all the future risk of growth. They’re gonna put up all the capital to build the second office or expand my existing office. And I think it’s that element, which is what’s driving so many younger doctors to do these things today.

Yeah. I I I I see this. I almost think of it as a kind of a I I can compare it to the TV show Shark Tank. You got an entrepreneur that wants to grow their business.

Maybe they don’t have the skills to do it. Maybe they haven’t done it over and over again. They go to the Shark Tank, and they give them a you know, they they they sell part of their company, and then they’ve got the team behind them. It it’s it’s kinda like that.

Isn’t it Chip? I mean, you’ve got a a team of people that know how to do this, and they’ve done it with, you know, like you say, anywhere from a couple of dozen to, you know, hun hundreds and hundreds of practices.

Yeah. And and they’re all eager. And part of the reason a younger doctor will get a higher value than an older doctor is because they’re eager to drive organic growth. Because, you know, ultimately, the real money in these transactions for doctors is that piece of ownership that they retained as a part of the initial transaction can become much more valuable as a part of an Invisible DSO than it could remaining independent.

Now the, the biggest Invisible DSO in the country completed their third recapitalization, meaning they sold to a third investor in seven years. And their first recapitalization valued the Invisible DSO at three hundred and thirty million, which was a great number. And their second in, recapitalization, thirty eight months after their first, valued them at one point two billion.

And their third recapitalization, seven years almost to the day after their first, valued them at three point eight billion.

So had you been a shareholder or had retained equity, in that, that first recapitalization, you would have seen the value of your equity or your ownership increase by ten to eleven times. Unfortunately, we had some clients who did that.

So the real upside for doctors is if you choose wisely, and you gotta choose wisely, the upside in that retained ownership piece is far more valuable than what you could build by yourself.

So so, Chip, what what practices in twenty twenty five, and we’re talking general specialty or or just the type, what practices do you think will achieve the greatest values in this year in twenty twenty five? And we’re we’re we’re recording this here in the spring of twenty twenty five.

Well, you know, the key value today is growth in the first half of twenty five versus the first half of twenty four.

All of the invisible DSOs today are concerned that the, economic issues or the trauma, let’s call it, and the stretched consumer, a k a patients, you know, you potentially see declining collections of practices.

And so they are steering very wide of any practice that is not growing.

So they’ve become more selective this year, and the key to value is growth rate. A practice that’s growing at double digits is gonna get a far higher value than a practice that’s not growing. And, again, if a practice is shrinking, we can’t help them at all because the Invisible DSOs won’t touch them.

And so it’s, all about growth at this point. Doctor eight is important.

Interesting thing is geography is not as important as it was three or four years ago, and there was a gold rush to Florida, Texas, Tennessee, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Idaho, and Georgia. And today, I mean, our highest value is a multiple transaction. It was actually done in Vermont last year at eleven times EBITDA.

And it was a big practice. It was growing at double digits, relatively young doctors.

So geography, interestingly, is less important.

If you’re a practice in Florida, are you gonna get more bidders than a practice in Connecticut? Yes. You will. But it’s interesting that the values, are not distinctly different. I think one of our highest GP deals we did last year was in in Michigan.

So, don’t get hung up on where you are. Yes. It helps if you’re in Florida and Tennessee and and not in Maine or Vermont, but, shockingly, our highest multiple deal last year was Vermont.

Well, let’s talk for a second, Chip, about who candidates are. In other words, I I know that if you’re a three operator practice doing a half a million dollars a year, you’re probably not a candidate for any type of a DSO, invisible or non invisible.

So, what are we talking? A million, billion and a half, two million revenues? How big the facility?

What what should a doctor be looking at as far as being a candidate to to get into this discussion?

You know, ultimately, the size of your facility is irrelevant. Your collections are irrelevant. But, ultimately, what’s valuable is if you have an EBITDA or operating profit after paying the doctor because many doctors after hearing my podcast will go to their CPA and go, hey. What’s my EBITDA? And the CPA will come back with, well, your take home last year was a million bucks. Well, that’s great that they forgot to pay the doctor, for doing what he does every day. So half a million dollars in Eve does, kind of the magic number to achieve great values with an invisible DSO.

