Transcript: 

Michelle Grasek: Hi Ruth, welcome. How are you today?

Ruth Mannschreck: Wonderful. I’m so pleased to be here with you and I can’t wait to converse with your audience.

Michelle Grasek: Yeah, thank you so much for being here. I’m really excited about our topic for today, but before we dive in, why don’t you introduce yourself for the audience?

Ruth Mannschreck: Sure. I’m Dr. Ruth Mannschreck. I have been in dental practice for 36 years and I’ve been a coach for professionals in private practice for the last 17 or 18 years. And most of what we cover in coaching happens to be the experiences that we run into in our practice. And about today’s topic, I sold my practice. One day I was working on a patient in my operatory and the ceiling in my operatory collapsed while we were working.

It was a horrendous mess. We had to vacate the office. I had no office for weeks. Anyway, to make that long story short, I fell into a sale for my practice that I didn’t prepare for. And therefore, I left a lot of money on the table. I left a lot of heartache or I got a lot of heartache because there were so many things I didn’t prepare. I didn’t prepare my team. I didn’t prepare myself. And it was a horrible feeling.

I had worked so hard on my baby, my practice, and I never want someone to have that feeling of, boy, I just messed that up, when it’s your one and only chance at selling a practice. So I’ve since then bought a practice, sold a practice. So I feel much more comfortable in the world of how to get your practice ready to sell, how to get yourself as the founder ready to sell in whatever kind of practice. So that’s what I like.

I don’t work on the finances of what your practice is worth. None of that. Just all the little pieces that we can put together. Because in my mind, selling your practice is a lot like Goldilocks and the three bears. Just because someone has deep enough pockets to pay for your practice doesn’t mean they’re a good fit for your team or your patients. It doesn’t work like that.

So the more you prepare, the more you develop other aspects of your practice that we’ll talk about, the better you’ll feel about the fit of the potential buyer you find to take over your practice.

Michelle Grasek: I’m happy to hear that I’m not the only person who considers their practice to be their baby.

Ruth Mannschreck: Oh my gosh.

Michelle Grasek: It must be everyone.

Ruth Mannschreck: You know, when you start from scratch, it’s like hot dogs and mac and cheese forever, seemingly. So that is an area where we are very similar. Those of us professionals who start a private practice from scratch, there’s a lot of that in the beginning. We wear many, many hats. And I kind of wanted to touch on why I’m appropriate to talk to your audience.

I think there are a lot of similarities between the world of acupuncture and dentistry. When someone comes to your practice, they’ve probably not been there before. They could be in pain. Society as a whole has judged both our industries, both dentistry and acupuncture, and they’ve judged us. And there are assumptions out there in the world. Oh, it’s going to hurt. Oh, this is not real science. Oh, it’s this.

They come with all that baggage in their heads. So I think we have a great opportunity because they’re so emotionally wired when they walk in the door. We have this wonderful opportunity to guide their emotional journey through their treatment and help them come to a calmer, more reflective experience that they’re going to want to talk to their friends about.

Because in my industry, and I’m sure in your industry, the best marketing is word of mouth. Our happy clients and patients are the best broadcasters of what we do and how we do it, who we are as professionals, how we care for people, all those things. Both our industries, I think that’s our ticket to success as far as marketing goes. And it doesn’t cost anything.

I always like a piece of marketing that isn’t going to break the bank to make it happen.

Michelle Grasek: Me too. The free marketing is my favorite. And you’re right, there’s so many ways that we can leverage our patients and their experience, their testimonials and repurposing them. This brings up for me a really interesting question. We talked about this a little bit before we hit record where a lot of acupuncturists are solopreneurs.

I think it’s hard for many acupuncturists to imagine selling a practice when it is built so much on their personal reputation and the attachment and affection that their patients have for them as an individual, the trust essentially that they have built.

I think our profession would certainly benefit from more conversations about thinking about our retirement or our stepping away from practice and what that would really look like. And I love that you have this very proactive approach of how are we preparing for those things in advance. I think that taking steps to prepare a practice for sale in advance is generally good for the practice, even if you decide not to sell.

