You’ve been there before you turned on the lights for the first time. You envisioned how this business venture would get off the ground and what it could become. You’ve got years of stories about how it went right and how it sometimes went incredibly wrong. You’ve built a great organizational chart with a dedicated team of capable people, some no longer with the team and some who’ve made significant contributions to the operation, all of which are a part of your story.
You’ve planned everything for years. Now it’s time to begin thinking about what’s next. Most business owners don’t want to run their operations forever. Some will die on the shop floor. The vast majority of entrepreneurs don’t plan for the inevitable. Nearly 85% of business owners we’ve met over the last 25 years don’t have a well-developed exit strategy and they can miss out on maximizing their asset value w/out proper organization and planning. At S&P Capital Partners, the following topics, concepts, and objectives all belong to a careful and well-developed exit strategy:
Liquidity & Exit Planning
- Liquidity Planning
- Whether it be integrated financial forecasting, collections automation, or understanding your liquidity requirements, we can help assess your cash flow needs, accurately assess asset valuation, or potentially generate additional income that a business owner may not realize otherwise.
- Selling a Business
- Reasons, timing, documentation, determining value, courting potential buyers, managing financial, legal, HR, insurance, environmental, and taxation diligence are all part of selling a business entity. It’s not easy to sell a business at any price point. There are variables, moving parts, and many unknowns that get answered as we work through the process.
- Pre-transaction Planning
- Business owners rarely play out the entirety of a business exit before deciding to put their business on the market. We help navigate the emotional ebb and flow of pre-planning to protect your family’s investment and livelihood along with developing a transparent process that can reduce potential internal conflict. In addition, planning now for the future to include contingency planning review, tax exposure mitigation, along with charitable and inheritance giving plans, will eliminate several transactional questions amongst an abundance of unknowns.
- Transaction Planning
- Taking a business to market requires dedicated planning that is specific in its objective. We’re answering several questions that will come up during the marketing and transactional phase of an M&A transaction before we ever go to market. We want to make sure your business entities are in the best shape to generate the best price and terms for you and your shareholders.
- Exit Strategies
- There are a myriad of options to begin the potential business exit strategies discussion. Do we look to bring on a partner to help facilitate growth via majority recapitalization? Do we sell internally, do we bring on additional management to take the majority shareholder(s) out of the day-to-day, or do we shut down operations and call it a day? Do we go public? Our team at S&P Capital Partners will take the guesswork out of the conversation and help create foundational solutions to maximize your business value before a transaction.
- Estate Planning
- Business owners want to ensure their lifetime of creating assets is managed properly during and after their lifespan. While estate planning costs money and time, thorough estate planning will guarantee that your assets are distributed according to your preferences, your beneficiaries are clearly defined, and a pathway for decision-making is established on your behalf should you be unable to do so.
- Succession Planning
- Long-term succession planning strengthens any organization. Establishing critical positions and highlighting potential vacancies, determining critical skills and future employee performance necessary for business continuity, and focusing on individual and group development to meet future business needs are all components of long-term planning that need immediate and regular attention. It takes foresight and experience to build out a succession plan. We’ve worked with businesses at every stage of the business life cycle and understand that although each business’ needs are unique and specific, there are certain standards that we’ve found are universal. We’ll make sure those foundational standards are solidified while we help plan for succession.
- Business and Asset Valuation
- “How much is our business worth?” It’s the question we receive more than any other. Business valuation consists of multiple variables linked to an excess of variances. We provide detailed metrics based on your empirical data. In addition, we dig into recent comparable sales and specific industry metrics that establish a marketable range of value for your business.
- Tax Mitigation Strategies
- Taxation and reporting are complicated and time-consuming. The sooner you begin having conversations about tax savings, the better. Whether exit planning, pre-determining allocation, maximizing deductions, deferring income, depreciation calculations, taking advantage of business tax credits, etc. proper tax planning is a critical component of a successful business exit strategy. Our team can help navigate this complex and often enigmatic department.
- Cash Flow Strategies
- Business owners have felt the cash flow crunch at some point in the business cycle. Often many times. You may need new software to track cash inflows and outflows and establish consistent invoicing and receivables, more payment options for customers, better terms to improve customer viability, etc. Our team can help develop cash flow management strategies to stabilize and improve operations.
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