Business Planning

If you are like many of our clients, your business represents a sizable personal investment, years of hard work, and a significant portion of your overall estate. Family-owned businesses are unique in that they constitute blood relationships among members. While this common bond often creates a competitive edge that manifests itself in a solid sense of purpose among the founding generation, petty disagreements among members of succeeding generations may lead to distrust, discord, and eventually, the collapse of the business.

To prevent a bleak outcome for your own business, we offer business and succession planning services to family businesses. This includes a combination of tax planning and estate planning designed to separate personal assets from business assets to protect against an economic downturn. The issues we can help you address through proper business planning include:

• Establish sound management for the family business

• Prevent future generations from treating the family business as a personal piggy bank

• Structure buy-sell agreements in such a way that they keep ownership of the business within the family in spite of any marital or personal problems among family members

• Create a succession plan so that children who are not actively involved in the business do not hold an interest in it

• If necessary, designate one family member as the sole decision maker and create an extrajudicial procedure employed to address disputes

• Provide for minority shareholder rights and remedies

• Establish a board of directors made up of family members

• Establish a requirement that shareholders hold meetings, thereby facilitating communication so that conflicts among family members do not become destructive

To achieve these and other goals, we can provide you with all of the following services, depending on your particular situation:

• Company formation

• Choice of business entity

• Structure of business entity

• Purchase or sale of a business

• Ownership issues

• General legal counsel to business owners

• Coordination of personal, estate and business plans

• Tax planning

• Reorganization and restructuring

• Shareholder control agreements

• Voting agreements

• Buy-sell agreements

• Shareholder and partner disputes

• Sales and disposition of businesses

• Dissolutions

• Succession planning

• Recapitalization

We serve the estate planning needs of individuals, families and business owners.

We take time to understand and plan for your goals, your values, and your uniqueness.