There’s so much that we can do to really build up our businesses, make things more streamlined and have systems that can make our life easier.

Ruth Mannschreck: One of my favorite stories to tell is I had a client that I helped get her practice ready to sell. And we did all those things you just listed. We looked into her systems and her team and how she led her team, how she was growing. And when she got done, she decided she liked it so much. And it took so much less effort on her part that she didn’t sell it. She decided to stay because it was cleaned up. It was easy to run. It was so irresistible that she said, I love doing this. Everything is cared for. I only do the parts that I love. So she stayed.

Michelle Grasek: I love that.

Ruth Mannschreck: Yeah.

Michelle Grasek: Could we walk through what you recommend for preparing a practice? And I guess maybe before we do that, could we also talk about what if someone is a solopreneur? Does this apply to them as well?

Ruth Mannschreck: Sure. And I would say absolutely. And more importantly, to those of you who are totally on your own, it’s a wonderful design for a practice. Not everyone can pull it off, nor does everyone want to, which I totally understand. But I’ve been there. That’s the way I started. So yes. So keep listening because what I say does apply to you.

There’ll be parts that are about other things, but so much of what I’m going to talk about applies, especially this beginning part. I want to start with, before we even talk about how to look at your practice, I think you have to define for yourself, what does a successful exit or a successful sale look like to you? Do you want to walk out the door?

Do you want to accept a check, sign a document and walk out the door and never practice again? Or would you just like to keep practicing, keep seeing patients, but someone else is responsible for the operations, for running, for marketing, for sales, all those things. But you’re happy to stay on for a given amount of time. So you need to decide what does that look like to you?

How comfortable are you letting someone else into your practice right now? Because before you start preparing, you may be very uncomfortable about people looking at all kinds of parts of your practice. But once you’ve got it tidied up and prepared, and you and your team, if you have one, know exactly what’s going on, it’s much less frightening. It’s less threatening, and you’ll have a different outlook on it.

So the first thing I want people to do before we start looking at their practice is saying, what do I want? What do I want to do when I retire? You know, after this sale, maybe I’m not going to retire. Maybe I’m going to use this funding to do my next big thing in my life. What am I going to do with myself all day long? How can I feel comfortable with my patients when somebody else has their hands on them?

So big questions, but it’s good to just brainstorm. Just dump a bunch of ideas on a piece of paper or in your notion and get that out there so you can talk about it. So you can see where you’re starting. You might be in a different place when you get done preparing your practice. But for starters, it’s great conversations to have with your family, with your team, if you have a team.

Michelle Grasek: It’s so funny that you mention, if you walk away with a check and you have a sum of money, do you have another project that you’re already prepared to work on?

Ruth Mannschreck: Right.

Michelle Grasek: And I always, I imagine that I will sell my practice someday. I have two independent contractors who work with me right now, and I’m in the process of backing myself out of my responsibilities, right? And I have this fantasy of someday when I sell my practice, my retirement business will be opening a bookstore and seeing if I can do it, if I can make that profitable. So it’s very far in the future. But I think it’s a lot of fun, the idea. And I know that I cannot do nothing, right? I’m not that kind of person. I will definitely have to start a new project and it might as well be a bookstore.

Ruth Mannschreck: Yes, fabulous. What a wonderful idea.

Michelle Grasek: If anyone is still reading paper books at that point, I really hope so.

Ruth Mannschreck: Yeah, boy, I hope so. I love them dearly. Me too. So the first area that I would encourage people to look at is how can I increase the value of my practice? What areas, what areas could I make more attractive? So it’s not to add services or to start doing something different per se, but look in your what, what would make it more valuable if you have?

So one of my clients had an onboarding system that was very unique to her style and very thorough. So onboarding, if you have team members, onboarding is, can be extensive and expensive and it’s time consuming. So she packaged up her onboarding system and made it a business in a box.

