Life after selling your practice

Recent experiences with various sole practitioners negotiating sales of their practices to larger firms give rise to this post.

Buyers are looking to achieve a strategic benefit from purchasing your practice and to make a good profit from it to justify the investment.

They may want you to work with them for a time to help make it happen.

A key point to address is why you are selling and why the purchaser is in a position to buy.

You may want less pressure and to withdraw your equity for other purposes...



The purchaser may well be well-organised and have management systems that suit them and drive their culture and profitability, but are almost always not what you chose when you were on your own.

This is the point...the trade-off in getting a firm to buy you out is that while you work for them you are now an employee...you now "work for the man"...and must fit in with their systems while you're drawing a salary, just as any other employee does.

Negotiate hours, conditions and remuneration by all means, but don't gripe about having to comply with systems the new firm believes it needs to achieve it's goals..it's their firm not yours...you had your time where you had all the freedom in the world to operate in exactly the manner you chose...for better or worse.

That time has ended now.

Many firms will want you to be fully accountable for your agreed inputs, to marketing, fees output, training and supervision etc.

See it as what it is for the relatively short time you will be expected to do it...a reasonable and understandable trade-off for the sale proceeds you receive.

Don't expect to find a full cultural fit...firms are very very different and it doesn't happen often.

If you have questions about what a purchaser is expecting of you, and would like to discuss them with an experienced mentor, please don't hesitate to email me to set up a phone chat... robkblog@lawfirmprofit.com