Selling a Dental Practice in Georgia (2026): Ownership, Non-Competes, and Who's Buying

Last updated: August 2026

I'm Sean Yu, co-founder of Peony. Before Peony I spent my career on the deal side, and one thing I've learned watching practice sales is that the general playbook only gets you halfway: the half that decides whether your deal closes, and at what net, is state law. Georgia is a good example of why the state matters as much as the multiple. It is a stricter corporate-practice state, its non-compete regime is unusually seller-friendly, its Board has concrete records duties that reach into the closing, and its Medicaid roster just turned over in July 2026. This post is the Georgia-specific layer — the ownership rules, the non-compete math, the records and licensure duties, the tax treatment, the Medicaid mechanics, and who is actually buying in the state. For what your practice is worth and how the sale runs step by step, I lean on our national dental practice sale guide rather than repeat it. I run Peony, a data room company serving 6,800+ customers, so I have a view on the confidential-process tooling too, but most of what follows is law and market, not software.

Quick answer. Georgia is a stricter corporate-practice-of-dentistry state: the clinical entity must be dentist-owned, and DSOs use a management/clinical split (O.C.G.A. § 43-11-47). Georgia has no healthcare non-compete ban, and a seller non-compete is presumptively reasonable for the longer of five years or the payout period (O.C.G.A. § 13-8-57) — far stronger than an employment covenant. On sale you owe patients at least 14 days' advance notice naming a 30-day emergency-care location, and only a Georgia-licensed dentist may take custody of the charts. A one-time asset sale generally qualifies as a casual sale with no Georgia sales tax on the equipment — unless it runs through a broker "regularly engaged in making sales." Georgia is equitable-distribution (no automatic spousal joinder). The state is under-supplied on dentists, and buyers include Benevis (HQ in Marietta, GA). This is not legal advice; confirm specifics with Georgia counsel.

What makes selling a dental practice in Georgia different?

Georgia bends the national sale playbook in five ways: it is a stricter corporate-practice state, it lets seller non-competes run long, its Board imposes concrete patient-record duties on the sale itself, a one-time asset sale usually escapes state sales tax as a casual sale, and it is an equitable-distribution (separate-property) state. Each of those is a lever that changes how you structure the deal, who can buy, and what you net — and none of them shows up in a generic "how to sell a dental practice" article. I'll take them one at a time below.

A quick word on the division of labor, because I don't want to waste your time repeating things. This Georgia post owns the Georgia-specific law and the Georgia buyer landscape. Valuation bands and the seven-step national process live in our dental practice sale guide — I reference them in a sentence and link, rather than restating them here. The cross-state comparison (how Georgia stacks up against other states) lives in our sell a dental practice by state hub. The full confidential-process build lives in our dental practice sale data room guide, and I carry only a Georgia-localized confidentiality section here. If a DSO offer is what you're weighing, our DSO offer evaluation guide reads the term sheet; the buyer's verification lens is in our dental due diligence checklist. Consider this the Georgia overlay on top of that stack. One standing caveat for the whole post: I am not your lawyer or your CPA, and Georgia law is specific enough that you should confirm anything below with Georgia counsel before you sign.

Who can buy your practice under Georgia law?

Georgia sits on the stricter, more-protective side of the corporate-practice-of-dentistry spectrum: the clinical entity must be owned and controlled by Georgia-licensed dentists, and a general-business corporation or a non-dentist may not own the clinical practice or employ a dentist to practice dentistry. That single rule shapes who can buy your practice and how a DSO deal has to be papered.

The statute is the core of it. O.C.G.A. § 43-11-47 makes it a ground for license discipline to practice dentistry as an employee of an individual not licensed in Georgia, or as an officer or employee of a corporation other than a Georgia professional association or professional corporation, or as a member or manager of an LLC or LLP other than one in which all members are licensed dentists and all professional services and professional-judgment decisions are delivered and made by licensed dentists. The Board's own language describes the prohibited conduct as being "engaged in the practice of dentistry as an employee of any individual not licensed to practice dentistry in this state", and it treats practicing as an officer or employee of a non-professional corporation, or an LLC or LLP "other than one in which all members are licensed dentists and all professional services and professional judgment decisions are delivered by and made by licensed dentists," as the same kind of violation. That is the corporate-practice bar in plain text, and it is why the ownership structure of a Georgia dental deal is not a formality.

