Exit & Succession Planning

There are three doors you could walk through when you exit your business. Each brings certain benefits and challenges that need to be managed. Although you should plan for your first choice, it's important to be prepared to conted with all three:

• Sell to Insiders
• Sell to Outsiders
• Keep until Death

FGP offers a process that provides the framework to uncover opportunities, maximize results, and put you on a solid path to achieving all that is important to you.

Step One: Identify Owner Objectives

In the first and most indispensable of the Seven Exit Planning Steps, our Business Strategies advisors help business owners form their unique goals and  objectives that determine the destination for each Exit Plan. Making certain the owner understands the ramifications of his or her objectives establishes the groundwork for guiding owners through the process of benefiting from their life's work.

We help you clarify and prioritize objectives and focus energy on what is most urgent, so that you can control and define your Exit Planning process.

Step Two: Quantify  Business  and Personal Resources

Next, our advisors assist in establishing the value of an owner's business and personal resources both today and as a basis for the future. Business value is a critical component in an owner's ability to meet his or her exit objectives.  This allows you to  monitor progress toward the objectives, provides a basis for determining tax consequences of the various Exit paths, considers tax minimization, and analyzes and quantifies cash flow.

Step Three: Maximize and Protect Business Value

Then our Advisors help owners protect existing business value and create customized plans to build more value. Our process identifies Value Drivers, the elements that preserve and build the value of a business the owner has worked so hard to create, and those that are most important to meeting the owner's objectives. We formulate steps to protect the tangible and intangible value of the business, reduce income taxes upon sale of business and protect assets from potential business and personal creditors. This is designed to increase business value and cash flow, create the ability to sell the business and motivates and retain key employees.

Step Four: Sale of Ownership to a Third  Party

Sometimes owners desire to sell to a third party, and our advisors are here to prepare you and your company for sale. We are here to help you understand the merger and acquisition market of Instrinsic/Extrinsic/Promoted Value, determine a strategic design based on your timeframe, and structure the deal.

Step Five: Transfer Ownership to a Key Employee Group or Family

Our Business Strategies advisors help owners who choose this Exit Path create a transfer plan that keeps owners in control of the business until purchase is completed. This path can motivate and retain key employees, while planning can reduce risk minimize taxes. 

Step Six: Business Continuity:  Lifetime  and At Death

We work with owners to protect businesses (and owners' families) in case the owner does not live to transfer or sell the business. For co-owned businesses, we structure a plan that facilitates the departure of one owner in a way that is equitable to both the departing and remaining shareholders. A complete Exit Plan incorporates potential changes, such as death or permanent disability of an owner, so that the owner's objectives can still be achieved if circumstances change while he or she still owns a stake in the business. 

Step Seven: Personal Wealth and Estate Planning

We help you coordinate your plans for your businesses with your estate plans for your family. The ownership and sale of a business generates cash for owners, their families and the IRS. In this component, owners and their advisors create a plan that not only preserves wealth, but minimizes taxes using both lifetime and death planning tools. Many business owners believe that personal financial and estate planning are closely tied to planning for their business interest, and some do not, but all agree that personal planning is essential to reaching objectives that are tied to personal wealth.