Brad McKeiver, CPA, MBA, Principal, Aprio
Brad is a Principal in the Matthews office of Aprio where he heads our Accounting Solutions group. As a member of the National Society of Certified Healthcare Business Consultants, Brad works extensively with medical professionals providing doctors, dentists and surgeons the opportunity to rely on their CPA firm as a strategic business advisor.
A special interest for Brad is helping clients maintain and review internal controls and metrics and their effect on the bottom line of small businesses and its owner’s involvement. He believes that the unique experience of a small business owner is that the decisions made day to day and year over year have a direct effect on current earnings and future prospects; that with the proper planning and processes in place, those decisions can present opportunities that are endless.
BradMcKeiver@lbahs.com
http://lbahs.com/
https://yourdentalaccountant.com/
AUTOMATED EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:01] You're listening to Scaling Up Services where we speak with entrepreneurs authors business experts and thought leaders to give you the knowledge and insights you need to scale your service based business faster and easier. And now here is your host Business Coach Bruce Eckfeldt.
[00:00:22] Are you a CEO looking to scale your company faster and easier. Checkout Thrive Roundtable thrive combines a moderated peer group mastermind expert one on one coaching access to proven growth tools and a 24/7 support community created by Inc award winning CEO and certified scaling up business coach Bruce Eckfeldt. Thrive will help you grow your business more quickly and with less drama. For more details about the program, visit eckfeldt.com/thrive . That’s E C K F E L D T. com / thrive
[00:00:57] Welcome, everyone. This is Scaling Up Services. I'm Bruce Eckfeldt. I'm your host. And our guest today is Brad McKeiver. He is principal and director national director of dental services for LBA Haynes Strand, which is an accounting firm focused primarily on dental practices. And I love I love this opportunity to speak with Brad and speak with a company who's really focused. I think one of the things I'm always emphasizing and suggesting to the clients that I work with when they're trying to grow and scale their business is you have to find a niche exploit that you really differentiate yourself, find a way to stand out from the crowd. And picking a category like this is a great way to do it. I'm very curious to have this conversation on how that played out, what they've been able to do since they've been so focused on the dental practice world. Again, it's a great strategy, great insight. I'm excited to have this conversation with that, Brad. Welcome to the program. Thank you. Happy to be here. So let's talk a little bit about background and how how you got into kind of dental practice world and how that played out. Was that a conscious choice? Did you fall into it? And tell us about the background and how you guess how how kind of the accounting practice developed and how you got to where you are today. Sure.
[00:02:06] Yeah. Bit of an atypical journey for the traditional CPA. Most of us start out in the, you know, the big four and we work our way into private accounting or smaller firm world or we stay in the big four and work our way up the ladder. My background was actually a little different, so I was born and bred in the financial advisory industry and worked in the private wealth management field for a few years after getting out of my schooling. And then, you know, from there I looked out into the landscape of my resume and the business world and decided a sales career would help broaden my my resumé. And so I took that opportunity and sold medical devices for a few years and really got to learn the mindset, mentality of of working with doctors and hospitals and purchasing groups and things of that nature and really saw it from the sales side, the product side of that world and how they leverage that technology in their day to day work. So fast forward a couple of years as I get ready to start a family and look at my next 10, 15, 30 years of work. Medical device sales are great, but they also require at that time a pager on your hip and 24/7 access. So I decided to go back towards my classical education and landed on the CPA world to do so. At that time I thought, well, let's go out and and build a niche around doctors. And here in the Charlotte community and in many major metropolitan areas, where are you and doctors networking with large hospital groups who frankly didn't really need or use a lot of outside small CPA, local CPA firms for their work?
[00:03:37] And so, you know, based off of that conversation and really understanding what market I was entering, Dennis became a focus of mine as they are still primarily privately owned and still looking for good local advisors to help them kind of understand how to work through their practice financials to better their not only their practice profits, but you know how they leverage that profit into their personal lives.