So how do DSOs and MSOs operate here at all? The same way they operate in other strict states: through a management/clinical split. The DSO or MSO — which may carry outside or private-equity ownership — provides non-clinical business services (billing, marketing, HR, procurement, real estate) under a management services agreement to a dentist-owned professional entity that retains clinical ownership and professional judgment. The clinical practice stays in dentist hands; the business services sit in the management company. For a selling dentist, the practical read is this: an individual dentist-buyer can buy your clinical entity outright, but a DSO buyer will typically acquire the non-clinical assets and put a management agreement in place over a dentist-owned professional entity — sometimes yours restructured, sometimes a designated dentist's. That structure is not optional flavor; it flows directly from § 43-11-47.

Two honest hedges. First, no enacted 2025 or 2026 Georgia legislation changed the corporate-practice rules — the 2026 legislative session ended in April 2026 — so treat § 43-11-47 as current. Second, I'm describing the lawful structure that flows from the statute; I'm not pointing you to a dedicated Board "DSO position statement," because I don't want to assert one exists. The management/clinical split is the compliant path that the corporate-practice bar produces, and how it applies to your specific entity is a question for Georgia healthcare counsel.

Is your Georgia non-compete enforceable?

Georgia has no healthcare or dentist non-compete ban, and it enforces restrictive covenants under the Georgia Restrictive Covenants Act — which is materially more permissive for a seller (sale-of-business) covenant than for an employment one. If you are selling, this cuts in your buyer's favor and yours together: the non-compete you sign at close is one of the most enforceable covenants Georgia law recognizes, which is part of what a buyer is paying for.

Start with the contrast, because it surprises people who have read about other states. Colorado now bans non-competes for healthcare providers including dentists. Georgia does not. Georgia enforces non-competes under the Georgia Restrictive Covenants Act, effective for covenants entered on or after May 11, 2011, which replaced the state's old strict-scrutiny approach with a flexible reasonableness test: a covenant has to be reasonable in time, geographic area, and scope of prohibited activities. The Act reaches skilled and professional employees, a category that includes licensed dentists, so an associate employment non-compete is enforceable here too — just on tighter terms.

The seller-versus-employee gap is the part that matters for a sale. For a post-employment non-compete, a duration of two years or less is presumptively reasonable. For a seller covenant, the presumption is far longer. Under O.C.G.A. § 13-8-57, against the owner or seller of all or a material part of a business's assets, a court shall presume to be reasonable in time any restraint that runs for the longer of (a) five years or (b) the period during which payments are being made to the seller as a result of the sale. In practice that means a seller's non-compete tied to an earnout or a seller note can be presumptively reasonable for the full life of those payments, even beyond five years. This is exactly why a buyer wants your covenant framed as a sale-of-business restraint, and why it is worth negotiating the geography and scope deliberately rather than signing a boilerplate radius.

Two cautions keep this honest. Georgia courts can "blue-pencil" or modify an overbroad covenant, but modification is discretionary, not guaranteed — a covenant drafted too broadly can still fail. And Georgia courts continue to strike down overbroad covenants, healthcare ones included: a 2025 Georgia Court of Appeals decision held that non-competes barring an employee from working for a competitor "in any capacity" are overbroad, and Georgia's business court struck a physician non-compete that lacked any geographic restriction. Legislators have also tried: a 2024 bill to void physician non-competes was introduced but not enacted, and it targeted physicians only, not dentists, and even carried its own exception for business-sale covenants. As of the close of the 2026 session, Georgia has not enacted a physician or dentist non-compete ban. Net: enforceable, seller-favorable, but only if drafted with real geography and scope. Get counsel to draft the covenant.

What happens to your patient records when you sell?

