Deciding to buy or sell your practice will be one of the most fundamental events in your professional life. Whether you are thinking of starting your own practice or planning to retire, we will provide you with personal, tailored advice. When advising our clients, we always try to put ourselves in their shoes.

Our Dental Law team at CCW aims to make the experience of buying or selling your practice go as smoothly as possible.

We’ve prepared this short guide for you in order to help you understand the different issues you have to tackle in order to make the sale or purchase of your practice a success.

Selling a Dental Practice

Preparation

Selling your dental practice can often take longer than you bargained for – that is why being well prepared for each step is important to take some of the stress away. It’s important to be well prepared – not just to minimise the length of time to complete the sale but also to create a favourable impression to a potential buyer.

We’ve highlighted some points to think about to make sure that you are one step ahead.

1) Do you own your dental practice? Will you be selling the premises along with the practice? If so, you will need to account for this in the price for the sale. If you own your premises, but will be leasing them to the buyer, you need to think about what terms you want in the lease. If you lease your premises, you will need to think about the steps for assigning the lease. You will need landlord consent for this. You should be aware that obtaining consent can take time.

2) Be aware of the notice period which you must give to your local Health Board (normally, three months), as this will affect how long the sale process will go on for.

3) How are you going to market the sale? Consider whether you intend to sell your practice through a private sale or whether you want to go through a specialist agent.

4) Get your lawyers and accounting advisers involved, so they can guide you through the process.

5) You’ve found a buyer.  You want to make sure that your position is protected, as is the information about your practice. Make sure you enter into heads of terms with them and a confidentiality agreement – we can provide this for you.

Negotiation and detailed checks

You will need to provide the buyer’s lawyers with financial and legal documents for the sale of the dental practice. This is where the buyer will ask for information from you about the practice and you must disclose this information to them.

Examples of the sort of information that you have to provide would be

• the lease documents for your practice premises and consent from the landlord
• if you own your premises, you may also be intending to sell them along with your business – the buyers will want the title deeds relating to the property
• all licences, insurance policies for the property, guarantees and any service contracts for key equipment
• health and safety files, control of asbestos management policies, any building warrants and planning permission affecting the property
• employment contracts of your practice and other sensitive information.
• all other agreements including agreements with associates in your practice and agreements with other self-employed persons
• patient contracts
• practice accounts dating back a minimum of three years; you may also have to access to more recent financial information and key performance indicators, such as NHS payment schedules and patient turnover.

Sealing the deal

Once everything has been agreed, we will produce the business purchase agreement for the sale of your dental practice that we will have agreed with the buyer’s solicitors. This agreement will address all areas relating to the sale. We will consult with you closely on this to make sure that you are happy with the terms and that there are no unforeseen revelations or uncovered areas, once the deal is complete.

Now, all that there is left to do is to sign the paperwork and wait for the funds. We can arrange for delivery of the keys to the buyer.