Valuation Insights: Aligning Business and Personal Investment in Enterprise Transitions

Welcome to Legacy Builders, strategies for building successful family enterprises. Brought to you by Beacon Family Office at Assante Financial Management Limited. I’m your host, Cory Gagnon, Senior Wealth Advisor. And on this show, we explore global ideas, concepts, and models that help family enterprises better navigate the complexities of family wealth.

Today we welcome Sharon Gray, founder and partner at RDT Valuations Group Inc. With over 35 years of experience navigating the complex financial landscapes of diverse organizations and industries, Sharon excels at analyzing and simplifying intricate business and financial situations. Sharon is a Chartered Professional Accountant and holds the Certified Business Valuator and Family Enterprise Advisor designation. Harnessing her sharp analytical skills and

innovative problem-solving approach, Sharon’s pioneering work has enabled clients to make solid, well-founded, and proactive decisions with confidence, fostering understanding and collaboration among all parties involved in the process.

My goal is to be the most curious person in today’s conversation with Sharon, where we explore the complexities of family business valuation and the importance of proactive planning. Sharon emphasizes the need for a cohesive plan that balances personal financial needs with business investment and the challenges of transitioning ownership between generations. We’ll also highlight the significance of understanding value drivers, managing expectations, and making informed decisions to ensure the long-term success of the family enterprise.

Now let’s dive in! 

Cory: Welcome, Sharon. We’re excited to have you today to share your wealth, knowledge, and experiences with us. Let’s dive in, shall we?

Sharon: Thank you, Cory. Happy to be here.

Cory: Sharon, imagine you’re delivering the commencement speech to the graduating class of 2024, and you have the chance to inspire them with your story. How would you begin your speech to convey the incredible lessons and experiences that you’ve gained throughout your career?

Sharon: That’s a heavy-weight conversation to start with. I think like anyone who reaches a certain age and stage in their life, they reflect on all the decisions they made along the way and realize that a lot of things happen out of happenstance and luck including hard work and energy spent trying to perfect the plan.

I think that we would all realize later that you know many things go off the rails along the way. All we can do is do our best at that time but it also gives you some reflection that most things aren’t life-altering especially in the business category, many things can go wrong.

Many things do go wrong, many things don’t certainly go as planned. But most often, those are blips along a longer journey. The ability of business owners and business families to navigate some of these impactful moments for good and bad is what defines the legacy.

One of the most descriptive slides when I took my family enterprise advisor program for me, was a continuum. It was just a flat line with birth on one end and the left, death. The description was about the longevity of families and also that during a lifetime, a legacy, a family succession, there will be blips within that line.

There be deaths, there will be divorces, and there’ll be probably bad decision-making. There’ll be people that come and go in the business. The true legacy of the ability to weather that is to recognize that those things I think are going to happen and to plan the best you can around the fact that they will happen.

Let’s get some processes and structures in place to allow us to weather those situations in a lot more proactive way rather than just being reactive when they do happen.

Cory: There’s so much to dive into there Sharon. I’m very excited about it! You mentioned the perfect plan going back to that sense of need to make something perfect.  How in your career and your lifetime have you seen that? Work and maybe not work for people or yourself?

Sharon: Well, I think as individuals, we all think we’re doing the right thing. We are all independent of everyone outside of us, we believe that the decisions we’re making, the plans that we view for our kids and our families, and our companies are all the right things.

For many reasons, perhaps, where the person that is the driving force behind them, perhaps our kids aren’t ready for the transition, time and conditions suggest that you got to put hard work in but sometimes that’s not the right thing to do.

We have to give away or give up before we need to give up. You have to transition earlier than you probably think you need to transition you need to bring people in place, in advance of when you possibly need them, on the ground, you need to bring up people with a longer runway.

You’re not just dropping people into the middle of a situation that is too gnarly to kind of unwind themselves. It’s about recognizing that when you think about families, it is a bit of some person gaining and some person giving.

