Disaster Planning Advice For Dentists & Clinic Owners

Do you have a plan in place in the event that something unforeseen happens in your life? If you didn't have the capacity to work physically or mentally tomorrow, do you have a plan in place that protects you, your practice and the longevity of your business?

Disaster Planning For The Unexpected

We've had more practices of late come on the market when they weren't planning to sell, whether it's a back injury, an eye injury, something that's happened in the family.

We have to be prepared for these things and unfortunately due to some unforeseen events for our clients we've uncovered a number of different things that someone could have been better prepared for.

We certainly want to make sure our clients are prepared going forward.

That they've done all the right steps, they've touched all the right items, and have a plan that the key member in the office knows how to execute.

It's very different than preparing for a holiday or vacation. We recently had a holiday after the coldest winter we've had, a 50 year record. We've had flight cancellations. We've had family colds, local flooding and it's all good reminder - we have to pack our patience when you're on holidays. Of course, disaster planning on a holiday is very different, than what you're going to do for a practice but we all can relate to those disasters that happen on a holiday. They are unforeseen events, and there's no way to plan for them a lot of times.

Mapping Out The Predictable

In a practice however, there are a lot of ways that we can plan for the unexpected. Hedge things in our favour so to speak.

Based on the scenarios we've come across recently, we want to make sure our clients are set up for the best possible result.

While you can appreciate, it's difficult to cover the full details of this type of complex topic in an article, we're going to be running some seminars called "Disaster Planning 101" both in-person as well as through a webinar for those of you who are interested but not able to make the local events.

What To Consider When Disaster Planning In Your Practice

We're going to cover things like how to plan for a health disaster, what do we do?

How do we manage our team, how do we manage our staff, how do we manage our Associates?

What do we do if one of our associates leaves unannounced and we've been planning to sell our practice for 15 years, and now is the time that we're going to sell, and we have a high producing associate leaving.

Or maybe one of our staff members, a key staff member in the practice leaves unexpectedly.

How do we tie up those loose ends and mitigate those risks to make sure that you don't find out that someone's actually stealing from you, when you actually have to go sell your practice.

Unfortunately, we've actually seen scenarios like this pile in on one practice, so we're going to go through that scenario in our seminar as well others, and how we identified the theft in the practice, the weaknesses that we could have potentially avoided if we had been in there a little bit earlier, and unfortunately, we've seen the cases where these great practices that are doing $1.5 million end up selling at $800,000 because they've been hit by all of the different aspects that could have been potentially avoided or protected against.

There's obviously some of these things that you're never going to be able to out plan, but a lot of things you can mitigate.

Mitigating Your Practice's Key Risk Factors

If we are able to get in there early, we can plan ahead and reduce the impact of some of these items.

For example, find out that there defalcation or staff stealing from you and remove that staff member saving you ten's of thousands of dollars (or more). If we had been able to regulate, and get a new associate in there earlier some of the damage could have been avoided. Thankfully, the lease in this particular case was okay, but we have seen cases where the lease is non-transferable, or there's a demo clause, or the landlord is not wanting to transfer that lease to a new person, or even give extensions.

So many things can happen in those components that are out of your control.

We want to mitigate the risks that we can, we want to make sure your benchmarks are in good shape in your practice so the practice is on solid ground. We want to make sure you are getting the most out of your practice, you've got the best plan in place, and then we can deal with things like market impact.

If a disaster happens in the market, for example, we're flooded with new buyers, or we're flooded with people looking to sell, that's going to affect your practice in a number of different ways.

What's Your Clinic's Biggest Area Of Risk

Some items to consider are timing, market, lease negotiations, we want to prevent theft, associate and staff contract risk, any other contracts that you may have for your practice as well.

And then, of course, your health.

These are things that we're all going to cover going forward, and we want to make sure that you're taking care of each of these.

If you've got a quick question for us or want to audit your own practice, book a time to call us at CallWithAVAIL.com. We'll also be out in your neck of the woods soon delivering our seminars as well. You just need to be prepared. We'll be happy to discuss some disaster planning for your practice. Let us help you make sure your transition is the best it could possibly be. You can also find a webinar available to help you out, visit: www.availdentaladvice.com/ce to find a course that will help you along the way.

Darren Shanahan has been working in finance for healthcare professionals for over fifteen years and in his role as owner at Avail Dental Exit Advisory Services he has the unique ability to see inside over 80 practices per year which give him perspective on mitigating risk and disaster planning for clinic owners and dentists. If you'd like to reach out to the Avail Team for a confidential call, use our toll-free number 1-866-Go-Avail (1-866-462-8245).