And so we often see, practices that are specialists, need to have at least a million and a half in collections, and GP practices should have at least a million eight in collections. And that’s that’s kind of what we look for above those two numbers.

Now now one of the things that that we also I wanna chat with you a little bit about is doctor compensation because I hear because I I I do a little bit of consulting in this world. I don’t have anywhere near the expertise that you do. But what I hear the doctors, they say, well, you know, I want forty five or fifty percent of my production or my collections as compensation.

And and Chip explained the the how the doctor’s compensation, the seller’s compensation affects the valuation.

Well, it’s, you know, it’s interesting because there’s a direct correlation between future compensation to the doctor and initial value because initial value is gonna be dictated based on the current EBITDA.

So if a doctor says, hey. I want fifty percent of collections, and this is in a practice that’s doing we’ll call it a a single doc practice doing two million in collections, and there are plenty of those out there.

So if he wants fifty percent of collections in compensation, that means he’s gonna get paid a million dollars a year on a go forward basis.

Whereas if he says, look. I the industry standard is thirty percent of collections. Therefore, I’m only gonna get compensated at thirty percent of two million or six hundred thousand a year. That’s a four hundred thousand dollars swing in EBITDA.

Well, a four hundred thousand dollars swing in EBITDA and, you know, the lowest deals we’ve done in the last couple of years are seven times EBITDA.

That means asking to get paid an extra four hundred thousand dollars a year for the five year term of your contract is gonna cost you two point eight million dollars, seven times four hundred thousand in that example Right. In reduced initial initial value. So the smart doctors would love to work for zero because there’s zero impact for the doc, and they get to get, you know, an x multiple on that, EBITDA number upfront in cash at long term capital gains tax rates or make more money for five years at thirty seven percent federal tax rate. So that whole puzzle is pretty easy to explain. But, you know, the and and I wish I could do deals for doctors that would get paid zero. They’d be happy. I’d be happy.

Oh my god. Evaluations would be off the charts.

Yeah. But the Invisible DSOs usually want compensation for the doctor to equate to what is market and what would it cost to replace that doctor in the market today.

And the reality is that most of these owner doctors are not replaceable because they’re high performing, high value practices.

But, you know, sort of the general compensation range for GP is thirty to thirty five percent of collections, and it it depends on the geography.

And, you know, oral surgery, thirty to forty.

Herio, about the same. Endo, pretty close to that. And orthos are typically paid an annual salary plus a case start bonus or a day rate.

But, you know, the the compensation is all over the map, but it’s the higher the compensation, the lower the initial value. And the math says from a tax perspective, you want more cash upfront and low tax rates.

Yeah. It it it it’s funny. When I when I do, you know, as being having been a dental CPA for forty one years, and I consult with doctors who wanna just sell a part of their practice to another doctor, not what you do. I I I have in the lectures that I do in big letters, doctors, you are selling a part of your business.

You can’t expect to make the same money if you sell a part of your business. Now in the Invisible DSO situation, because we can get lower costs combined with higher, PPO reimbursements and and better management, and maybe adding, you know, adding services and locations, we could actually make more money. But but that’s the thing the doctors have to realize is because, I mean, I hear from them, well, I’m worth forty five. Well, that’s great, but you’re gonna cost yourself this. And then if you have a a a group like the one and I know exactly which one you’re talking about, that’s recapped three times and could go again. You know?

The amount of the initial valuation, the loss in each of those recaps is a lot more than the two point eight. I mean, it’s it’s it’s lots and lots of millions of dollars. Right?

Yep. Absolutely.

Yeah. So it it’s a matter of having someone who’s a consultant, who understands the market, who understands the players. Talk for a second. You know, if somebody is thinking they’re listening to this, but they still they’re thinking, well, maybe I wanna do this myself.

What warning signs of some of these invisible DSOs that are on your blacklist? What are their warning signs? What are reasons that they’re on your blacklist?

Great question.

So it’s interesting. There are a lot of different criteria to end up on the blacklist, so let’s talk about some recent ones. There’s an Invisible DSO that was not on the blacklist that recently joined the blacklist, because they, refinanced their credit line at a very onerous, rate, not just from an interest rate standpoint, but from an equity dilution standpoint.

