01
Readiness assessment
Six to eight weeks
Scored, written and specific. Most owners find two or three issues here that they had privately suspected and never quantified.
At a glance
Exit readiness assessment, transition structure design, management and family buy-outs, gifting and trust coordination, and the governance that makes a handover survivable.
Who this suits
- Owners within ten years of stepping back
- Families with some children in the business and some outside it
- Companies where the management team is the natural buyer
- Businesses too dependent on the founder to sell well today
- Owners who have had one offer and realized they were unprepared
Most owners plan the sale and forget the seven years before it.
The value a business realizes at transition is largely set by decisions made long beforehand: whether the customer base is concentrated, whether the management team can run it without the founder, whether the financial records would survive diligence, and whether the entity structure permits an efficient sale at all.
We start with a readiness assessment that is deliberately uncomfortable. It scores the business the way a buyer or a successor would, names the specific things that would reduce the price or block the deal, and puts a rough timeline against fixing each one.
Then the structure. Transferring to family raises gifting, valuation discounts, trust design and the fairness question between children in the business and children outside it. Transferring to management raises funding, security and the seller note. A third-party sale raises the entity structure and the difference between an asset and a stock deal, which is frequently the largest single number in the whole exercise.
The family conversation is part of the engagement, not an afterthought. Plans that are technically elegant and never discussed tend to fail at exactly the moment they are needed. We work with your attorney and wealth advisor rather than around them.
Deliverables
What a transition
What a transition
plan contains.
This is a multi-year engagement reviewed annually, not a document produced once and filed.
Exit readiness assessment
A scored review across financial, operational, customer and management dimensions, with the value-limiting issues named specifically.
Transition structure design
Family, management or third-party routes modelled side by side with the after-tax proceeds shown for each.
Gifting and trust coordination
Annual and lifetime gifting programs, grantor trust structures and valuation discount planning, coordinated with your estate attorney.
Management buy-out support
Funding structures, seller notes, earn-outs and the phased governance that makes a buy-out actually work.
Family governance
Compensation policy, board structure and the fairness question between active and inactive family members, addressed before it becomes a grievance.
Annual plan review
The plan re-run each year against actual results and changed circumstances, because a ten-year plan written once is a document, not a plan.
How it runs
Assess, structure,
Assess, structure,
execute, review.
Ten years is a comfortable runway. Three is workable. Twelve months means accepting a worse outcome than was available.
02
Options modeling
After-tax, side by side
Family, management and third-party routes with the proceeds, the timeline and the risk of each shown honestly.
03
Structure and documentation
With your attorney
Entity changes, trust funding, buy-sell revisions and shareholder agreements, sequenced so each step is valid when it happens.
04
Execution and annual review
Over several years
Gifts made, notes drafted, roles transferred, and the whole plan re-examined every year against where the business has actually got to.
Related
More in Advisory
These sit next to each other for a reason: most engagements draw on two or three of them at once.
Advisory overview
Business ValuationEstate and gift, buy-sell agreements, shareholder disputes, 409A and ESOP support.
Transaction AdvisoryQuality of earnings, buy- and sell-side diligence, working capital pegs, purchase price allocation.
Entity StructuringChoice of entity, holding company and multi-entity design, reorganizations, state footprint planning.
Private Client ServicesOwner and family returns, equity compensation, charitable planning, trust and estate coordination.
Transition
Ten years out is
Ten years out is
early enough. Barely.
Start with the readiness assessment. It is fixed fee, it is written, and it is useful whether you exit in three years or fifteen.