The Georgia Board of Dentistry's practice-closure guidance imposes concrete, quotable duties on a sale: at least 14 days' advance notice to patients, a notice that names a 30-day emergency-care location, and a hard rule that only a Georgia-licensed dentist may take custody of the charts. These are not soft best practices — they are duties the Board spells out, and the custody rule in particular constrains who your buyer can be.

On notice, the Board's guidance is explicit. It states that a retiring or selling dentist must notify current and previous patients in advance, and that "notice shall be sent to all current patients at least fourteen (14) days in advance to the last known addresses of the patients." The notice itself, per the Board, "shall include: The date that the sale or retirement shall become effective, and the date on which the dentist/patient relationship may resume, if applicable; A location at which the patient may receive emergency dental care for at least thirty (30) days following the termination of the dentist/patient relationship; A statement of further dental treatment required, if any; and A means for the patient to obtain a copy of his/her dental records." The Board also suggests announcing the sale in a newspaper of general circulation "at least once a week for at least four (4) weeks" to reach patients whose records you still hold — that piece is suggested, not mandatory.

On custody, there is a line that directly limits your buyer pool. The Board's guidance states: "At no time should a dentist transfer any patient's record to an unlicensed party. Aside from a patient or his/her representative, only a dentist actively licensed in Georgia may control or maintain the custody of a patient's dental records." Read that against a sale and the implication is concrete: the party taking custody of your charts at close must be a Georgia-licensed dentist or a dentist-owned entity. In a DSO deal structured around a management/clinical split, that is one more reason the clinical records sit with the dentist-owned professional entity, not with the management company.

Retention has a wrinkle worth knowing. Georgia's general medical-records rule requires keeping records for at least ten years from the date each item was created. But the Board's closure guidance notes that a retiring or selling dentist is not required to keep patient records for ten years under the applicable statute — the Board cites Ga. Comp. R. & Regs. r. 150-8-.01 and O.C.G.A. § 31-33-2(a)(1)(B)(i) — provided you do not destroy any patient's records without at least fourteen days' notice, and the Board suggests waiting a minimum of ninety days to let patients obtain records before final disposition. Present those together: the ten-year baseline is the rule the selling-dentist exemption carves against. I'm reproducing the rule and statute numbers only as the citations the Board's own guidance uses, not as figures I re-verified against the code myself. Confirm the current text with counsel before you rely on the exemption.

How fast can an out-of-state buyer get licensed in Georgia?

An experienced out-of-state buyer's practical route is licensure by credentials (endorsement), which requires several years of recent full-time practice, an active unencumbered out-of-state license, an NPDB report, a Georgia jurisprudence exam, and a licensure-by-credentials fee — but Georgia publishes no processing timeline, so treat credentialing as a closing dependency, not a scheduled step. This matters because a buyer who cannot practice cannot take custody of the charts or bill under their own credentials, so licensure sits on the deal's critical path.

Here is what the credentials path involves. Georgia offers a licensure-by-credentials route for experienced out-of-state dentists. The applicant must have been in full-time clinical practice or faculty for the years immediately preceding application, hold an active license in good standing from another state, have no recent disciplinary action, submit National Board scores directly, provide an NPDB report and an employment-history affidavit, pass the Georgia jurisprudence examination (the general requirement is a score of 75 or higher), and pay a licensure-by-credentials fee. I'm deliberately not pinning the exact year-count phrasing or the fee amount to a hard number, because those come from the Board's application packet and can update — verify the current amounts on the live application before you rely on them. The general licensure requirements more broadly include a degree from a CODA-accredited school, a passing clinical exam, verification of licensure from all states where the buyer has ever been licensed (unencumbered by past, present, or pending disciplinary action), and a criminal background check.

The one thing I will not do is give you a number of weeks. Georgia does not publish a licensure processing timeline for either the standard or by-credentials path, and I'd rather tell you that plainly than repeat a figure I can't source. The practical consequence for your deal is the same either way: start the buyer's licensure application as early as possible, and build the closing schedule so that funding does not depend on a credentialing turnaround you cannot control.

