I own a medium-sized children’s mental/behavioral health practice. I’m in conversations with another pair of owners who have a very complementary practice – different services with different types of clinicians; but we serve the same population and in fact share many clients.

If we combined our practices ahead of an exit, the whole will be valued at more than the sum of the individual two parts. This is because our services and employees are very complementary but not duplicative; and because it will push our top and bottom lines over perceived valuation-multiples thresholds.
I’m inclined to de-risk the process by merging and then selling together, as opposed to buying the other practice outright and then selling it all on my own. We would want to streamline the integration – keep costs down and execute on the most valuable opportunities to integrate – with a focus on a successful execution of the ultimate sale while minimizing impact/change to the employees.
Thus, I’m looking for experience shares on mergers of similar entities as opposed to one entity doing an add-on acquisition of the other. Any structural differences? Differences in post-transaction integration? Things to consider? Thanks!!