Congratulations on purchasing your dental practice. This is an exciting time for you.

There are quite a few predictable truths when purchasing a dental practice. Here are some:

1. If you are purchasing a dental practice from a retiring dentist chances are the existing patient pool has an elevated age range – they're older.

2. If you are purchasing a dental practice from a retiring dentist chances are you will go through a 12 to 18 month “getting to know you” period with the established patient base. Convincing patients to complete treatment will take more time than normal. No matter what the retiring doctor says about you in their introduction letter – the patients will take their own time to get to know, trust and respect you.

3. If you are purchasing an established practice from a non-retiring dentist chances are there's a reason the practice is for sale. Before you commit take a good long look at the prevailing doctor/patient ratio in the market area. This will dictate, more than anything else, the budget and time it will take to accelerate quality new patient growth.

Here are some fairly common ways to maximize your investment in the new practice.

1. Communicate, communicate, and communicate with the established patient base.

This will accelerate their familiarity, trust and respect for you. For newly purchased practices we typically recommend mailing a single dental topic mailer to the entire patient base at least three times during the first year. Leverage your strengths: What do you provide that the previous owner did not provide? How and why would that be a benefit to the existing patient pool? You may not recognize it but this can be as simple as adding more convenient office hours. Or maybe you do all of your own endo while the retiring doctor referred everything out. You may also introduce some new technology to the practice perhaps something as simple as a Diagnodent, which can be presented as a big benefit to the existing patient base.

2 . Get the existing patient base to start referring again.

Once you erode the fear, uncertainty and doubt – now you want the existing patients to refer their friends, family and co-workers. Our referral brochure would be a great example of how to do this.

3. Get your quality new patient numbers up to meet/exceed existing capacity.

You can't count on the existing patient base for top line growth. The only thing that's going to drive top line growth is quality new patients. We can figure out your capacity and the number of new patients you'll need but make no mistake – you will need to market this practice externally if you plan to fully leverage the investment you've made in it.