You’ve built and grown your medical practice over years of hard work, and you love the community you serve. But now you’re looking for an exit strategy to sell the practice.
Since the pandemic, healthcare has seen almost contradictory trends of a rise in private equity and a renewed interest in physician-owned independent practices. For many of the healthcare practices we work with, owners are looking to balance long-term financial stability and near-term autonomy. A well-prepared exit strategy can achieve both of these goals.
Whether it’s because you’re nearing retirement age or because you’re aiming to pursue other career aspirations, here are a few key marketing moves to maximize the value of your practice and sell at a premium.
Before You Sell
Before you sell, or even before you draw up a marketing strategy, it’s important to meet with legal advisors and financial planners to chart out your ideal exit.
These advisors will help you understand your current revenue sources, outstanding debts, and liabilities — as well as determine the most favorable deal structure for your goals. Many of the practices we work with begin planning their exit strategy at least three years in advance.
In any case, any buyer of your practice will be looking for reliable performance and scalability. To put it another way, buyers don’t want a vintage wine; they want a vineyard that’s actively producing. One of the biggest concerns for any buyer is that your patients will leave with you. For this reason, practices that are overly dependent on a single provider are often seen as risks, even if you feel busy and thriving in the work you do each day.
To change this perception—and book more appointments in the meantime—marketing efforts should focus on widening the practice’s reach. These are the strategies we most commonly use in our playbook for a medical practice exit plan.
1. Amplify Positive Brand Awareness
When buyers are shopping for a medical practice, they care about reputation. Building brand awareness is a cornerstone of any business exit strategy, especially in healthcare.
This may seem counterintuitive if most of your current patient roster has come through word-of-mouth referrals. While having patients who value you, the provider, creates a great work environment, it’s also a risk in the eyes of potential buyers. It’s important to demonstrate that patients care about the practice, not just the provider.
Now is the time to maximize Google reviews, launch social media brand awareness campaigns, and take an active role in community sponsorships. If you have any negative reviews, it’s important to respond to them professionally, even if the original comments are a year or two old.
We’ve helped medical practices install and leverage healthcare reputation management platforms for automated review generation, and many of these patient testimonials have also translated to social content on Facebook and Instagram. If your practice has a presence at a charity event or fundraiser, an active social media presence allows for sharing and cross-promotion to new audiences.
Facebook is still the most-used social media platform in America, and demonstrating an engaged following for your practice can potentially raise your valuation in an exit.
2. Streamline the Patient Experience
If you haven’t done so already, now is the time to automate patient communication and appointment reminders. Missed patient appointments cost American healthcare practices billions of dollars each year, but a few key investments can drastically reduce your no-show rate.
Automating reminder texts and emails with personalized communication helps to keep your patient’s appointment at the top of their mind and expedite rescheduling if needed. Most electronic health record (EHR) systems have built-in reminder systems to send HIPAA-compliant text messages, or they can easily integrate with third-party systems that offer more customizations.
Make sure your reminder message gives clear instructions for what the patient needs to do to reschedule and is sent at an intuitively helpful time. For example, if a patient receives a reminder on Monday afternoon around lunch time, they may immediately call the office to make any changes. If that same reminder arrives on a Sunday morning when the office is closed, the patient is more likely to forget to call back.
Keeping appointment waitlists and offering online appointment request forms are other ways that your practice may streamline the patient experience. Strong patient retention and a full booking calendar are certainly attractive features for any buyer.
3. Refresh Your Website
It may seem counterintuitive that a new website would be part of a medical practice exit strategy, but operational infrastructure is a huge consideration in determining a practice’s valuation. Too often, medical practices focus only on what’s in the physical walls of the building before planning an exit.
We work with many healthcare practices on frontend refreshes of their websites. This could include a user experience and interface (UX/UI) audit that leads to a modern, intuitive site navigation structure and updated imagery. Adding new contact forms or calls to action can also increase conversion rates on your website, leading to new appointments.
Your online presence is your digital front door. Most prospective patients will prefer to explore your service offerings on their own rather than call with questions. For this reason, it’s important to highlight any specialized equipment you have or procedures you offer. Include FAQs and patient resources to make scheduling a visit as easy as possible.
This is also a good time to make sure all of your web pages are tagged correctly for analytics tracking and optimized for local searches (e.g. “optometrist near me in Knoxville, TN). Demonstrating new patient visits from organic web traffic is golden in negotiating the sale of a practice.
4. Target Ads to High-Value Patients
It’s no secret that a balanced payor mix makes your practice more attractive to buyers. If too many patients are on Medicare or low-value commercial insurance, it lowers your valuation.
To address this, use targeted digital marketing to attract private-pay patients for elective surgery or ancillary cosmetic procedures. If your practice offers it, counseling or specialized testing are other ideal service lines for a pay-per-click ads campaign.
Targeted advertising on Google, Microsoft, and Meta has many rules and regulations when it comes to marketing healthcare services, so it’s important to consult an experienced ad agency to make sure your creative assets and ad copy aren’t flagged for violations. Baker Marketing helps healthcare providers optimize advertising campaigns for a maximum return on investment while staying compliant with the platform’s policies.
5. Survey Your Patients
This advice may be the trickiest on the list due to HIPAA regulations that limit how you can collect feedback from patients. But, when done correctly, having a trackable data library of patient experiences in your practice allows you to improve the quality of care and quantitatively demonstrate patient satisfaction, especially in benchmarking to other healthcare providers.
It’s important to ask questions about the practice’s communication methods, the overall appointment booking experience, and satisfaction with the care provided. Survey responses can help you make immediate adjustments and resolve any issues before patients turn to leaving negative online reviews or seeking other providers.
As an added benefit to your medical practice exit plan, you’ll be able to show a potential buyer that patient satisfaction is not tied solely to a single provider but rather stems from a loyalty to the practice as a whole.
Prepare for Selling Your Practice with Baker Marketing
If you’re thinking about an exit from your healthcare practice in the next two to five years, now is the time to consider what marketing strategies will best position you for the sale. We work closely with single-physician practices and regional surgical groups, and we’ve successfully helped practices transition through ownership changes and private-equity sales.
Get in touch today for a quick, no-obligation call with one of our strategic marketing advisors.
Baker Marketing Laboratory supports healthcare businesses in East Tennessee and across the U.S. with a combination of inbound digital marketing and powerful messaging strategies. Whether you’re a solo practice or you represent a group of physicians, we can help you build a marketing campaign that resonates with your ideal patient base. Get in touch for a free marketing review.