When you are ready to ask for help planning your exit – how to get out, where do you turn for help? Here are five questions to ask potential advisors to determine if they will focus on your best interests.
1. What is your specialty? What is your core business?
You want an exit strategist whose focus is exclusively on your optimal exit, who is not distracted by other disciplines.
2. How will you charge me for exit planning services pre and post transaction?
You want to know you are being charged for exit planning expertise and exit planning time, not attorney time to do exit planning. You need an exit strategist on board, engaged in your situation years before you need your attorneys, accountants, and wealth and insurance advisors.
3. How engaged will you be in my operational implementation and transition up to the transaction?
Leading up to the transaction, licensed advisors will be focused on the expertise they bring to the table. Their availability will be limited to help you with operational decisions and issues leading up to the transaction. After the transaction, you will need your exit strategist engaged to ensure your total integration into your reinvention lifestyle, but after the transaction, licensed expert advisors will move on to the next transaction. How much will they/can they be there for you?
You want an exit planner who will be fully engaged in operational implementation, growth and optimization strategies and your own transformation from operational president/owner to the strategic CEO of a stronger more profitable enterprise, not just the 6-month end game.
4. Will you help me assess exit options and timing/tax/liquidity impact of each?
You need an exit planner to help facilitate discussions with all your exit advisors to integrate their recommendations and tradeoffs for each exit option you are considering. An exit expert who stays focused in their own silo of expertise cannot provide the wider perspective you need to make the best decisions.
5. What will you do to assist me in determining my reinvention plan and my goals and lifestyle beyond the business exit?
The licensed experts you engage for their expertise can ask you all the right questions, but they expect you to prepare and deliver the answers on your own. You need an exit strategist who will assist you in developing your reinvention plan and lifestyle beyond the exit, test it, refine it and lay out a blueprint to implement it from Day 1 of your reinvention.
Whether you engage the Exit This Way Out Group as your virtual partner or not, you need to use the materials, checklists, tables and guidelines provided here on the site and in this blog to make your business a wealth producing machine that will provide the financial independence you dream of to fund your reinvention.
