20/20 Money Episode # 82 – Navigating a Private Equity Practice Exit: A Conversation with Jason Preator

Hello, and welcome to this episode of 20/20 Money! My guest on today’s show is Jason Preator. Jason is one of the leading resources and advisors in the optometric space when it comes to helping optometry practice owners sell their practice to a private equity firm. Today’s conversation was so good and long that I actually made the decision to break it up into a two-part episode. In today’s episode, we talk about the duration of the process of selling, making sure you understand your why around selling your practice, two big factors that influence your valuation, why it’s important to understand first market mover advantage, when there’s an ideal time to break the news to your team and why you should have a conversation with your associate in the beginning, and we wrap up this part of the convo by discussing where are we at in the PE cycle.

I also wanted to let you know that we actually recorded this episode earlier in spring, long before the COVID-19 disruption turned everyone’s lives on a dime. I held the release of the show because I wanted to make sure that the content that we were putting out was timely and relevant. Now that practices are starting to open up, I reached out to Jason to see if he had any additional thoughts on how transactions are being affect post-COVID closures, and here was his response in an email: the market continues to change and evolve with the passage of time.  The activity has definitely picked up with the buyers as states remove the stay at home orders and practices begin to re-open with many fully re-opened.  The buyers are optimistic but cautious as they want to ensure that the demand is returning, which all indicators from the buyers and our clients is that the demand, capture rate, and other KPIs are strong.

As a reminder, you can get all the information discussed in today’s conversation by visiting our website at integratedpwm.com and clicking on the Learning Center. While there, you can also set up a 20-30min Discovery conversation to learn a little bit more about what it means to work with our firm or check out any number of additional free resources like our eBooks and on-demand webinars.

And with that introduction, I hope you enjoy my conversation with Jason Preator.