Dr. Allen Nazeri explains why dental practices ignore intellectual property assets like websites, social media followings, and operation handbooks during valuations. Documenting workflows by department reveals bottlenecks and redundancies that lower value. These hidden assets can significantly raise what a practice is worth.
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Hi guys, this is Dr. Alan. Welcome to my channel here. Today I'd like to discuss with you about intellectual property or known as IP assets in your practice. And this is an area where most accountants, CPAs or brokers, if you are appraising your practice, miss out because it's never classified on the balance sheets. Yet the IP assets is an important aspect of any healthcare practice and that needs to be classified so we can actually increase the valuation of your business. Now, in my recent book, Value Engineering 10x Strategies to 10x the value of your clinic and dominate the market, I have dedicated a section called Documented and protected where I actually talk about.
The various.
Assets that are classified as ip that is important to be recognized on a balance sheet, but it's not just about improving the valuation of a business. When you have good set of documentations of systems and processes in your practice, what happens is that as the manager, as the owner of the practice, you're able to identify the bottlenecks and redundancies or repetitive work that is being duplicated in your practice. And usually those are the source of additional cost and overheads. And by identifying these, you can eliminate them and obviously reduce the your cost and increase your profit. So it has both a short term and a long term benefit to practice owners when you document everything very well. So what am I talking about, documentation? Well, for one thing, when we help clients, we help them figure out the workflows for every aspect of their business, whether it's marketing.
New patient acquisition, different departments. If it's a dentistry practice, it would be mostly, you know, dividing it up, let's say to general dentistry, oral surgery, endodontist, endodontic department, let's say oral surgery and so forth. And you basically map out the workflow that happens in every department. Now this is a huge task and it does require some time and someone committed to it. So my recommendation is if you have such departments in your practice, you have a multiple group dentist practice to actually ask the dentist in charge of that specialty to write all this out. It would also be very beneficial that you allocate some time to that workflow process. And then as an office, you can get together and kind of understand it, look through the areas of redundancies and repetitiveness and be able to find a way to make it more efficient. Now, once you have that, then you compile it into a formal document which is used as the operation or the workflow of your practice. Okay. And that becomes one of many IP assets in your practice. There are other things that are considered IP Assets which are hardly ever recognized on the balance sheet and there's a value assigned to them. And some of that could be your website.
Because both time and money has gone into it. Following the website has been established. That's important. Your social channel followers. You know, if a dental clinic has 400,000 followers versus one that has 500, definitely there is a different valuation matrix there.
Because again, both time and money has been spent in creating that, you know, captive audience.
Other IP assets and so forth could be your training.
Modules or your training programs that you may have for your staff. You may actually hire outsourced companies to come in and do some of these training. All of your documentation material, those are part of your IP assets. Your handbook of operation, your employee manuals, those are all part of your IP assets.
It could be that you have a certain know how in providing a certain level of service or certain level of marketing or a business management expertise that is considered IP asset. So it's important to recognize this. And this I hardly see being recognized in healthcare practices. Again, My name is Dr. Allen. Thank you for landing on my page. If I can be of an assistant, I'll be happy to help you. We run a healthcare consulting and advisory group. Most of our clients are dentists, but we do have some medical doctors as well, or clinic owners. And if you see value in this video, I appreciate it. If you can hit the like button and share it, thank you so much. Take care and we'll see you in the next session.