[00:03:59] And I think it's a good kind of story of finding that Neasden and identifying areas that you're not going to be able to serve well. And then and then finding that audience, that target that. But you have kind of any capability or particular capability to serve based on where they're at with business.
[00:04:12] And I like this because it's a it's a service business servicing service businesses. It sounds like a double double layer here as you kind of decided to focus on the dental practices.
[00:04:23] What did you see being their needs here above and beyond, just kind of straight up, you know, tax prep, you know, kind of services like when you when you look more strategically at, you know, accounting and advisory work around finances. What are the needs that you saw within the dental practice space?
[00:04:39] Yeah, I mean, I think when I go back and look at kind of launching into the market at the very basic level, their initial need was availability and access both to their advisor as well as current financial data. And I think that's a pretty obvious checkbox in today's environment. You know, a decade ago it wasn't it should have been maybe, but it wasn't. And so I think that was an easy box to check. Now, once we got beyond that, it was very clear that, you know, the average practice owner, when they get a balance sheet and a piano, they look at it and go, well, what is that? What does that mean? And so we had they understood a taxable income and what net income equaled in tax payments. But they didn't always understand how to translate that into comparing to their industry standards and their. Here's how. And then that's in most industries, right? That's a good benchmark to start with. How do I compare to my peers and industry averages and that PNL, unless it's properly construed and pushed into other management reporting, you know, can can leave you a little short on understanding that information. And so I built kind of our initial platform based off of translating that data into, you know, basic chart mentality that doctors could could take five minutes to review and understand where they're at. Interesting. We could we could expand beyond those five minutes into deeper conversations based off of, you know, however their ratios were being presented.
[00:05:56] So it's almost like leveraging their familiarity with looking at a patient chart and graphs and, you know, the data they're getting back from, you know, reports and pathology and things like that and kind of treating it the same way from a financial point of view in their business.
[00:06:11] Yeah, we wanted to break it into bite sizes that would allow them to get that snapshot. And from that snapshot, you could drill down deeper into areas that were opportunities for improvement.
[00:06:20] And what were some of the sort of things typically that you would look at, you know, given the kind of business model of a dental practice? You know, either key metrics, KPI is critical numbers think things in and are being pretty common benchmarks of cost practices that you could look at to kind of evaluate how our practice was doing, you know, identify areas of focus. What did you how did you kind of boil the ocean down to a handful that that made sense for practice owners?
[00:06:46] Yeah.
[00:06:47] You know, fortunately in dentistry, there are, you know, several national publications, regional newsletters, a national consultancy firms and surveys that help us, you know, grab some key statistics out there.
[00:07:00] And so we we leveraged the research that was at our fingertips. And, you know, generally in dentistry practice, owners are looking at five buckets of major expenses. Of course, these buckets have sub buckets, so to speak, but they really want to focus on their staff costs, both on the admen and clinical side occupancy, you know, repairs, maintenance, utilities, et cetera, their supplies, costs, including both lab and just traditional dental supplies and in general, overhead Mark. And then, of course, marketing. Right. Those are generally the five areas that we started with. You know, from there the conversation expands based off of where the practices and their lifecycle. Are they established? Are they a startup? Are they growing or are they adding locations? So depending on the lifecycle of the practice and its performance, we might dive deeper into, you know, clinical cost. Is it time to expand to another two rooms at a high Genest, for example?
[00:07:57] It's interesting is I think a lot of people know a lot of people treat accounting as essentially bookkeeping where I've got to keep records to be able to pay taxes at the end of the year. And I think that it's a missed opportunity to really create insight around your business, facets of your business. I love that you're looking at at stages, you know, based on the stage of the company and stage of the practice, you know, what are the important metrics are? What are the expected kind of metrics at different levels? If you're in a high growth scenario, you know how that's different than if you're in more of a optimization like you you've saturated or you feel like you've grown your practice where you want to be and you really want to optimize the finances of it. You know, those are very different objectives and very different goals. And you would treat or you'd use your financial data very differently to kind of evaluate those things. What are you guys? So there are there different capers as you're looking at the different stage of practices, sort of different Capesize or different areas of focus that come up as you go from kind of practice to practice, given their their growth trajectory or the phase of growth that they're in?
