You built the company. We build the plan that turns it into the rest of your life.
If you are a Houston founder or privately held owner, your business is probably the largest asset on your personal balance sheet — often 60% to 80% of your net worth (Alan Birsinger Insights). The way you exit that business, the timing you choose, and the personal wealth plan you put around the transaction will determine more about your family's next 30 years than any investment decision you have ever made.
Mint Wealth Management coordinates the wealth side of that transition — working directly with your attorney, CPA, business broker, and M&A advisor so nothing falls between the seats.
Book a business-owner planning call • Or call 281-970-4200
Who this is for
- Founders and privately held owners with $2 million to $50 million in enterprise value.
- Owners 3 to 7 years from a sale who want to structure the business — and their personal finances — so the exit is a choice, not a compromise.
- Owners with a written offer already on the table who need coordinated tax, estate, and post-liquidity planning before signing.
- Second- and third-generation owners planning family transitions, management buyouts, or partial recapitalizations.
- Owners without a continuity plan whose business is exposed if something happens to them tomorrow.
Nationally, 70% of small business owners are in early-stage planning or have no formal succession plan at all (Chase Media), and only 45% report having a formal succession or exit plan (Huntington 2026 Beyond Business Report). If you don't have a plan, you are in the majority — but the outcome gap between planners and non-planners is measured in millions.
The four things Houston owners get wrong before an exit
After coordinating dozens of Houston owner transitions, we see the same four mistakes cost owners real money:
- Waiting too late to plan. The best exits are engineered 3 to 5 years out — long enough to clean up records, transition management, and put tax structure in place. The Exit Planning Institute reports that 78% of owners still do not have a formal transition team in place at the time they consider selling, while roughly 80% oftheir net worth is tied up in the business (Forbes Finance Council, May 2026). Owners who wait until after receiving a letter of intent give up their strongest planning window.
- Optimizing the deal, ignoring the tax. On a clean equity sale, the top federal rate is roughly 23.8% — 20% long-term capital gain plus the 3.8% Net Investment Income Tax — before state tax (AE Tax Advisors). Structure decisions made before you sign — asset vs. stock sale, entity type, QSBS eligibility, installment structure, opportunity-zone reinvestment — routinely swing the after-tax proceeds by 15% to 30%. Founders who confirm Qualified Small Business Stock (Section 1202) eligibility before deal discussions begin can potentially exclude up to $15 million of federal capital gains (Uncle Kam Tax Strategy).
- Skipping the personal balance sheet. Over 75% ofowners experience significant regret within a year of selling, with 60% attributing it to the absence of a personal plan for life post-business (Forbes Finance Council). A wire hitting your account is not a plan.
- Treating estate and investment planning as separate projects. Buy-sell agreements, ILITs, trusts, and beneficiary designations are usually set up at different points by different people. When the sale closes, those documents often no longer match. Coordinating them before closing — not after — is where a wealth manager earns their keep.
The 2026 federal estate tax exemption sits at $15 million per person, $30 million per married couple (Uncle Kam Tax Strategy) — an unusually generous window that makes pre-exit estate work particularly valuable.
Our process
We work in four phases. Every phase is billable planning work; nothing is contingent on selling a product or a portfolio.
Phase 1 — Discovery and readiness (Weeks 1 to 3)
- Full personal balance sheet: business value, real estate, retirement accounts, taxable investments, insurance, deferred comp.
- Entity review: LLC, S-corp, C-corp, holding-company structure, and any related real estate.
- Existing document inventory: buy-sell agreement, operating agreement, will, trusts, beneficiary designations, key-person coverage.
- Owner readiness: what "done" looks like, what income you need after, what you want your family and community to see.
- Written diagnostic memo naming the specific decisions in front of you.
Phase 2 — Structure and coordination (Weeks 4 to 12)
- Multi-scenario tax modeling: asset sale vs. stock sale, installment sale, QSBS eligibility, Opportunity Zone reinvestment, charitable remainder trust, and holding-company recap options.
- Estate coordination with your attorney: buy-sell funding review, ILIT setup or update, GRAT/IDGT consideration, family-limited partnership review.
- Personal cash-flow model: post-sale income design, target withdrawal rate, retirement-account sequencing.
- Insurance and risk audit: key-person, disability buyout, umbrella, and directors and officers.
- Written coordinated plan — one document, one set of numbers, aligned across every advisor on your team.
Phase 3 — Transaction alignment (weeks up to closing)
- Working directly with your investment banker, M&A attorney, and CPA through diligence and negotiation.
- Deal-structure review: earnouts, seller financing, rollover equity, escrow, and non-compete terms — from the wealth side, not the deal side.
- Pre-close gifting and trust funding while the business is still valued at pre-sale multiples.
