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We frequently meet business owners who are hesitant to make a plan to transition their businesses to successors—often their adult children—during today’s volatile times. If volatility has put your transition on pause, we’d like to help change your mindset by focusing on just two words: volatility and plan.  Volatility  According to Merriam-Webster, the word volatile means: characterized by or subject to rapid or unexpected change. We see the word used a lot lately to describe the financial markets, wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, and national politics, to name

The transition of family businesses from Generation 1 to Generation 2 are complex, yet complexity increases exponentially in transitions from Generation 2 to Generation 3 and beyond. In this article we look at (1) the reasons for the complexity and (2) four building blocks of sustainable family business transitions.  Families: They’re Complicated!  Transitions from Gen. 1 to Gen. 2 typically involve parents and children in one family unit. This family could be blended (meaning it includes children from prior marriages), and that only some children might want to participate in

Great title for an article, right? A great topic, too … if only it were possible to know if and how early preparation saved a family business.  But there isn’t.  There are simply too many unexpected twists and turns, route changes and reboots in every transition journey to know that early preparation is the one thing that prevented a family business transition from becoming a catastrophic failure.  What we do know is that longer planning runways dramatically increase the odds of successful family business transitions because long runways give owners

“If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up somewhere else,” so said Yogi Berra, the man The Economist magazine named in 2005 as the “Wisest Fool of the Past 50 Years.” As far as we know, he was not talking about family business transitions, but his words certainly apply. Through long experience guiding owners, we’ve found that preparation is the best way to increase the odds of transition success. In this article, we share with you five key steps in preparing a family business for transition. Step

Navigating the complicated terrain of private and family business transitions is both an art and a science for everyone involved: owners, successors, their families, and us, as Transition Guides. On the art side of the equation are experience, intuition, careful listening, open-mindedness, humility, confidence, humor, and the attitude that others have the best of intentions. On the science side are setting and prioritizing goals, choosing a transition path, assessing family members’ preparation, willingness and ability to transition successfully, and preparing successors to lead. Today we want to introduce you to

The first question most owners wrestle with when they think about the future transition of their businesses to successors is: How much will your company be worth in a business transition? How much is the business worth and how do I figure that out? How much will my business be worth if I sell at the right time? How much at the wrong time? How much do I need from the transition of equity to achieve my financial goals? How much do I deserve from the transition in return for