Cory: Right. If we go back to that process and the giving before you feel ready, does that translate to the processes that allow the business, the family, and the enterprise itself to build it to weather the storm? Is that some of the same as you were getting it?

Sharon: I think we all have to be proactive and when you’re proactive, firstly, you feel more in control. So much of people’s stress is that they don’t spend enough time planning so when things do go off the rails or when issues happen, you’re in emergent mode and you don’t know how you carry on, unwrap yourselves, and move forward.

Thinking through some of the processes to transition, perhaps it’s not today, perhaps it’s 5 years from now allow you some reflective time. Maybe, put in place some of the things you should be putting in place before you transition it. I’m a finance person and I’ve worked on many situations where often the builder of the business, they’re not ready to sell the business or to transition it.

They have their children come in and work very hard and diligently. As they’re working very hard and diligently, the father is often the father spending less and less time there. There’s been no formal transition of ownership, so what’s happened from a financial perspective is the kids are bringing wealth to the business.

They contribute to its growth and its prosperity. And then, you do a transaction where the ownership changes, and the kids will have to pay for their effort.

Cory: Right.

Sharon: There can be very challenging conversations when there’s been that shifting of impact but not a coinciding shifting of power or ownership that does have an impact on the family dynamic.

Cory: If you were to say, the paying for their efforts and I love that going into that discussion, Sharon, is how it’s almost people realize it when it’s too late. How can they proactively get ahead of this when they’re thinking about it or maybe their advisors are bringing it up to them so that they don’t get to that point where you get involved and they realize that we’ve created a bit of an issue?

Sharon: Well, people do create a bit of an issue especially when they own businesses because it’s a constant fight between paying yourself personally and investing in the company. I think in terms of the financial side which is often a driver of when you transition, people have to feel ready financially.

You need to have a more cohesive plan between your business and how those profits that generated how it expands and how its financial aspects are impacting you personally. Because for the builder, often the builder is the person who takes great pride in the expansion of the company. They’ve done it from the grassroots up and the number of trucks on the road is what brings them great pride.

Cory: Yep.

Sharon:  In doing so, they’ve starved the other side of their equation which is the fine of their financial situation. The only thing that they have is the company which becomes more and more profitable and bigger and bigger for the 2nd generation It becomes a minefield to try to figure out the best way to pay the builder while not starving, and it’s because of the price that it’s going to cost. There’s a value proposition there and you have to get one person out before the other person gets to take it as their own.

Cory: Sharon, how do you tell the builder to stop investing?

Sharon: Well, I don’t necessarily think of stopping investing. I think it’s been cognizant of what at some point, there is going to be a value for the builder, maybe they don’t get value all at once. Maybe it’s going to have to take time for them to extract whatever it’s worth when they change ownership.

It’s not just going to help him with a check landing but it also has to not starve the buyer because I’ve seen transactions that were sort of negotiated amongst the people being the owners, one getting out and one buying in and they haven’t done any diligence over the values per se. In some circumstances, the exiting shareholders expect that the buyer pay for 10 years’ worth of profits over 10 years.

If that’s what they’re doing, imagine that every dollar that person’s making for the next 10 years is going back to the original owner. That’s not a good investment, not unless you’re Amazon or something like that. It takes some time.

There are lots of businesses and just as business exists, it’s complex. Just running a little store is complex, you add on families, you add on finances, I mean, for most family structures who own businesses, everyone’s reliant on that business for living.

And where you see a lot of challenges is where the personal financial situations of the individuals around the table are bearing. Some people need more money, some people need less money, and some people are in blended families. The complexity only grows. The more people in the ecosystem and it’s not for the faint of heart.

Cory: Yes. And let’s go back to the comment of starving the buyer. To me, that means expectations. What are the expectations of all the parties at play? How have you seen maybe unrealistic expectations in your world when you come into they’re saying, okay, now we need evaluation.

Be it somebody, one of probably their advisors said, we need this to be somebody else to give us evaluation and expectations on one end of the continuum are here and then somebody else there. How do you see those showing up?