So other founders, other practitioners could purchase her onboarding service or system and apply it to their business and they didn’t have to spend forever figuring out how to onboard new team members. Awesome. So when she put that as part of her sale package, because you, you’ve got a book of business, you have a location, you have all these parts that you’re going to sell. She added, it’s called intellectual property.

Whatever you have as your certain way of doing things, especially in your world where not everybody understands what you do, you have a way, a style, a process that you use with your patients or your clients. I really encourage you to look at that and say, that’s my intellectual property. How can I make that something that’s mine that could be sold separately or with the practice? It’s a conversation for an attorney.

But we do so much of that and we think, oh, when I sell my practice, they’re just going to keep doing it the way I do it. But you spent years coming up with your style, your process for how you bring new, new clients in how you maintain your relationship with them. That’s all very individual. And I think they’re awesome.

So it’s worth a conversation to find out, is this intellectual property that could make my practice more valuable? Or is it something I could sell separately?

Michelle Grasek: I never thought of that. And I would say at the very least, it sounds like really strong SOPs. Like even if it doesn’t turn out to be intellectual property, I think those SOPs are very valuable because then the next person who comes in, they have a map to follow if they want to. I think that’s a hard thing about selling a practice too, is accepting that maybe the next person will want to do things very differently.

Ruth Mannschreck: Sure. So here’s a thought to hang on to. When someone comes in after they purchase a practice, if you don’t have SOPs, they have this gigantic chore in front of them to design them because not many buyers are going to want to practice without SOPs. It’s just everybody wants that. So they’re going to have to come up with their own. That’s very time consuming.

So for those of you who don’t technically have your processes all figured out, it’s not like I want you to write them all down. It’s very time consuming and nobody’s going to read them. I’ll just tell you. But what if, what if you made a video library of all the things that your team does? What if you just made a very simple Loom video explaining all the steps of your processes?

Because then your new team member could just go into the library, watch it. It’s like the Q&A section in a website. Just go watch the video for how to do something and it keeps them from hounding you with another question about how do I do this again? Does that make sense?

Michelle Grasek: Absolutely. One thing that I have focused on for a couple of years now in terms of not just the benefit for the practice currently, but also trying to build up the value for a sale someday is the marketing that I’m doing and our professional reputation.

So trying to collect as many Google reviews as possible and not just because they’re great social proof for patients or potential patients, but also because if we continue to be far and away the practice with the most reviews, I think it makes us very appealing to a buyer as well as winning like best acupuncture clinic in the Finger Lakes multiple years in a row and just seeing like how many years can we keep that going.

So we’re at four years right now and my obsessive goal is just to continue, but you never know what will happen. But really thinking about how that compounds over time and then what that looks like for a potential buyer choosing my practice over someone else’s.

Ruth Mannschreck: And we’ll talk about that in a minute. That’s one of that’s part of one of the areas that I like to focus on. So increasing the value of your practice is looking at all the areas your marketing, as you said, your sales process, your reputation in the area, all those things to take a look at and how could those be improved. So the second step is to decrease what would be considered risk.

When buyers take a look at a practice, they’re always looking for red flags, what could possibly make a bad idea. And a couple areas, if you look at who is the bigger, biggest producer in your practice, and it might be yourself because you’re the owner, if you’re a solo practitioner, it’s yourself. So where is the revenue going to come from if you’re no longer a producer?

Just assuming that whoever purchases your practice is going to pick up where you left off is not helpful. They may be amazing and step in and eventually get back to your production level, but not right away. And that’s not usually what I see happening. There’s usually a big. So that’s one risk that buyers are going to look at. If you’re a solo practitioner, you don’t have other practitioners working with you.

How are you going to get back that revenue dip? Because it’s right at a time when they need to make loan payments and pull up a salary. So the demand is higher right then for revenue, and there’s going to be this dip. So having one person in the practice who’s responsible for too much of a percentage of the revenue.

Because even if it’s, even if the biggest producer is one of your contractors, what if they don’t like the new person?

