When is the right time to sell your practice?

Most owners ask this question about the market. The more useful version is about your own practice, because that is the part you control and it moves the number more.

There are three clocks running, and only one of them is external.

The short answer

Sell when the practice is finished being improved, not when you are finished being interested. Those two moments are rarely the same, and the gap between them is where most value is lost.

Concretely, that means: after the preparation work is done, and on the far side of a size threshold if you are anywhere near one.

The threshold effect, which almost nobody accounts for

Multiples do not rise smoothly with size. They step. And the steps are large enough that being just under one is expensive.

Take a group with associates approaching the $400,000 line:

Earnings grew 10.5%. Value grew 37% — an extra $294,000 for $40,000 of additional earnings. The step happens because the buyer pool changes: above roughly $400,000 you are no longer selling only to individual clinicians with SBA loans.

It happens again higher up. Crossing $1,000,000 of SDE moves the same practice from 2.6× to 2.9× — worth about $575,000 on a 10.5% earnings increase.

If you are within striking distance of a threshold, the year spent crossing it is usually the highest-paid year of the whole exercise. The bands are published in what multiple do therapy practices sell for, so you can see which line you are near.

The preparation clock

This one cannot be compressed, which is why it decides the timing.

The work that raises your price — clinician agreements signed, payer contracts moved to the group, books cleaned, a clinical director who is not you — takes twelve to twenty-four months and has to be already true on the day a buyer looks. A buyer prices what they can verify, not what you intend.

So the honest sequence is: decide, prepare for a year or two, then go to market. An owner who decides and lists in the same quarter is selling the practice as it happens to be, which is almost always the cheaper version of it. How to increase the value of your practice sets out the order that work goes in.

The signals that you are actually ready

Not feelings. Conditions.

The practice runs without you for a fortnight. Not theoretically — it has actually happened, recently, and nothing broke.

Your last three years of financials reconcile to your tax returns, and you can explain every add-back with a document rather than a memory.

Someone else signs off on clinical decisions. If that is still you, you are selling a job.

You know your number and it makes the next two years worth it. Run the calculator before you decide anything, not after — the answer sometimes ends the conversation, and it is much cheaper to end it early.

The worst time to sell, and it is not a market condition

When something has forced you to.

Burnout, illness, a partner dispute, a lease you suddenly cannot carry, a co-owner who wants out. These produce the same pattern: a compressed timeline, no preparation, one buyer, and a seller whose alternative to accepting is worse than the offer. Buyers can see all of it, and diligence is designed to surface exactly this kind of pressure.

The defence is unglamorous. Do the preparation work while you are not selling, so that if the decision is ever made for you, the practice is already in a condition to be sold well. That work also makes the practice better to own, which is the argument for doing it regardless — the same point the value-building guide ends on.

What you cannot time

Buyer appetite, credit conditions and how many similar practices happen to be for sale in your region the quarter you go to market. These are real and they move prices, and nobody — including anyone who tells you otherwise — can reliably predict them eighteen months out.

Which is an argument for controlling what you can. A practice with a clinical director, group-held contracts and clean books is worth more in a weak market than an owner-dependent one is in a strong market. Structure beats timing, and structure is the part with your name on it.

A rough sequence

More than two years out. Do the structural work without any intention of selling. Everything on that list improves the practice you still own.

Eighteen months out. Check where you sit against the nearest size threshold. If you are close, that is the year to grow deliberately.

Twelve months out. Financials normalised, diligence material assembled before anyone requests it, your own clinical hours coming down.

Six months out. Advisers engaged. Decide whether you are running the process yourself — the trade-offs are in how to sell a group therapy practice.

Then go. And expect the process itself to take most of a year on top.

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Nothing here is legal, tax or accounting advice, and none of it is a prediction about market conditions.

The valuation calculator shows where you sit today, including which size band you are in and how close you are to the next one. Free, about four minutes, no account.