Your Business is Our Business

By Peter McGuire, Esq.

As a firm focused primarily on estate planning, Strauss Attorneys works intimately with our clients to plan appropriately with a complete and accurate asset profile. Often with our business owner clients, that asset profile includes, first and foremost, the business itself. Planning for one’s business is absolutely planning one’s estate.

As our clients with businesses approach the idea of retirement and succession, we find that a large majority have not devoted the necessary time or strategic planning to dictate how the business might continue after one exits stage left. The reasons for this are myriad, from pure procrastination to an understandable unwillingness to redirect time to planning strategies that would otherwise be spent making a profit.

At Strauss Attorneys, we recognize this area of estate planning as one that requires particularized skills to address the many elements of business succession. Most clients understand that straight sales to third parties are rare, at least sales involving a continuation of a business as opposed to a fire sales of assets. Continuation of the entity that provided for our clients for so many years is a concept that is dear to their hearts and important to their planning goals. Moreover, many clients have ideas of their business’s valuation that will never be recognized on the open market. Lastly, many clients have ideas for their business succession that include family or key employees taking the helm. Of course, the common problem we encounter with the inside sale is that often the buyers do not have the money to adequately provide our client a comfortable retirement.

These are problems with solutions. The solutions can also be implemented in a manner that minimizes the time away from the client’s business and reduces the omnipresent question marks associated with succession planning. Strauss Attorneys has formed a strategic alliance with a number of area financial planners, business valuators, business consultants, and certified public accountants, and has joined Business Enterprise Institute (BEI) to hone a true team approach to best, and most efficiently, implement business succession strategies. We have done this by customizing each plan to the client with a step by step approach that simplifies the process yet keeps an eye on the client’s specific goals for the business post-exit. The result has been a highly specific plan that minimizes waste and duplication across the spectrum of advisors, and maximizes cost control, tax savings and time management.

Strauss Attorneys works directly with clients as well as with advisors with business clients to consult and implement these strategies. If you are interested in, or have a client who made have a need for, these services, please contact Attorney Peter McGuire at Strauss Attorneys at (828) 258-0994 in Asheville, or (828) 696-1811 in Hendersonville. Additionally, our firm would be happy to provide additional information or include you on a special business succession electronic newsletter.