On reciprocity, do not count on the interstate compact to shortcut this. As of 2026, Georgia has not joined the Dentist and Dental Hygienist Compact, and the compact is not yet issuing privileges (implementation across the states that have joined is still pre-operational). So a buyer's route into Georgia runs through the state's own credentials process, not through a compact privilege. Treat the compact as unavailable here until the state's status changes.

What happens to Medicaid and payer contracts?

A Georgia practice sale is a change of ownership (CHOW): the buyer must re-enroll with Georgia Medicaid and, if participating, credential with the relevant managed-care plans — and because the Georgia Families plan roster turned over on July 1, 2026, both sides should verify plan and administrator names against current state sources. Credentialing lag is a real closing risk, because a buyer who is not yet enrolled cannot bill under their own number, and that gap shows up in post-close collections.

Start with the mechanics. Georgia Medicaid dental care runs through Georgia Families (managed care) plus fee-for-service. On a sale, the buyer handles the Medicaid provider-record change through the Georgia Medicaid Web Portal (mmis.georgia.gov), where provider enrollment and application status live; changing a Tax ID for practitioners because of an ownership change requires a letter explaining the reason plus a Power of Attorney for Payee for the affected Medicaid providers. Separately, for DCH-licensed facilities, providers are required to notify the department at least thirty days in advance of an ownership change through the Healthcare Facility Regulation Division — though that HFRD rule addresses licensed facilities, and a solo or group dental office's Medicaid provider-record change is handled through the enrollment portal above. I'm pointing you to the portal rather than quoting a dental-office CHOW turnaround, because Georgia does not publish one.

The currency-critical piece is the 2026 plan shake-up. DCH awarded new Georgia Families CMO contracts: CareSource was retained, and Molina Healthcare, UnitedHealthcare, and Humana came in as new plans, replacing Amerigroup and Peach State Health Plan. The three new plans targeted a July 1, 2026 operational launch; the outgoing plans' contracts were extended through June 30, 2026; and incumbent protests were denied in January 2026. If your practice takes Medicaid, this is not background trivia — it changes which plans your buyer credentials with. Each Georgia Families plan contracts with a dental administrator to run its dental network, and historically a single administrator served several plans, but the July 2026 transition may change dental-network administration. I'm not going to name the administrator for the new plans, because that relationship may have changed with the roster; the reliable move is to confirm on each plan's current Georgia Medicaid provider page. Point the buyer at the state portal and the individual plans early, and plan the closing around credentialing, not the other way around.

Do you owe Georgia sales tax on the asset sale?

A one-time sale of your practice's equipment and assets generally does not trigger Georgia sales tax, because it qualifies as a "casual sale" — and a sale in complete, bona-fide liquidation of the business is a defined casual sale. The big caveat: the exemption can be lost if the sale runs through a broker or agent "regularly engaged in making sales." Most dental deals are asset sales, so this is a live question for the equipment portion of nearly every Georgia transaction.

The Department of Revenue is direct about the exemption. Georgia DOR states that "A sale that meets the definition of 'casual sale' is not subject to sales tax," referring to the casual-sale rule for the definition. That rule (Ga. Comp. R. & Regs. r. 560-12-1-.07) covers, among other things, tangible personal property not acquired or held for use in a business or for resale; sales whose total price plus related sales over the current and preceding eleven months does not exceed $500; and — the prong that fits a practice sale — property sold in "a complete and bona fide liquidation of a business," where the liquidation means selling all the assets over a period not exceeding thirty days from the first asset sale (or longer if the Commissioner approves). The rule states that no sales or use tax liability will be enforced against either the seller or the purchaser in a casual-sale transaction. For the casual-sale test, DOR defines "business" as "any activity engaged in by any person or caused to be engaged in by any person with the object of direct or indirect gain, benefit, or advantage."

Here is the framing that fits a practice sale, and the trap inside it. In a typical asset sale you are disposing of equipment held for use in the business (not for resale), often in complete liquidation of the practice — squarely the fact pattern the liquidation prong is written for, which is why practice asset sales usually carry no Georgia sales tax on the hard assets. But the rule excludes a sale made through "an agent, broker or other person who is regularly engaged in making sales." Because dental-practice asset sales are frequently run through transition brokers and advisors, whether the equipment portion is broker-facilitated can affect casual-sale treatment. That is a real structuring point, not a technicality: how the equipment sale is documented and who executes it can decide whether the exemption holds. Confirm the liquidation timing and the broker-facilitation facts with a Georgia tax advisor or the DOR before you assume the equipment moves tax-free.

