The Ideal Practices Webinar · On Demand
The full session is below, with the moments marked so you can jump straight to what you need.
The full session runs about 90 minutes. The moments below show you where to jump in.
You post the collections and ask whether it is a good deal. Stephen compares that to a patient posting a photo of their smile in a room full of dentists and asking whether it looks healthy. It might. Nobody can tell you until there are x-rays and an exam. Collections are the photo. The question worth asking is whether this is the right deal for you.
Picture a ballplayer in the last year before free agency who suddenly bats .300 with 40 home runs and 100 RBIs after years of nothing close. Stephen has watched sellers do the same thing for 20 years. Collections climb for two years, and when you pull the reports the marketing budget doubled or tripled over exactly the same stretch. A practice showing 50 new patients a month was getting 15 or 20 before the run-up started.
The accounts receivable goes to the seller unless you negotiate it into the deal. You will be seeing patients from your first morning while the money already on the books walks out with the person who left. That is what the bank's working capital is for, and it is why an approved loan and a comfortable first quarter are two different things.
She does not believe a number until three separate sources give her the same number. One report never tells the whole story. Alongside it, a hard floor: collections at 95 percent or higher. Anything under that is pointing at a system that is broken somewhere, and it is worth finding out where before you own it.
A seller who has been in network 15 years and never renegotiated has a fee schedule you are about to take over. Push back and the carrier tells you the last owner accepted these fees, so you can too. Stacey lays out the trade honestly. Get running without a gap in revenue, or fight for better fees and wait. You do not get both.
A client's seller pushed hard against a 10 mile non-compete, and it did not add up. The reason turned out to be a son with his own dental practice 7 miles down the road, and a plan to go work there. Stephen's rule ever since: if a seller resists a non-compete, there is something underneath it that has not come out yet.
"Should the seller introduce me to the office manager while we are still at the letter of intent stage?"
The question came from an attendee 45 days into a letter of intent, heading back for due diligence the next morning. Stephen's answer was to wait for the purchase and sale agreement, because a letter of intent binds nobody and sellers get cold feet more often than buyers expect. Stacey then split it cleanly. Credentialing can start off a letter of intent alone, once your entity and malpractice are in place, and if the deal dies you have lost nothing. Announce it to the team and have the deal die, and you have a much bigger problem on your hands.
Due diligence is not a hunt for reasons to walk away. It is the work of finding a practice you can make your own. The reports tell you what happened, the seller tells you what they want you to hear, and the answers you need sit in the space between the two. Ask how many patients were actually seen in the last 12 months. Ask when the fees were last negotiated. Ask who on the team the seller could not run the place without. A practice that cash flows in a town you would not have chosen is still the wrong practice, and the buyers who get this right are the ones who decided what they wanted before they started looking.
If this session has you looking at a practice more carefully, the next step is a conversation about your situation specifically. Book an Ownership Clarity Call with Jen Gilbert, Startup Strategic Advisor. You will leave knowing where you stand and what your next move looks like, whether that turns out to be an acquisition or a startup.
Book Your Ownership Clarity CallWhen you are ready to go deeper
Everything in this session comes back to one thing: knowing what you want before you evaluate what is sitting in front of you. The Startup Practice Blueprint™ is where that gets built. Two full days with Stephen Trutter and the Ideal Practices team, working on your situation rather than a general case, alongside 40 future owners at the same point you are. Whether you end up buying or building, you leave with the vision the rest of the decisions hang on.
Friday, November 6 and Saturday, November 7, 2026 · Virtual
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