The sale and purchase of Australian general practices

Know more about the sale than the broker. Sell to the right buyer, not the first.

You will sell your practice once, maybe twice. The buyer across the table does this for a living. Proxeno closes that gap. We prepare you, then match you to the buyer who fits, so the sale works for your staff and your patients as well as your price. The first step is the business acuity assessment, a free operational review of the practice.

Start your business acuity assessment Sale readiness check
  • One declared side
  • Fees fixed before each stage
  • Independent valuation always
The story

The proxenos

Twenty-four centuries ago, a merchant from Corinth arriving in Athens had a problem that will be familiar to anyone who has sold a business. He was competent at home and a stranger here. He did not know who decided things, what anything should cost, which assurances were real or who could be trusted. The people who did know had every reason to charge him for the difference.

The Greek cities solved this with a role, not a market. A proxenos was a citizen of one city appointed by another to look after its people: to house them, introduce them, get them in front of the right officials, stand beside them in disputes and vouch for them. The word means, near enough, one who acts on behalf of the guest. The appointment was made by public decree, and cities carved those decrees in stone. Thousands survive.

A proxenos was rewarded in standing, with honours, privileges and a name that carried, not with a cut of whatever his guests transacted.

The arrangement had a structural feature that modern intermediaries have lost. The proxenos picked a side and everyone knew which. He served the visiting city openly while remaining a trusted citizen of his own, and the openness was the point: because his allegiance was declared and his reward was reputation, both sides could rely on him. The institution ran for centuries, outlasted the independence of the city-states themselves and persisted well into the Roman era. It faded when empires replaced the world of many small polities dealing with each other as strangers.

The same problem now

The owner as the Corinthian merchant

A GP practice owner selling a practice is the Corinthian merchant. They will do this once, perhaps twice. The buyer across the table does it for a living. The owner does not know who the buyers are, what practices like theirs have sold for, which conditions in a deal are standard and which are opportunism, or what their own numbers will look like under a buyer’s scrutiny. The people who do know monetise the difference. That is not a criticism of any individual broker; it is the business model. A broker’s asset is opacity, and a success fee ties their income to a deal closing, any deal, with whoever turned up.

The technology has changed and the values problem has not moved at all. Which is the argument for reaching back past the broking industry entirely, to the institution that solved strangers-transacting-at-a-knowledge-gap the first time.

What to expect from an engagement

  • Fixed fees for defined work, quoted before each stage begins: preparation, evidence, matching, coordination.
  • One declared side in every deal, named in the engagement letter. The other side knows who we act for.
  • No listing and no advertising. Your practice never appears on a marketplace, no teaser circulates and the owner register is confidential.
  • Matching from our national record of who owns Australian general practice, not one firm's contact book.
Five principles

What Proxeno keeps

Proxeno is the proxenia rebuilt for one market: the sale and purchase of Australian general practices. Five of the old role’s values carry across whole.

A declared side

We represent one party in a deal and say which. The other side knows who we are and what our interest is. No dual mandates, no acting for the transaction itself.

Reputation, not commission

We are paid fixed and staged fees for work done: preparation, evidence, matching, coordination. Our incentive is that the sale is the right one, not that a sale happens fast.

Knowledge in public

The proxeny decree was carved where anyone could read it. We publish the record of this market, who owns what, what is changing hands and what the process involves, because an informed owner is the client we want and an informed market is the one we want to work in.

Preparation of the stranger

The proxenos’s first job was to make the visitor competent in an unfamiliar city. Ours is to make the owner competent in a sale: their numbers, their gaps, their options, before any buyer is in the room.

Principal to principal

The proxenos opened doors and vouched. The parties dealt with each other. We manage the engagement to the point where owner and buyer discuss terms directly, and independent accountants, not us, put the value on the practice.

For sellers

Two ways to start

Preparation comes before any buyer. Start with a business acuity assessment, or register your practice and we will arrange a conversation. Registrations are not shared with any buyer. When a sale is in view, the readiness check scores how prepared the practice is to sell.

The two ways to sell

Business acuity assessment

A free review of how the practice runs as a business, scored across six areas. It sets a baseline and shows where the gaps are, and asks for nothing you would not want a buyer to ask about.

Start your business acuity assessment

Register your practice

Provide details on your practice and we'll get back to you pronto. Nothing here commits you to a sale or an engagement.

How we collect and handle personal information is set out in our collection notice.

Something went wrong sending the form. Email us instead at sellers@proxeno.io.

For buyers

Buying rather than selling

Tell us what you are looking for at no cost and we put you on the shortlists we build for owners. For groups working out where to grow, we also produce a report on which practices fit what you are after, who owns them and where they are.

For buyers

A note on the names

Medius and Proxeno

Medius is Latin: the one in the middle. Proxeno is Greek: the one who acts for the guest. Different tongues, different traditions, and we do not pretend they are one.

What they share is age, and the reason for it. Roles survive that long when the problem they answer is permanent. Strangers still transact across a knowledge gap, and the answer is still a declared, accountable intermediary whose reward is standing rather than a toll.