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Hello doctors, I'm your host, chip Fichtner, co-founder of Large Practice Sales, and you're listening to Practice Partnership monetizing your dental practice.
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Doctors, thank you for joining us today.
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We have a pretty exciting event that has just occurred the largest invisible DSO in the US just completed their third recapitalization within seven years, and that recapitalization saw the value of the equity retained by the doctors in some cases go up five, six, seven hundred percent in a relatively short period of time.
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Even doctors who joined this invisible DSO three years ago saw a 300% increase in the value of the equity that they retained, and so it's an interesting story to understand how this group achieved a $3.7 billion valuation and the impact that'll have on other invisible DSOs and their coming recapitalizations, because there are more coming.
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Part of the reason that doctors choose to partner with invisible DSOs is not only because they're interested in the administrative support, the marketing support, the recruiting support and the help in executing a growth strategy.
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Certainly the cash up front, which today is taxed at long-term capital gains tax rates federal of 20% in most cases, plus your state tax.
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So the cash up front to be able to diversify your portfolio and limit your risk, because in many cases, a doctor's practice is his largest asset May not have figured it out yet, because today values are in my world about twice what they are in a doctor-to-doctor transaction, which doctors would have been doing if they're smaller or years ago.
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But really the holy grail of why so many younger doctors have joined Invisible DSOs and certainly just about any doctor, and certainly just about any doctor is the fact that in an invisible DSO partnership, the doctor is going to sell anywhere between 51% and 80% of their practice for cash up front.
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The doctor is going to retain ownership in the balance, and that ownership may be retained directly at the practice level, or it may be retained in the new parent company level, or it may be retained in a combination of both practice and parent level equity.
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But ultimately, the goal of all of these invisible DSOs is to increase the value of that equity that is owned both by their doctors and their investors.
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And the way you monetize that value increase is you complete what is called a recapitalization, which is a big fancy term for saying one investor and doctors sell to another investor, typically a bigger investor.
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Immediately after the election, the largest invisible DSO in the United States completed their third recapitalization, and this is a great story, not only for the investors, but a great story for the doctors who partnered with this invisible DSO.
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If we go back seven years, to October of 17, this invisible DSO completed their first recapitalization, which means an investor gave them the capital to go accelerate their growth.
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And in November of 17, we partnered our clients with this particular Invisible DSO, which was at the time relatively small, with only dozens of practices across the country.
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But we liked their management, we liked their strategy, we knew they had the capital to grow.
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So we urged our client, who at the time was a 38-year-old doctor and a little skeptical of the whole process, to complete a transaction with this group, and so he was one of the first new doctor partners that they brought on.
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In his case, he did a transaction that was about 60% cash up front and 40% equity, and 38 months later that group had grown from dozens of practices to about 240 practices.
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And in January of 21, they completed their second recapitalization at a very high value and our client had the opportunity to take money, take part of his equity off the table in cash at a return of about 300% in only 38 months.
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At this point our client had become the ripe old age of 41.
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And he said they've done what they said they would do.
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Let's see what they're going to do for the next three years.
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And so he did not cash in his equity.
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Let's see what they're going to do for the next three years.
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And so he did not cash in his equity.
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And 46 months later uh, november of 24 that group recapitalized for the third time.
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Now they had grown to over 700 practices using the capital that had been provided by the second recapitalization, and in that case we had dozens of our clients that had partnered with this particular group over the seven-year period of time.
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And our dozens of clients just after election were very happy, as some of them saw gains of six to seven times the value of their equity and some of those who got in more recently only saw two, three or 400% gain on their equity.
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But this proved once again that the capital markets are eager to invest in the invisible DSO concept, and this proves that it is possible for doctors, if they choose wisely, to find a great partner that's going to give them a long-term equity upside.
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In this particular transaction, the group was valued at over $3.7 billion and it's a very exciting thing for our industry.
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There's another group that recapitalized in late October and there are several more that will complete recapitalizations in the first quarter of 2025.
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Now, keep in mind, there are over a thousand invisible DSOs in the US today.
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We consider less than a hundred of them qualified to bid on our clients for a variety of reasons, and one of those reasons to get on what we call the LPS blacklist meaning you can't bid on our clients, to get on what we call the LPS blacklist meaning you can't bid on our clients is if, in our view, you don't have the ability to complete a recapitalization in the next decade, let's call it.
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And many of those groups will not complete recapitalizations and not deliver on the promise of high equity value returns.
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So you have to choose very carefully, and that's one of the things that we spend a lot of time studying is to make sure that the bidders that we allow to consider and bid on our clients have the potential for significant value increases over time and fortunately, with this particular event at a $3.7 billion value, we proved that we're pretty good at picking winners because we had, I believe, over 50 doctor clients who had partnered with that particular invisible DSO.
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So congratulations to all of them.
