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Featured Speakers at 2014 AAO’s Practice Transition Seminar

Chris Bentson and Doug Copple, CVA, of Bentson Clark & Copple are honored to be two of the featured speakers at the upcoming AAO’s Practice Transition Seminar being held during the 2014 AAO Annual Session. This year’s seminar will take place at the Hilton New Orleans Riverside Hotel, Jefferson Ballroom, from 7:30 AM – 4:30 PM on Friday, April 25, 2014. The event will be followed by a networking reception from 4:30 PM – 6:00 PM. Contact the AAO for more information, to register for the event or to order a copy of the lecture and supplemental materials. Tickets for the event are $125 for doctors and $60 for orthodontic residents.

Chris Bentson will focus on Metrics that Matter: Valuation and Transition Fundamentals for Buyers and Sellers. Doug Copple will discuss in detail Cash Flow Pro Formas and Terms for Buy-Outs and Partnerships.

As a perennial favorite, the Practice Transition Seminar is a tool to aid AAO members during the challenging time of a career transition. The seminar brings together a four-person panel of transition experts to share insights for orthodontists that are preparing for a future transition. The seminar is hosted by the Council on Orthodontic Practice (COOP) in hopes to educate doctors on how to achieve an equitable outcome in a practice transition.

Bentson Clark & Copple will also be setting up their vendor booth (Booth #453) in the exhibit hall at the AAO Annual Session. Be sure to stop by to learn more about practice valuations, orthodontic recruiting services and transactions negotiation services for both buyers and sellers. While visiting the booth, subscribe to the Bentson Clark reSource, a subscription-based, quarterly newsletter focused exclusively on the business aspects of running a successful orthodontic practice.

Resident Webinar Announced: Transition from Residency into Practice

Take control of the future of your orthodontic career! Doug Copple will discuss how to successfully transition from residency into an established orthodontic practice, in his upcoming free resident webinar, Practice Valuation & Transition – Part 2. This webinar is scheduled for Monday, March 31 at 8:30PM EST.

Information will be presented on current purchase prices, and comparative practice data will be provided to illustrate benchmarks and trends. There will be an extensive conversation regarding cash flow pro-formas, one of the most important documents in a transition. A number of other general topics will be discussed including types of practice transitions, where to obtain financing and understanding the basics of a practice valuation. The webinar will conclude with a brief question and answer session.

This webinar is one of the many scheduled presentations that are part of the Ortho2’s Cutting Edge Webinar Series. This series will provide knowledge in helping to run a future orthodontic practice. This webinar series is being hosted exclusively for residents, recent grads and Ortho2 users, at no charge. If you have a desire to learn more from an elite group of experienced orthodontic professionals, you’ll want to take advantage of this free series that has everything you need to know to operate a successful orthodontic practice. Webinars occur weekly at 8:30 PM Eastern/5:30 PM Pacific and last approximately one hour.

Click here to register for Doug’s webinar or to find out more.

2013 GORP Promotion Winner Announced

GORP 2013 WinnerBentson Clark & Copple is pleased to announce that Dr. Doug Shaw of Nova Southeastern University is the winner of our on-site “Who’s the Boss” GORP promotional contest.

All GORP attendees were invited to participate in our Instagram contest for a chance to win a Mystery Prize, valued at over $2,800. The prize included:

A lifetime subscription to the Bentson Clark reSource quarterly newsletter. The Bentson Clark reSource is an all-in-one informational source that provides and analyzes real data from real practices to present the most accurate information available within the orthodontic industry. Each issue of the Bentson Clark reSource includes articles written by the most distinguished consultants, industry insiders and businesses leaders within the world of orthodontics.

A $1,000 worth of consulting from Bentson Clark & Copple.  Bentson Clark & Copple can review an existing practice valuation to ensure the value determined is reasonable and appropriately represents the fair market value of a particular practice. Consulting services also include practice transition mediation between Sellers and their advisors and Buyers and their advisors.

A Lunch and Learn webinar for the winner’s orthodontic program. This includes a one-hour webinar and lunch and cupcake delivery for the residents in attendance.

Company-branded paper neckties were given away at the Bentson Clark & Copple table during the UNC-hosted event.  Residents were asked to snap a photo of themselves wearing a branded “I’m the Boss” tie, then upload the photo to Instagram with the hashtags #BCCOrtho and #GORP2013.

A huge thank you goes out to all of the residents who entered the contest. We received many great pictures via Instagram and we regret only being able to select one winner. To view a sample of the entries, please visit our Facebook page.

Bentson Clark & Copple Traveling to GORP 2013

Bentson Clark & Copple will be arriving on the campus of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill just in time for GORP 2013.

Our table will be located in the exhibit hall during GORP. Please plan to stop by and say hello. We would love to speak with you regarding purchasing an orthodontic practice or locating an associateship position. Shannon Patterson, our Director of Practice Opportunities & Executive Recruiting, will be on hand to register you in our database of practice opportunities. We will be able to supply you with potential opportunity matches as they come to light, based on your specific geographic preferences and future ownership desires.

