Fictional owner, Peter Miller, had called his accountant to ask her to help him value his business with the idea of retiring in a few years. No stranger to Exit Planning, his accountant assembled all of Peter’s advisors and launched a complete Exit Planning process. She began, not with an examination of how a transfer [...]

Let’s review the four areas where business owners who want to both survive in today’s economic climate and emerge from it poised for growth (or sale) can focus their energies. As you may recall, those areas are:

Preserving and Protecting Value
Identifying Value and Cash Flow
Creating Revenue
Creating Value

Most owners are currently waist-deep in the first area: cutting [...]

Business owners must meet the challenges presented by recent changes in the economy. What can we learn from owners and their advisors across the U.S. about which strategies are most effective? We invite you to share stories about how your company has been affected and how you are responding.
General Observations
Owners, who ran tight ships when [...]

We’ve met few business owners who believe they should pay more income taxes every year. Instead, most business owners are frustrated with the inability to engage in meaningful income tax planning that reduces the annual tax bite. Take Thomas Lamplighter for example.
Thomas was a second-generation owner of a brickyard. His eventual Exit Planning objective was [...]

We have all heard the old proverb that it’s dangerous to put all of your eggs in one basket.” But does the proverb apply in the world of business ownership? Specifically, is it a valid warning or just a worn-out cliché? It seems to make good sense to concentrate all of your business effort and [...]

We talked briefly about how owners can and do build the value of their companies — even during a recession. Some owners will take that approach, but all owners should be, at a minimum, protecting the existing value of their companies.
There a few of the ways you can do exactly that by concentrating on specific [...]

When transferring your company to insiders, a Low Value can put Dollars in your pocket.
Owners of successful businesses valued between $2 and $5 million face two difficult exit problems:
1. Cash buyers are usually seeking larger companies; and
2. Owners are generally unwilling to assume a long-term installment note because of the risk of non-payment.
Given these hurdles, [...]

The last step in your Exit Plan is Wealth Preservation Planning. But that doesn’t mean you should wait until you are out of the business to begin actively preserving your wealth. In fact, if you wait until the value of your business is converted to cash, it may be too late to realize all of [...]

How do you successfully transfer your business to a child, key employee or co-owner? The most successful method is to follow a recipe that mixes, in equal measure, three key ingredients:

One part: the ability, experience and dedication of the prospective new owners;
One part: a company with strong, consistent cash flow and little debt; and
One part: [...]

 
Maximize what you get and minimize what the IRS takes.
We talked about setting your “end game” objectives as an important step in mapping your business Exit Plan. Remember, if you don’t know where you’re going, any map will do. Equally important is the starting point. If you don’t know where you are…a map won’t help. Valuing [...]