Someone Already Set a Price on Your Practice
I have sat across from owners who could quote their production, their overhead, and their patient count to the decimal, and then went blank when I asked what the practice was worth. Not a range. Not a method. Blank. These are careful operators who track everything inside the four walls and have no independent read on the one number that decides whether a lifetime of work turns into a comfortable exit or a rushed one.
That blind spot used to be harmless. It is not anymore, because a very motivated buyer has spent the last decade learning exactly what your practice is worth while you were busy running it.
A market price already exists
Dental has consolidated fast and it is still going. The share of U.S. dentists affiliated with a dental support organization climbed from around 7 percent in 2015 to roughly 16 percent by 2024, according to figures widely cited from the American Dental Association's own tracking. DSO-affiliated practices are still a minority of offices, somewhere near a quarter, but they already account for more than half of all dental spending. The consolidators are punching well above their count.
The pace is the part owners underestimate. Industry trackers estimate the combined platforms complete on the order of 800 to well over 1,000 practice acquisitions a year. That is not a handful of marquee deals. That is a functioning, liquid market in practices like yours, running quietly in the background whether or not you ever pick up the phone.
A liquid market means a price. Deal advisors who work this space describe a fairly settled structure. Single-location and small-group practices, the tuck-in acquisitions, tend to trade around 5 to 8 times adjusted EBITDA. Larger regional groups and platform-grade practices command 9 to 11 times or more. Those multiples have held reasonably steady, which tells you the buyers have a disciplined model and are not guessing. You are the only one at the table without the model.
The buyer is reading numbers you ignore
Here is what unsettles owners when they finally see a term sheet. The price is not really about last year's revenue. It is about how transferable the earnings are once you, the owner, are no longer the whole show.
The same levers that run the practice are the ones that set the multiple. A buyer looks at how much of production runs through the owner's own chair, and rewards a practice where associates and hygienists carry the load, because it can own that cash flow without owning you. Advisors describe a meaningful uplift when owner production sits below roughly 70 percent, and a discount when it runs above 90. A buyer looks at hygiene as a share of collections and pays a premium past about 30 percent, because recurring recall revenue is a stable, transferable base rather than a book that walks out the door with the founder. Recall adherence, hygiene-to-doctor ratio, payer mix, the concentration of production in one set of hands. Those are the underwriting inputs, and they are all things you can influence years before any conversation.
Which is the whole point. The practice that reads its own numbers the way a buyer reads them is not preparing to sell. It is running better and, as a byproduct, becoming worth more. The two are the same project. The owner who waits until a consolidator knocks is negotiating on the buyer's information, against the buyer's model, on the buyer's timeline. That is a bad seat, and it is the default seat.
Get your own read before the knock
You do not need a sale on the horizon to fix this, and you should not wait for one. Get a real, defensible valuation of your practice now, from someone whose fee does not depend on you transacting. Understand the multiple your practice would actually command and, more useful, the specific reasons it lands where it does. Then treat those reasons as an operating agenda, because every one of them is a lever you control.
Do that and the next unsolicited offer stops being a moment of pressure and becomes a data point you can weigh, priced against a number you already trust. The consolidators have done their homework on you. The least you can do is show up to your own market knowing what you are worth.