Are you CPA firm looking to increase revenues?

Does this sound familiar?

Your client calls and asks for all the tax returns and P&L’s you generated for him over the last five years. You provide them and one day you learn that he has sold his business and retired. If you’re lucky, you prepare one more tax return and never hear from him again.

We are in the business of helping people buy and sell companies. In every deal we’ve ever done we were hired by the seller because we approached him and offered our services. Rarely do we see a CPA get actively involved with a client’s exit strategy, which frankly seems strange to us…

Consider the fact that you may have spent a dozen or more years looking after your client’s financial interests. You may have saved him thousands of dollars with proper tax planning. You may have helped him make a lot of money by providing a clear understanding of which parts of his operation are profitable and which are not. And when it is time for him to retire and enjoy the fruits of his labor, he leaves a lot more than you ever saved him on the table, thanks to an ineffective performance by his business broker. So at the end of a long and rewarding relationship you get a handshake and he gets a haircut. A lose-lose deal.

Here is a fact. The quality of the books you keep for him are directly proportional to his enterprise value when he decides to exit. The clearer the financial picture, the less risk there is to the prospective buyer. A business with fuzzy books will never bring top dollar.

And since most entrepreneurs sell their businesses at some point, whether you realize it or not, from the minute he hired you as his CPA you have been a huge part of his transition team.

Preparing the financials for his exit is something only you can do. And we can help you do it better. A well planned and successful exit should be a coordinated effort between ownership and several professionals including accountants, attorneys, bankers, appraisers and financial planners, captained by the M&A advisor. Notice we said professionals… not amateurs. Professionals get paid for their work. Positioning a company for an eventual sale is not the same as keeping the company legal as far as the IRS is concerned. It takes extra time and diligence to prepare a company for sale. And unless the financial picture is crystal clear, that company will never be sold in the optimal manner… quickly, quietly, at a premium, in a private process that never sees the open market.

Here’s our value proposition to you: When you have a client who may be considering a sale, introduce him to us. We will pay you 25% of the fee we generate for selling his business, as a member of our team, in return for going the extra mile to portray the client’s financials in the best possible light. In a hypothetical sale of the type we are contemplating, say we sell the client’s company for $10,000,000. If we earned a fee of 4%, that’s a commission of $400,000. Instead of a “thank you” you now get a 100k parting gift, which might be a lot more than you made in the lifetime of the account.

This is a highly ethical arrangement. There are no conflicts of interest. We get an engagement we may have never gotten. You get an “exit fee” that may be more than you made in the lifetime of the account, and most importantly the client gets a far more effective team working on his behalf.

And that’s just where it starts. We have a platform that can help you win new clients and keep the valuable ones you already have. Talk to us to learn more!