The Four Most Important Questions to Ask Right Now About Retirement

Dear Practice Owner,

I've had a lot of conversations with practice owners in the past 38 years that I've been consulting, and while their most immediate problems are very often tied to staff and patients; underlying those problems is the more disturbing concern that their practice is not going to be able to generate enough income for them to retire as they'd hoped.

The four most common strategies that practice owners have for retirement are:

1) And this is the best one. Make enough money every year to fund your retirement and then sell your practice and retire in style.

2) Make as much as you can every year. Sometimes you're able to hit your retirement funding goal and sometimes you fall short, and then sell your practice and hope that the profits from the sale make up for the short-falls along the way. Most practice owners are in this boat.

3) Put off thinking about it and hope that things turn around somehow at some point and they can start funding. This one's more common than you might think.

4) And some practice owners never really make enough to fund their retirement and hope to sell their practice some day at a profit large enough to fund their entire retirement and that everything will be OK. Of the four, this is by far the least practical approach.

The choice is yours.

In planning for your retirement, there are four basic questions you need to ask yourself:

1) How much does your practice need to collect each year and for how many years, so that you can retire in the manner that you hope to?

2) How do you most effectively grow your practice to the point that you're consistently hitting your financial goals each year along the way and it's not hit or miss?

3) How much will you need to realize from the sale of your practice?

4) How do you build the value of your practice to the point that you get the price that you want for it?

Your financial planner or CPA can and should tell you how much you need to make in order to properly fund your retirement, and the tax implications surrounding the sale of your practice. But your financial planner or your CPA can't tell you what to do in order to build your practice so that you can hit these numbers. That's not what they do.

When it comes to having enough money to properly fund your retirement, there's a lot that you can be doing right now to enable yourself to reach your retirement goals. If you're not consistently hitting your retirement goals, we can help you spot the reasons behind this and help you develop and implement strategies that will get your practice to the point that it's producing and collecting the level of income that you need.

For more specific answers to these questions, fill out our Practice Management Analysis. It's a free, online service that you can fill out at your convenience. It takes about 20 minutes.

Go to exectechweb.com/pma, fill it out, and one of our consultants will get back to you to schedule a time to review it with you and make recommendations. There's no charge for this service. It's a free service that we offer to healthcare professionals and it has helped hundreds of practice owners get a better handle on their practice.

Take our Practice Management Analysis and see what you find out!

Yours in success,

Mike Graves

Senior Consultant

ExecTech

(800) 340-6737 ext. 2