[00:08:55] Yeah, they are. They certainly become goal oriented, based off of the practice owner that working with the geography they're in and what are their long term goals. But I would generally say when when you're an established practice and we can talk about what that means maybe a little later, but if you're established practice, you really are honing in on your true margins.
[00:09:13] And how do those margins compared to where you could and should be per those industry standards in this in the startup phase.
[00:09:20] And that's for a solo location, kind of your traditional quote unquote, mom and pop doctor own and led dental practice. We'll start startup doctors that are launching a practice from scratch, right. De novo start. You can't use those industry standards.
[00:09:33] They don't make any sense. Right? Exactly. And so they're are focused on new patient cow production per month and kind of establishing what a lot of doctors have referred to as their their BAMN score. And I don't know how friendly, family friendly your podcast is. So that's okay. Feel free to use whatever you need to use. Yeah. So they call it their BAMN scores. So it's their best estimate on the right.
[00:09:57] And so that's one where I try to help them back into when do they get to industry standard as their initial target? What does our revenue run rate need to be and all? What hiring cycle for staff do we get them to industry standard? So that's the start up doctor. And then as we get into our expanding locations, right, you're out in your second, third or fourth location and you need to start adjusting for the fact that you as the doctor owner aren't doing all the doctor work. Right. You're not doing all the doctor. And so now you have to factor in paying someone else at the associate level to help assist you generate your revenue. What does that do to the bottom line?
[00:10:28] Well, it usually works. I see they come up a lot. Surly and early stage companies where you've got an owner operator and, you know, we're kind of looking at the finances or looking at the numbers.
[00:10:38] And also I'll often sit down with with with the prospect that's looking to grow and scale the business. And I'll ask him, well, how is your profitability? I know they'll say, oh, it's great. It's like 20 percent or 25 percent. And, you know, they'll show me all the money that they've taken home. I'm like, OK, yeah, but how much how much do you pay yourself? How much are you working the company? How much are you paying self? And then how much profit do you generate? Now, like, well, well, you know, I bring home a couple hundred thousand dollars a year. OK. But what is it? How much are you working? Well, I'm working 80 hours a week. OK, okay. Well, you better be taking. You're working those over and just hold on to this whole issue of paying yourself, as you know, as an operator, you know, for the work that you're doing in the business versus profit. And oftentimes when we actually do the math and we figure out what a market rate is for their work, they're doing their profitability goes from, you know, 20, 25 percent to 5 percent or minus 5 percent. The severity of the situation, I guess talk to me about how how you kind of normalize or deal with the fact that, you know, a lot of these folks are gonna be owner operators, you know, whether they're working in the business as well as owning the business. How does that change the dynamics for you?
[00:11:42] Yeah, I think we built, you know, again, based off of kind of the way that the industry standards have for decades kind of evolved as doctors have. That's one good thing that the industry has done in dentistry, is they've always kind of set their standards and not net income, but net operating income. Right. So what what's what are your margins, Prieur, quote unquote, doctor pay. Right. So this allows you to take the overall expense margins and normalize them across the board because it's not based off of, you know, whether you are the owner doctor or you have a associate doctor doing the doctor production. Those are removed from the stats and we charge those for our practice. So they can see their true operating margins at that kind of industry standard, andnational national nationally accepted process. And then beyond that, we help them see their cash flow based off of all their other fringes, their salaries, what they pay associates, what they might have in debt services so they can see their true take on dollar to themselves based off their production stats, as well as you know, that all the tax items, all the tax boxes we have to check of, you know, maximizing where your W-2 should be versus your own or distributions based off of your goals, set of retirement planning or health insurance needs or whatever a particular practice owner has. And so an area that we focused on early with that KPI review that we did was being able to show them both their industry standard operating margins as well as that below that line. Whereas the money actually getting into your pocket versus where is it going to your debt service to your associate or to other expenses that are considered not operating on it.
