u/vc_sigma

i've been looking into what makes businesses actually transferable vs. what just looks good on paper, and i keep finding the most useful stuff comes from the buyer side rather than sellers or brokers.

Specifically curious about the owner-dependence problem. How often did you get into due diligence and realize the business basically couldn't run without the specific person selling it and what did that actually look like? Key relationships that only existed because of the owner personally, institutional knowledge that was never written down, customers who'd followed them for 20 years and might not stay?

And when you found something like that, did it kill the deal or did you just reprice? curious whether it's actually a dealbreaker in practice or whether buyers just factor it in and move on.

Also wondering about the stuff sellers consistently don't disclose voluntarily. Not outright fraud, just the things they know are problems but figure you'll discover yourself. what shows up most often? If you walked away from a deal, what was the real reason

Specifically asking brokers who've done dental practice sales, not general business brokerage. The stuff i keep reading about, like owner dependence, messy books, no associate in place — feels like the obvious list. what i'm more curious about is the things that blow up in due diligence that the owner genuinely didn't anticipate the surprises. A few things i'm trying to get a clearer picture on:

Is payor mix concentration actually a dealbreaker in practice, or does it depend heavily on the buyer type? feels like a DSO would care about it differently than an associate buyout or an individual dentist buyer. How much does hygiene department independence matter to buyers? i've seen it cited a lot as a transferability factor but i don't know how much weight it actually carries in a real deal. And the DEA registration thing — how often does that come up as a real complication vs. something that gets handled cleanly?

Also curious whether you find practices generally come to you in better or worse shape than they used to, and whether the DSO market has changed what individual buyers are willing to tolerate.

been spending a lot of time lately trying to understand why so many small business sales fall apart or just... don't happen. not from the broker side, from the owner side.

if you've gone through it, a few things i keep wondering about:

what was the thing that nearly killed the deal or that the buyer flagged that you hadn't seen coming? and was there stuff you already knew was a problem but kept putting off?

also curious how much your CPA was actually involved vs. just doing taxes while a broker handled everything else.

if you sold and could go back 3 years, what's the one thing you'd do differently? or if you tried to sell and it didn't happen, what was the real reason?

dm me if you'd rather not post publicly, i'm trying to build a clearer picture of where things actually break down

My impression is that for most USA business owners these exist in completely separate silos, with different attorneys, different CPAs, nobody really talking to each other, but i don't know how true that is in practice.

For advisors or attorneys here: how often do you actually see a business owner whose succession plan and estate plan are genuinely integrated? and when it's not, what's usually the structural mess you're walking into. Is it entity issues, real estate held separately, retirement plan stuff that wasn't modeled or coordinated correctly against the exit?

Also how early are owners typically coming to you before exit, and is it usually early enough to do anything meaningful or are you mostly cleaning up? Wondering if there are certain types of owners where this gap is especially bad, professional service firms, family businesses, specific industries, etc.

Doing research into what actually makes dental practices easy or hard to sell/transfer, and I'd love to hear from people who've been through it or are thinking about hanging it up.

A few questions if you're willing to share:

1. When you started seriously thinking about exit — whether DSO offer, associate buyout, or straight sale — what was the thing that surprised you most about the process?

2. Looking back, what would you have done differently in the 3-5 years before you were ready to sell?

3. Did your CPA play a meaningful role in the transition planning, or did that mostly fall to a broker or transition consultant?

4. Is there anything about your practice right now that you think would make it harder to sell if you needed to — something you know you should probably fix but haven't?

Trying to understand what the actual friction points are from the owner's side rather than the broker. DMs cool too!