Selling a healthcare facility or a medical practice isn’t like selling a gold coin. Gold has a fixed market value and it trades on its weight in troy ounces.
Instead, it’s more akin to selling a house. As anyone who’s sold one knows, any house can be groomed for sale. It can be positioned in the market. The effort returns a higher sales price and can speed up the time to sale.
The underlying story is the same whether we’re discussing your ASC, your imaging center, or any other outpatient facility. And, it’s the same whether we’re discussing your hospital-based physician group, such as an anesthesia or radiology group, or an office-based practice, such as an oncology, dermatology, or orthopedic surgery practice.
Although a house might be spiffed up in a matter of months, it takes longer to do that to your business. Depending on the starting point, it could take at least a year, and often from two to three. The main goal, of course, is to increase earnings which in turn will drive a higher sales price and more money in your pocket.
On the flip side, this means that someone who just one day decides that “we are for sale” has missed the opportunity to take advantage of the time to take steps, not just operationally, but internally as to structure, to increase the business’s or practice’s value.
Of course, even if you take the steps to increase the value of your facility, business, or practice, it doesn’t mean that you have to sell. Done properly, taking those actions will also increase your operational efficiencies, your cash flow, and your bottom line profits for your own ownership.
Either way, it’s too late to have started a year ago, but it’s not too late to start today.