- Family communication plan for anyone who needs to know before the wire hits.
Phase 4 — Post-liquidity planning (First 12 months)
- Staged deployment of proceeds, tax-loss harvesting from day one, direct indexing where it fits.
- Tax coordination with your CPA through the first full post-sale tax year.
- Retirement account and Roth conversion planning around the new income profile.
- Charitable planning: donor-advised fund funding, appreciated-stock gifting, or CRT installation.
- Full estate-plan refresh reflecting the new balance sheet.
Details on each phase live on our owner-exit planning process page.
What we do — and what we don't
We do:
- Coordinated wealth, tax, and estate planning for owners approaching or executing a sale.
- Personal cash-flow and retirement modeling built around your actual afler-tax proceeds.
- Investment management for post-liquidity portfolios, with a bias toward tax-aware structures.
- Family and generational coordination — bringing spouses and adult children into the plan when it is time.
- Direct coordination with your M&A attorney, CPA, business broker, and investment banker.
We do not:
Practice law or write your will. We coordinate with your attorney; we do not replace them.
- Prepare your tax return. We coordinate with your CPA; we work from their numbers.
- Broker your business or represent you in the sale. We work alongside your M&A advisor.
- Guarantee a sale price, a tax outcome, or a market return. Every plan is scenario-based and revisited.
The line between coordination and legal advice matters. When our planning work involves wills, trusts, or estate documents, we coordinate the strategy across your existing advisors — the legal work itself is performed by qualified counsel.
Services under this pillar
Every page below is designed for a specific moment in a Houston owner's timeline. Start where you are.
Page | What it covers | Who it is for |
|---|---|---|
How we coordinate with your attorney, CPA, and broker | Owners 12+ months from a sale | |
Wealth-side work aligned to closing | Owners with an LOI or engaged banker | |
Tax-efficient investing after a sale | Owners in the first 12 months post-close | |
Emergency succession and buy-sell review | Owners without a documented continuity plan | |
Family, partner, and third-party transitions | Owners choosing among transition paths | |
Coordinating company value with estate goals | Owners whose company IS the balance sheet | |
Ongoing planning while you still run the business | Owners not yet in exit mode | |
Comparison of Houston firms in this category | Owners still selecting an advisor |
Why Mint Wealth Management
Houston-based, independently owned, fiduciary. Mint Wealth Management is an independent registered investment advisor practice headquartered at 12807 Haynes Road, Building H, Houston, TX 77066, with a second office in The Woodlands. As of 2026, Mint services more than 500 accounts and approximately $270 million in assets under management, with Adam Lampe as the producing advisor and principal.
Business-owner focused. Adam has spent the past decade building the practice around Houston founders, privately held owners, and their families. His work regularly extends beyond investment management into business valuation, compensation modeling, and succession planning — the same disciplines that determine whether an exit produces a good number or a great one.
Coordinated, not siloed. We are not brokers. Our planning work is done alongside your attorney and CPA, and we document decisions in writing so every advisor on your team is working from the same numbers.
Osaic-affiliated. Mint Wealth Management provides securities and investment advisory services through Osaic, a nationally recognized independent broker-dealer and registered investment advisor.
About Adam Lampe. Adam is the principal and producing advisor at Mint Wealth Management. He holds Series 7 and Series 66 registrations and is a Texas licensed life and health insurance agent. He lives in Houston with his family. Read Adam's full biography or connect on LinkedIn.
A representative client scenario
Details anonymized; not a testimonial.
A Houston services-business owner in his mid-50s came to us with a written offer to sell his company for $18 million, all cash. His attorney and CPA were already engaged. What he did not have: a personal plan for what happened after the wire hit.
Working alongside his existing advisors over eight weeks before closing, we:
- Modeled the after-tax proceeds under the offered structure and two alternates. Adding a small installment component reduced first-year federal tax by roughly 8%.
- Funded a GRAT with a portion of pre-sale equity while the valuation was still contested — moving future appreciation out of his taxable estate at the pre-sale valuation.
- Repositioned his existing ILIT to keep a second-to-die policy aligned with the new balance sheet.
- Designed a staged deployment plan for the post-close proceeds across tax-managed equity, short and intermediate bonds, a donor-advised fund, and tax-loss-harvestable brokerage sleeves.
- Coordinated a family conversation so his adult children understood what they would eventually inherit and when.
He closed eight weeks later. Twelve months after, his answer to "was it worth it?" was yes — because the money was doing what he told it to do, not the other way around.
How our fees work
Business-owner planning is a flat-fee written engagement during the exit-planning phase, and fee-only investment management on any assets we manage after closing. Planning fees are quoted before we start and are not contingent on a transaction. We do not accept commissions on planning work. Full details on our how we charge page.
