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 #123: Practice Valuation 101: What Buyers See That You Don’t
Two numbers, same practice, same year: $4.4 million and $5.5 million. The difference comes down to one concept most surgeons never encounter until an LOI is already on the table: normalized EBITDA.
In this episode, Jared walks through what normalized EBITDA actually is and why a buyer's number is almost always higher than the one on your tax return. He breaks down the five adjustments that create the gap: owner compensation above market, family employment at above-market pay, personal expenses running through the business, one-time non-recurring costs, and lease terms on owner-held real estate. On a practice reporting $1.1 million in net income, those five adjustments can add over $1.1 million to the valuation.