Exit Planning

Most owners I meet have spent twenty or thirty years building something real and about twenty minutes thinking about how they get out of it. That is backwards. Your exit strategy business plan is the roadmap for how you leave the company and turn what you built into cash, income, or a legacy, and for almost every privately held business it comes down to five routes: selling to an outside buyer, selling to your managers, selling to your employees through an ESOP, handing it to

Here is something that catches most owners off guard. Roughly 70 to 80 percent of small businesses that get listed for sale never actually sell. They sit on the market, the price gets cut, the owner gets tired, and eventually the listing just disappears. The single biggest reason has almost nothing to do with the economy or interest rates. It comes down to whether the business was ready and whether the owner was ready. So when people ask me the best time to sell a business, h

The tax implications of selling a business can swing your net proceeds by 10 to 30 percent depending on how the deal is structured, your entity type, and the state you live in, which means a $2 million sale can put anywhere from roughly $1.4 million to $1.8 million in your pocket after federal and state tax. Same price. Hugely different outcome.

Three out of four business owners who sell their company say they deeply regret it within the first year. That is not my number. That comes from the Exit Planning Institute's national survey of over 1,200 business owners. And having sat across the table from sellers who built something real and then watched it slip away on bad terms, I can tell you the statistic holds up. Exit planning for business owners is the process of preparing yourself, your finances, and your business