Rx 05 — PREPARING FOR SALE
Preparing a healthcare practice or platform for sale
CC — PRESENTING COMPLAINT
Multiples are made two years before the banker calls.
Buyers pay for systems, not spend. We make growth legible to a diligence team — instrumented, repeatable, and independent of any one owner or operator.
05.1
Banker-ready growth narrative
The story the book tells, backed by instruments a diligence team can re-run themselves.
05.2
Multiple-modelling assist
Which operational moves actually move the multiple — ranked by leverage, costed, and sequenced against the clock.
05.3
Diligence support package
Attribution history, cohort data, capacity models — in the data room before anyone asks for them.
05.4
Post-close integration
The system survives the transition, so the gains don't walk out the door with the founder.
SIGNAL
KPI retention through the first two post-close quarters.
DILIGENCE
What a buyer's diligence team actually asks for
Not a growth story. A set of files, and the ability to re-run your numbers themselves.
Where new patients came from, by channel, by site, for the trailing three years, on one definition that did not change midway. Marketing spend rebuilt from the ledger rather than from vendor invoices, with fees and tools included — the number is always higher than the one in the board deck, and finding that out in the data room is expensive. Same-store growth separated from growth by acquisition, by cohort. Cost per new patient by site, with the outliers explained rather than smoothed. Retention and repeat behaviour, because a buyer is pricing the panel and not the quarter. Attribution coverage stated honestly, including what is not traceable. And evidence that the system runs without the founder in the room.
The reason to assemble this two years early is not tidiness. It is that most of these numbers cannot be reconstructed backwards — if the definitions were not frozen at the time, the history does not exist and no amount of work in the final quarter creates it.
OWNER DEPENDENCE
Owner dependence, and how it shows up in the numbers
Buyers price operator-independence, and they detect its absence long before anyone says the word — inside a PE-backed platform the same detection happens at every add-on, quarter after quarter, rather than once at exit. It appears in ordinary places: one site outperforming the others for reasons nobody has written down, referral relationships held personally rather than institutionally, pricing decisions that live in one person’s judgement, a marketing function that is somebody’s instinct plus three vendors.
Each of those reads to a diligence team as a growth story that cannot be re-run — and growth that cannot be re-run gets priced as a good run rather than as a machine. That is the difference the work is aimed at, and it is a larger number than most of what is spent chasing incremental volume in the same period.
The remedy is boring and it takes time: written definitions, instruments that anybody can read, a cadence that survives a change of staff, and a documented handoff. The test we use is simple. If the founder went away for a quarter, which numbers would move — and can you show, from history, that they did not?
Case file № 0214 — PE-backed DSO, 24 → 42 locations. EBITDA multiple modelled 8.4× at intake, 8.7× at exit. Dykema publishes 5–6× for individual practices and 9–10× for large platforms; nothing for a dental group of this size, so the exit sits at the conservative edge of the platform band and is a model, not a comparable.
READ THE CASE FILE →SEQUENCED WITH — nothing here runs alone
Rx 04 · REPORTING
Diligence starts with the readouts you already run.
Rx 03 · INTAKE & OPS
Owner-independent systems are what buyers price.
The order comes from the diagnosis, not the org chart — see the five-phase method, or all five categories.
PRESCRIBED BY
Admen '26