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Preparing yourself and your family can be one of the most overlooked parts of a business sale and exit strategy. But it goes beyond maximizing tax efficiency and unlocking newfound wealth—it’s a monumental transition filled with emotional considerations. This article outlines key questions and critical areas of considerations for business owners and provides a hypothetical case study of how a company founder can maximize after-tax proceeds from a sale.

“You only sell your company once” is a phrase founder/family-owned business leaders often hear before embarking on a major liquidity event. It demonstrates the enormity of the undertaking to effectively sell a business. Ensuring your company is prepared for a sale is crucial to any exit strategy, and should be considered long before beginning a sale process. This article outlines key questions that business owners should expect and aspire to have answers to leading up to a liquidity, followed by four critical focus areas that are important for them to consider.

While business continuity planning and good crisis management are important, organizational resilience encompasses much more. An integrated approach to resilience provides organizations a competitive advantage over less-prepared peers, as well as the ability to adapt to constantly changing external circumstances. Organizations would be well-served to adopt a structured, disciplined resilience approach that accounts for situations in which multiple risk events interact.

Since the disruption of COVID-19, organizations have had to navigate soaring inflation, a rapid increase in interest rates, and escalating global tensions that have destabilized supply chains. All around, there has been enormous pressure on organizations to adapt and move from one crisis to the next. It’s no longer an option to simply take shelter and wait for the storm to pass and rely on traditional approaches to risk management. Against this backdrop, companies have started to adapt an ‘antifragile’ approach to risk, one that seeks to find opportunities in crisis.

For leaders of founder-owned businesses, raising significant capital without relinquishing control can seem challenging. But investors focused on non-control transactions are becoming more common. Non-control-oriented funds have boomed, fueling demand for minority recapitalizations and enabling business owners to maximize the valuation of their company without selling control. As owners begin to approach this market as part of their business strategy, they should think about what makes an optimal partner for their businesses as there are many to choose from.

If you’re considering a sale of a business, listen in on this 10-minute interview for some valuable potential tax-savings strategies. Attorneys Jason Kohout and Stephanie Derks also discuss income and estate tax planning opportunities, especially for business owners who are in a high income tax state.

Artificial Intelligence (AI), including generative AI, has the power to transform your enterprise—to the extent you can integrate its capabilities and drive adoption. In other words, the limit is not within the technology itself, but within your ability to imagine and implement practical applications. Getting started with AI is about more than how you’ll use it. It’s about preparing your data, systems, processes, and most of all, your people. You need a data-driven, people-centric, and governance-focused AI strategy.

For many business owners, their tax accountant has been with them for years, and therefore understands the business, along with some aspects of the industry, key employee roles, and family dynamics at play. In addition, a tax accountant who is viewed as a trusted advisor is in a key position to help a family-owned enterprise think through some of the most pertinent questions when it comes to succession planning.

The pay levels for board directors have been increasing as the board members’ responsibilities grow with the need to fully understand and navigate the challenges arising from a variety of areas including geopolitical risk, regulatory complexities, macroeconomic shock, climate/environmental challenges, and technology advancements.

The pay levels for board directors have been increasing as the board members’ responsibilities grow with the need to fully understand and navigate the challenges arising from a variety of areas including geopolitical risk, regulatory complexities, macroeconomic shock, climate/environmental challenges, and technology advancements.