Exit Planning Articles and Tools

How to Structure Multiple Businesses — Legal Entities, Tax Consequences, and Best Practices

Learn how to structure multiple businesses for legal and tax efficiency. Discover key concepts and entity types today.

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Buying and Selling a Business in a Changing Market

Buying and selling a business is a challenging and calculated process that is influenced greatly by market conditions. On one hand, business buyers must consider the historical performance of the business they intend to purchase and gauge that against financing options and other acquisition challenges to make a judgment call on how the business would perform post-acquisition. Business owners, on the other hand, must consider the money they are making now, and weigh that against a pay out and their need or desire to work less.

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What the Great Resignation Means to Your Business

If you intend to grow and sell a valuable business, the Great Resignation that kicked off in mid 2021 means everything. Everything that is if you care about the value of your business.

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What is Exit Planning?

Learn about the three phases in a business exit plan and why each is important for the business, its employees, the owner and his or her family. This post includes our most popular FAQs on this topic as well. Wondering about the Exit Planning designations for professional advisors? We’ve covered that in this post as well.

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4 Things To Do to Prepare to Sell Your Business

What should a business owner do to prepare to sell his or her business some time in the near future?

Aside from right-sizing the business’s overhead costs to line up with its current level of revenue, and looking for opportunities the pandemic may be presenting, there are four things a business owner can do now to prepare to sell. And more importantly, doing these four things will mean that when a Letter of Intent is received from a buyer, the business will be very well-prepared to survive the due diligence stage of the sale.

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ESOP as an Alternative Exit Strategy

When thinking about ways to sell your business, you are likely familiar with the most common strategies proposed by business advisors: selling to a third-party such as a private equity firm or a competitor, or selling to your family. What your business transition advisor may not have discussed with you is instead selling your business to an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (an “ESOP”).

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How to Calculate Customer Concentration Risk

How to Calculate Customer Concentration Risk

Business owners should be aware of the relative size of their top customers (or clients) sales revenue to their business’ total revenue. All it takes is a simple division computation to reveal a customer’s relative size in terms of gross revenue.  If calculated properly, a customer concentration may be confirmed. While it is generally good for customers to increase their purchases of goods and services with a business, unless the remaining customers do so in similar fashion, the growing concentration of revenue from one (or more) customer(s) creates risk for the business owner.

Key Questions When Transferring Your Family’s Business

Key Questions When Transferring Your Family’s Business

Anyone who owns a family business is intimately familiar with the blood, sweat, and tears associated with building and then keeping the business viable. Nevertheless, it is not unusual for the business entrepreneur to postpone consideration of various issues involved in transferring the business to the next generation, including determining the value of the business.

The Importance of a Buy-Sell Agreement

The Importance of a Buy-Sell Agreement

For every entrepreneur, a smooth transition of business ownership will be of importance at some future point. The Buy Sell Agreement deals with a specific exit strategy case. An agreement by and between business owners, it establishes a mechanism for the purchase of ownership interests following the departure of an owner due to a triggering event (i.e., death, divorce, disability, retirement, etc.).