The new lender is getting paid in equity, which dilutes the value of the doctor’s ownership. That’s bad. Yeah. Another group recently joined the, blacklist, because their investors had replaced multiple, senior management within that group. And until we we know that new senior management is going to do, we we we will not trust, our clients’ futures with unknowns.

The other thing that’s that’s a real tell is to go look at the practices that the Invisible DSO has partnered with. And when you see the practices that they’ve partnered with, if they are not quality practices, this is an Invisible DSO that’s gonna have a problem. Right? If you partner with with substandard doctors with substandard practices in substandard areas, you don’t really wanna be a partner with that group. So the other thing you gotta look at is their balance sheet. You gotta look at their financing sources because the trick to creating real value, you know, the ten times, the ten times your return on your equity, is do they have the right financial partner? In other words, who is their sponsor?

You know, doctors, mistakenly believe that, all of the money in dental consolidation has come from private equity, and that is just not true anymore. Not at all. Certainly private you know, private equity has been been active in it. But, you know, you have sovereign wealth funds. You have BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, which, today owns four invisible DSOs.

And you’ve got family offices, and there’s a lot of different sources for money. But what you’re looking for is money that has a successful track record in health care consolidation.

So there are a lot of different different elements you need to look at. You know, one of one of the the things that gets a gets a group on the blacklist pretty quick is if their only financing source is the founding doctor and his personal guarantee on a bank line.

That’s a recipe for disaster.

And so we we put those doctors, unfortunately, on the blacklist, because you can’t grow if your future is based on a bank line guaranteed by the, the doctor who founded the group.

Yeah. That’s just not a recipe for creating value.

I I’ve seen I’ve I’ve researched for clients some of these groups, and I’ve seen groups that are you know, we they have an initial influx of maybe five million from a bunch of investors, and when they run out of money, they go get hard money. I saw one that was at twelve and a half percent variable, and that scares me to death.

So, again, you really need to know who you are partnering with and and why, you know, why they’re a a good fit. And it it’s scary to me that nine you said there’s about a thousand invisible DSOs, and and and about a hundred or you’ll only work with about ten percent of them, which tells me that ninety percent of these groups are having issues. Is that what you’re I mean, or a large percentage. Right?

Well well, no. It it’s not necessarily that they’re having issues. It’s just that they don’t have a very high a super high likelihood of success. You know, we wanna partner our clients with the groups that are gonna be the most successful.

So the nine hundred that are on the blacklist doesn’t mean they’re necessarily bad.

It just means that they are not going to provide the potential returns that the good ones will. And, you know, that’s our job as an adviser to make sure our clients choose wisely.

And Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

You know, it’s it’s an experience, a knowledge, a insider information thing. I mean, I think one of our best values is, you know, we I think we had bids for our clients from forty different Invisible DSOs last year, and we have a pretty intimate knowledge of how they’re doing and what they’re doing and when they’re gonna do their next recapitalization.

And so knowing that stuff helps you get higher values for your clients with the right partner.

Well and and the nice thing is that when you get on the phone with any of these Invisible DSOs, their whole mantra changes. It’s like, okay. Now I’m I guess I’m dealing with the a team, so, I guess, my bid’s gonna come up. Right? You know?

You know? I don’t think It’s it’s it’s true. You know, my favorite story on that was the ortho in Tampa who was about to sign a nineteen million dollar deal, and and I said, well, don’t do that. What how many bidders did you have?

And he’s like, well, just one. I like these guys. Some of my friends went there. I was like, why don’t you not do that?

I’ll get you a lot more. And we signed him up as a client. I called the bidder at nineteen and said, the CEO, who I knew because we’ve done multiple deals with them in the last six months. And I said, you realize nineteen is is an insult.

He said, yeah. Yeah. I got it. I said, you’re not gonna get to come to dinner because we always do three finalist dinners for our clients with the prospective bidders so that they can see each of the managements live and in person and do a practice tour.

And, I was like, John, you don’t get to come to dinner at nineteen, etcetera. We’ll go to thirty. But he was about to the doctor, my client, was about to sign a deal with these guys at nineteen.

