Chiropractors Have Your Eyes Opened Wide With a Chiropractic Practice Valuation

As a chiropractor, your life has been dedicated to serving your community to the best of your ability. It is an investment of time, energy, money, sweat and sacrifice starting with the many years of schooling right through to the early starts and full days in practice. So naturally, when the day arrives when it is time to take a step back from practice, there is that piece of you that feels like you are giving up your eldest child. The years of service have no cash value because to you, it is priceless.

However your practice is a tangible asset that has value and you deserve to exchange that value for dollars to help support your retirement. So how can we maximize the value of our practice?Simple answer= find the elements that the market is interested in when buying a practice, and enhance those pieces to make it a more valuable!

In our experience, most chiropractors feel there practice is worth more on the open market than the marketplace thinks it is worth. Remember …… it feels like one of our children! The chiropractic market is simply undervalued. This is why we recommend a practice valuation within 5 years of considering a transition.

Why? Think of it this way… if you could attend your funeral 5 years before you actually died, how eye-opening would it be to hear the eulogies spoken, with time to shift and change things  in order to make the biggest impact in your remaining years?

Now think of your practice. If you could see where systems are not optimized, team members are not as efficient as possible, where profits are bleeding, what your assets are actually worth, and most importantly, the coefficients that can add thousands of extra dollars to your final sale value, then you would have time to change things to maximize the value.

See, you don’t know what you don’t know. Therefore, without guidance you may not know what inefficiencies to correct in order to make the magic you perform each day more reproducible and therefore maximize the value.

 

How to test your transition:

1. Plan a 2 week vacation
2. Hire a locum to fill in while you’re away
3. Get a write up from the locum on how easy it was to fill in and reproduce your practice results with the systems and team you currently have.

 

You will be able to see how good your systems are at this point and begin to improve on making it more “reproducible” so any doc can walk in and replicate the same success that you create.

A few tips to begin your succession planning: (whether you’re 5 years or 20 years away from transition)

• Keep your eyes and mind open each day as to any “leaks” in your systems
• Look at your policies and rhythms and ask yourself if they would be just as flawless if a new doc took over
• Ask yourself: If your front desk staff went down for a few weeks, would your systems and policies allow for the same efficiency in the practice?
• Ask your most loyal members for pure honest feedback on any improvements that can be made. (ex. wait times, C.A. friendliness, cleanliness etc)
• Sit with your coach and/or accountant and reduce overhead wherever possible
• Take notes on how you spend your time when you are not adjusting – then figure out how to either systemize, outsource, or eliminate that task