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The Cashing Out Advisory Council™ is the retiring business owners’ singular resource for easily accessing essential professional advisory information and services to help them build, extract and preserve maximum value when selling their companies.

The Cashing Out Advisory Council™ (COAC™) is a holistic community of professional advisors committed to devising and deploying cashing out strategies for exiting entrepreneurs. The mission of the COAC™ is to provide retiring business owners with easy access to the multi-disciplinary advisory resources necessary for a seamless business transition. Each Cashing Out Advisory Council™ member offers a specific consultative service in the complex business selling process, yet also recognizes the broad array of solutions needed in a complete cashing out plan. COAC™ members share a common vision as well as role clarity and core ethical values, evidenced by their pledge to abide by the COAC™ Code of Ethical Conduct.

Cashing out is the process of converting the built-up equity inside a business into cash with the goal of realizing and retaining optimum value from all business assets. Selling a company is the biggest financial decision a business owner will ever make, and this decision is even more important for a retiring entrepreneur due to having unique and complex advisory needs. An expertly designed and executed cashing out plan creates a fluid business selling process that is consistent with an owner’s vision and accomplishes his or her financial and personal goals.

Furthermore, due to the aging of the baby boomers, we are at the precipice of the largest business transition in history, with millions of entrepreneurs seeking to monetize business equity. Deloitte & Touche recently reported that, "71% of small and mid-sized enterprise owners plan to exit their businesses over the next ten years."¹ Because only 30% of family businesses survive to the second generation and just 15% survive to the third², most companies are sold, and if a sale isn’t possible, closed. With so many companies up for sale at the same time, the increasing competition to sell demands innovative cashing out strategies to capture and conserve maximum value as well as create more cash with which to expedite a sale.

Most business owners are ill-prepared for the challenges involved in successfully selling a business for top dollar and on the best financial terms due to being preoccupied with the many pressing operational concerns of running a business—intense global competition, employee retention, escalating health care costs, business growth and capital acquisition. As a result, the critical issues of optimizing and protecting business value when converting hard-earned equity into hard cash don’t get much attention. In addition, many business owners admit that the cashing out process can seem overwhelming.

This is why an entrepreneur can be a spectacular success at running his or her business and a spectacular failure at selling it. In fact, few closely held business owners have any cashing out plan at all—even fewer know their company’s actual market value. Instead, they mistakenly rely on industry “rules of thumb” for determining valuation, “guesstimates” which can be wrong by up to 50% in either direction.

And, this is why the Cashing Out Advisory Council™ was created: To help retiring business owners secure and safeguard the full value of their business assets when selling their firms. We are a portal to the collective wisdom of a multi-disciplinary network of dedicated cashing out professionals, and our purpose is to provide insight into cashing out strategies and opportunities as well as specialized issues exiting entrepreneurs face as they transition out.

To view our “Featured Advisor Profile,” please click Featured Advisor Profile

To locate a COAC™ member in your area, please contact us at (650) 477-2726.

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Endnotes

¹ “Is Your Business Worth What You Think It Is?” Deloitte & Touche LLP – Canada, 2006
² Small Business Administration, 2003

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