Michelle Grasek: Right, what if they leave?

Ruth Mannschreck: And to a buyer, that’s a risky thing in their head going around. What if these people leave? So come up with a way to address that risk. How can you lower the risk that buyer is going to see? Another one is to look at your referral sources. If you have one referral source that produces 30% of your referrals come from one place, that looks very risky to a possible buyer.

Because if the new source, if the referral source doesn’t like the new owner, they’re sunk. There went a big chunk of their revenue, their referrals. So look at, and if you have a software or even just QuickBooks, it can take your data, you feed it, you know, what percentage are all these people referring to you, and it’ll turn it into a pie chart so you can show them.

Not only is it, you know, dollar-wise like this, but out of all my referrals, all the people that send me referrals, the biggest one is only 20%, you know, or different for every practice, your numbers. But to be able to bring that to the table and say, this is my number one referral partner, who knows that I’m selling the practice already and is willing to be supportive of the new owner.

So building those relationships, because that’s a huge piece of what they’re buying, is your book of referrals, your referral sources. So telling your referral sources way ahead of time that this is eventually going to happen, and I would like your support to help me make this new person successful. It’s a great conversation to have.

There’s this idea, especially the dental world, it’s very much an idea that you don’t tell anybody that you’re going to sell your practice until after it already happened. It’s because, well, they’re afraid. If I tell people I’m going to retire, they’ll start to leave. They’ll go find a new dentist on their own.

Michelle Grasek: I see, yeah.

Ruth Mannschreck: But I, that’s what I did when I sold my first practice, and I’m so embarrassed that I did that. I was horrified, because usually you sell it on a Friday, and on Monday you make this big announcement in your staff meeting that, guess what, I just sold the practice, and here’s the new owner. And my office manager burst into tears. I was mortified that I had not prepared her for what I was doing.

That I, even as a friend, I felt like I had failed in supporting her moving forward in her life, you know. So I have this idea instead. What would happen, what if we told our team and our patients, our referral partners, what if we had conversations with people 10 years ago? What if we started now and said, you know what, in 10 years, I’m going to be off buying a bookstore.

But I’m going to make sure that the person who takes over for me cares for my team, follows up in my value systems, has the behaviors that all these things list, all the things that are important. I’m working right now to make sure that you are surrounded by the right people before I walk out the door. Like this is a planned event 10 years ahead. So it’s not shock and awe, or it’s not, boy, look how much gray hair she’s got.

She might retire soon. I better move on. Just have that conversation. Work on it collaboratively with your team so it’s not a shock. It’s not scary or threatening to your team or to your precious clients.

Michelle Grasek: Yeah, when I stepped back from practice, I, so I had an acupuncturist part-time already in place. So we were both practicing. And then I wanted to step back and just run the practice and then also teach marketing online. So I hired another acupuncturist to take my place. And that process of transferring my patients to her was a delicate and a long process.

Because even telling them, gosh, I think they had about two and a half months advance notice while we were waiting for Laura’s license to come through. It just, like the initial telling people I’m going to be stepping back was a shock, right? So then it was a lot of like very gentle management, kind of like you’re describing of the person I’m bringing on. Her name is Laura. She’s wonderful. I picked her on purpose.

I think we’re very similar for these reasons. And then Laura had an onboarding training with me. Gosh, I think it ended up being five weeks of shadowing because we were expecting her license to come through after two weeks and then it didn’t. So it was managing that process. But I think about how poorly that could have gone if it was abrupt. And I was just like, happy Monday, everyone. I’m leaving.

Here’s your new acupuncturist. This person’s going to be touching you. Feel free to tell them. Tell her all about your bowel movements and your personal health history and the stuff that you’ve been sharing with me for six years. So and what happened was most of the patients ended up staying on with Laura. She lost a couple that was just natural attrition. She couldn’t keep everyone, but it ended up working.

But now whenever I hear about people selling a practice, I think about the same thing, right? If you’re transitioning your patients to another acupuncturist, in any capacity, communicate with everybody. Communicate with your patients in advance so that they feel like they have a choice and they already trust your judgment. Then you have the opportunity to convince them, I chose this person for a reason.

