For the sixth consecutive year, we are offering business owners a free, confidential phone consultation to discuss your business exit goals, and determine how prepared you and your company are to achieve them. If the majority of your net worth is tied up in your company; if you want to exit on your terms; and if you have employees, customers, and perhaps business partners that you want to treat fairly in your exit, then you cannot afford to have an incomplete exit plan.
Recent Posts
The next recession is coming!
One does not need a Ph.D. in economics to know that an economic recession is coming. The hard part is predicting when it will hit, and how badly it will be. Given that we are currently in the ninth year since the previous recession ended in late 2009 to early 2010, it is reasonable to conclude that we likely are closer to the next recession than we are to the last.
Okay, okay, it seems like everybody has used the “like a box of chocolates” metaphor at some point. But in honor of the 25th anniversary of the movie Forrest Gump (yes, it’s been 25 years!) we are taking our turn. As the full saying goes, “Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.” Planning and preparing for exit is like a box of chocolates in that you too will not know “what you’re gonna get” until you lift that lid and take your first bites. Some of the flavors and textures will pleasantly surprise you, and some you will find distasteful to put it politely. As the owner and leader of a successful company, you probably don’t like a lot of surprises, especially ones that leave you wanting to spit.
If your exit strategy is to pass your business down to a member of your family, you face a unique set of issues, different from business owners who plan on selling their company when they exit. Woven into these issues are family dynamics, relationships, and realities which can at the very least complicate matters, and at worst prevent a successful exit. In our experience, there are seven conditions that you must address to successfully and happily pass a business down to the next generation. Reviewing these conditions helps you evaluate how prepared you are to pass your business down to family.
“Unlike a marriage, business partnerships are supposed to end.” Attorney William Piercy offers this insight in the opening chapter of his book Life’s Too Short for a Bad Business Partner. Piercy, with the law firm Berman Fink Van Horn in Atlanta, Georgia, is a specialist in resolving and dissolving unwanted business partnerships—an area sometimes called “corporate divorce.” Many business owners have unspoken expectations that their relationship with their business partner(s) will last forever when, in reality, those affiliations are not intended to be perpetual. All business partnerships should one day end, hopefully with a successful exit featuring the “partners departing as friends with full bank accounts” as Piercy observes. In the real world, this does not always occur. Many business partnerships fail, some quickly and others after an otherwise long and successful collaboration.
