Contingency Planning FAQ
What is a contingency plan? A contingency plan is an agreement between two or more advisors designed to protect your business in case of your death, disability (temporary or permanent), loss of license, and possibly even retirement (although most plans do not deal with succession planning). There are a variety of plan types to solve for these issues:
Maximum Sales Value: The Role of Compliance in the Great Advisor Cash Out
This article was originally published by the National Ethics Association and E&O for Less on February 26th, 2016 and written by Harry J. Lew, NEA Chief Content Officer.
Revenue Sharing: Variable Comp and Your Value
We recently spoke with an advisor who generated $10.5 million in annual revenue and was contemplating the sale of his business. Like many, he expected a premium sale price/valuation given the size of his operation, his radio show that generated a consistent stream of new business, and being located in a very desirable market. Surely his business was worth the $30 Million he was expecting, right? The unfortunate part of the story is that, even though he had built a large “enterprise” and was the sole owner, he compensated all of his employees on an eat-what-you-kill (EWYK) model paying them a percentage of gross revenue for the book they serviced, leaving only a fraction of the total gross revenue to the owner (approximately $500K annually). Not exactly what you would expect from a $10.5 million business and would make a $30 million asking price seem ludicrous given the free cash flow.
Building a More Valuable Practice – Tip #3
Tip 1 | Tip 2 | Tip 3 | Tip 4 Growth is King One of the most important drivers of value in any business is growth. Historical growth, while no guarantor, is a useful proxy/tool for projecting a business or asset’s ability to produce revenue in the future. As a buyer, you will pay more for a practice that is growing each year than one that is getting smaller. One of the biggest mistakes advisors/reps/agents make is waiting too long to sell their businesses, often having contemplated selling for several years before they finally made the decision. By the time many decide to actually sell the business, they have been coasting for a few years, causing their growth to stall or even decline – making it a suboptimal time to sell. For financial service practices, growth of the business can happen in three specific ways. Anyone contemplating selling their business, or a buyer looking at practices to acquire, should pay attention to the following growth metrics.
9 Tips to Prepare Your Business for Sale
Depending on what source you look at, the average age of an advisor in the financial services industry is anywhere from 51-57 years old. While that would typically leave plenty of time until the average age of retirement, the average age of an advisor selling their business is much younger, most often occurring near age 59. This is due in large part to the long-term seller involvement that is ideal in the sale of a professional services business, ranging from as low as 12 months to as long as 5 years. While you may not sell your business, you will leave this industry – planned or unplanned. The better prepared you are for your eventual transition, the happier your clients will be with the process, and the more you are likely to get out of it (financially and emotionally).
Building a More Valuable Practice – Tip #1
Tip 1 | Tip 2 | Tip 3 | Tip 4 There are many ways to grow your practice – the most obvious being adding more revenue, more assets and/or more clients. The most valuable businesses in the industry however focus on building value in their enterprise every year, in addition to growing the revenue/asset base. There is a long list of recommendations that we would make as your succession/valuation consultant and the easiest way to understand these recommendations is to look at your business from a buyer’s perspective. When a buyer evaluates a business for purchase, there are many items reviewed in due diligence that drive or detract from the value, including the revenue sources, growth rate, age of the clients, location of clients, client service process and many others. Here is our first tip in this series of how to Build a More Valuable Practice:
How Soon Is Too Soon?
As a small business owner, there are many things that fill your typical day, most focused on either maintaining the business you’ve built or on ways to grow the business. Having worked with small business owners over the last decade, I know most of you reading this post don’t spend any measurable amount of time thinking about your succession/exit plan. With this in mind, the focus of this post is to answer a question I hear frequently from owners and their successors – “When should we start developing the succession plan?”
