Partnership
Private Equity firms partner with The Growth Cooperative for a variety of reasons. Our deep understanding of, and relationships in, the eye care market make it easy for us to rapidly identify practices for sale and educate owners to the unique private equity opportunity. We are platform builders and move into markets with the intent of creating market-leading, salable groups ($5 million or more in combined revenue) ready for purchase or partnership by our participating private equity firms.
Market Research and Marketing: We offer a sophisticated database of over 10,000 professional eye care practice owners that delineates who is “ready” for sale and who is on the bench. Sophisticated email, direct mail and phone-based techniques allow us to reach more of the right practices for our partners – and we do so with respect for the owners. We are not looking for opportunities to come to us. We manufacture opportunities with practice owners that otherwise have not thought to pursue a practice sale.
Educational Dinner Meetings: The Growth Cooperative conducts two to three dinner meetings each month in markets across the US. We take responsibility for the planning, attendance and 
conduct the presentation to educate the doctors in attendance on the value of working with specific PE firms. After the meeting, we build a platform of practices for the PE firm’s consideration and ultimately and offer.
Platform Development: Our partners share the demographics they seek in their prospective purchases: Practice size. Medical v. Optical. Number of ODs or locations. We use these guidelines to create a platform of practices and match the group to the PE firm that is the best fit.
Our practice platforms are individual practices coming together in a specific market to form a group of five (5) or more practices ready to sell within 90 days and having a demonstrated total revenue in excess of $5 million. We vet all practices to ensure they meet PE criteria. We collect necessary financials, provide practice sale estimates in accordance with purchaser guidelines and ensure the platform that gets presented is exactly to the specifications of our equity partners. Sure, our equity partners pay a little more for the platform sale, but the end of the acquisition process means a dominant market role and leadership for that firm.
Pre-Sale Implementation: We are all aware of the dreaded dip in productivity as soon as the sale is consummated. All energy and motivation is used during the sale process and then is unavailable for the hard work (implementation and integration with corporate) now that the sale is complete. We offer ‘pre-sale’ implementation programs that use the energy of the sales process (and the promise of a closed deal) to align the practice(s) with PE programs, policies, procedures, products and a variety of productivity elements that mean the difference between a good purchase and a great purchase.
Post Sale Implementation: After the sale is complete, the real work has begun in order to realize the return on the investment from the sale. Your operations team may be stretched to the limit, but we’ll step in and bridge that gap, bringing efficiencies to support your implementation team temporarily avoiding costly hires or less than stellar implementations .
The Growth Cooperative is now the leading provider of practice sale representation to private equity and a great way to supplement your sales and operational efforts.
Photo credits:
Top of the page: Photo by Andreas Klassen on Unsplash
Top side of the page: Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash
Middle side of the page: Photo by Tamarcus Brown on Unsplash
Lower side of the page: Photo by Kal Visuals on Unsplash