Sharon: Well, if you’ve got a person who’s actively working in the business, then the language is common. They know profitability, they understand what makes the business valuable, what drives value, and whose efforts are important.

In terms of that, they have a common ground where it becomes challenging is that if often the smaller businesses people aren’t properly paid or being paid too much or too little for their involvement.

You need to get the compensation rate and then you need to get the ownership value properly accounted for. Because when you do a business valuation, one of the main adjustments in looking at profitability is in those owner salaries.

What is fair market value? Because before you buy, you pay a dime for the value of shares, you’re going to want to be paid for the time and effort you put into generating profits. It’s really important that in doing that math, people first get paid for what they contribute and in a fair way. And over and above that becomes the quantum of business value and when you’re dealing with people when you have one person who is used to earning a lot of money and then, may not be able to do that on an ongoing basis or if there’s no profits, extra profits for the company.

There are layers of all these issues, I also find that, often when people negotiate between say one sibling, one sibling’s interested in the business, and maybe 3 aren’t or 2 aren’t. The other 3 or the other 2 siblings who are outside the business need to understand that there’s enough due diligence done on the transaction itself so that they never feel like the first is going to win.

There has to be some recognition that there may only be one new owner but there are other people within the system who need some feedback on the process, the plan, and the execution.

Cory: Now in your world, Sharon, where you’re doing evaluation and we’re talking about siblings, oftentimes farming is a good example where what’s fair isn’t equal and what’s equal isn’t fair. Now when it comes to evaluation, you don’t put any of that into your valuation. It’s here’s what the business is worth. Now it’s up to the family how do you create fairness or how do you equalize where do you see some of those struggles come in?

Sharon: Well, I worked on a file several years ago, which was such a learning field for me because there were children, dad had died, mom was still there, and they owned a very successful private business. They had real estate, which was in a separate company and they had an operating business.

The boys were gifted on the transition, the operating company, and the girls. Mom hadn’t died yet so it was promised that the girls would get the real estate. In that way, it would be equal.

The challenge, however, was as you could potentially expect the boys got the operating business early and the girls had to sit and potentially wait for their share. Not only did you have that as sort of a problem because it’s a real problem.

You also had the operating company need to use the buildings of security for the operations. You had a lot of challenges with how you navigated that and all the emotional aspects of the kids. The parents were trying to be fair.

They had their best intent. You talk about intent, we’re not no one’s many people. There are a few but most of them aren’t doing things out of spite. They’re doing things that they believe in and for the parents, they felt strongly that that was the best thing to allow the legacy business, the operating business to continue with some of these other assets in place.

But for the few years from the transition to the operating company forward, it was a real challenge. For the girls, they didn’t have rights to those buildings. They couldn’t say no to the mortgages that were placed on it or the equity drawdowns that were made. Because the mother was in charge of them.

That complexity of the family enterprise where it’s not just there’s one business, there’s multiple different types of assets is the complexity that we deal with. In those cases, we’re, again,  expectations where somebody comes up with the best intention.

This goes back to one of the comments he made when we started about those bumps in the road. The death divorce and bad decisions, how does that play in? Best intentions, but maybe a bad decision, how do we bring that into to family enterprise evaluation?

I think people have a hard time being challenged and made to listen. It’s the what-ifs that always derail the process. My background is I probably spent well, I know I’ve spent over 30 years looking at probably 50 to 80 businesses a year.

I can tell you that probably of all the negative files I’ve worked on. Then by that, active litigation work, shareholder disputes, estates gone wrong, things like that, if people had perhaps not been driven by one thing. There’s always one magic thing that’s pushing someone to transact often.

Often, it’s a tax-driven motive or got to get these shares in someone’s hands and worry about the details later but if they spent some time sitting back and thinking about the big bigger ecosystem how is this all going to work? And what’s this going to mean over here in the case I just mentioned to the girl’s legacy?

