Most business owners have a good law firm or a good accounting firm, but nobody is really thinking about them across the whole picture. The professions see their clients as a transaction, or a small series of transactions. They are not in between the silos. So bad things happen. Things fall through the holes, things never get done, or each firm only works inside its own lane.
And nobody knows what to ask for. The owner is the one who should ask, but he cannot, because he often does not know what he needs. So I am trying to be a bridge on the top of all of these professions and professionals, to make the whole system clean and clear and run like clockwork, on both offense and defense, at the business level and the family level.
I hear the same thing over and over from the law firms and accounting firms: we have never seen anybody do what you do.
Why There Are Two Businesses
I run a small practice, Long Family Office. We do not have a huge number of clients, but for me it is enough. It is an efficient, small practice that is still well worthwhile.
There is a second business too, Build.Prove.Sell, which provides exit planning and business consulting. The two are legally separate, but often work together for the benefit of the clients. Most of the people we work with are business owners, or people who have sold a business and retired.
What I Do
The core of it is simple to say but takes time to accomplish: we want owners to run their company so it is always ready to be sold. A company that is prepared to be sold is worth more money, runs more efficiently, and gives the owner options, whether they want to keep it, transition it to their kids, or go to sale. It means that the company is also ready to grow and capable of accessing capital when needed. But I want it ready for the negative side too, death or disability, and I want the company to run as much as possible on its own.
I want the owner to move into what I call the ambassador role: lots of time to think, to make connections, sometimes to close big deals, but generally out of the day-to-day operations. Alongside the company, I cover the estate planning, the tax planning, and the personal-life pieces. I go through each piece of their life and each piece of their business.
A lot of that is getting things clean for a buyer. For instance, we arrange the accounting so it's in the form the buyers expect to see, so that when there is due diligence and the buyer comes in with their accountants and lawyers to decide whether they want to buy the company, the accounting is in a format and operates the way they expect it to look.
I do not like surprises when we go in for a sale. Nothing should be a surprise. I want the accounting crystal clear, the entity clean, the books and records clean, and a strong management team in place, just to name a few things. We go down to the level of even reviewing the property and casualty to make sure there are no holes.
We want them to begin to look at their business through the eyes of a buyer and not the eyes of an owner because those are two different perspectives. We want them to see the things that make a buyer nervous and would cause them to withdraw or offer less. I tell my clients all the time: Capital is a coward and it will run if it perceives too much risk in a deal.
Building Wealth Outside the Business
Too many business owners have way too much wealth inside their business. They have not thought to make themselves independently wealthy. But when something bad happens to the company, the family is in a lot of trouble. So part of the work is building net worth outside the company, so the family is not exposed to undue risk.
I have written before about why exit planning is about more than just selling your business, and this is the other half of it. The company being ready is one thing. The family being protected, and even having wealth independent of the company, is the other. We want our clients to retain walk away power from a sale right up until the close.
Why It Takes Years
That is why the work tends to take two or three years before the company and the family are really under control. No single-lane professional can do it, because the value is not inside any one lane. It is the bridge that sits above all of them, connecting them together that gives them strength and knowledge that both the business and the family are in fact prepared for a sale or to retain the business for the family going forward. Then they have options they can pursue with confidence.
Once it is in place, the owner is not just protected. They can finally see the whole board, and even the harder decisions tend to get easier from there.
