High Quality Advising in ¼ of the Time

An Interview with Nicholas Newsad of Healthcare Transaction Advisors

Small businesses have the great advantage of giving high quality to their clients, while avoiding the time-consuming hoops to jump through that huge firms have. Healthcare Transaction Advisors is a great example of the success of a small firm that delivers quality at record speed.

We sat down to talk with Nicholas Newsad from Healthcare Transaction Advisors about business and his time with Office Evolution. Nicholas is a member at our Lone Tree office, as well as uses other locations to meet with clients in Downtown Denver.

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About the Business

Healthcare Transaction Advisors is a national healthcare consultant firm that advises hospitals and physicians on major business deals that allow these parties to work together better to fight disease.

Success Stories

We’ve helped struggling health systems sell off hospitals, we’ve helped retiring physicians find other physicians to sell their practice to enable the continuation of care for their patients.

Changes in the Industry

With the affordable care act, Obamacare, we’ve had major changes in the health insurance industry, and they’ve created what’s called “Minimum Essential Benefits.” So that’s pushed a lot more money into the mental health sector and the addiction treatment sector. We’ve also seen health insurers like Medicare change with it. They pay for positions with medical services, so just the fundamental way physicians get paid has changed. So physician practice evaluations have gotten more complicated. Because instead of just getting paid for every office visit, for every patient, physicians are now getting paid on their outcomes and quality scores based on individual clinical metrics. So it’s added a new element of complexity to appraising a practice and trying to get to a fair number.

Changes for Your Business

Ten years ago, we had predominantly physician-owned medical groups, and now with all these baby boomer physicians retiring, they’re not only trying to sell their practices to their partners or other physicians, there’s now a big play to sell practices to hospitals and health systems who have not traditionally employed physicians up until 7 or 8 years ago. So the sophistication of the buyer of health care businesses, particularly physician practices, has increased.

Now we have very serious financial buyers buying practices and they tend to be a little more sophisticated and shrewd business people, rather than one physician selling his ownership to his partner. So often times we can serve as independent fair market value appraisers who are hired by both parties to come in and give an objective assessment of what the business ownership is worth. That provides some independence and enables the parties to move beyond just price and talk about the other aspects of the transaction.

Future of the Industry

At some point, we’re going to get to a level where there aren’t as many physician practices to be sold. We’ll get over this baby boomer hump and we’ll have a lot of employed physicians who are working for hospitals and health systems, the folks who are my age. I think we’ll start to see it swing the other way where they want to go out and work on their own and not be employees anymore. I think we’ll see in the next 3-5 years the shift back to entrepreneurialism.

Future of Your Business

HTA is expanding from providing just services into licensing data products and entry research. So this year we’re licensing more and more data and research to other consulting firms. Companies that were our competitors are now becoming our clients. I like to think of it as moving up the supply chain, so instead of just providing the labor that provides the consulting services, we’re also providing the data intelligence that the labor uses in the consulting industry.

Differentiating Your Business

Our competitive advantage is really speed. Unlike the big consulting firms, there’s only 2 layers at our firm. So we endeavor to get all project reports out within 1 week, whereas with the big consulting firms, it could take 4 to 6 weeks or more. Sometimes we’ll actually beat our 1-week deadline and we’ll get things out to clients in 3 or 4 days.

Business Tips

Business Tip #1 – Personal Marketing

In the high end consulting industry, we’ve found that we send out probably 60 email marketing campaigns, and probably over 10,000 mailers. We really didn’t get any business out of any of those. We learned over time, 2.5 years, that our major driver of new business was just face-to-face meetings with prospective clients. So I go on a sales trip pretty much every month now to go meet new people. We usually convert 10-20% of the people we meet into new business.

Business Tip #2 – Start Your Own Business

I think this is one of the greatest times ever to start your own business with all of the technological advances we have, and gas prices are so low. I just flew to Indianapolis last week for $45 to do new business, so I had a dinner with somebody that cost more than the airfare to fly out there. It’s really a great time if you want to go out and generate a business for yourself, from a cost perspective.

In addition, it’s easier to travel once I get to a city like Indianapolis. I can take Uber Car all over the place, I don’t have to rent a car, I don’t have to stress out or pay for parking. So it’s a lot easier to get around. Between Amtrak trains, Megabus, Uber Car, Lyft, and cheap airfare, it’s really a great time to go out and have a national business.

The Office Evolution Experience

We looked at several executive suite companies, and what was really appealing about Office Evolution was that it really is a bundled package and you’re not going to get nickeled and dimed for every add on you use. There were some companies we went to and there was a base fee, but there was an add-on for the internet, there was an add-on for the phones, there was an add-on to use the conference rooms, and there was an add-on for telephone services.

It was just nickel and diming us, so it was very appealing to come to office evolution. Every month I get one bill with one line on it, and it’s predictable. It’s hard enough to run a small business without a bunch of hidden surprises popping up every month.

One of the greatest benefits for me, and it wasn’t at the beginning but it is now, is the drop-in business spaces. We have this location here in Lone Tree, which is in the suburbs in which we live, but there’s also downtown locations in Downtown Denver. So if I ever go there and have one or two meetings, I can drop into one of those locations and stay productive during the day instead of sitting around in a Starbucks all day.

For more information about Nicholas and Health Transaction Advisors, visit their website at: https://hctadvisor.com/

To rent an office space at Office Evolution or to learn more about how we can help you grow your business, visit our website at https://www.officeevolution.com/locations/lone-tree or call (303) 734-7140