Our Business and Exit Planning Process
At Inspired Wealth Solutions, we help business owners strike a balance between their business and personal planning needs. We realize that for you, everything in your financial world begins and ends with your business. Whether it’s retirement planning or healthcare decisions, your situation doesn’t fit the traditional planning mold.
As a business owner, you have the opportunity to dictate your own financial success in a way that few others do. However, that opportunity comes at the risk of a great deal more to lose if life doesn’t unfold as planned. During the course of our business planning process, we will help protect your business from loss, provide strategies to recruit, retain, and reward key employees, and most importantly guide you on when and how you can ultimately exit your business, helping to ensure that you and your family receive the full value of your life’s work.
Business Continuation Planning
Business Continuation PlanningWhen it comes to planning for tomorrow, as a successful business owner, it’s likely that you don’t just think about your own future; you also worry about the longevity of your company. Fortunately, there’s a solution that can help you protect both: business continuation planning.
When properly executed, business continuation planning aims to help your company thrive for the long term, regardless of what lies ahead. And it can help to protect your future as well, by ensuring that a succession plan is in place if you or one of your co-owners leaves the business — due to death, disability, retirement, or some other unplanned event.
Implementing business continuation planning using a buy-sell agreement helps you to prepare for the unexpected. That’s because a buy-sell agreement is a legal contract that obligates surviving owners, or the company itself, to buy out the interest of an owner who dies or becomes disabled. The agreement may also spell out other triggers for a purchase or sale, such as the retirement of an owner, the criminal conviction of an owner, and more. A buy-sell agreement also outlines methods to determine a fair price for the deceased or disabled owner’s interest in the business. And, when informally funded through the use of permanent life insurance, a buy-sell agreement can also help your company save money.
The advantages of a properly funded buy-sell agreement are many:
- It establishes a ready market to purchase the business
- It establishes a value for the purchase price of the business
- It identifies future buyers
- It identifies the events that would trigger the buy-sell agreement
- It provides a source of funds1 necessary to make the arrangement effective
It would be my pleasure to help you with your business continuation planning — and to help you fund it in an efficient manner. If you already have a buy-sell agreement, I can provide a complementary review to help ensure it is still meeting your needs. My goal is to help you worry less about the future, so you can focus more on running your successful business today. I’ll contact you soon, so we can start working on your customized business continuation plan.
1 All whole life insurance policy guarantees are subject to the timely payment of all required premiums and the claims-paying ability of the issuing insurance company. Withdrawals and loans from a life insurance policy reduce the death benefit and cash value, may increase the chance the policy will lapse, and may result in a tax liability if the policy terminates before the death of the insured.
Exit Planning for Business Owners
What was your vision for your business when you first started it? Did you just want to be your own boss or earn more money? You probably didn’t think about selling your company to your investors or partners or passing it down to the next generation. And yet, all business owners must eventually create an exit strategy for their company. Maybe it’s time to move on to another project that’s calling to you. Maybe it’s time to retire. Whatever your reasons, you need an exit strategy to help ensure that the business you built can continue to thrive after your departure.
There are many options available for an exit strategy, including:
- Going public
- Mergers & acquisitions
- Sale to a family member or peer
- Buyout by managers
- Selling to partners or investors
The sale of your business can be part of your retirement strategy, but it can also allow your vision to continue on even when you’re no longer actively involved. But before you can sell the company or pass it down, it’s a good idea to assess your business. The more value you can add, the more you can sell it for when it’s time.