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7 min
Selling the shop: a two-year checklist
The best time to plan the sale of a business is two years before it. Here is what June does in each of those twenty-four months.
Written by
June Okafor
Most owners start planning a sale when a buyer calls. By then, many of the decisions that set how much you keep are already made: the entity, the payroll history, who owns which shares.
Two years out, we review the structure and clean up the books. Eighteen months out, we look at gifting shares to family or a trust while their value is still modest. A year out, we model the tax on different deal structures. Six months out, we build the plan for the proceeds, so the money has somewhere to go on day one.
Owners who give themselves the two years tend to keep noticeably more and sleep noticeably better. Paul and Nadia sold their ceramics studio this way; they still have Sunday dinners on the same budget.
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