Our Process

Exit Planning begins with forming an Advisor Team, which includes your key trusted advisors. The Advisor Team works together to clarify and implement your goals.  The Advisor Team strategy is to increase business value, and to preserve, promote, protect, and ultimately transfer ownership, while retaining maximum wealth.

The Advisor Team members are selected and retained by you, which is appropriate because you will invest a significant amount of trust and time with these professionals.  It is important that you feel comfortable with them.  We will work with the Advisor Team that you choose.  If you need referrals for any Advisor Team member during this process, we can refer one to you.

Once the Advisor Team is formed, the process includes:

• Data Collection
• Strategy and Design
• Preliminary Plan Presentation (to Business Owner)
• Final Plan Presentation (to Constituents)
• Implementation

Our process helps to ensure you have planned your objectives, managed business value, orchestrated a transfer, and protected your family’s financial future from risk.  The end result is your Personal Road Map that defines the journey in actions that lead towards and through a successful and stylish exit.

Without exception, every owner leaves his or her company.  It is not always voluntary.  Whether you do it in style depends on the specific Exit Planning actions you take before you leave.  Leaving a business on your terms and on your schedule can only happen through a carefully executed Exit Plan.

Your Personal Road Map

Your Personal Road Map considers these areas and may vary depending on your circumstances:

Your Road Map includes specific actions you decide upon with input from your Advisor Team, the expected completion date, and who is responsible.  The action checklist helps bring reality to your vision.  It becomes an integral part of making it all happen… not just a report that gets filed away.

Depending on the timeline for transition, we believe it is critical to assemble your Advisor Team at least annually to see that your goals and milestones are being achieved and what, if anything, needs to be adjusted.

Data Collection The process of designing and implementing your Road Map tailored to meet your specific goals begins with a meeting during which we obtain information about you and your business, and answer questions you have about possible strategies to build and protect business value, manage and transfer personal wealth, and/or exit your business. We will help you to prioritize competing objectives and understand how certain strategies and exit paths may (or may not) allow you to achieve your objectives.

Strategy and Design  After our Data Collection meeting, we (along with other members of your Advisor Team, as appropriate) will develop a preliminary Road Map, which will serve as a central location to organize and present important facts about you and your business, your objectives and recommended strategies to achieve your goals.  We may contact you to discuss additional information or your preferences to facilitate the preliminary design phase.  We will work as efficiently as possible, either in Advisor Team meetings or independently, depending on the nature of the Road Map that we will present to you.

In this step, we begin the process of looking at many possible ways to meet your goals.  Everything we do will be focused on your goals.  While it is our role to challenge your goals, it is not our role to determine your goals.

Preliminary Plan Presentation. It is during this step that we begin to eliminate those possibilities considered in the previous step that no longer seem probable.  We want the Road Map to be more likely than not to be achievable, probable, and realistic.  In this meeting, we will walk you through your preliminary Road Map to confirm basic facts, revisit and solidify your objectives and carry all of that information through to one or more Recommendations that will be included in your Road Map.  Most business owners modify this first draft as they see how their objectives and their unique circumstances interact and affect their potential options.

All members of the Advisor Team should participate in this Plan Presentation meeting to receive your comments and to agree on changes to the recommendations for which each of them is responsible, so that a final Road Map can be created.

Your Business Owner Road Map will include an "Action Item Checklist" – a comprehensive "to do" list that we will manage and maintain for you and the Advisor Team that you select.  The Action Item Checklist tracks tasks necessary to complete each Component of your Road Map, the person responsible for each task and the date by which the responsible person has committed to complete the task.  This Checklist will be an effective tool for measuring your progress through the process and holding your Advisor Team accountable for that progress.

Final Plan Presentation  Once you have reviewed the preliminary draft of your Road Map, we will schedule a meeting with you and any constituents or stakeholders in the process to present the elements of the Road Map that affect them and to seek their comments and approval of the strategies we have identified and recommended.  It is important to obtain the support and enthusiasm about your strategies from this group to avoid obstacles in the implementation phase.

There is no need to implement a technique that will be resisted by someone close to you or that will create problems in other areas.  That is why we pause here to make sure that all who have influence on your decisions and implementation are on board.

Implementation  Finally, the Recommendations described and agreed upon in your Road Map are implemented.  We remain involved through the implementation phase so that the process that we have described here achieves your intentions as effectively as possible.