What’s that going to mean? Can these 2 entities be unbundled so to speak? When’s mom going to give the girls their share? These are things that need to be talked about.

When I sat in on the final meeting and he had lawyers and accountants and the family and the nature, the mother there, definite red flags were going off in my head.

It was like, “This will not end well”, I don’t know when. I don’t know how, there are too many undecided, unplanned, unthought-out consequences to this intermingling of these two businesses and these sorts of set-aside future distributions to the girls that haven’t been dealt with.

Cory: Right.

Sharon: Personality gets in the way. There’s lots of emotion just how we all are in the bigger world, aspects to these matters.

Cory: Now going back to the motivations behind actions, you mentioned tax-driven decisions. It can be from an estate perspective. Oftentimes, people will act first and pick up the pieces later, how what are some of the consequences of some of those examples that you were giving?

Sharon: There’s always another great tax plan, we all know that. Taxes drive a lot of decisions, my experience has been that what you do for one purpose, will be used at some point along the way for a completely different purpose and potentially with a difference where you wanted a high number start.

You now need a low number. You’re still expecting a low number. One of the very first assignments I worked on in Vancouver is probably a great lens into this. A lawyer had crystalized his one-person law firm using back then half a million dollars capital gain exemption.

He went to an accountant, did the crystallization, and had a freeze of $500,000 tax-free. He could effectively withdraw from his little PC and 2 years later, his wife came in. I worked for Deloitte back then and his wife came in and they were going through and so she comes in and she says, what’s the value of my sole practitioner’s law practice?

The theory evaluation has to be salable and a one-person law pro practice likely wouldn’t have too much balance outside of the person, so we said, listen, it won’t be worth very much, but you go argue hard on that half a million dollars right?

The personalized value that he came up with at the time he did his tax transaction. She went before the court with her lawyer. The judge said to the fellow, “I’m not letting you”, there you either refile and tell them your value is 0 or you pay your wife $250,000 half of the 500. He got out his checkbook. You can’t argue with something you’ve done.

Cory: Yes.

Sharon: So the lesson is, of course, whatever you’ve done for one purpose, for lack of a better phrase, bite you in the butt the next time.

Cory: Let’s talk about how he came up with that valuation and how often we see that where it might be for lack of understanding, could be that somebody was trying to avoid some professional fees?

They decided that I could come up with an evaluation. How or what are the consequences of that?

Sharon: Well, I just worked on a fall a few years ago, which was quite an interesting file because it was all there and was a lot of complexity, but a lawyer had come up with this new design for sort of transferring goodwill. It was a paper CRA transaction and it didn’t necessarily have any legs in terms of taxable effect except to one party.

This client whom I worked with before had used an online valuation program to come up with this value for goodwill, he was allowing these people to crystallize goodwill to give them a loan back effectively. He was using this online program to determine the goodwill value. CRA came back and said for this little piece of this transaction which had tax consequences to him, they came back and reassessed him on these numbers.

He would like this online program to come up with these outrageous valuation numbers because when you put 3 bad assumptions into an online calculator, it’s going to come up with wrong numbers. So we had asked to go through and devaluate all these 5 or 6 entities that he had this proposed transaction.

Ultimately, it cost him $100,000 in fees to fight the CRA. But the CRA, they it’s on the taxpayer’s own to prove. If CRA comes knocking on the door and they’re asking you to validate a transaction that you’ve done, you have approved your position. What we often find is that because people do things, 3 years ago. They do things perhaps for a very valid reason at the time, but they don’t paper it properly.

They forget why they thought the way they did and even the Excel file that they had done their calculations with. It’s just people change their minds and memories fade, what was appropriate in one case may not be appropriate in another. You do get wrong numbers out there all the time and when CRA were to assess you, I mean, it just starts ringing for the tax lawyers and the accountants and the evaluators to try to help you support or come up with the proper position. It’s just not worth shortchanging on the initial transaction.