Who is buying Georgia dental practices in 2026?

Georgia is an under-supplied dental market, which makes it demand-positive for sellers, and the buyer field runs from individual dentists to multi-state DSOs — including Benevis, which is headquartered in Marietta, Georgia. I'll name only what I can verify on a company's own site, and I'll hedge the counts that move, because stale office numbers are how these sections go wrong.

First the market color, because it frames demand. Georgia had roughly 5,704 actively practicing dentists in 2025, a rate of about 51.0 per 100,000 residents — below the most recent national ADA figure of about 60.4 per 100,000. The state's Dentist Workforce Report also found that 21 Georgia counties had no practicing dentist in 2025, and the average age of an actively practicing Georgia dentist is 46. Read together, that is an under-supplied, demand-positive market: fewer dentists per capita than the nation, an aging cohort, and access gaps that support patient demand. Georgia also has a single dental school, the Dental College of Georgia at Augusta University, the state's only dental college for decades, which broke ground in 2026 on a second campus in Savannah slated to open around summer 2028. A thin local pipeline of new graduates, in a growing state, is part of why out-of-state and institutional buyers look here.

Now the buyers. Benevis is a dental support organization headquartered in Marietta, Georgia; on its own site, Benevis states it provides non-clinical business support to dental practices in 13 states and the District of Columbia. I'm using the 13-states-plus-DC figure because it is the company's own-site number; I'm not quoting a live office count, because those move. Great Expressions Dental Centers has a Georgia clinical footprint but is headquartered in Southfield, Michigan, not Atlanta — it previously ran a support center in Norcross, Georgia that closed when it consolidated its headquarters to Michigan. The safe read is simply that Great Expressions, a Michigan-headquartered DSO, operates practices in Georgia among several states; verify current Georgia locations on its site before relying on any count. Beyond those, several national DSOs (for example Heartland, Aspen, Pacific Dental Services, and Dental Care Alliance) are active nationally but are not Georgia-headquartered, and I did not verify their Georgia office counts on their own domains in this pass, so I won't publish Georgia numbers for them. The broader market also includes quieter, invisible consolidators that acquire a steady handful of practices a year without a public brand — a pattern worth knowing exists even where no name is attached.

On the advisory side, if you want a broker who knows the state, US Dental Transitions is a dentist-transition brokerage headquartered in Suwanee, Georgia, with a Southeast emphasis. For the full advisor bench — transition brokers versus DSO-scale advisors, and how to vet them by practice size — see our best dental M&A advisors guide. One note on brokers that ties back to the tax section: if a broker runs the equipment sale, revisit whether the casual-sale exemption still applies, since a sale through an agent regularly engaged in making sales falls outside the rule.

How do you keep a Georgia sale confidential with multiple buyers?

In a Georgia metro like Atlanta, your most likely buyers and your nearest competitors are the same small pool, so a confidential sale runs on a blind profile, an NDA gate before any file opens, per-buyer links, per-viewer watermarks, and one-click revoke — the same controls I described in our dental data-room playbook, localized to the reality that the practice down the street is a plausible bidder. The whole point is to let real buyers do diligence without your staff, patients, referrers, or competitors learning you are selling.

The Georgia-specific risk is density. In Atlanta and the other metros, the buyer who responds to your teaser may be a group two miles away, and the moment they learn your identity they learn your patient volume, your payer mix, your margins, and your staffing costs — and can use every bit of it against you, whether or not they ever intended to buy. So you market with a blind profile (region, collections band, general or specialty, no practice name and no address), gate every buyer behind an NDA before a single document loads, release your real name and detailed financials only to bidders you have vetted, serve every file view-only and watermarked with each viewer's name so a leaked page traces to one person, give each bidder their own per-buyer link so you can cut one without touching the others, and revoke access in one click the instant a bidder looks like a competitor. The engagement analytics double as buyer triage: a bidder who reads the full production report and returns to the lease twice is serious; one who accepted the NDA and never opened a file is not.