[00:13:13] And I could see it at a separate that out because a nice kind of apples to apples comparison, not only between companies, but actually, as you know, the company gets bigger or as, you know, practice starts to grow. You get you get some kind of plot that regardless of how many practices they have or many locations, they have a good benchmark. Talk to me about how, you know, I guess to the extent that you see kind of a different strategy or a different operating model, if an owner is looking at just kind of creating one or two locations and, you know, really kind of maximizing it versus I would call it a more entrepreneurial practice owner who's who's looking to really do, you know, make a play, you know, dozens of practices, potentially multiple cities and stuff like what's the I guess what do you notice as being the difference or what's the strategy or the approach difference for you when it comes to the kind of financial advising side of it?
[00:14:04] Yeah, it's a great question and one that we certainly spent a lot of time the last, let's say three to four years, as you know, here in the North Carolina market. The entrepreneurial approach to dentistry has become a growing phenomenon, so to speak. You know, I think I'd start by saying that, you know, there's not a right or wrong way. Right. When you think about the practice owners we work with and we work with a ton of multi-location owners that, you know, those that's their goal set and are doing a fantastic job of breeding a great culture of family based culture in their practice locations. And they have an approach where that's where they want to go to market. We have other family offices that are have been so low, Doctor Owen, and led for four years and will continue to be. And that's that's their comfortable place. Both of those owners can have vastly successful careers. It's just a matter of how they want to take it to market. And so we try to understand the personality. In my mind, it starts with the person, right? We got to understand the doctor. What are their goals? And even if they want to grow multiple practice locations, how do they want to do it? Do they want to do it as the leading entrepreneur or do they want to stay the doctor right.
[00:15:06] And bring in professionals to help advise them on their growth strategy. And we have worked with practice on both sides of that equation. Right. Who have brought in folks, both external advisors as well as internal hires, to help them lead and grow their practices. And they've been that. Mission, right? Establishing that culture, making sure that dentistry stays the number one target. We've had other doctor owners who are more entrepreneurial in nature and have taken on a lot of that growth profile themselves. So I think it really depends on the person. But I think if you want to be a growing practice, one of the additional KPI is, so to speak, that you need to bring in is really understanding the structure of your debt repayment cycle and how that affects your debt covenants. And that's one of the primary leverage points that keep growth down for practice. Who wants to acquire and build additional locations is making sure they understand their debt model and how your EBITDA and your net operating income affect your debt service ratios for ongoing growth.
[00:16:03] And where are you finding I mean, how are most these practices finding the capital to do the growth? Are they self-financing or are they going they're taking on debt? Are they doing equity deals? What is. What have you noticed as being the general model for for this kind of professional practice?
[00:16:17] If the general model, especially if you're, you know, sub 20 locations and you're hoping to grow into that range is still kind of bank led debt financing, maybe with a sprinkling of some seller financing or personal investments and that bank led debt financing, that, again, the dental industry is very fortunate to have a lot of really good banks out there that do a great job of lending to dentists, are invested in their success or want to grow with them. And so it's a great field for being able to grow through partnering with a bank versus some other industry. Just aren't fortunate. Right. Yeah. That's got to do with the margins. And the success rate of the average practice is just phenomenal.
[00:16:55] And just the formula is reasonably known. You kind of you kind of know where you need to go and do it. You know, you had to operate it. You know what is what is going to be successful at most of the debt is used for building out offices, equipment, things like that. Marketing or what? How how are you?
[00:17:10] You know, you build out it for a startup. So equipment, construction, working, capital marketing or looking at practice acquisitions. If a retiring doctor is looking to exit, you know, can they buy that practice from that doctor's help continue that practice location?
