Mark Richards has been in the advanced planning and life insurance space for more than four decades. He has served ultra-high-net-worth families, family-owned businesses, and privately held companies. And across that time, he went through not one, not two, but three major business transitions. When Mark joined us on a recent episode of the Business Transition Roadmap podcast, he shared his full story with a level of openness that every business owner can learn from. The thing that stays with me from this conversation is how the values behind his
There is something that almost every successful business owner has in common. You have built the team. You have built up the revenue. You have got your reputation. And you are still building. That is good. That is actually great. But there is one thing most founders never build: a plan for what happens when something changes. Not because they are careless. Not because they have not thought about it. But because when you are still in the middle of building, the idea of planning for what comes next can
Most business owners spend decades building something and then only months trying to sell it. That gap is where value disappears, deals fall apart, and sellers walk away with regret. Tim Vorhoff, founding partner of CreoValo and author of Exit Right: How to Sell Your Company, joined Elizabeth Ledoux on the Business Transition Roadmap podcast to talk about what it actually takes to prepare a business for an external sale. Tim is a veteran of Evercore turned founder and advocate who helps mid-market and family-run business owners prepare for and
When a business crosses the $10 million mark, everything about transition gets more complex. More stakeholders. More tax implications. More at risk if the process goes sideways. And yet, the thing that causes most transitions to fail at this level is the same thing that causes them to fail at every level: the people involved were never aligned. If you are looking for a transition consulting firm to help you move through this, here is what to actually look for, what to watch out for, and why the most expensive
Your attorney has a plan. Your CPA has a plan. Your financial advisor has a plan. But do you have one? Not a tax strategy or an estate document. A plan for the people. The conversations. The relationships that will either hold your family together through this process or quietly fall apart while everyone focuses on the paperwork. That is the difference between exit planning and business transition planning. And when only one of those is happening, the most important part of the equation gets left to chance. The
If you run a small business and someone brings up the word “governance,” your first instinct is probably to change the subject. It sounds corporate. It sounds slow. And if you have been making every decision yourself for the last 10 or 20 years, it sounds like someone wants to put handcuffs on you. I hear this from business owners all the time. And I understand the resistance. You built this thing by being decisive. You go home, think about it for a couple of nights, come back, and say,
If you are in the middle of planning a business transition, or even just starting to think about one, chances are someone has already told you to call your attorney. Get the entities set up. Talk to your CPA about the tax implications. Put together an estate plan before a sale or a transition. That advice is not wrong. Those professionals are essential, and every successful transition needs them. Bring smart people together who are specialists in their area and you are going to get a great plan. But here
There is a particular kind of stuck that only shows up in people who have built something significant. They are decisive in business. They can read a market, manage a crisis, and make a hundred calls a day without flinching. But ask them to sit down and plan what comes after the business, and everything grinds to a halt. Dennis Passis, founder of the Family Wealth Library and author of Founder Paralysis, has a name for it. And in a recent conversation on the Business Transition Roadmap podcast, he helped
We work with a lot of families and owners who are carrying a quiet fear. They’ll say things like, “I don’t want my family to fight over this,” or “I just want to protect what I’ve built.” And underneath those words is this belief that they have to choose between keeping their family together and preserving their business legacy. It’s one of the most common things we hear. And I want to tell you: you don’t have to choose. We have plenty of examples where families ended up with both