Can you give them a chance? And then if they don’t want to stay, they don’t have to. But man, the communication is everything. You can’t get away without it.

Ruth Mannschreck: The next step in that communication has to do with your marketing. I love this because when you’re a solo practitioner, all your marketing starts with the letter I. I do this. This is mine. And to adequately prepare people for this exit, you have to change from I do this to we do this. It’s a huge transition and your marketing needs to reflect the we.

Your team members’ communication needs to reflect the we so that when you do exit, the we goes on. The we is always the same. No matter who’s sitting at the helm, the we is the same. And your patients know that. They’ve been educated. And they can tell you what the we is like, what the we feels like, how it affects them, how it makes them feel.

Because that’s what they’re telling the world in their warmed-up word-of-mouth marketing. That’s what they’re doing, is saying how I feel about the we. So I think that change in language is very important. And it needs to start way ahead of time so it doesn’t look like you’re trying to fix a boo-boo at the end.

Michelle Grasek: Right. Yeah. I found that really hard, actually, because I had been sending all of my marketing emails was I, right? Me, I. And I would always sign it, Michelle. And then on your social media, like on my Instagram account, it was like I was talking to them one-on-one. And I definitely sort of did it towards the end. Like all of a sudden, there’s three of us. And so we’re a we.

Ruth Mannschreck: Yeah, we’re a we, you know? So starting early gives you a runway to make that a gracious transition instead of an abrupt change to a different pronoun, you know?

Michelle Grasek: Yeah.

Ruth Mannschreck: So that’s a really good, good point. And it fits right in with your marketing piece. The third piece that I would have people think about is something we touched on a little bit. It’s the competitive advantage that you have in your area. One reason that a new person would consider purchasing a practice is that there’s a barrier. There are many barriers to entry.

If you’re thinking of, if you’re a new practitioner and you’re thinking about starting your own practice, you have to figure out how to run a business. You have to find real estate. You have to have all this equipment. There’s so many. That’s called, those are called barriers to entry. The competitive advantage of having a practice that you’re going to sell is that you’ve got a business in a box to hand to someone, you know?

And you’re going to want to know more than just what are your SOPs, who’s your team, all those basic things. They also need to know, and here comes your marketing world again, they also need to know where are you in the industry in your area? Were you the first? Are you the biggest? Whatever your competitive advantage, now is the time to start singing that song.

So that when, because what, what the question really will be for the buyer is, it’s not, do I want to buy your practice? It’s, why would I buy your practice instead of this practice? There’s always more practices for sale than there are practitioners. So you have to set up a competitive advantage. You should pick me because I’ve been here longer. I have whatever it is. It could be your culture. It could be your location.

It could be your real estate. Think of all the barriers that a new practitioner coming into town would have to deal with and then flip those because that can enumerate your competitive advantage to why they should choose your practice instead of the guy next door.

Michelle Grasek: And I like what you said earlier about really leaning into your referral relationships and making them strong because I think that is a competitive advantage for sure if you have established relationships because those take years. They do. And a new practitioner is going to have to build that from scratch. But if you’ve got them built and if you’ve also had conversations with those people, like I’m preparing to retire or step back or do halftime, then they’re aware of it. If they’re supportive, that’s something that you can also sell as part of your package. I love that.

Ruth Mannschreck: And newcomers into your world, a new practitioners don’t always know that they need referral sources. They haven’t thought that far ahead. You know, like it’s enough. I know I need an appointment book, but yes, somebody has got to send me patients. So saying not only do I have referral partners in a network, I have this wonderful relationship. I meet with them every month or I keep in contact with them every month.

Show people that it’s not just I have the list in the phone book. It’s I have an ongoing relationship with these people. And that translates into six months. In the last six months, this referral partner has sent me this many referrals. And our conversion rate is so-and-so for those referrals so that there’s meat to your referral network because anybody can know those people.

