Many business owners facing imminent exit have the enviable but difficult choice of either selling the business to an outside third party and achieving their financial objectives or, conversely, transferring the business to loyal motivated key employees or family. This is nothing more, or less, than a clash of exit objectives.
Take John Conover for example. [...]

“You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.” — Yogi Berra
It is not always easy to interpret Yogi. In this case, perhaps he is advising you to figure out just where you are headed in your business. As you near the time when you [...]

Exit Planning is an on-going process. It begins with establishing your objectives and a valuation of your company and ends with your successful exit. Along the way, you and your Team of Advisors look at preserving the value of your company, protecting that value from creditors and increasing overall value. Also important is making contingency [...]

According to Paul Simon, there are 50 ways to leave a lover. Not being as creative as Mr. Simon, we’ve only come up with eight ways for owners to leave their companies.

Transfer the company to a family member;
Sell the business to one or more key employees;
Sell to key employees using an Employee Stock Ownership Plan [...]

Nora Chapman’s story was typical of most business owners. At age 54, she was ready to leave her 25-employee business. She was thinking of selling to one or two of her key employees and when we met her, her first question to us was: “Is this the right exit choice?”
Many of you find yourself in [...]

Making Sure the Business Continues When You Don’t
Greg King barely survived helping his oldest son learn to drive and now it was time to teach his younger son. Before putting himself through on-the-road training one last time, Greg called his life insurance representative. “I have no co-owners to buy my company if I don’t come [...]

Franklin Taft was understandably a bit neurotic. He was increasingly anxious to begin planning for his eventual departure from his business but his concerns prevented him from proceeding. “I’m too busy working in my business to think about how to leave it. Besides, I don’t know what to do-and neither do my advisors.”
Sound familiar? In [...]

There may be nothing worse for a business than to have its owner suddenly die. . . especially if it’s your business.
Let’s look at what can happen when an owner dies.
Joe Carpenter was the 55-year-old sole owner of a successful construction company. Joe hoped to sell his company to a third party in the next [...]