That is the work I do at Peony, a data room company serving 6,800+ customers, so I'm not neutral — but I'll give you the honest version. To be fair to the alternatives, a shared drive with a good accountant genuinely can be enough for a quiet single-buyer conversation, and other data-room platforms run competitive multi-bidder processes well too; the controls, not the logo, are what protect you. On our pricing specifically, link expiry and analytics are on every tier including the free one; the $30 Business plan adds a Simple NDA gate, screenshot protection, and one-click revoke; and per-viewer dynamic watermarking, the Advanced NDA, and granular per-file permissions sit on the $52 Data Room plan, which is the tier a competitive multi-DSO Georgia process usually wants — the current plan breakdown is on our pricing page. I'm not going to re-derive the full folder-by-folder build here — that lives in our dental practice sale data room guide, with the document checklist and the multi-bidder mechanics. And the honest boundary holds: if you are selling to a single associate you already trust, you need almost none of this. Match the tooling to the process.

Frequently asked questions

Can a non-dentist or a DSO own a dental practice in Georgia?

Not the clinical side. Georgia is a stricter corporate-practice state: the entity that delivers care must be owned by Georgia-licensed dentists. O.C.G.A. § 43-11-47 makes it a ground for discipline to practice as an employee of a non-dentist or of a company that is not a Georgia professional entity or an all-dentist LLC/LLP. DSOs operate here through a management/clinical split: the DSO provides non-clinical services under a management agreement to a dentist-owned entity that keeps clinical ownership. Confirm the structure with Georgia counsel.

Is a Georgia dental non-compete enforceable when I sell?

Yes, and a seller non-compete is stronger than an employment one. Georgia has no healthcare or dentist non-compete ban (unlike Colorado), and enforces covenants under the Georgia Restrictive Covenants Act. Under O.C.G.A. § 13-8-57, a court shall presume reasonable in time any restraint against the seller of a material part of a business that runs for the longer of five years or the sale-payout period. Employment covenants get a two-year presumption. Courts still strike overbroad covenants, so draft scope and geography carefully with counsel.

What are my patient-record duties when I sell a Georgia practice?

The Georgia Board of Dentistry's practice-closure guidance is concrete. You must notify current patients at least fourteen days ahead of the sale at their last known addresses. The notice must state the effective date, name a location for emergency dental care for at least thirty days, note any further treatment needed, and give a way to obtain records. Critically for the deal, the Board states only a dentist actively licensed in Georgia may take custody of records, so the buyer taking the charts must be a Georgia-licensed dentist.

Do I owe Georgia sales tax when I sell my practice's equipment?

Usually not on the hard assets, because a one-time practice asset sale generally qualifies as a casual sale, which the Georgia Department of Revenue states is not subject to sales tax. A complete, bona-fide liquidation, where all assets are sold within thirty days of the first sale, is a defined casual sale, and no tax is enforced against seller or purchaser. The trap: a sale made through a broker regularly engaged in making sales is not a casual sale and can lose the exemption. Confirm with a Georgia tax advisor.

What data room do I need to sell a dental practice confidentially in Georgia?

In Atlanta, your buyer pool and the practice down the street overlap, so you want NDA gating before any file opens, per-viewer watermarks, and one-click revoke. I run Peony, a data room company serving 6,800+ customers. The free tier is $0 with analytics and link expiry on every tier; the $30 Business plan adds a Simple NDA, screenshot protection, and one-click revoke; the $52 Data Room plan adds per-viewer dynamic watermarking, an Advanced NDA, and granular per-file permissions. A single trusted associate buyer may need none of it.

How does an out-of-state dentist get licensed to buy in Georgia?

