When a clinic changes hands — a full sale, a partner buy-in, or a DSO acquisition — the offer almost always starts the same way: a multiple of EBITDA. Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization. It's the number that gets quoted in the first conversation and the number everyone anchors to.
But the multiple is the easy part. What determines whether an offer holds — or quietly gets revised down after diligence — is what's sitting underneath that number. Buyers don't just accept your EBITDA. They rebuild it, line by line, and stress-test every assumption behind it.
Here's what they're actually reading.
Revenue quality, not just revenue volume
A buyer wants to know how durable your earnings are. Recurring, predictable revenue is worth more than lumpy, one-off production. So they look at where your revenue comes from, how much of it depends on a single high-producing associate, and how much of it leaks out before it reaches the bottom line. A clinic producing strong top-line numbers that hemorrhages margin on the way down is a less attractive asset than one producing less but keeping more.
The cost of your third-party dependencies
Every recurring fee you pay to an outside provider is a line a buyer will scrutinize — because it's a permanent drag on margin that transfers with the practice. Payment plan financing fees are a common one and an easy one to miss. If a meaningful share of your treatment revenue is being routed to a third-party financing company on every plan, that's not a shared margin — it comes straight off EBITDA. A buyer sees it immediately, and they price it in.
Labour efficiency
Diligence looks hard at staffing cost relative to production. Front-desk hours spent on administration — building payment plans in spreadsheets, re-keying cards at the POS, chasing missed payments — are hours not spent booking recalls or supporting patients. That inefficiency shows up as higher staffing cost against your revenue, and it depresses the very number your sale price is built on.
Risk that warrants a discount
Buyers apply discounts for risk they'd be inheriting. Compliance exposure is a big one. If patient card details are living in spreadsheets, PMS free-text notes, or being manually re-entered, that's a liability a sophisticated buyer will flag — and either price down or ask you to remediate before closing.
The point most owners miss
None of these are growth levers. You don't need a single new patient to move them. The revenue lost to financing fees, the hours lost to manual admin, the risk sitting in your workflow — it's already in your practice, right now, suppressing your EBITDA every month.
And because your sale price is a multiple of that number, every dollar you move back into it at exit is multiplied. Recovering margin that already exists in your operations is one of the few valuation levers entirely within your control.
That's the column Credi8 is built to move things out of. By keeping 100% of treatment revenue in the clinic, automating the admin that eats staff hours, and tokenizing card data so raw card numbers are never stored, it takes cost and risk that were dragging on EBITDA and puts them back where they belong — on the asset side of the ledger.
If you've never seen what your current payment plan approach is doing to your practice value, that's exactly the number we'll show you.
This article is general information for Canadian dental clinics and is not financial, legal, tax, or valuation advice. Figures are illustrative. Speak to a qualified advisor about your specific situation.