Deal or no deal? What to do with marketing when you’re thinking of selling up
Dentistry is a fantastic industry to be in and owning a practice can be a hugely rewarding experience. Growing a patient base that rely on you for their care and dental health, that keep coming back time and again because of the trust they have in your abilities can be a very fulfilling experience. However, there will always come a time when it’s the right moment to step away from the chair once and for all and look towards a well deserved retirement. The immediate reaction to this from a digital marketing perspective is to put a stop to everything, but is that really the best thing to do?
Selling a practice can be a lengthy and sometimes onerous experience. Whilst there are no shortage of buyers in the corporate heavy market we have right now, such buyers tend to have a lengthy checklist of necessaries that they want to tick off before any sale goes through. One of the most crucial elements of the transaction for any potential buyer is how profitable the practice is. This will be a massive factor in determining the price they are willing to pay for the practice and if they look at the data (and rest assured they will!) only to see a practice with declining patient numbers and books full of white space, then you won’t be getting full value for your business.
The real issue with this scenario is that it’s often self-inflicted. Putting a moratorium on any marketing business may seem sensible, after all why do marketing if it’s the new owners that’ll see the fruits of that labour. However, the bigger picture demands that the business operations continue very much as normal leading up to any potential sale. Buyers look for an established, successful marketing strategy in a practice in order to calculate the sustainability of the business and its room for growth. If they see sliding visibility on Google, a decline in the number of enquires or massive cuts to the marketing budget, they may rightly assume that this is a practice on a downtrend, and that will impact the sale price.
It may be a wrench to keep marketing practices in place if you’re looking to sell, but it’s imperative in convincing prospective new owners that their money will be well spent. Often in marketing we talk about ‘return on investment’, and the returns could easily be in the 6 figure range during what is a vitally important time for the practice. SEO and PPC work will illustrate that the practice is forward thinking, good at maintaining busy diaries and will allow the new owners to inherit a solid strategy rather than having to make a new one out of whole cloth. That’s a situation that is potential gold dust in the eyes of investors.
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