But to have a relationship that really does provide referrals for you so you can serve more of the right people, that’s where the gold is. So that they know, wow, she’s on the ball. She’s got these people that agree with how she practices and rightly send people to her. And she’s making sure that the relationship is warm and can be passed on to me.

Michelle Grasek: How far in advance do you recommend someone starts prepping for sale? I like a long-term game. You know, if I don’t sell my practice for 10 or 15 years, I’m happy to prepare for it the entire time. But I think that’s maybe not practical for most people there because I love the marketing and the practice management on the back end and they’d be like, kill me to prepare for that for 15 years. But is it two or three years? Is a year enough to really collect this data to establish these things and to start talking about them?

Ruth Mannschreck: I say everybody start now. Just start now. But sincerely, hear me about this. If you’re a practitioner and the only thing in your practice that you want to do with all your heart, all you want to do is practice. You don’t want to run operations. You don’t want to do marketing and sales. In my world, which is just my world, you get to do that. You can do your practice whatever way you want.

You just, I call this the Henry Ford business model. Henry Ford never even graduated from high school. He knew one thing. He knew machines. He knew, he understood mechanics, engineer, engines. That’s all he knew how to do. He wasn’t an engineer. He just was good with engines. So he surrounded himself with experts in all the other areas.

Somebody for marketing, somebody for sales, somebody for operations, somebody for growing his team. All the things that he didn’t want to do, he didn’t do. Now to a sole practitioner, that sounds like an expensive way to run a practice. But I say, if you can’t afford an expert, then let’s come up with a champion because that’s what you need is a champion. So if you don’t want to do

Ruth Mannschreck: social media posts, go find a teenager who needs credit for something in high school and have them do it. Go to a teacher. If you need a website, go to the graphics teacher at the high school and say, I have a project for your class and have them do it. Come up with champions, people who know how to do what you need that you don’t want to do and have them do it. So I love that you can’t get rid of everything you want.

You don’t want to do all at once, but think about this is the thing I hate doing the most. Let’s give that away so that if you give yourself a long term, five to 10 years, you will fill those champion spots all around you and you will have created a wonderful world to practice it much less to hand off to somebody when you sell it.

Michelle Grasek: Perfect.

Ruth Mannschreck: The last, the last thing in my, so we’ve got four so far. We had to increase value, decrease the risk, competitive advantage. And the last one is turnkey operations. So exactly the thing that you spoke about and turnkey people feel that when they purchase something, they want it up and running all by itself. They don’t want to recreate the wheel. They would have just started a practice if they had to do all that work.

So the more you can have operations systems that run with the right team members without you being involved, you want a practice that runs itself. That’s what’s very attractive to a buyer. They’re looking for organization. They’re looking for a step up over so many of the barriers that they see, barriers to entry. And having turnkey operations is a big one for most buyers.

Michelle Grasek: Your idea about recording your SOPs as screen shares and videos, I think is so helpful because you’re right. I’ve, I’ve really spent time writing SOPs and they’re detailed. Like, here’s how to conduct a free 30 minute consult for cosmetic acupuncture patients. And then my poor acupuncturists are like, can you make it one page? Why is it seven pages? I’m like, I’m just, it’s like a brain dump.

I’m like trying to share, oh, and then if they say this, this has worked in the past, but okay, nobody, no one needs that. Not all at once. Right. Yeah. How can we make it succinct? And then I do think in many ways a video is easier for people to consume depending on the way that they learn.

And if it is something done on software, just being able to share the screen and be like, you click here and click here and click here, the end. That’s great for people.

Ruth Mannschreck: So for example, take what you were just referring to, let’s make it an intake call for that first time a patient calls inquiring about your practice. So you can, you can do one video that’s a general overview of the whole thing, but then you can do separate little vignettes on video.

So if they are focused on cosmetic things, this is where you’re going to go so that somebody can look at what they’ve done and say, I had trouble here. I just want to hear about this part and go to that part in your library. They don’t have to listen to 47 pages and only get to the question that they really had. So it helps them.

