A practice owner told us about a colleague’s sale recently. The colleague listed with a traditional broker. Over six months, the broker produced exactly one offer.
The deal didn’t close. There was no second offer behind it, so there was no deal to fall back on. The listing went quiet, then stale, then forgotten. The owner is still running the practice, a year older, no closer to an exit.
Nobody did anything wrong, exactly. The broker probably worked hard. They likely talked to dozens of people to produce that single offer. And that is precisely the problem, because one offer is not a sale process. It is a coin flip. Industry-wide, only 20 to 30 percent of businesses that go to market ever sell, and that number is not a talent problem. It is arithmetic.
The funnel math nobody shows you
Here is the arithmetic, from the inside.
Most buyers who inquire about a practice are not real buyers. Some are competitors fishing. Some are curious. Some are real but wrong: wrong size, wrong specialty, wrong financing. In our experience, it takes roughly 50 buyer conversations to produce one genuine offer.
So work backwards. A properly run sale should end with three to ten offers on the table, and even then a couple of those will turn out not to be real once you test them. Screening those out is part of the job. To get there, you need somewhere between 150 and 300 buyers entering the process. That is what we run on a typical engagement: 150 to 300 buyer conversations, each one tracked, each one moved through the same steps.
Now look at what a solo broker working an inbox can actually sustain: maybe 15 to 20 live conversations, across their entire book of listings, not per deal. Divide 15 conversations by the 50 it takes to produce one real offer and the six-months-one-offer story stops being bad luck. It is the expected output of the process. You tell me how a person with an inbox gets multiple offers on one practice within weeks. They can’t. The math does not allow it.
The practice was never the problem. The pipeline was.
The first ten minutes decide most of it
Volume is only half of it. The other half is speed, and this is where we are frankly obsessive.
Buyer interest behaves like any inbound lead: it decays in minutes. One widely cited study of over 100,000 sales calls found that the odds of qualifying a lead drop by a factor of four when the first response slips from just five minutes to ten. Every hour after that is worse. A buyer who inquires about a practice is comparing it against every other deal in front of them that week, and the first process to engage them usually keeps them.
So we engineered buyer-finding the way a serious company engineers a sales process. When a buyer inquires about one of our listings, from any marketplace or channel, the inquiry routes into the deal’s pipeline the moment it arrives. The NDA goes out electronically. The moment it is signed, the full information memorandum is in their hands and their questions are being answered. From first touch to NDA to reading the SIM to getting answers, the clock runs in minutes, not hours. Not days. Minutes.
A traditional process does the same journey over two to three weeks, if the buyer is still paying attention by then. Most are not.
What a launch actually looks like
Before launch. There is no weeks-long document chase to get started. Most of what we need, we collect in one friendly phone conversation the same day we begin working together. We walk the seller through exactly what buyers will ask, and most of it gets answered right there, verbally, in a few minutes. From there, our team builds the package with help from Ava, our internal AI. Once we have the information in hand, the full valuation and listing can be built within 24 hours. The market standard for that same work is two to four weeks. Ava works internally only. Nothing a seller tells us touches anything public until the anonymized profile is approved, which is how confidentiality holds from day one. We build the valuation model ourselves from the actual financials, so the price is one we can defend in diligence, not a number picked to win the listing. The profile and the full memorandum are finished before anything goes live.
Launch. The listing goes out across the major marketplaces and, in parallel, into our own network of more than 8,000 healthcare-specific buyers built across 134+ transactions and more than $1 billion in closed deal value. These are buyers whose criteria we already know. A pediatrics practice does not get blasted to everyone; it goes to the buyers who buy pediatrics practices in that region.
The funnel runs. Every buyer enters a timed multi-touch sequence, so no inquiry ever dies from silence on our end. Information is released in stages: blind profile, then NDA, then the full memorandum, then a call. Confidentiality holds, and buyers prove they are serious at each step. This is how 150 to 300 conversations stay manageable, and it is how the fake offers get exposed early, before they can waste a seller’s time or blow up a process at day 60.
Offers. Because buyers enter in volume during the first days instead of trickling in over months, offers arrive together, and offers arriving together is where the seller’s leverage comes from. On a recent engagement we had four offers at full asking price within two weeks of launch. Our record is a signed letter of intent 24 hours after launch, above every other offer on the table. One client, facing a lowball from a hospital system, ultimately sold through our process for 7.8 times what the hospital had offered. None of that happens with one offer. All of it becomes possible when buyers know they are not the only ones at the table.
Diligence is where we refuse to walk away
Getting offers is not the finish line. More deals die in diligence than anywhere else, and this is the stage where a lot of brokers effectively disappear: they found the buyer, they earned the introduction, good luck.
We do the opposite. Once an offer is accepted, our brokers take over the deal personally and give it the white-glove treatment through to close. Managing the diligence checklist, keeping both sides on the clock, defending the price when a buyer probes for a mid-diligence discount. Deals do not usually die from one big problem. They die from three unanswered weeks. Knowing which issue is a real threat and which is a buyer testing the seller’s nerve comes from having been at this table 134+ times, and it is the part of this business no software will ever do.
That is the honest division of labor. The machinery gets 150 to 300 buyers into the funnel fast and moves them without dropping any. The humans price the practice, read the buyers, pick the offer, and carry the deal across the line.
The honest number
We close 70 to 80 percent of the engagements we take on, against an industry norm of 20 to 30 percent. Our clients say we are better at this more bluntly than we do.
But the other 20 to 30 percent is worth being honest about. When one of our engagements does not close, the reason is almost never a shortage of offers. The funnel produces them. Most of the time, the deal that doesn’t close is a business that was not truly ready to be sold, or a price expectation no market would meet. Part of our job is saying that to an owner early, instead of collecting a fee to list a practice that will not move.
One more truth from inside the process: the offer a seller accepts is rarely the first one that shows up. It is usually the second or third, chosen from a full table. A process that produces one offer gives you one chance. A process that produces three to ten lets you pick.
If you are thinking about selling
If you are a medical practice owner starting to think about an exit, the question to ask any broker is not “what is my practice worth.” It is “how many buyers will actually enter my process, and how fast do you engage them.” If the answer is a listing site and an inbox, you already know how the story ends.
Start with our free guide, How to Sell Your Medical Practice. And for what buyers are actually paying right now, read what your practice is actually worth.
When you want to talk about your specific situation, reach us directly.
Pedro Rojas | Platano Advisors
Sell-side M&A for healthcare founders. 134+ closed transactions, $1B+ in deal value, 8,000+ healthcare-specific buyers.
📧 pedro@platanoadvisors.com · 📞 786-882-1095
