Practice Area
Succession Planning
For business owners passing the company on — to family, partners, key employees, or the next chapter. Planned together with the personal estate, because none of it works in isolation.
For a business owner, succession is rarely just about ownership. It’s about who runs the company, how value transfers, what the family becomes when the business is no longer the family’s center, and what the founder does with the next chapter.
We plan all of it together — because none of it can be planned in isolation. The estate plan, the buy-sell, the gifting strategy, the management transition, and the family conversations are all the same project. We’ve learned to treat them that way.
“The right time to plan succession is when you don’t need to. The wrong time is when you do.”
What’s included
Coordinated planning, multi-year roadmap
- Ownership transition design Sale, gift, family transfer, ESOP — choosing among them with eyes open to the tax, legal, and family implications.
- Buy-sell & shareholder agreements Drafting and updating the agreements that govern who can own the business and at what price.
- Estate & gift tax strategies Lifetime exemption use, valuation discounts, GRATs, family limited partnerships when they fit.
- Valuation coordination Working with qualified appraisers to support the values used in the plan.
- Family governance & communication How the family talks about the business, makes decisions, and handles disagreements once the founder is no longer the deciding voice.
- Key-person & management transition Identifying who runs the company next, retaining them, and structuring incentives that align with the transition.
- Coordinated personal estate planning The owner’s will, trusts, and beneficiary structures — drafted in lockstep with the business succession plan.
- Multi-year roadmaps When the transition needs to happen in stages, we map the sequence and the dependencies.
Owners of closely-held businesses thinking about how the company outlasts them — whether the next chapter is a child, a key employee, a strategic buyer, or an ESOP.
We work most often with founders whose business is a meaningful share of their personal wealth, whose family is part of how the business runs, and whose timeline gives us room to do the planning right rather than under deadline pressure.
Thinking about the next chapter?
A consultation is a conversation. We’ll listen.
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