[00:17:25] Now, you mentioned it, but the Kurds talk a little bit more about it. Is this whole. You know what? What does the owner want to do? Do they want to stay the dental professional? Do they want to become the CEO, the operational head? Do they want to, you know, focus on finding deals? I mean, there's there's there as you as you grow. There's lots of different roles you could fill. And I think that kind of diagnosing or figuring out what role that practice owner wants to play is a really important one. And my guess is if you get it wrong or they don't choose. Right, it's it can be very difficult. What have you noticed about that process and how have you helped owners really kind of answer that question effectively so they're going to be successful?
[00:18:00] I think when you this is a great question as far as this scaling goes and shared with some of our practice owners that often, you know, dental practice and a CPA firm don't operate too much and different from one another.
[00:18:11] We have different, different titles.
[00:18:13] But we've you know, we've got doctors and associates and hygienist and office administrators and a CPA firm, much like a dental practice. And I think there's been a lot of interplay between, as I looked at my practice and trying to, you know, scale our growth both with the amount of practices we service, but also with the services we provide. One of the areas that I had to add to our pipeline of services was the ability to sit down with the doctor and attach their financial and life goals with an organizational and risk assessment process where we can help show them. And here's where you are today. Here's you on where you want to be in five, eight, 10 years.
[00:18:50] Let's talk about the roles that are going to be required along that growth profile and really let logit literally draft out an org chart form and help them understand how as they grow, their needs will grow and how they can fill that org chart.
[00:19:03] Yeah, really kind of putting that. I think that having a map, having a plan, a map for what the future's gonna look like and then identifying well what what seat do you want to sit in in the future and then how how are you going to fill these other seats. But technically but also you know, from a culture point of view, from a style point of view, how do you make sure you get the right people surrounding you so that you can you can be successful? And then and so it's about being on the same page. Sometimes it's about creating some diversity, you know, bringing people that in that may think differently than you ad skills and capabilities. But that kind of organizational planning is a key one. I find in a lot of times, you know, if you don't get it right, you can spend a long time undoing that trend, trying to rebuild that. It can be painful. So let's talk a little bit about, you know, applying some of these things to other professional services. I mean, I think the benefit of the dental practice is that it's you know, it's it's quite well known the benchmarks are there. But if if you're in other professional services, what are the general things that you think become important when you look at the numbers, you know, looking at how you collect data, financial data, other kind of data to make better business decisions around the growth and scaling of the company. What are some key things that you would you would look at, you know, for other professional services, not just dental care?
[00:20:16] I think timeliness is one that. No matter what industry you're in. The timeliness of your financial data and, of course, the accuracy of it. How quickly can we get our hands on the data? And then how do we combine both the quote unquote tax or CPA accounting side of it with the practice management operational side of it? And so, so many professional services live in two worlds, right? They have an accounting system separated from their production system. And so how do how can we build a management philosophy that allows you to look at both of those and and as real time as possible that that budget allows? Right. So I think that's timeliness is certainly one. And I guess I could maybe expand what I call the three T's, the 40s, considering I just started with the timeliness. But I talk a lot about with my team as is as we've grown is technology training and trust. And I think that spreads across other professional services. And I know even in dentistry it applies. I think, you know, being aware of the technologies that exist, how you can utilize them in your in your business to give better service to your client base, whether that's dental clients or if you're a law firm, but leverage technology and then train your staff to properly use that technology to be an adviser and give access to more information to your client base. And I think that breeds trust both in your clients to come to you when they need answers.
[00:21:36] But it also allows the doctor, the CPA, the attorney to trust their staff that they've been equipped with the right information and training to give the end user, the client, the patient, the information they need to go on about their day and help build their business and make their life better.
[00:21:51] Yeah, it makes sense. I mean, I think that the it's always a challenge of kind of figuring out what are the tools that we should really implement and do we buy them? Do we build them? I've seen a lot of companies, you know, spend a lot of money on technology and end up really not getting the return that they hoped, not using it. Well, yeah, I think it's interesting because they haven't operationalized it. They haven't figured out how to get their entire team, you know, their team, the customers, you know, patients, clients, that they are using it as well. And sometimes it's wishful thinking. Sometimes they haven't done there. They really have investigated it to figure out, well, how how hard is it to use or how likely are people going to use it. You know, and then they they end up spending a lot of money on something that ends up gathering dust or or worse, making their systems more complicated.