It’s like a table of contents for a book, you know, where, where can I find exactly the thing I want to learn?

Michelle Grasek: Do you recommend then having the SOP set up in a Google drive in just that way, like a table of contents, like the ability to click here based on the title?

Ruth Mannschreck: Sure. But they’re videos. So remember, you’re going to run out of room. So, but Dropbox works great and it’s not very expensive. In fact, you could do a lot because we’re talking little, little videos, two or three minutes. You could put them on a YouTube channel that is private, that nobody sees except your team. Okay. Yeah. And that’s a great idea. We’re talking storage of videos. That’s all in an organized fashion. And you could do that so many places. Amazon has AWS, which is really nice. It’s got a lot of space because videos take up a lot of room.

Michelle Grasek: So I like the YouTube channel idea because YouTube also lets you drop videos into almost like chapters or content topics and you can order them as well. You can choose your order. They’re arranged in. Yeah, that’s good.

Ruth Mannschreck: So all they need is like a little key in your Google Drive, a key that says, okay, go to this channel, this video, if you have this question. Very nice. Yeah. So lots of ways. See, and as you’re organizing your team, your practice, getting it ready to be sellable, you’re also making it very enticing for your team members because it’s so much smoother when life is organized at the office, then it’s chaotic.

And because I don’t know about your practice, but in my dental practice, I used to refer to my receptionist as a schizophrenic octopus, because she’s got this lady trying to find her credit card. She’s trying to make an appointment and the phone’s ringing and there’s all these things going on because you don’t have six people at the front desk. There’s one person or there’s an answering machine.

So the smoother you can make the processes that you do have set up, the more people are going to be attracted and want to stay in your practice. You know, once you get people trained to do things your way, the we way, you want them to stay because it’s so much work to train a new team member. So there’s all kinds of benefits for getting practice ready to sell. Only they’re all aimed at making it more sellable.

But boy, some of them really are helpful for the owner and his team and your patients. Yes.

Michelle Grasek: And I wanted to bring up a sale of a solo practice to another solo practitioner that I know of. It’s a friend of mine, because I think a lot of times solo practitioners think to themselves, it’s just me. They’re my patients. They trust me. Who’s going to buy this from me? But it does happen.

And everything that we’ve talked about, all of these processes, even creating SOPs, if you’re the only one there, it still matters because if you passed it on to another individual, like you said, they’re still going to want to walk in and know, like, this is what has been working in this community for these people in the past. Right? It gives them such an advantage.

And the funny story with this practice sale is the last name of this acupuncturist was Thompson. So her practice was Thompson Acupuncture. And she managed to find a buyer whose last name was also Thompson. And it felt like the convergence of the universe. It was a beautiful thing. And it didn’t really matter what the name of the practice was, because this person wanted to practice in that area. Right?

And she had a very busy practice. She was very successful. And this person who was selling it also had an onboarding process for the new person, where she basically let her shadow and made a big effort to convince her current patients, I’m picking this person on purpose. She’s wonderful. Right? So even if she ultimately had to change the name of the practice down the road, she still would have wanted that practice.

It just was magical that they happened to have the last name. Yeah, right. Right. But it does happen. And those like all the preparation that the seller did in advance, made a big difference. So even if you’re a solopreneur, it is certainly possible.

Ruth Mannschreck: Absolutely. And remember, it doesn’t all have to be done tomorrow. So start with the squeakiest wheel and get that under control. So much, so much of selling a practice or running a practice is about the mindset of the people involved. So what I’ve watched as I help practitioners get their practice ready to sell, as I see the mindset of the practitioner changes, because all of a sudden, it’s like, wow, I really did this.

They gain more confidence, not in their skills as a practitioner, but in their ability to run a business. And I’m caring for people and their mindset changes.

And when that happens, then their team members also have more of a sense of pride in the practice because it’s apparent to them because we’re working on making things better and more aimed at our vision and making sure our core values go through the entire practice and we care for our clients and our patients.