The same bidder went to thirty on one phone call. I was like, yeah. You still don’t get to come to dinner, and we ended up doing the deal at, forty two million, ninety five percent of it in cash because the doctor was older and really wanted cash.

And, so, you know, in that case, we we made the guy an extra twenty million dollars after our fee.

And doctors so so, alright, so you so you got this guy an extra you said nineteen to forty two. So that’s, let’s see. I’m the CPA here. I gotta do the math. Twenty three million dollars.

As much as it would have been wonderful that your commission was twenty three million, it was probably nowhere near that and the amount of profit they made. And that’s the other thing doctors is, you know, we get people that they don’t wanna pay a commission. But when you look at the benefit of number one, partnering with the right invisible DSO, and number two, of getting a much better deal than just trying to do it on your own. I mean, it’s a no brainer. Right?

Yeah. And and he ended up a group that frankly was better for him. The the nineteen million dollar bidder was not a bad group. They were a good group. We’d sold them multiple practices.

But he he ended up with a net I mean, our fee was a little over three million dollars. And, you know, even he had to admit, you know, you got me an extra twenty million paying you three.

You got me an extra twenty million net after paying you three. It’s still not a bad deal, so enjoy your three million dollars. I was like, yeah.

We were I’ve I’ve heard three times the commission. You got him seven times your commission in additional money, so that’s, like, ridiculous.

So Chip is put a bow on this, and I want you go ahead.

No. I was gonna say that’s a unicorn story. That doesn’t happen very often. But anytime a doctor has an offer from an invisible DSO, we urge them to give us a call and find out whether we think we can beat it or not because, you know, we only get paid if we close a transaction, and it can’t hurt to have a conversation.

Well and the important thing that doctors have to remember is if they’re talking to one of these invisible DSOs, once they sign a letter of intent, there’s not a whole lot you can do to help them to change the deal. Right?

Nope. There is not.

So that’s why it’s important, doctors. If you’re listening to this and you’ve gotten a call and these people all sound nice and they’re all talking to you about this amazing deal, and we can get you millions of dollars.

And it it’s just like, okay. Let me take your deal under advisement. Send me your proposal, and then give Chip a call and just I mean, in about, you know, five minutes, you can take a look at this and say, well, no. That’s a good deal.

Or no. Like you said with this guy in Florida, no. Let let let me get involved, and and this is what I think we can do. And and you’ve done it over and over again.

So any any other comments or things you wanna chat about today, Chip, in the marketplace? I think we covered all the the high points of what we were gonna talk about because I want you to have your contact information.

No. It’s just you know, I urge every doctor, to give us a call. Let’s have a conversation. It’s no risk. No obligation. You’re gonna talk to me, nobody else. And you can find us at large practice sales dot com.

And, you know, I love talking to doctors because I learn something from every one of them every single day. And, so go to large practice sales dot com and, contact us, and we’ll set up a call, for us. It’d be about a twenty minute call, and we’ll learn a little bit about you, and you can learn a little bit about us. But, it’s no risk, no obligation. It’s confidential. Why not? It’s all about it.

And and and, Chip, if, if there’s a large dental meeting coming up, there’s probably a pretty good chance that you guys are gonna be there. Right?

Yes, sir. Absolutely. And and keep in mind that the specialists, have some of the most eager bidders at the moment. It’s not just GP.

Oral surgery is the fastest consolidating of all practice types today because of the recruiting problems.

And so it’s it’s a good time. You know, despite the turmoil in the economy and the coming recession, which I believe is already here, These groups still have capital, and they’re still looking for growing practices with doctors who are passionate about dentistry, have a personality, and a plan for growth, the three p’s as we call it.

Well, listen. It’s always an honor and a privilege to talk to you. I learn something every time I talk to you. So one more time, how do we get ahold of you?

Large practice sales dot com.

Or at a dental meeting near you. Chip Fichtner, cofounder of large practice sales. Thank you for your time and your expertise today. And on behalf of, Decisions in Dentistry Magazine and Belmont Publishing, this is Art Wiederman. Thank you for your for time and for listening, and give give Chip a call if it’s something, that you’re considering. Chip, have a great day.

Thanks. Thanks, Art. Good to talk to you. Have a great evening.

You too.