Kyle Francis on Building a Transition Team Early

Most practice owners don’t think about assembling a transition team until they’re already holding an offer. PTS Founder and President Kyle Francis has spent two decades on both sides of dental M&A, and his advice on this point is consistent: by the time an offer is on the table, it’s already too late to build the team that should have been shaping your decisions for the past year or two.

Why “Early” Means Before You’re Ready to Sell

The instinct for most owners is to treat a transition team as something you hire once you’ve decided to sell. Francis’s view runs the other direction — the team should be in place well before that decision is final, because the choices that determine your outcome (how the practice is structured, how clean your financials are, what your lease looks like, how dependent the practice is on you personally) all need lead time to fix. Waiting until you’re in active negotiations means you’re managing those issues under deal pressure instead of on your own timeline.

Who Actually Belongs on the Team

A full transition team is smaller than most owners expect, but each seat does distinct work that the others can’t cover:

• A transaction-focused CPA. Not your everyday tax preparer — someone who understands how EBITDA normalization, addbacks, and entity structure affect what a buyer will actually offer, and who can get your financials into a state that survives diligence without last-minute scrambling.
• A healthcare transaction attorney. Practice sale agreements, non-competes, employment terms, and (increasingly) state corporate-practice-of-dentistry rules require someone who works in this specific area regularly, not general business counsel.
• A wealth or financial advisor. Especially relevant when a deal includes rollover equity or an earnout — someone who can model what the proceeds actually mean for your retirement and tax picture before you sign, not after.
• An M&A advisor or broker. Someone who runs a structured, competitive process rather than negotiating a single unsolicited offer in isolation — which is consistently where the largest gaps in final outcome show up.

The Cost of Assembling It Late

When these advisors are brought in only after an offer arrives, they’re reacting to a deal someone else designed instead of helping shape one. Financials that needed six months of cleanup get diligenced as-is. Lease terms that could have been renegotiated a year earlier become a liability discovered mid-process. And owners frequently end up accepting the first structure presented simply because there wasn’t time — or a team in place — to compare it against anything else.

Starting the Process on Your Terms

The owners who get the best outcomes, in Francis’s experience, aren’t necessarily the ones with the biggest practices — they’re the ones who treated the 12 to 24 months before a transition as preparation time rather than downtime. That window is when a transition team earns its value: cleaning up the story your financials tell, addressing owner-dependence, and making sure that whenever the right offer does show up, you’re evaluating it from a position of readiness rather than reacting to it cold.

If you’re starting to think about a transition — even years out — that’s exactly the conversation our team at PTS is built to have early.