What Doctors Don't Know Is Costing Them Millions: The Sell-Side Truth About Practice Valuation | Ep. 163 | Ben Ellis

Most dental practice owners only sell once. That's exactly why they lose.

The information gap between a prepared buyer and an unprepared seller is where practice value disappears — and it's a gap most brokers have zero incentive to close.

Ben Ellis is a former investment banker, M&A executive, and founder of Ellis & Associates, a sell-side advisory firm focused on helping dental practice owners get deals they actually deserve. With a career spanning capital raising, corporate acquisitions inside large PE-backed dental platforms, and investment banking at major institutions, Ben now sits exclusively on the doctor's side of the table — and he has seen every angle of how these deals go wrong.

They discuss:

- How a group of 70 doctors sold for $50 million when the buyer would have paid $100 million — and what those doctors never knew about their own valuation

- The four things most practice owners never do before going to market: proper profit calculation, buyer underwriting knowledge, competitive process, and non-headline term negotiation

- How adding a single full arch case per week translates to a 30-40% increase in practice sale value through EBITDA multiples

- Why the support structure around a selling doctor matters as much as the deal terms — and what straight, honest counsel actually looks like in an M&A process

- The "control freak" operator pattern: how owners unknowingly shut down their teams' feedback loops and what that costs them at the table

- Why secrecy is almost always necessary in a sale process and how to navigate it without destroying team trust

- The desire and execution equation: why there's no magic formula for building practice value, just want and work

- Why Ben left two decades of corporate finance to go independent — and what he'd tell anyone sitting on the fence about doing the same