Over a three month period beginning July 2011, I wrote a series of seven posts on how to avoid the common pitfalls of dental practice transitions.  My comments were focused on  the sale or purchase of an existing practice resulting in a merged larger practice still with one owner. In the general scheme of things, this is  relatively uncomplicated.

The most difficult and complex practice transition is an equity partnership. In the typical situation, an associate who has been working as an employee for a number of years in a dental practice is offered the opportunity to buy a percentage of the business and become an owner. The sale is designed as an exit strategy for the senior doctor who will be retiring from clinical practice – probably in five to seven years.

The complexity of a dental partnership can perhaps be measured by the length of the legal agreement, often 90 to 100 pages. Contrast that to an outright sale of a practice where the legal documentation of the purchase is usually 10 to 15 pages.  There are significant risks to both parties when entering into a partnership. From the perspective of the seller, some  questions might be:

1. How am I going to handle losing total control (power) over decision making?
2. What will happen to my income stream?
3. Am I giving away the store?

The buyer will also have questions:

1. Will I be able to afford all this debt?
2. Am I paying too much?
3. I know that I am an equal partner, but will I ever be able to truly exert my influence?

You are going to the altar on this! It is a marriage without the romantic benefits, and in my experience I have observed that a dental partnership has about the same chance of success as a marriage. That being said, most marriages that don’t last certainly don’t fail in the first few years. So with hard work on everyone’s part, there is a reasonable chance to have the partnership survive until the senior doctor retires.

Contrary to my normal optimistic approach to life – and since I have seen so many unfortunate situations – and since partnerships don’t always turn out to be long term success stories – I have to force myself to use restraint when advising clients in this arena. The challenge is to design what essentially is a pre-nup agreement that tries to anticipate every possible contingency in the event that things don’t go smoothly and blissfully or as planned.

By definition, a dental partnership between a senior doctor and a younger “associate to become partner” is full of built – in inherent conflicts of interests. Recognizing this dynamic makes it all the more important that the prospective partners at least share basic core values like personality, consideration for others, and an ability to communicate well. Without that to start, all of the thoughtful contingency planning in the world will not insure success.

In my opinion, success in life is always about having reasonable expectations. I would suggest that you will be disappointed if you think your dental partner is going to be your best friend and golfing buddy. But if at the end of the day, you and your partner respect each other and can co-exist in a peaceful professional relationship, then that would meet my definition of success. Anything more than that would be icing on the cake.

Over the next few months, I plan to document and discuss in detail a number of positive suggestions and strategies to implement when designing a dental partnership.

True confession–I have not been a big Facebook fan. I always recommend to my clients that they should have a Professional Facebook Page. It is free and relatively easy to set up and there are benefits. But my priorities in the Internet marketing world have always related  to Google search. Create a great website that is attractive and easy to navigate, one that positions high up on the local Google business map when someone does a search for a dentist in their geographical area.  In my experience, I continue to see a strong correlation between a well-positioned website and new patients calling the office.

But new evidence shows that there are almost as many searches for a dentist on Facebook as there are on Google. So with the advent of Facebook’s Timeline, now may be the time to upgrade your Facebook presence. Here are three good reasons why.

1. Additional real estate– with the wider profile of Timeline, you have more of an opportunity to tell your story graphically with a bigger logo and bigger and more dramatic photos. It gives you the feel of a website on your Facebook page.
2. Pinned posts–in the old Facebook format, any post you made about an offer–like a free exam or a discount on Zoom whitening–would quickly fall off of your live feed page. Now you can “pin” or attach that offer to the top of your Facebook page so the offer stays visible at the top of the page for seven days or until you unpin it.
3. Icons–in the old format, any icons were very small and appeared as a list below your small photo or logo on the left side of the page. Now with the open layout and wider format, the icons can be much bigger–similar to the buttons on your website. In my case, with my new layout, Get my Blog and Videos are now prominently displayed. Click here to see the before and after of my new Facebook page. I think you will agree the differences are pretty dramatic.

I want to thank Tim Healy and his talented team at TNT Dental for all of their extraordinary efforts in creating my new website,  my new mobile website, and my new Facebook page. I am especially grateful to them for the screenshots they were able to create on this post and the two previous ones that make it easy for people to see what I’m describing. I also want to thank my good friends Rich and Dave Madow who teach a fabulous course on Social Media. I took their course three years ago, and it provided me the inspiration and the technical knowledge to begin a journey that continues uninterrupted to this day.

On March 30^th, whether you like it or not, Facebook is going to force the timeline change, so any custom work you have done under the old format will look funky and possibly distorted. And if you are not prepared in some fashion, you are not going to look good under the new format either. So don’t delay. Speak with your technical people and take the appropriate action. And please remember to Like us on Facebook!

Laptop and desktop computers are no longer the only portal to the Internet. 50% of the web is now viewed on mobile devices such as smart phones, iPads, and other portable tablets. And that percentage will only continue to grow and increase over time. Thus it makes a lot of sense to create a mobile version of your website that can be easily viewed and used.

This mobile site will fit into a cell phone screen without having to scroll horizontally. The mission is to redesign a simplified Home Page that looks graphically similar to your main website. As the viewer scrolls down, a navigation menu appears. A correctly formatted mobile website enables users to access the website information easily and helps with conversion as it is designed to enable users to take the next step and call into the practice or e-mail with an inquiry. The mobile version will not be an exact replica of the main website, as smart phone users will not be spending the same amount of time on the site as someone browsing it from their laptop or PC. Consequently, they won’t typically want to view as much information. Instead, the mobile site  will contain key pages such as the welcome page, contact us, meet the doctor, and key service pages.

Click here from your computer to see what my new mobile site looks like. If you access my website from your mobile device, then you can get the total interactive experience.

A very important feature is to have your webmaster set up your full-size website so that it recognizes a mobile user and automatically redirects the search to the mobile website.  It would also be important to replace any meaningful Flash animation on your website with HTML5 or jQuery so it is viewable to the mobile browser.

This is not a costly project. What are you waiting for?