• Remind your client that it’s a marathon and not a sprint.
• Make sure your client fully understands that buyers pay a premium for certainty, which translates into consistent customer revenues and relationships. It also means a clear understanding of relevant leadership succession. Address succession well in advance of a letter of intent or a leadership uprising.
• Having a financial and estate plan in place is invaluable. Many clients don’t appreciate that advance financial planning will translate into permanent tax savings. As advisors, we understand these strategies. It’s imperative they are addressed early in the process so the team understands the client’s goals.
• The sales process can be very iterative as the specifics of the transaction evolve. Have an analytical tool that ties the deal structure into the CPA’s tax analysis and your client’s financial and estate plan so the client clearly understands the ramifications of changes that get made after the letter of intent is signed. And, of course, there always are changes.
• Make sure you have addressed your firm’s long-term competency for investing your client’s sales proceeds. The financial and estate plan should already have the relevant investment strategies for your client’s accounts, trusts and other charitable entities that may have been created as part of your client’s planning. Your clients will be moving from regular cash flow to portfolio withdrawals, and probably won’t understand the investment portfolio at the level they understood their businesses. Show them how their overall strategy, allocations and accounts tie into their long-term goals as well as their regular cash-flow requirements.
As you can see, competently working with business owners, especially through the process of selling their businesses, requires exceptional skill, care, teamwork and advanced planning. Before marketing yourself as a business owner specialist, be sure you’re willing to make a personal investment of time to have your tools, team and techniques in place.
After all, you don’t want your clients to ever think that, because they are coming into money, maybe they want to upgrade their advisor, too.