Cory: Going back to a previous discussion, as you mentioned, people actively involved in the business know their business extremely well and there are these online tools or call it, shortcuts out there, call it the country club effect. What’s your valuation? Is it seven times? Well, seven times what? And so how can people who believe that they’re savvy?

How do they check those biases and make sure that it’s okay or not?  It might be an evaluation that they don’t need for a transaction or tax purposes, it might just be that they’re looking to see are driving value in this enterprise. How do they check that? What do they do other than call you?

Sharon: Well, they call me to start it perfectly because then you at least have some insight into how a buyer might look at you. So there’s value and there’s other assets that exist redundant cash, redundant assets.

What kind of working capital would a buyer expect to take if they were to acquire you? What’s the multiple? What’s the right debt level?

There’s a reason that the CBV is a charter business evaluator. It requires 3 years of study, a national exam, and so many hours of work. It’s not on the back of a Kellogg’s box.

Even if you wanted a gut check, for an experienced evaluator who can educate you on the process, how people might look at you, what are the value drivers, and what is extracting or removing value, it’s worth a lesson.

Cory: Let’s talk about that as it relates to business strategy because you talked about the undecided, the unplanned, the things that come and bite you, and so understanding those value drivers and understanding what a buyer would be looking for can also mean that you’re running a healthier business.

Sharon: People often think they need to just organize themselves to sell but the reality is why are you not organizing yourself now and, earning higher profits because you’ve made some more insightful decisions?

A couple of high-level things I’d say when if you’re thinking about an acquisition is often what people might do is they might buy new equipment and so they buy that equipment over let’s say, they’re trying to sell today and they’ve spent the last year acquiring new pieces of equipment.

Well, it’s really hard if your cash flows haven’t monetized the implementation of that new equipment. Your cash flows are still last year’s cash flows reflecting lesser equipment. It’s hard to sell the buyer on, I’m going to be so much busier.

I’ve got these 3 new backhoes and they’re going to add so much more value you have to be mindful that if you’re strategically expanding, then you need to do so in advance of your exit.

Cory: Right.

Sharon: Take something on the back end of the deal to allow her to capture value later on in some aspect. The other thing that is very important and worth mentioning for sure is working capital because lots of private companies, particularly those that are financially prudent, often have less spend, less time on working capital which is accounts receivable, inventory, less payables.

They may not collect their receivables as quickly as they need to. They extend their customers, good credit, and payables, and they pay right away. They’re the ones that want to get that payable off their books. They’re running probably at a very high working capital and they have maybe two and a half or three times receivables to their payables.

Well, that’s not what the industry out there might need. They might need one and a half times, not three times.

Cory: Right.

Sharon: And what that translates to when you’re doing a transaction is if you don’t need that excess working capital sitting there, you should get paid for it. There’s an extra value that a person who is running a 3 – 1 company should get compared to someone who’s running at 1 1/2 times working capital.

Cory: Yep.

Sharon: And working capital is always one of those, throw-away points when you initially have a letter of intent signed. Basically, I will pay you X and working capital to be decided later and I would always advise. No. I want to know the whole deal.

I want to know the whole situation today, not 3 months after you’ve done your due diligence because it can be millions of dollars to business owners.

Cory: Absolutely. If we go back to knowing value drivers as a good strategy. Let’s talk about the kids paying for their efforts because maybe that rising gen comes in and maybe mom and dad have stepped back a bit and they say we want to implement strategy.

And Sharon, can you come in and give us a bit of an idea of these drivers maybe we’re doing some contingency planning and making sure that we’re taking the right risks here. But then they have to pay for it because they haven’t.

So how in a family transaction like that, where maybe we’re not talking about an outside buyer, working capital is a little blurrier because that transaction isn’t as cut and dry. If you were to that advice to a family who maybe the kids are just starting or they’re working their way through.

Maybe they’ve got a profit center that they’re in control of right now, and they’re looking at maybe an executive position next. Now it’s becoming closer and we need to get started or get a plan in place, how would you advise on that one?