So the mindset change that happens within a practice, once they get things organized, that’s the part that’s hard to see ahead of time, but it’s so fun to watch from my position of helping them go through this. And it’s something we never aimed at, but it’s really a big deal when it comes to, I’m proud of what I created. I’m proud of our team. I’m proud of the docs that are here. Our practitioners, we have this thing going.

We’ve now defined it and it’s a thing that is worthy of our pride, our care, our love. This is how we serve. It’s something I want to be a part of. And that’s what we want our team and our patients or our clients to say, I picked this one. Sure, all you acupuncturists are good, but I want this one. I love how they treat me. I love how they treat each other. I love how they talk to each other.

It’s a mindset thing that ends up coming from the founder, from the owner, to the team, to the patients.

Michelle Grasek: That’s such a nice way to look at it. It’s kind of like you’re polishing your business and it becomes very organized and you can see what a great little gem it is because when we’re in it, I think we don’t appreciate what we’ve built. And if it feels scattered and messy, that’s stressful. But organizing things and polishing them up, oh, I think that’s wonderful to have that end outcome. Even if the person never sells, just suddenly feeling like recognizing, wow, I created something pretty spectacular.

Ruth Mannschreck: And what a wonderful place to work. If you decide you’re going to bring in practitioners or a team, what a wonderful, irresistible place to work it is when they sense because there’s so much more to what we do than just what we do with our hands. Sure, we’re good at what we do with our hands, but that whole ambience that comes with an office is such a big part of the healing process. And I’m sure you guys are well aware that the mindset is so important as we try to get our patients to heal and to move forward and to get out of wherever they’re stuck. It does matter, not just to the sales price, but to our practice.

Michelle Grasek: Irresistible. I like that a lot. Yeah. Well, I have one more question for you, and it is a question that I ask all of my guests. What is your definition of success?

Ruth Mannschreck: Well, my definition of success is just for me, so that’s not very helpful to you. But what I think is- That’s okay.

Michelle Grasek: We’ll take it.

Ruth Mannschreck: For me, it’s… So I live on a lake in Northern Michigan, and this is my world. So if I just look out my window, the lake is right there. Beautiful. I work three days a week. I have certain hours that I work. That to me is successful. I still am contributing through my coaching because now I have a business retired from dentistry. But it means I get to travel when I want. It means I get to be there for my grandchildren.

But a huge piece of my success is that I get to continue to coach clients in their progress of building their practice and getting it ready to sell. So note the pieces that are in there. Some of it is about freedom. Some of it is about income or money or whatever you want that piece to be. But a big piece that I think about success is your impact. What kind of impact do you want to make in the world?

Do you want to continue providing services? Do you want to step up and create a bookstore? Do you want to move on to something else? What would make your heart sing in your next stage? And how can… So that’s another reason to start now to say, I want to have this much on my sale price.

I want it to be this much because I’m going to do this or because I want to live here or because I want to put my kids through college or whatever that looks like. So those three parts to me are real important. And I think you have to look at all of those to say this is success for me.

Michelle Grasek: Thank you. So how can we find you online if people want to work with you? Sure.

Ruth Mannschreck: The name of my company is Shoreline Strategies. And we help professionals in private practice either work fewer hours in their practice or get their practice ready to sell. Those are our two big areas that we work clients with. You can find us shorelinestrategies.com is our website. You can find me on LinkedIn. I’m Ruth Mannschreck on LinkedIn. We have a handout, a resource for your listeners that reviews the parts we talked about today. So I will get that to you.

Michelle Grasek: Yeah. And I will make sure that all of those links are included. I actually thought I had it pulled up so I could tell people what it’s called, but it’s a PDF download. So we’ll make sure we’ve got those links in there.

Ruth Mannschreck: Okay, great.

Michelle Grasek: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate it. This is wonderful. What a great interview.

Ruth Mannschreck: I appreciate it. You’re good at this, Michelle. Keep going.

Michelle Grasek: Thank you so much.