Keep, Sell or Succeed the Family Business

I want to talk about the case for keeping a business versus selling it without, of course, giving any financial or legal advice, right? But I think, well, I know that this conversation today is about exploring and making the case for keeping the business or at least considering it.

Mm-hmm.

Can we talk about that a little bit and maybe some of those benefits of keeping the business that fly under the radar? It seems that it might be, it might seem or be almost a norm to like sell it.

yeah yeah especially especially in today's markets we're seeing that that's kind of the the plan going in right i'm gonna i'm gonna create this business i'm gonna grow it fast and then i'm gonna sell it and be done um which i guess is is fine i mean that that if that works for them that's fine um it really comes down to what the goal of the family is um And my experience in growing up in a family business was that the business and the family were pretty similar.

We held the same.

We tried to hold the same values, tried to work honestly with each other, all those types of things that you that you deal with in family dynamics.

We dealt with them as business as well.

And we had.

You know, we had employees that worked with us for multiple generations.

We had some that worked for us for 40 to 50 years.

They're family at that point.

So how do you deal with the sale of the business and still provide for them? They probably don't want to work for somebody else.

They like working for you and your family, right? So there's a lot of dynamics that go into it.

Now, what I find is that most entrepreneurs haven't thought about it.

They haven't even thought about what they want to do with the business.

So that's usually where my conversation starts.

Let's talk to the kids.

Is there anybody that wants to take it over, that has any sort of interest in what the business does?

Can you go back, sorry, to where you said that most of your conversations start? They start in a position of where the individual hasn't really explored.

Yeah, so if they haven't explored and we're talking about what to do estate planning-wise with their business, I mean, that's the first kind of questions I want to know is...

Is succession to the next generation even a possibility? Like, are there kids that want to take it over, have the tools to take it over? What education do they need? Do we still need to support them in certain ways? Then if that's a possibility, now let's look at it.

And then if it's not a possibility, then we can look at, you know, is there a plan for sale? When is that sale going to take place? You know, who are the buyers? What are the markets like?

And how long of a, sorry, Matt.

No, no, go ahead.

But how long of a journey, right? This is a discovery phase you're describing.