Answers for business owners planning their next chapter

Three to five years before your intended exit is the practical minimum, and five to ten years produces meaningfully better outcomes. Starting earlier gives you time to clean up financial records, transition day-to-day management, put tax-efficient entity and gifting structures in place, and design the personal balance sheet that will absorb the proceeds. Waiting until you have a letter of intent limits your options to the transaction itself.

We work alongside them. Mint Wealth Management is a wealth-planning and investment-advisory practice, not a law firm or accounting firm. Legal documents are prepared by your attorney; tax returns and formal tax opinions are handled by your CPA. Our role is to coordinate the wealth strategy across those advisors so decisions are made once and consistently — and to fill in the personal-planning work most transactional advisors do not do.

Regular wealth management assumes your wealth is already liquid and diversified. Business-owner planning assumes 60% to 80% of your net worth is inside an operating company — illiquid, concentrated, and correlated with your income. That reality changes almost every planning decision: how much insurance you need, what your buy-sell agreement should say, how your estate documents should be structured, and how aggressively you can invest what liquid capital you do have.

Common levers include Qualified Small Business Stock (Section 1202) exclusion of up to $15 million of federal capital gains for C-corp founders who meet the holding-period requirements; installment-sale structures that spread capital-gains recognition across tax years; Opportunity Zone reinvestment of gains within 180 days of the sale; charitable remainder trusts for owners with charitable intent; and pre-sale gifting into GRATs or IDGTs at pre-sale valuations. Which levers apply depends on your entity structure, holding period, and personal situation — and every one of them has to be decided before you sign the LOI.

No — but the window is short and it matters what you sign first. A letter of intent typically triggers exclusivity and locks in deal structure, which is where most of the tax and estate leverage lives. If you have an LOI in hand and no coordinated plan behind it, that is a reason to move fast, not a reason to skip planning.

Family transitions, management buyouts, and partial recapitalizations use different tax and legal tools than third-party sales — but they still benefit from the same coordinated planning approach. Owners often think a family transition is "simpler" than a sale; in practice, family transitions are usually harder because they add relationship dynamics on top of the tax and legal work.

No. Our exit-planning work is priced independently of investment management. Some clients move accounts to us after closing because coordinated tax-loss harvesting and Roth planning are easier when the same firm sees the whole picture; others keep their existing broker or advisor. Either works.