[00:22:36] What are there any other kind of best practices or things that you've learned in in working with some of these folks?
[00:22:42] You know, things that typically are missed in professional services in terms of things that aren't managed perfectly well or things that are not considered that, you know, later end up becoming a problem and you have to kind of go back and do a lot of rework.
[00:22:54] Yeah. I mean, if I think back about what what experiences that some of our folks have shared from just putting my CPA hat back on would be one of their largest line items that it does not show up in their accounting software, in their PNL is the tax expense that the individual owner pays. Right. Most of these practices are flow through owners, meaning they're an S corp partnership or sole proprietor. And so that net income hits their 10 40 and there's a tax bill. Right. And so one of the things that a CPA is known for is file taxes and trying to develop tax strategy. Well, we find a lot of these services as one of their largest line items is that the tax checks they write to the government every year. And so managing those tax outcomes throughout the year so that they're not caught with any surprises is incredibly important as they try to build a budget and cash flow model for the growth of their businesses. If they have to all of a sudden pay taxes, they're not expecting, it takes money out of their pocket. They might have had other plans for them. And so even though it's not on the PNL, it has to be something that a professional services owner is aware of. If you are growing, you are going to owe more taxes unless you put strategies in place that help offset that growth. Right. And that's not the worst thing in the world to write a check to. That means you've been successful. But be aware. Be aware that it's coming. Know how much it's going to be. And if you are going to put strategies in place and I think this is sometimes forgotten, if you're going to put strategies in place to reduce the taxes and you want to grow now, that that can impact your ability to go capture more debt to grow. And so understanding how all those components work together is something that's often left on the table.
[00:24:29] Yeah, that's a fascinating one. I've seen that happen again and again where where people have been, you know, extremely aggressive on tax avoidance strategies and they've done a great job.
[00:24:38] But then they go to, you know, borrow, you know, half a million dollars, a million dollars to do a build out or something. And and, you know, bank will look and say, well, look, you're not you're not bankable. I you can't we can't loan you this because you're you know, you can't you don't you're not showing profit. You're not, you know, the way that you've done it, you know, and then you get into this game of trying to show them, well, no, I really have developed.
[00:25:01] But I just you know, I've done this to avoid the taxes.
[00:25:04] So, yes, there's there is a need to look at your plans and look at your goals and anticipate if you're you know, you're gonna be going out and, you know, getting debt or selling the company or doing an acquisition in three, four or five years. And if you don't show the income, that is going to be what the valuation is based on, you may actually end up hurting yourself in terms of, you know, what what the transaction looks like. So, yeah, I think that having a real good understanding of, well, what strategy you employing. Why are you employing them? What are the trade offs and how is it going to impact you over the coming years? That's a good one. And I think a lot of people end up pulling down on it.
[00:25:42] What else do you see that kind of drives?
[00:25:44] If you've kind of think through the, you know, successfully able to practice, you're looking at doing a sale. What are the other factors for you that go into kind of that valuation side when you're looking at, you know, either a transaction or doing some kind of sale of the practice? What factors into the money or the terms or the valuation that you're going to get?
[00:26:05] Sure. And again, in dentistry, there are some unfortunate to have a long history of industry guidelines. Now they continue to change and update based off of current markets.
