| As the owner of a dental practice, have you
created an exit strategy for when you want to retire?
No?
Don't worry. You are far from being the only one. Most
dentists don't spend a lot of time thinking about their exit strategy. Maybe it's because
"exiting" your dental practice or beginning to phase out seems completely
unattainable at this time.
So you don't want to think about exit strategies just like
you didn't want to approach that really pretty girl or hot guy in high school because you
had this perception that he or she was somehow unattainable.
Today, we're going to change your mind set.
In this article I'm going to show you what it takes to
really engineer an exit strategy. But before I reveal some of my hottest tips, I want you
to understand that I've been really studying what it takes for people to be financially
independent for a long, long time and have personally achieved it myself. I have been a
business owner essentially since I was 18 years old. I literally have hundreds of dentists
in my coaching programs. I am in the business of taking dentists and helping them work
toward an exit. And here's how I get them started.
How to Create a Plan That Helps You Become Financially
Independent & Set-up an Exit Strategy for Your Dental Practice:
1. Know how much money you need to retire.
If you think about an exit, it means you leave something.
So think just for a second about leaving your practice.
Here is the problem with leaving your practice. Number one,
there's a thing called money. For most people, they have no idea how to answer the
question of how much is enough. So the answer is always one more dollar. When you don't
know how to answer that question, the truth is you always just need a little bit more. You
never get closer to your ultimate goal – selling your dental practice and enjoying
retirement.
2. Visualize the lifestyle you want to enjoy once you sell
your dental practice.
Your exit strategy has to be crafted around the particular
lifestyle you want to experience when you retire. Nine out of ten dentists who come to see
me do not have clarity on this particular subject matter. And the reason they don't have
clarity is because they cannot visualize what it is like to retire. They cannot visualize
the exit date. They cannot visualize exactly what they need. They cannot visualize what
it's going to take to be at peace with the decision to sell their dental practice. They
just can't visualize retiring.
3. Work on your relationship with money.
When we put dentists through our program, one of the things
we realize is that almost everyone's income is too small to retire. You have to know what
assets you have now and understand how to make more money so you can become financially
independent.
Before you focus on where you want to go, you have to know
where you are right now. Look at your numbers and figure out if you just tried to live off
the cash, do you have enough?
Do you see a problem? I'm going to assume you do.
The next number I want you to look at is how much money you
save every month. Write that down.
Now, do some quick calculations and take how much you save
times the number of years you have left to work and do your math. I'm willing to bet you
that the numbers don't add up.
In order for you to sell your practice, you have to have a
lot of cash saved and you have to have all of your real estate paid off.
4. Realize the trap that you're in.
If you go back to when you started your dental practice,
you literally went up year after year. You might have gone up 20%, 30% or 40%. Then all of
a sudden, your practice and your income hit a plateau, but your expenses keep rising. You
feel the pinch and there's less and less margin.
You start doing things you don't want to do and making
decisions you don't want to make. The next thing you know, you're cutting out staff
bonuses or scaling back on marketing.
You start thinking, "I'm only going to work for so
much longer and I don't want to make these investments." But the gap keeps closing
between the expenses and the gross. That's when you get in trouble.
5. Make the necessary changes to become financially
independent.
Change is coming if you want it or not. So why not go ahead
and dictate the change? To be in control of the change is a lot more fun than a forced
change.
Design and create the changes you want so you can
"exit" when you want and live the lifestyle you want from then on
Start mapping out a plan that you have full control of and
create your exit strategy so you'll become financially independent. Then when you're
ready, sell your business and enjoy the retirement you dream of. |
