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Guide · Buying and selling
Buying a dental practice, without losing what you paid for.
Most acquisition advice covers the contract and the finance. Far less covers the first ninety days, which is where a badly handled handover quietly undoes months of patient flow the seller built.
Buying a UK dental practice involves valuation, funding, legal due diligence, regulatory transfer and handover. Beyond the obvious financial and clinical checks, the areas most often mishandled are the transfer of the practice website domain, the Google Business Profile and its reviews, and the advertising accounts, all of which carry goodwill you are paying for. Establishing who controls each of these before completion, rather than after, is what prevents a drop in new patient enquiries in the first months of ownership.
- Value sits in
- Recurring profit and patient flow
- Most at risk
- Listings, reviews and rankings
- Sort before completion
- Domain, listing and ad account control
- Riskiest period
- The first 90 days
The financial and clinical checks
Your accountant and solicitor cover the accounts, the contract position, the lease, associate arrangements, equipment condition and any regulatory history. That work is well understood and you should use dental specialists for it rather than generalists.
The checks almost nobody does
Who is the domain registered to. Who controls the Google Business Profile, and therefore the reviews. Who has admin access to the advertising accounts and the analytics. In a surprising number of practices the answer is a former marketing agency or a relative, and finding out after completion is expensive.
Why the Google listing matters more than the website
The listing carries the reviews, and reviews take years to accumulate. Transferring ownership of an existing listing preserves them. Creating a new listing because nobody could access the old one throws away part of what you bought.
Rebranding, and whether to
A rename loses local recognition that has real value. Sometimes it is the right decision, particularly when joining a group. Often it is not. If you do rename, plan the redirects properly and give it time, rather than switching the website over on completion day.
The first ninety days
Patients are alert to a change of ownership and some will drift. A short, plain communication to the existing list explaining what is changing and what is not tends to hold more of them than saying nothing. This is also the moment to work the lapsed patient list, which almost every practice has and almost none has contacted.
If you are acquiring into a group
The additional question is catchment overlap. Two practices you now own bidding against each other in paid search means paying twice for the same patient. Agree the postcode split before either site is advertised.
Where it usually goes wrong
The mistakes we see most often, in roughly the order they cost the most.
- Discovering after completion that the domain is registered to a former agency
- Creating a new Google listing and losing years of reviews
- Rebranding immediately and losing local recognition
- Switching the website on completion day with no redirects
- Saying nothing to existing patients about the change
- Advertising a newly acquired site against one you already own
Questions and answers
Common questions.
What should I check before buying a dental practice?
Beyond accounts, lease, contracts and clinical records, check who controls the domain, the Google Business Profile and the advertising accounts. These carry goodwill you are paying for and are commonly held by third parties.
Will buying a practice affect its Google rankings?
It can, if the website is changed or the listing is recreated. Handled properly, with ownership transferred and redirects in place, rankings and reviews carry over. Handled badly, you can lose months of visibility.
Should I rename the practice after buying it?
Usually not straight away. Local recognition is worth real money. If you do rename, plan it properly with redirects and a patient communication, rather than switching everything over on completion day.
What happens to the reviews when a practice changes hands?
They stay with the Google Business Profile, which is why transferring ownership of the existing listing matters more than the website. Creating a new listing starts your review count at zero.
How soon should I start marketing after acquiring?
Immediately, and ideally with the transition planned before completion. The lapsed patient list is usually the fastest return, because those patients already know the practice.
How much notice do you need to handle the transition?
About eight weeks before completion is comfortable. The urgent items are listing ownership and redirects. Everything else can follow.
Related
Where this connects.
Patient reactivation
The lapsed list in a newly acquired practice is the fastest return available.
Read more →Next step
Want to talk it through?
Thirty minutes, no obligation, and we will tell you honestly which parts of this apply to your practice and which do not. If the answer is that you do not need us, we will say so.