Exit & Succession Planning

You will exit this business eventually. The question is not whether — it is whether the exit happens on your terms or someone else's. An unplanned exit — forced by health, by a partner dispute, by a buyer who arrives when you're not ready — almost always produces a worse outcome than one structured, prepared, and executed deliberately.

The owners who get the best exits are not the luckiest ones. They are the ones who started thinking about the exit long before it was urgent.

Exit planning has traditionally been treated as a late-stage event — something you do when you're ready to sell, not while you're still building. That framing is the most expensive mistake most business owners make.

The tax structures that determine how much of the sale price you keep must be in place for 24 months before the transaction under Canada's Lifetime Capital Gains Exemption rules. The operational systems that make a business saleable take time to build. The customer relationships that need to survive an ownership transition take time to transfer. None of that can be compressed into the six months before closing.

We build your exit strategy as a multi-year plan — starting from where the business is today and working backward from the outcome you want. We assess your business's current readiness for sale: financial quality, operational documentation, customer and supplier dependency, management structure, and tax position.

We identify the gaps and sequence the changes required to close them. For Canadian business owners, we ensure the corporate structure and ownership conditions are in place to access the Lifetime Capital Gains Exemption — up to $1.25M of capital gains sheltered tax-free on a qualifying sale of small business corporation shares.

For owners considering succession to family members or key employees, we model the financial structure of the transition and the tax implications on both sides.