Prepare the structure before you sell or hand it over.
A business is usually easier to sell, and a transfer to the next generation usually goes better, when the ownership structure was built with that moment in mind, not fixed afterward under time pressure.
What a buyer’s advisors find.
Diligence rarely kills a deal. It repositions one, and almost everything it repositions was fixable eighteen months earlier at a fraction of the cost.
In our experience, the same handful of things surface in almost every diligence process: ownership that can’t be evidenced end to end, silence on change of control, key-person dependency, informal related-party terms, undocumented tax positions, and a structure that can’t receive the proceeds well.
We go through all six with you before a buyer does.
Every item above has a cheap version and an expensive version. The variable is not difficulty. It is when.
What this solves.
Sale readiness
The ownership record, the entity structure, the related-party terms and the governance history, put into the condition a buyer’s advisors expect to find them, well before a process starts, so that nothing has to be negotiated from a weak position or explained under an exclusivity clock.
Buyer search support, alongside your broker
Where a founder does not yet have a corporate finance adviser or broker, we help identify and work with one. We do not run the process. Being useful in the introduction is different from holding the mandate.
Succession and transfer to family
A handover to the next generation is a transaction with no counterparty to keep it honest, which makes the structuring more important rather than less. Who receives what, on what terms, with what control, and what happens to the people who are not taking over.
Proceeds, before they arrive
The receiving structure built, funded and governed in advance, so that after the sale the question is where the money goes rather than where it might be put. For most founders this is the moment concentration in one business becomes concentration in one currency, which is the point at which the offshore conversation stops being theoretical.
Working with your broker or dealmaker.
We do not compete for the deal mandate. Preparing a structure for a sale and running a sale are different disciplines, and the founders who do best have both: an adviser whose mandate is the transaction, and separately someone responsible for the ownership architecture the transaction has to pass through.
There is a structural reason to keep them separate. An adviser paid on completion is the wrong person to ask whether the transaction should wait a year for structural reasons. That question needs someone with no fee riding on the answer, and our fee does not depend on whether you sell.
If you already have a broker, they keep the mandate and the transaction fee. We brief them, work to their timetable, and hand over a clean structure. If you are a broker, this is what that looks like from your side.
If a credible offer arrived on Monday, what would you want finished first?
Write that list. It is usually short, usually structural, and usually takes twelve to twenty-four months to do properly and calmly. That list is the work.
A founder here is often time-pressured and not ready for a full diagnostic, so this is the one page where the ask is smaller: a conversation, not a Snapshot.
General information about structuring and governance, written for founders. It is not legal, tax or financial advice, and it does not take your circumstances into account.