The Ortho Money Show
Money, business, and life strategies for orthopedic surgeons who want to build wealth beyond the operating room
Ep #129: Your Practice Is Your Biggest Bet. Are You Treating It Like One?
If your financial advisor put 46% of your portfolio into a single stock with no liquidity, no hedging, and no diversification, you'd fire them. That's roughly where most practice-owning surgeons already sit, just with the practice instead of a stock, and almost nobody frames it that way.
In this episode, Jared breaks down why "my practice is my retirement plan" is one of the more dangerous sentences in surgeon finance: a retirement plan compounds, diversifies, and protects against risk, and a practice does none of those things on its own. He walks through three ways to reduce that concentration without selling tomorrow: diversifying revenue within the practice so it doesn't depend entirely on you, documenting personal goodwill years before any sale (the difference between ordinary income and capital gains treatment on a $4M sale is $678,000), and building a transition timeline even if you have no plans to leave.
He also gets into private equity as one legitimate de-risking option among several, and the four things a polished PE pitch deck tends to leave off the slides: rollover equity terms, compensation adjustments, EBITDA normalization, and the hold-period reality.
Ep #125: Life Beyond the OR - What the Best Practice Transitions Have in Common
The happiest surgeons two years after a practice transition aren't the ones who got the highest multiple, and they aren't the ones who negotiated the most aggressive earn-out. They're the ones who knew what they were transitioning to.
In this episode, Jared walks through the question that almost never shows up in transition planning: who are you when you're not a surgeon? He lays out what happens when that question goes unanswered, using a scenario where a surgeon nets $2.9 million from a practice sale, has no next-chapter plan, and watches the balance fall to $1.7 million within three years through a series of individually reasonable, collectively costly decisions. Then he runs the same $2.9 million exit with a plan in place: a structured budget, a waiting period on large purchases, and identity work done before the sale closed. Same starting number, $1.5 million apart three years later.
Jared closes with the three elements that make the difference: identity work, purpose architecture, and financial guardrails, and why they matter as much at a $2 million exit as a $10 million one.