Whether you plan to leave the business to children or grandchildren, sell to existing partners, transition to a management team or keep the company for a third-party sale years down the road, the right plan starts with clarity about where you want to end up. We assist you in working through the strategic options, modeling the financial outcomes of each, and constructing a roadmap that aligns ownership transition with your personal retirement and estate goals.
For businesses with multiple owners or partners, a well-drafted buy-sell agreement is the foundation upon which all other succession decisions are based. The agreement defines who can buy, when (death, disability, retirement, or voluntary exit), at what price, and from what funding source. We coordinate the structure, the valuation considerations, the funding (often through life insurance), and the integration with each owner’s personal estate plan.
A business succession plan is only as strong as the people running the business during and after the transition. Keeping the key executives and employees who create the value in a closely held business is a critical part of any succession strategy and often a gap in succession plans that focus only on ownership.
We help business owners build and maintain executive benefit programs that help them attract and retain the talent their business depends on. These include Non-Qualified Deferred Compensation plans, Corporate Owned Life Insurance (COLI), supplemental executive retirement plans (SERPs), and golden handcuff structures to keep key people in place through ownership transitions. We tie those programs to the overall succession plan, the company’s tax strategy, and the business owner’s personal financial picture—so the executives who built the business with you are in a position to carry it forward.