You know, if you're looking to sell, like, what are the things that should be top of mind?

I would really say when you're thinking about, "Okay, when do I need to get involved here?" Like, "Well, when should I start be thinking about exit planning, succession planning?" Um, two really critical questions I ask business owners all the time is, first, how prepared do you want to be for a sale? If the answer is very prepared, then you probably do need to start earlier rather than later, right? Conversations can come together very quickly from, you know, a potential buyer.

Maybe it's someone you didn't anticipate, m- you know, being interested in buying your business, or all of a sudden just the conversation starts heading that direction with someone that maybe you've known about in the market, and, you know, you see them wherever it might be, at a conference, some industry event.

And all of a sudden you don't even know where to begin because you haven't really gone down that path.

So buyers are very good at making you throw out a number, right? Or trying to gauge, you know, okay, you know, realistically, what would this look like from you? And if you haven't gone through the process already, that's going to potentially leave you in a situation where, you know, you're a bit vulnerable without having, you know, any backing from, okay, what valuation should you be expecting in this transaction? So that's the first question.

The second question is, how important is the value of your business to your net worth, to your overall estate, to your overall wealth planning? Um, to the extent that it matters at all, which is, like, 99.9%, then you really are gonna be wanting to, um, kind of be kicking that process off, getting it started, 'cause some of the more powerful estate planning tools do take time to implement.

Um, they can't be done just in, you know, like a month or something of that nature, and therefore you probably wanna be allowing yourself to have as many tools at your, um, disposal as possible.

Um, and also, like, what problems could potentially delay the transaction?