Sharon: Well, I think ultimately, the goal is to generate returns. You’re making decisions based on where you feel you can get higher-value ads. When you’re looking at something as simple as a working capital, it doesn’t mean you’re going to change your process or policies but it might mean that you change them 3 years before you sell. It’s all about education. It’s about appreciating where you add value and where you detract value and sometimes that’s okay.

Lots and lots of businesses think they should go big. It’s about expansion and it’s about growth. And you always have to be on that trajectory and many smaller operations are incredibly profitable with probably less stress because you’re not trying to continually move and hire means better or bigger means better.

That’s okay because if you reach a level of profitability that may be just enough which wasn’t the fellow who built Vanguard. The biggest answer to a question is how much do you need? It’s enough, it might be just fine for what you want to accomplish and what your financial life looks like.

Cory: Yes. Well, Sharon, as we near the end of our conversation today, there are a few questions that I ask each guest before we wrap up. Are you ready for the tough ones?

Sharon: Okay.

Cory: Awesome. Well, the first is, what is one key strategy you believe is most essential for building a successful family enterprise?

Sharon: Communication.

Cory: Communication. And can you expand a little bit on that one?

Sharon: Well, I think that we often hear what we want to hear. We also have bad memories as people so I think that communicating about things that you’re thinking, you’re contemplating, what would it look like spitballing a lot of things immersing people in the business or the discussion and not withholding right?

As a parent, I have 2 older kids and I’ll tell you there’s a fine line between giving them access to everything and trying to create what you envision, you need to create good people.

There’s this tug of war between “Do I show them everything” or “Do I just sort of let them see a little bit”. Those are all personal for all of us, they’re challenging but I think communication is so vital to just you know, people sharing who they are and sharing what their vision is and sharing who what they believe and having this common grounding amongst especially your family.

Also, when you’re making these bigger decisions, why did you make the decision you did, if you have 3 siblings and they’re all offered the same opportunity and one person says, no, I’m out? Then the opportunity that presented itself turned out to be amazing.

They’ll be kicking themselves for a lot of years but they’ll forget that they decided to not be a part of that for whatever reasons at the time. It’s documenting some of the reasons you do things, but also some of the reasons that decisions other decisions were made.

Cory: Great. And what is the most common challenge that UHNW Family Enterprises encounter when it comes to wealth transition and generational continuity?

Sharon: Communication.

Cory: Alright. Do you have maybe another strategy, something to overcome that?

Sharon: The other thing I would recommend is that, to sort of bridge those conversations they have independent people on board. People who can hear the question differently people who can watch the room differently, people who may be able to provide mentoring to the individuals who are coming into their own.

When you have the dynamics of always being in that family unit is hard. We remember kids as they were not who they became as siblings. Same thing.

It’s hard to unwind that.

On that point, because you and I were talking beforehand, but one of my big lessons, during the whole time of being a family enterprise adviser, which I think would be very important for families is to go through discovery insights which is really like a personality tech, but it was so interesting for me to see how people were coded into sort of their natural behavior.

Those people charged ahead or sat back and were reflective or other people were more socially aware, they wanted a team, an environment.

I found it very insightful to be aware of who we are and how we are and who they are and how they are because we all need different modes of communication.

Time to reflect and be analytical. Some people don’t like numbers at all. Other people like nothing but numbers.

Cory: And in those family units, they might look at something as a weakness. And in fact, they might be that person’s greatest strength as well.

Sharon: I’ll tell you personally that my husband took this program, the FCA before I took it.  After I took my discovery insights, you get a little breakdown of who you are and a summary of your key values. It made sense in my life and married life because we kind of think we’re all the same. We’re just so different.

Cory: And in the discovery report, there are so many different placements where people can show up and where you might think you’re in this quadrant of an analysis tool and it means generalization, you must be like this. Well, no. There are so many intricacies of how people show up and in different situations.

Sharon: And to that last point, it’s not just who you are but how you react to different situations. It was quite interesting to me.