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One of the interesting things about the invisible DSO business that most doctors don't realize is that when your friends join an invisible DSO whether they were advised by an advisor or they did a transaction directly with the invisible DSO in pretty much all of the cases the doctors are incented to bring their friends to that invisible DSO, and when I say incented, meaning they can get paid six figures for convincing you to join the invisible DSO.
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Now the challenge with that is, while you have a friend that you trust who is urging you to join that invisible DSO, you miss the opportunity to have multiple bidders to consider what's the right fit for you, and multiple bidders will typically drive up values pretty significantly.
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And sometimes that doctor who is urging you to join the invisible DSO that he chose may forget to tell you that he has a six-figure payday on the line if you choose to join his DSO.
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So what you'll find is they will oftentimes urge you not to seek competitive bidders because it's financially beneficial for him for you not to seek additional bidders and just join that invisible DSO directly.
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And I can promise you we see this pretty much every day and doctors are missing out if they don't go through a bidding process and look at all of their options.
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Now you may end up with the group that your friend is urging you to join, but we suggest that it's best to not do that until you have had multiple other bidders to consider, not only to drive up values, but to help you understand what's the right fit for you, because, culturally, all of these groups are different.
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They're of different sizes, they have different financial capabilities, they have different growth opportunities and, ultimately, you need to make sure that the one you join is properly financed and will be able to complete a recapitalization and monetize that retained equity piece that you kept in the future, and so it pays to understand exactly who the bidders are and what their prospects are.
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One of the interesting things about this $3.7 billion recap that was just completed is that there will be a lot of investors and other invisible DSOs examining what that particular invisible DSO did to achieve that kind of valuation from an extraordinary investor.
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The investor in that deal was one of the largest private equity firms in the world one that has been around since 1966.
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And their investment was truly a seal of approval on the whole concept of Invisible DSOs, and so I think that there will be other invisible DSOs studying this transaction to understand what enabled them to get a high value and a big number.
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There are relatively few investors who can step up for that kind of investment, and what I think they will find is that this particular group accomplished what is the most important thing today, which is their support services and their strategies help their average practice grow their EBITDA in 2023 by over 5% across 600 practices.
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So their average growth rate in EBITDA in 2023, which was a pretty tough year for margins grew by five percent, because the Invisible DSO actually provides support services that added value to all of their practices.
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And that was particularly difficult for this invisible DSO because, unlike many of them, this one was an exceptionally large partner with orthodontic practices, and orthodontic practices across the US are about to complete their third year of three consecutive years of case start drops, and this has never happened before, and so this particular invisible dso that was able to create a five percent average EBITDA increase across all of its practices had to make up for the fact that their orthodontic practices were probably not performing as they would like them to have performed.
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So I think the there will be a lot of looking at.
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Okay, what did they do to grow the value of their partner practices.
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If you go back to pre-COVID or during COVID, the valuation metric that investors used in valuing Invisible DSO was not just its EBITDA, but were they able to grow via adding new partners?
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And so you had a great rush.
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You saw groups that added 100 partners a year but ultimately they were unable to recap because, while they were able to add partners, they were not able to add value to the partners that they had partnered with because they had not increased the EBITDA organically within the practices that they had already partnered with.
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So today the valuation metric is not just on how many new partner practices you can bring to your invisible DSO, but what exactly did you do for the partners that you have to make their practices perform bigger, better, faster, more profitably?
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So I think there's going to be a lot of studies of this particular invisible DSO to understand how they were able to complete their third recapitalization in seven years, which is very unique.
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Many of the invisible DSOs will sing the story of hey, doctor, join us, take equity in us or keep equity in your practice and we're going to complete a recapitalization next year.
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It's always next year.
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The reality is that completing for recapitalizations and I believe that we will see the investors be very selective.
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So it's important who you choose to partner with if your goal is to see a recapitalization in the next couple of years, because many of them will tell the story of how they're going to recapitalization in the next couple of years.
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Because many of them will tell the story of how they're going to recapitalize, but, given the fact that most of them have not even completed their first recapitalization yet, it's important that you understand exactly who you're partnering with and what the realistic not the promise, but what the realistic option is for a recapitalization in the next five years.
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You have to be careful.
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Thanks for listening to.
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Practice Partnership Monetizing your Dental Practice a podcast from Large Practice Sales.
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Large Practice Sales is the largest advisor to GPs and specialists of all kinds seeking to monetize all or part of their practice.
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The key for doctors to maximize your practice value is choosing the right advisor and the right IDSO partner.
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At LPS, we guide our clients towards partnerships with IDSOs that not only reduce administrative headaches but give you the resources to grow your practice bigger, better, faster and more profitably.
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And, best of all, with the right IDSO partner, you can create generational wealth.
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If you're interested in learning the potential value of your practice in an IDSO partnership, visit our website at largepracticesalescom or you can email us at podcast at largepracticesalescom.
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Follow this podcast for more tips you won't find anywhere else on how to monetize your dental practice at the maximum value.