Selling Your Business

PHASE 1

The years before

It starts at the end. Before we talk about the business, we talk about the life it needs to fund: what you want the years after the sale to look like, what should be left after taxes to support that life, and what you want to pass on or give away. That number becomes the target, and everything in Phase 1 is aimed at it.

This is the work that shapes what a buyer is willing to pay, and it happens long before anyone is at the table. Financials a buyer can read without flinching. A business that doesn’t stop when you take two weeks off. Systems written down somewhere other than your own head. A client or payer mix that doesn’t concentrate too much risk in one place. An entity structure that doesn’t hand an avoidable share of the proceeds to the IRS.

None of this can be fixed in the ninety days before a sale. All of it can be worked on over three to five years.

As a Certified Exit Planning Advisor (CEPA®), my role here is to help you see the whole picture, set the order of operations, and work alongside your CPA, your attorney, and any other professionals we need to bring in, from a business coach to someone who can help a family talk through what comes next. I’m not here to replace any of them. I don’t do your books and I don’t draft your documents. I help you understand what a buyer is actually looking at, and what it would take to be further along than you are now.

Some of the most important work in this phase isn’t financial at all. When a business has been in the family for generations and won’t pass to the next one, everyone at the table feels it. As a Behavioral Financial Advisor (BFA™), I make room for those conversations, and make sure the family has the right people beside them for what happens next.

Where we work together

PHASE 2

The transaction

This part isn’t mine, and I’ll say so plainly.

When it’s time to sell, you want a broker or an intermediary who does this all day in your specific industry. The dental transition brokers, the veterinary groups, the trades-focused M&A shops — they know the buyers, they know the comparable deals, and they run the process. They earn their fee.

I’m not trying to be that person, and I’m not competing with them. If anything, an owner who has done the Phase 1 work arrives at their door better prepared. If you don’t have one yet, I’m glad to point you toward people who do this well.

Led by your broker

PHASE 3

Everything after

The check clears. If we’ve done Phase 1 together, the biggest questions already have answers: what should be left after taxes, and whether that number supports the life you had in mind.

Phase 3 is where that plan goes to work. Investing the proceeds now that they aren’t a business anymore. Turning them into income for the years ahead. Putting the estate plan in place: what goes to your children, when, and how. What you give away, and how. Whether the thing you built keeps doing some good after you’ve stepped back from it.

And one more that owners rarely say out loud: who you are on the Monday after. For most of your working life, you’ve been the one whose name is on the door, the truck or the sign, the person everyone calls when something needs an answer. That doesn’t end cleanly just because a transaction did.

As a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER® professional and Accredited Estate Planner® (AEP®), this phase is the one I’m built for, and it’s the reason the first two matter.

Where we work together

DENTAL PRACTICE

The unsolicited letter

A dentist in his late fifties gets a letter from a group practice offering to buy. The number looks large. He has no way to judge whether it’s a good number, and no idea that nearly all of the practice’s goodwill is attached to him personally — which is exactly the thing a buyer discounts for.

If a letter like that landed on your desk tomorrow, would you know what your practice is worth without you in it?

HEATING & COOLING

The three trucks

A heating and cooling owner, sixty-two, built the business from one van. No written processes, a book of customers who ask for him by name, a son who might want it and has never been asked directly. Two competitors one county over have been bought by the same private-equity-backed group in eighteen months.

If a buyer called this year, could your business run for a month without you?

VETERINARY PRACTICE

The books that made sense to her

A veterinarian whose bookkeeping was perfectly logical to her and would have cost real money in a buyer’s diligence — personal expenses mixed in, no clean picture of what the practice actually earns.

If a buyer opened your books tomorrow, would they see what your business actually earns?

SMALL LAW FIRM

The two-partner firm

An attorney at sixty-four whose exit isn’t a sale at all. It’s finding the right firm to merge into, on terms that account for the clients he brings and the years he still wants to work.

Have you decided what your exit looks like, or are you waiting for someone else to decide it for you?