“Opportunities are abundant” for business appraisers who are expanding their businesses into niche area such as succession planning, reported James Anderson (Burr Pilger Mayer) during theBVR webinar “Succession Planning & Exit Strategies: Challenges & Opportunities Today” last month. 

The purpose of succession planning is either to sell your business for maximum profit, transition the business to key employees, or keep the business in the family.  To demonstrate these points Anderson created a schematic he dubs “parallel tracking” (see below). The far left-hand side relates to the  “Sale of Business” which Anderson calls “the polishing of the apple type of scenario.” In the middle, “Internal Transfers” deal with the transfer of ownership to employees, and on the right-hand side “Family Transfers” focuses on legacy planning. The “Buy/Sell Agreements” box at the bottom ties it all together.

“Each one of these boxes – there are 12 in total - is an entrée point to about succession planning with a client,” said co-presenter Ron Seigneur (Seigneur Gustafson).  “Our job is to help business owners to understand the trade-offs of each.” 

“The succession planning process is “a great opportunity and a great supplement to litigation work, says Anderson. And “one of my biggest source of referrals is CPAs.”