A few minutes of read-only financials and a short questionnaire surfaces what a buyer would discount your practice for — whether the numbers still hold once a market associate-dentist comp replaces your chair time, how concentrated you are in one PPO plan, and the deferred operatory and CBCT spend they'll subtract. Preview is free.
Enter two numbers for an instant Dental Practices ballpark. No signup — the real number comes from your books.
We answer each one from your books first — so you fix the story before a diligence team writes the number.
If you personally produce most of the dentistry, a buyer isn't acquiring a business — they're acquiring your hands. They normalize a market associate-dentist compensation to replace your chair time, which deflates the EBITDA they'll actually pay on, and they price the risk that patients followed the departing owner. An owner doing 90%+ of production typically takes a 10–20% haircut versus an associate-leveraged practice.
Dental buyers underwrite the payor mix line by line. If a single PPO network — or a heavy Medicaid book — carries an outsized share of your collections, a buyer prices the risk that one fee-schedule cut or a network change resets your margin overnight, and that the relationship isn't theirs to control. Single-payor concentration is underwritten the way a buyer would underwrite a customer-concentration risk anywhere else.
Hygiene recall is the closest thing a practice has to recurring revenue — a standing active-patient base that returns on a schedule. If the active-patient count is shrinking, recall isn't systematized, or new-patient flow rides on the owner's personal reputation, a buyer treats the top line as harder to repeat and prices it below a practice with a deep, front-office-run recall engine.
A financial buyer marks maintenance capex up to the replacement level and assumes a refresh of aging operatories, chairs, and digital imaging — CBCT, intraoral scanners, CAD/CAM — within a year or two. Without a documented equipment age and replacement schedule, they assume the worst and subtract it from the cash flow they're buying.
Each lever is sized for a typical $1.2m–$1.6m-collections general practice, ~15–20% owner-normalized ebitda — about $250K EBITDA. Same number whether we frame it as “what a buyer discounts” or “what you keep by fixing it.”
Turning a loose recall list into a measured, front-office-run system — tracked reactivation, pre-booked recall visits, and a membership plan for your uninsured patients — builds the durable, repeat-visit base buyers credit as recurring. It is the highest-leverage revenue play in a practice that has no formal contracts.
adds about 0.3–0.5× to your multiple · usually takes 12–18 months
Recruiting and ramping associate dentists so you are not the only producer is what crosses a practice from 'buying the owner's hands' to 'buying a business.' Associate-driven production is the single biggest lever on the multiple — it moves a practice off Main-Street SDE pricing and toward DSO-platform normalized-EBITDA territory.
adds about 0.5–0.9× to your multiple · usually takes 18–36 months
Shifting the mix toward fee-for-service and your better-paying PPO plans, dropping or renegotiating the worst fee schedules, and getting accrual-grade books with a documented add-back trail protects the price. Every buyer's team runs a quality-of-earnings pass, and a clean payor and add-back story is what prevents a mid-diligence re-trade.
adds about 0.2–0.4× to your multiple · usually takes 6–12 months
Typical impact ranges blended from lower-middle-market transaction data, sub-$50M M&A databases, and observed consolidator pricing in the $300K–$3M EBITDA band. Directional, not a guarantee — your memo computes your actual numbers from your books.
The metrics buyers grade dental practices on. The diagnostic fills the “your business” column from your actual QuickBooks data.
| Metric | Dental Practices benchmark | Your business | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recurring / contracted revenue | ~30% of revenue | Your data | Higher is better — the top multiple lever |
| Gross margin | ~82% | Your data | Pricing and job-costing discipline |
| EBITDA margin | ~18% | Your data | What flows to the bottom line |
| Healthy customer-concentration ceiling | top customer under 25% | Your data | Above it, buyers price the risk |
| Typical industry growth | ~4% / yr | Your data | Beating it can add to your multiple |
| Typical sale multiple | 5.0–9.0× EBITDA | Your data | Where the bidding starts; the levers above move you up |
Benchmarks are blended industry composites, service businesses $1M–$10M revenue, 2026-Q1 — directional, not a precise bar. Your memo measures you against your own books. Connect QuickBooks to fill in your numbers →
The diagnostic arrives as formats you can actually use, plus a private, scoped link to share a curated package with a specific buyer — you decide, card by card, what they see.
A branded slide deck, ready to present — for the buyer meeting, the lender, or the board.
A written diagnostic that holds up with buyers, yours to edit — plain-English summary, how we rebuilt your real earnings, every add-back listed.
Live formulas, not a dead printout — the path from raw profit to your real number, plus the cash-tied-up scenarios a buyer can stress-test.
Dental is one of the most actively consolidated healthcare niches in the country. Dental service organizations (DSOs) and dental partnership organizations — many private-equity-backed — acquire practices as add-ons and pay normalized-EBITDA multiples that step up with scale; a selling dentist often rolls a slice of the deal into the platform's equity and stays on clinically for a few years. Individual dentists, usually SBA-financed, buy solo and small group practices at collections- or SDE-based prices. Each underwrites your practice differently — the memo maps which type would actually look at a practice your size and how each tends to structure the deal.
Read-only, through Intuit. We never write to your books. About 5 minutes.
Just what the books can’t show — agreements, key accounts, who runs the crews.
Buyer-readiness score, normalized EBITDA, value range and top flags — instantly.
The full engine, all three deliverables, the dashboard and the buyer deal room.
Start with the free preview. Pay once — $499 — only when you want the full memo. No subscription, no per-seat pricing.
Most Dental Practices businesses in the $1M–$10M revenue range trade at roughly 5.0× to 9.0× normalized EBITDA, with a typical deal near 6.5×. Smaller, owner-dependent shops sit at the low end; larger, manager-run businesses with recurring revenue reach the top. Your actual number depends on your books — that's what the diagnostic computes, blending recent lower-middle-market closings, main-street marketplace sales, and academic M&A survey data.
It depends on size and who the buyer is. A solo owner-operator practice sold to an individual dentist is priced on a percentage of annual collections (roughly 60–80%) or on SDE, because the buyer replaces the seller clinically. A larger, associate-leveraged practice that a DSO would acquire is priced on normalized EBITDA — and the single most important step is replacing the owner-dentist's clinical production with a market associate-dentist compensation before computing it. Un-normalized EBITDA badly overstates the multiple, which is why a raw 'EBITDA multiple' for dental looks nonsensical. Every figure traces back to your books, never a revenue rule-of-thumb.
Because the two numbers sit on different EBITDA. A DSO quotes a multiple on normalized EBITDA — your earnings after a market associate-dentist comp is subtracted for the work you personally do. Your reported EBITDA, before that adjustment, is much smaller (your clinical pay is buried in it), so the same dollar value looks like a huge multiple on the small number and a sane one on the normalized number. The multiple also steps up with size: sub-$1M normalized EBITDA practices trade lower than $1M+ platform candidates.
Associate-driven production so the practice survives your stepping back, a deep and systematized hygiene-recall base, a favorable fee-for-service / low-PPO payor mix, clean accrual books, and modern digital equipment with no deferred-capex overhang. The diagnostic scores where you sit on each and shows what moving up would be worth.
Sixty seconds. Four numbers. No signup, no email. Just a real answer.