[00:26:15] But, you know, historically, solo dental practices really clung to the idea of a percentage of collections as a primary valuation driver. Cash flow is always a valuation driver. And as we've grown into the multi-location P E world, of course E multiples of these it become the primary discussion points. So, you know, owners need to be aware of those items if they're looking at exit strategy and working to properly position those specific metrics. But I tell you, the one thing that I think has rang true more of the last maybe nine to 12 months than than prior is culture. You know, dentist and dentistry is one of the best groups of clients that I've ever worked with. As far as just, you know, how they care about their patients, how they care about their staff. And so as I've had several doctors buy practices and or sell practices over the last nine, twelve months where they've got plenty of buyers. Right. And they've taken lower offers based off of a cultural fit because they care so much about the transition going. Well, that's not every doctor. But my experience has been that they they really are heartfelt and making sure that their staff and their patients have a great experience after they transition out of practice. And so culture has been something that, as I've worked with a lot of a lot of folks on the buyside. Right. That that then being able to make sure that they can identify their mission statement for that practice and their goal for it has been an important part of the conversation that we want to help them bring to the table when they're going to make an offer on a practice.
[00:27:42] And I think that's a good insight. I've worked with some medical practices.
[00:27:46] And, you know, one of the big things they were focused on is, you know, during acquisitions, like, you just need to make sure you have a cultural fit because the last thing you want to do is make an acquisition and have, you know, all the staff leave and all the patients leave in six months because what's the point? You know, we just blew a whole bunch of money. And, you know, we don't get. We're not getting the return that we bought in terms of timeframe when if you have, you know, professional services practice who, you know, has ambitions of doing doing a sale, you know, selling their company. What is the timeframe that you kind of need to start preparing for this? Is this, you know, a couple months before you hope to sell, a couple of years before you? So what is your general kind of heuristic when it comes to, you know, when you start taking actions to prepare yourself and your company for sale?
[00:28:30] You think in an ideal world, which frankly doesn't exist a lot. Right. But in an ideal world, you probably start five years out and really trying to take that first couple years to get your systems and processes in place. Well, document what you're doing. Try to grow along that stretch of time that when you get into that three year look back, you have a really clean set of books, easily identifiable you. But as cash flows and collection modeling processes and systems in place that you can transfer to a new owner. Now, the reality is that doesn't happen, right? The reality is somebody wakes up one day and they say, hey, let's go sell a practice or they're just ready to retire. You know, we've all seen that. And you can get that done right quickly and specifically in the dentistry world. So if you're not going to start five years out and really process it, I think if you give yourself the ability to look at it, you know, a 12 month, twelve to 18 month period, you can still get a lot done in that twelve to 18 months to take your practice to market at a max value that you're able to versus just throwing it out on the market. You know, two to four weeks after you decide you want to list it, you're gonna get hurt.
[00:29:30] Valuation is going to get hurt on that. Yeah, it's interesting.
[00:29:32] I just had this conversation with a client the other day and we're talking about, you know, kind of the five year plan. And, you know, there was this guy like, well, I'm not really sure. I don't really have any ambitions to sell. But I'm you know, I'm not quite sure. My advice was, you know, you always want to kind of be operating a business that is highly sellable. You know, I'd rather have the option to sell and not not take it than need the option to sell and not be able to do it. Because the fact is, you never know. You never know. You're going to wake up one day. You're going to want to do something different. Situations can change. Life events can happen. Where you're having a well honed, sellable company can be a huge asset. And the reverse, if you haven't really thought about it and you get stuck in kind of a fire sale, it can really be a value destruction kind of situation. So good advice, good insights. Brett, if people want to find out more about you. About LBA Heene's strand. What's the best way to get that information?
[00:30:22] Yes, certainly they can email me direct. BradMcKeiver@lbahs.com. And happy to be available via e-mail. They can also look at us up in a couple of places. So labhs.com. And again, specific to our dentistry niche, our web site is yourdentalaccountant.com.
[00:30:51] Excellent. I will make sure that all those links and the are in the show notes so people can grab those and get a hold of you.
[00:30:57] Brad this has been a pleasure. I love talking with folks who have developed a focus, a niche carved out good strategy. It's always fascinating to hear the insights that you can develop once you really get into a space and own it. So thank you for making the time. Thank you for sharing your insights. I think it's been really valuable for our audience. I really appreciate it.
[00:31:14] Yeah, absolutely.
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