The practical path for an experienced buyer is licensure by credentials. Georgia's requirements include several years of recent full-time practice, an active unencumbered out-of-state license, an NPDB report, National Board scores sent directly, a passing Georgia jurisprudence exam, and a licensure-by-credentials fee. Georgia has not joined the Dentist and Dental Hygienist Compact as of 2026, and the compact is not yet issuing privileges, so there is no shortcut. Georgia publishes no processing timeline, so treat credentialing as a closing dependency and start the buyer's application early.

What happens to Medicaid and payer contracts when I sell in Georgia?

A sale is a change of ownership (CHOW), so the buyer re-enrolls with Georgia Medicaid through the state portal and credentials with the managed-care plans. Georgia Medicaid dental runs through Georgia Families, and the roster changed July 1, 2026: CareSource was retained while Molina, UnitedHealthcare, and Humana came in, replacing Amerigroup and Peach State. Each plan contracts with a dental administrator, and the transition may change dental-network administration, so confirm on each plan's current Georgia page. Point the buyer to the portal early, since credentialing lag can delay collections.

Does my spouse have to sign to sell my Georgia dental practice?

Not automatically. Georgia is an equitable-distribution, separate-property state, not a community-property state like Texas or Arizona, so there is no automatic spousal co-ownership or joinder requirement to sell. That said, a practice built or grown during a marriage can still be marital property subject to equitable division in a divorce, so a selling dentist who is divorcing should still address spousal consent or settlement rather than assume a signature is never needed. If divorce is in the picture, work the sale and the marital-property question together with counsel.

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About the author: Sean Yu is the co-founder of Peony, the data room platform used by 6,800+ customers across M&A, fundraising, and diligence workflows — including healthcare operators and practice owners running confidential sales. Before Peony, Sean spent his career on the deal side — M&A at Nomura, early-stage VC at Backed VC, and growth-equity / secondaries at Target Global — running and supporting sell-side and buy-side processes across healthcare, software, and industrials in North America and Europe. He studied Biomedical Engineering at Imperial College London on a full scholarship before dropping out to build companies. Sean is also a co-founder of Gingercontrol, an AI-native trade-compliance platform that raised $2.1M. Contact: sean@peony.ink • LinkedIn.

Sources

• O.C.G.A. § 43-11-47 — grounds for discipline / corporate-practice bar (FindLaw)
• O.C.G.A. § 13-8-57 — restrictive-covenant time presumptions (Justia)
• Littler — New Era in Georgia for Post-Employment Restrictive Covenants
• Little Health Law Blog — Georgia non-competes "in any capacity" are overbroad (Mar 2026)
• Georgia Board of Dentistry — Guidelines for Practice Closure
• ADA — Licensure by state (Georgia laws & rules)
• Georgia DOR — Nontaxable Sales (casual sale)
• Ga. Comp. R. & Regs. R. 560-12-1-.07 — Casual Sale (Cornell LII)
• Georgia Medicaid Web Portal (GAMMIS)
• Georgia Dental Association — Georgia DCH announces major CMO contract shakeup (Jan 2026)
• Georgia Board of Health Care Workforce — Dentist Workforce Report 2025
• Georgia Board of Dentistry — Dental College of Georgia at Augusta University
• Benevis — Who We Are (own domain)

Related resources

• Dental practice sale guide — the national playbook: valuation as a % of collections and on EBITDA, the six-to-nine-month process, add-backs, and asset-vs-stock tax
• Sell a dental practice by state — the cross-state hub: how Georgia's ownership, non-compete, and tax rules compare with other states
• Sell a dental practice in Arizona — the Arizona spoke: a permissive, community-property state, for contrast with Georgia
• Sell a dental practice in Texas — the Texas spoke: DSO-accommodating, community-property, with a 2025 dentist non-compete change
• Dental practice sale data room — the confidential-process build: the folder-by-folder checklist, staff-invisible mechanics, and multi-DSO bid tracking
• DSO offer evaluation guide — how to read a specific DSO offer: EBITDA recast, cash-versus-rollover-versus-earnout, and the red flags
• Dental due diligence checklist — the buyer's verification lens: chart audit, hygiene math, PPO write-off reality, and the embezzlement screen
• Best dental M&A advisors — the named dental bench, including Georgia-based transition brokers, and how to vet them by practice size