On Tuesday, Dave drew the line between add-backs that survive diligence and the ones that get laughed out. I want to look at where the defensible ones actually live, because in most practices they are hiding in plain sight, scattered through the overhead lines of your P&L.
The usual suspects
Walk through almost any owner-operated practice’s books and the same items appear. The auto lease. The continuing-education trip that was also the family vacation. Meals that were part practice, part personal. The phone plan that covers the whole household. A subscription or two nobody remembers signing up for. None of this is scandalous. It is the normal texture of an owner-operated business, and buyers see it in nearly every deal they look at.
Family on payroll
The biggest one deserves its own paragraph. Plenty of practices pay a spouse or a child through the business, and the treatment is not complicated, but it does have to be honest. If the family member genuinely runs your books or manages the front desk, their market wage is a real cost of the practice and it stays. If the role is thinner than the paycheck, the difference is an add-back. Buyers do not flinch at this. They just need it stated plainly and matched to a payroll record.
Surfacing these honestly raises your number
Here is the part that surprises owners. These perks feel like something to be quiet about, almost like a confession. In a valuation they are the opposite. Every documented perk dollar flows back into adjusted earnings, and at a five-times multiple that dollar becomes roughly five dollars of price.
Put round numbers on it. A typical stack in an owner-operated practice, the auto, the CE travel, the meals, the phone, the personal share of insurance, a family member whose role is lighter than the wage, can run about 60,000 dollars a year.
Surfaced and documented, that is on the order of 300,000 dollars of practice value. Left buried in overhead, it is zero.
Keep it separable
The practical habit that protects all of this is separation. One card for the practice and one for the family. Perks coded to consistent categories in your bookkeeping instead of smeared across supplies and office expense. A folder with the auto lease, the payroll register, and the policy statements, ready for the day someone asks. When personal and practice spending are separable, diligence moves fast and your add-backs hold. When they are tangled together, the buyer’s analyst starts making conservative guesses, and conservative guesses always run against you.
This is housekeeping, not surgery, and it is some of the best-paid housekeeping you will ever do. An hour with your bookkeeper this quarter can be worth six figures at the closing table. Practice Worth asks about these categories directly, so the perks come out of hiding and into your number the defensible way; the methodology page shows how add-backs fit the larger picture. There is a free sample report at getpracticeworth.com.
About the author. Karen Eslinger, RDH, spent more than two decades chairside as a registered dental hygienist before co-founding Practice Worth in 2026 with her husband, Dr. David Eslinger. She focuses on the clinical and operational side of practice value. Practice Worth is a Missouri LLC. Learn more at getpracticeworth.com.
Dave’s companion piece draws the line these perks have to clear: add-backs that hold up, and the ones that get laughed out of diligence.