I’m Selling My Business

What you keep is decided long before you ever sign.

For most owners, this is the largest financial event of your life, and the one you have the least experience with. You have run the company for years. You have sold it exactly zero times. So it is natural to focus on what you can see, finding a buyer and agreeing on a price, when the decisions that matter most happen quietly, well before the deal.

Most owners leave them to the last minute. Only 9% of Canadian business owners have a formal succession plan, even as three-quarters intend to exit within the decade (CFIB, 2023). The gap is not a lack of intent. It is that the work feels like it can wait. It cannot.

The sale is the event. It is rarely the real problem.

What you came in thinking about is the price. What usually decides how much you keep, and how well the next chapter goes, sits underneath it:

How the business is structured before the sale, because the difference between selling well and selling unprepared can change the tax bill by a wide margin. Whether you have used what the tax system allows, including the lifetime capital gains exemption and the right holding structure. What the proceeds have to do the day after, when a lifetime of value becomes the wealth that now has to last. And the question few advisors ask: what you will do with yourself when the thing you built is no longer yours.

The owners who do best start this years before they sell, not months.

Where to begin, well before the sale

Depending on where you are, the next step might be Business Succession & Exit Planning, the pre-sale work in Corporate Structuring & Tax, or the plan for what the proceeds become in Wealth Foundations and Retirement Planning. The whole picture lives in Business Wealth Strategy.

You will sell your business once. It is worth getting that once right.

You do not need to have it figured out before you call. That is the point of the first conversation: we look at the business and the life around it, and tell you honestly where the real work is.