Cory: Absolutely. And in your experience, what are the top 3 qualities that successful family enterprise leaders possess?

Sharon:  I would say one of them is Inclusion. Recognizing that they don’t know everything, having confidence in that, and seeking support where they need to.

And they are very open to different ways to think and participate and recognize that there’s evolution. The system evolves and I think lastly, it’s probably their experience is from building from the ground up and they know everything that went on for the last 40 years or 50 years of the company’s development and not expecting that of the people coming in because they’re inheriting a much bigger beast, they haven’t had to do the quotes on the back of their truck bed.

They’re coming out of a very different space and knowledge than the people who started it and that’s a good thing.

Cory: Yep. Absolutely. Appreciating where somebody’s come from and what the situation is from both situations.

Sharon: Yeah and I think it’s interesting because some owners will and they should take great pride in the fact that they knew every quote and they worked on every job but that doesn’t mean it was the perfect job or the perfect quote. And it could be at the very end of how I built this, which is a PBS podcast.

Highly recommend it for entrepreneurs, but the question is how much of your success do you equate to luck or yourself?

Cory: Yes.

Sharon: And I’ll tell you more of it’s luck. You know, right place, right time, growing economies, being there, working hard.

Cory: Yep. Absolutely.

Sharon: So there’s lots of things that play into success.

Cory: Absolutely. And now Sharon, I wanted to make sure that we’ve covered everything today. Is there anything else that you’d like to share with our audience that we didn’t get a chance to touch on?

Sharon: The only thing I would say is that I’ve had the benefit of a lens through so many different businesses. I’ve worked for many years out of consulting out of Deloitte’s in Toronto with big organizations and worked here in Calgary and worked in Vancouver and doesn’t matter what size or scale, there are always issues.

There’s no perfect business, there’s no perfect situation, there are always challenges or you rest for a little while and then you have to shift and change.

It’s a new ecosystem, a business, and the relationships that extend from that. It’s just there’s always improvements that can be made. That’s why there are consultants. So it doesn’t mean the size scale from the littlest to the biggest.

Cory:  Well, and like they say, if you’ve seen one business, you’ve seen one business. Yeah.

Sharon: Yeah. That’s true.

Cory: Great. Well, thank you Sharon for taking the time to share your expertise and experiences with us today your insights have been extremely beneficial and valuable. And I know that our audience will be grateful and I’m grateful for your contribution to this episode. So thank you.

Sharon: Thank you for the opportunity. I appreciate it. Thanks. Okay.

As we wrap up this episode, we invite you to reflect on the insights Sharon has shared about valuation and planning for ownership succession in family businesses.

Whether you are part of a family business or provide consulting to them, Sharon’s expertise highlights the importance of proactive planning, understanding valuation drivers, and managing expectations to ensure a smooth transition and long-term success.

Throughout our discussion, Sharon emphasized several key takeaways. Recognize the need to transition earlier than you might think, allowing for ample time to plan and execute. Consider the financial implications of ownership changes and the potential impact on both the business and family members. Understand the valuation drivers of your business and organize accordingly, even if you’re not immediately planning to sell. Finally, ensure open communication and alignment of expectations among all parties involved in the succession process.

For those seeking additional guidance on business valuation relating to planning for your ownership succession, Sharon Gray at RDT Valuations Group Inc. has extensive experience working with family enterprises. Don’t hesitate to reach out if you have specific questions or concerns. We’ve included Sharon’s contact information and additional resources in the episode notes to support you on your journey.

Disclaimer: 

This program was prepared by Cory Gagnon who is a Senior Wealth Advisor with Beacon Family Office at Assante Financial Management Ltd. This is not an official program of Assante Financial Management and the statements and opinions expressed during this podcast are not necessarily those of Assante Financial Management. This show is intended for general information only and may not apply to all listeners or investors; please obtain professional financial advice or contact us at [email protected] or visit BeaconFamilyOffice.com to discuss your particular circumstances before acting on the information presented.