Buying a Practice

Buying a Surveying Practice
I have shared with you many tips and experiences on how to grow your surveying practice but possibly the smartest thing you could do to accelerate the growth of your business is to consider buying somebody else’s practice on a variable basis. Using the techniques, systems and ideas that I have mentioned in earlier articles to increase the effectiveness of your surveying practice you could easily enhance the profit by 15 to 20 percent and pay for the purchased practice with that enhanced profit. The rest is gravy.

If you have a fully utilized practice but are entrepreneurially minded, like me, you could buy a second surveying practice on a no money down, deferred payment basis, bring in staff to run it on salary or a percentage and still make money by keeping the lion’s share of the profits.

It doesn’t matter what you pay for the practice; it matters more how you pay for it. If a practice is billing $500,000 a year, you can pay two or three time its marketable worth if the duration of the payment is long enough. In other words, if you acquire $500,000 work of under-deployed billing and the going market price is one half times annual billings, you could offer two or three times that amount as long as you negotiate a sufficiently long payment period.