This year we invite you to participate in our Instagram contest for a chance to win a Mystery Prize, valued at over $2,800. We would like to also encourage every resident to contribute to Bentson Clark & Copple’s 2013 Annual Resident Survey. We will have paper copies of the survey available or you can scan the QR code displayed at our table to participate online.

GORP was started in 1989 as a means of bringing the orthodontists of the future together for a summer meeting, creating an environment to foster professional growth and interpersonal relationships among colleagues and representatives of the orthodontic industry. Over the past 24 years, the meeting has grown to an event that involves around 500 orthodontic residents from the United States and Canada.This program/meeting is unique in that it is the first annual conference to bring together residents in a dental or medical specialty program. The meeting is sponsored by donations from orthodontic exhibitors, the American Board of Orthodontics and its constituent associations and American Association of Orthodontists Foundation.

Reasons an Orthodontic Practice Cannot Grow

As valuation and transition consultants, we have the duty to analyze a practice for sale or purchase with great scrutiny. When performing a practice valuation study, we analyze the last three years of a practice’s financial performance and operational performance for each practice. This provides us not only the revenue and expenses, but the patient flow, the conversion ratios from new patient exams to starts, the fee structure, the marketing plan, etc. More importantly, when visiting each practice, we observe the physical facility, fixed assets in service, staff, location within the practice’s drawing area, competitors’ location(s), and so on. We also perform a detailed demographic analysis of the patient drawing area. Needless to say, we end up with a great deal of data on each practice; having the opportunity to see practices in every geographic region of the country.

Taken together, we see practices that are declining at various rates, practices that are maintaining a relatively flat “status quo” with regards to growth, and practices that are growing at various rates. We see these practices in all areas of the country, in all environments, generally battling a similar competitive and economic environment. However, there are situations that cause a practice not to grow.

There are many contributing reasons as to why a practice cannot grow: competitive environment, demographic environment, geographic limitations, and so on; however, our observation of the number one reason practices cannot grow is because they do not currently operate with efficient systems. Systems are perhaps the key foundation to growth and without them, a practice in chaos will experience greater chaos as it makes decisions and tries to grow, ultimately imploding under the weight of poor systems. Some examples are:

• If patients are not seated on time, adding growth to a practice will only exacerbate the problem.

• If cases are not finishing on time, growth presents real problems as chairs fill up with unhappy zero contract balance patients.

• If the highest level of customer service cannot be currently offered, then providing the same average, predictable, run-of-the-mill, mediocre service inhibits growth.

• If the staff is turning over at an accelerated rate, and there is gossip, backstabbing, and an ununified team that is just getting by, growth is not in a practice’s future.

• If there is poor direction and leadership from the owner, counting on the staff to pick up the leadership role and grow the practice is likely not going to occur.

To learn more, read Chris Bentson’s article, Observations on Growing an Orthodontic Practice, published in Orthodontic Practice US January/February 2013 issue.

Publication Focuses on Adding an Orthodontic Associate

There are many magazines, journals and newspapers that our team reads on a regular basis to keep up with current news and events in the orthodontic community. When a publication arrives, it gets passed around the office with a sticky note, indicating who has read it and who has not. (It’s ultimately a pretty good system unless the sticky note falls off.)

Chris Bentson has been recently published in a couple of orthodontic publications. His most current article is co-authored with Daniel Sroka, JD, who has served the legal needs of Bentson Clark & Copple’s referred clients since 2004. The April/May 2013 issue of Orthodontic Products Magazine features Plus One: What You Need to Know when Adding an Associate to your Practice.  Below is a short excerpt from the article.

“Adding a doctor to the practice is a big decision and affects a great number of systems in the office. Change will occur. Thus, having clarity about why you want an associate is often the first question to ask. While there may be many motivations for bringing an associate into a practice, typically, an owner doctor chooses to bring an associate for one of three reasons.

The first is to help with the workload of treating patients due to practice growth. The second is to allow for more time out of the clinic or away from the practice, or, said another way, to increase the quality of life for the owner doctor within the practice but not necessarily to grow the practice. The third reason is often as a first step in a future transition plan where partial or full equity will eventually be offered to the associate doctor, but that plan is not yet defined.”

Click here read the entire Orthodontic Products article.

Partnering with the AAO

We are always honored when approached by the AAO to participate in an opportunity to educate the orthodontic community. Over the winter months, Chris Bentson along with a handful of other industry experts recorded the AAO’s The Business of Orthodontics Webinar Series. It is a 9-part educational webinar series that consists of lectures addressing the core competencies for starting and managing an orthodontic practice. Chris presented three lectures in The Business of Orthodontics Webinar Series:

• The Pathway to Ownership, Partnership, Associateship
• Growing A Practice
• Overhead Management – Industry Norms and Understanding Market Segments

These learning lectures are now online and available via the AAO member website at no cost to members. To view one or all of the lectures in this series, log onto AAAinfo.org, go to the “Education” section and click “On Demand Learning,” then on the upper right tab, “View all On-Demand Lectures.” One hour of continuing education credit is available for each Business of Orthodontics lecture. For a full list of webinars included in The Business of Orthodontics Webinar Series, check out the Feature Resources section (page 22) of the AAO’s The Bulletin April 2013 edition.

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