Exit readiness
Your Business Is Your Greatest Asset. We Help Protect and Enhance Its Value.
You've taken risks, weathered economic cycles, and built an enterprise that serves your employees and clients across San Diego. But if you're like most successful founders, over 80% of your personal net worth is likely locked inside your business.
A simple 401(k) isn't enough. You need an approach that protects the income the business pays you now, and separately works on whether the business itself can be handed to someone else. Those are two different jobs. The second one is the harder of the two, and it is the one most owners start far too late.
No obligation. Strictly confidential.
How we approach coordinated planning
Certified experience in exit planning
You need more than a generic financial checklist. You need business exit planning from someone who looks at your enterprise the way a buyer eventually will.
Bradly Stevens holds the Certified Exit Planning Advisor (CEPA™) designation, integrating your personal goals with business strategy to help you:
Protect today
Implement advanced tax efficiency and robust risk management for your enterprise and your household.
Grow value
Apply tested growth principles to help optimize enterprise value (EBITDA), rather than just managing standard retirement planning.
Secure tomorrow
Construct a defined exit or succession plan, whether selling to a strategic buyer, transitioning to internal leadership, or a family handover.
A comprehensive framework
Your business doesn't operate in a vacuum. Neither should your financial plan.
We use a multifaceted approach that addresses the four key domains of a successful owner's financial life.
Domain I: Enterprise value maximization
Beyond bookkeeping, a structured look at where systems, management depth and revenue quality can be improved before a transition, and which of them a buyer actually prices.
Domain II: Comprehensive risk management
Business overhead expense (BOE), buy-sell agreement funding, and sophisticated income replacement.
Domain III: Optimized tax strategy
Leveraging the most effective, coordinated strategies to minimize tax drag on both your corporate and personal income.
Domain IV: Integrated retirement and legacy planning
Exit-ready doesn't always mean leaving. We coordinate your exit timing with other income streams, including optimized Social Security timing and private pension structures, to help protect your lifestyle for generations.
The tax side of this is covered in more depth on tax efficiency and wealth coordination, and the wider owner picture on the Business Owner Blueprint.
Why this matters before a transaction, not during one
Most owners find out whether the business can be sold at the moment they try to sell it.
As a Certified Exit Planning Advisor, the work worth doing is the work that happens years before a buyer is in the room.
A buyer is not buying what you built. They are buying what keeps running after you leave. Those are different things, and the distance between them is what decides whether a sale happens at all, long before it decides what the business fetches.
Most of that distance is made of a few specific things, and each one is measurable. How much of the profit walks out with the owner. How much of the revenue sits with three customers. How much of it recurs. Whether anyone else can run the place. Whether the books close on time and the lease is at market rent rather than a number you set yourself.
None of those is something you can look up, and none of them changes quickly. Each one takes one to three years to move. That is the argument for starting now rather than when a date is set.
What the readiness assessment looks at
How much depends on you
What share of profit and revenue leaves with the owner, whether anyone else holds the largest customer relationships, and whether the place runs for a quarter without you in it.
How the revenue behaves
What share sits with the top three customers, how much of it recurs rather than being re-won every January, and whether growth and margin hold up once the owner's pay is normalised.
What a buyer inherits
Working capital, debt against earnings, anything contingent, whether the books close within thirty days, and whether the premises are rented at market or from an entity you own.
A score is not a price. The assessment produces no value, no range and no multiple. What it produces is a list of what currently sits between the business you have and a business somebody else could take on.
Ready to see where your business stands?
Thirty minutes on what would have to be true for the business to transfer, and which of those things is furthest away. No obligation and no product pitch.
Book a consultationA 30-minute call. No document gathering beforehand, and no obligation afterwards.