If you are like many of our clients, you have built a successful business, you love your work and your clients, you've developed a great team, and you are having the time of your life. So why mess any of that up with talk of “exit planning”?
I recently invited a client friend of mine to an Exit Planning summit. He hesitated. He told me, “Tim, it's a great idea, but if I show my face at an exit planning summit, my competitors will think they smell blood in the water, and my employees will get nervous and start polishing their resumes. I can't risk that perception.”
And here is where the words of Chris Snyder, founder of the Exit Planning Institute, come into play:
“Exit Planning is simply good business planning.”
Read that again.
So what does “good exit planning” look like? Let’s compare it to getting your house ready to sell. Imagine your realtor comes in with a camera and a clipboard, and sweetly informs you that, in order to be “market-ready”, you will need to re landscape the back patio area, add new lighting, replace the pool filtration system, and spend thousands of dollars updating the kitchen. You and your spouse look at each other and sigh, but you eventually get contractors working on the punch list.
A few weeks later, you step back and look at the home. It's beautiful.
Uh-oh.
This wasn't supposed to happen. You weren't supposed to fall in love with this house again, but here you both are, talking about hosting your best friends for a backyard cookout, dreaming about adding a garden shed and greenhouse to do those green thumb projects you never thought you would get to. You love this home.
This house is as “market-ready” as it has ever been, but you dont want to sell. You
want to stay. More than that, you want to make this place even better.
This is why good exit planning is so transformational: the same things you need to do to prepare for Exit simultaneously prepare you for growth. And when you do this well, you might get to the end with a blessedly difficult decision to make.
Tomorrow, I will write more about exit planning. For now, if you have found this
helpful, I would be super grateful if you shared it with someone else like you who can benefit from it.
See you tomorrow!
Tim Weddle
Any opinions are those of The Weddle Team and not necessarily those of Raymond James Financial Services, Inc., or of Raymond James. The information contained in this presentation does not purport to be a complete description of the securities, markets, or developments referred to in this material. There is no assurance any of the trends mentioned will continue or forecasts will occur. The information has been obtained from sources considered to be reliable, but Raymond James does not guarantee that the foregoing material is accurate or complete. Any information is not a complete summary or statement of all available data necessary for making an investment decision and does not constitute a recommendation. Investing involves risk and you may incur a profit or loss regardless of strategy selected.
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