If you're a business owner starting to think about a sale, you may picture a single conversation, maybe with a longtime CPA, or an attorney who's handled your contracts for years, or a broker a friend vouched for at the club. A sale that goes well, though, almost never rests on one person.
The roles involved tend to look similar across most deals.
Each of these professionals brings something the others can't, and each one, understandably, tends to stay focused on their own piece of the puzzle.
An M&A advisor is typically measured by two things, the sale price they land for you and the structure of the deal itself. They're good at pushing for a strong number. A bigger number isn't always the right outcome for the business owner who's selling, though.
Take a client we've worked with who cared far less about hitting peak valuation than most sellers do. For this family, how the deal was structured meant more than what it added up to. There was a relationship they valued more than an extra year or two of earnout payments. They chose a lower purchase price in exchange for a faster, cleaner exit. The alternative, years of rollover equity, would have kept them tied to a business they were ready to leave. An advisor focused purely on maximizing price would never have steered them there on their own.
When advisors aren't coordinating with each other, the gaps tend to show up later than anyone would like.
These are things that can happen by default when a deal team operates in separate lanes instead of one.
We come back to a familiar image when we talk about this with clients. Picture an orchestra. Every musician playing from the same sheet of music can create something that stops people in their tracks. Let one instrument drift out of rhythm, even slightly, and it throws off everything happening around it. A deal team without intentional coordination runs into a similar problem. Each individual advisor can be excellent, and the whole experience can still feel disjointed, slower, or more expensive than it needed to be.
This is a large part of what we bring to the table when a client starts preparing to sell. We're not looking to replace the CPA or attorney a client has trusted for a decade, those relationships hold something we're never going to try to compete with. Our focus is making sure the full team is equipped for a transaction of this size and complexity, and that the people involved are talking to each other rather than working in their own silos.
It's part of why we chose the name Instrumental Wealth in the first place. A conductor doesn't play every instrument in the orchestra. A conductor makes sure everyone playing is in rhythm with each other, and that's the role we try to fill for the families and business owners we work with.
If a future sale is somewhere on your horizon, even years off, this is a good moment to take stock of who's already around you and where the gaps might be. If you're not sure where you stand, our exit planning readiness assessment takes about five minutes and gives you a clearer picture of how prepared your business, and your team, actually are.
Getting there starts with knowing who's involved, what each person is working toward, and whether everyone's on the same plan. From there, the rest tends to fall into place, from your first serious conversation with a buyer to the years after the deal closes.
If you'd like to talk through what your own team looks like, we'd welcome the conversation.
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This article is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as legal or tax advice. Please consult with qualified professionals regarding your specific situation.
Instrumental Wealth is an investment adviser in Tampa, Florida. Instrumental Wealth is registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Registration of an investment adviser does not imply any specific level of skill or training and does not constitute an endorsement of the firm by the Commission. A copy of Instrumental Wealth's current written disclosure brochure is available through the SEC's website.
Not an offer: This document does not constitute advice or a recommendation or offer to sell or a solicitation to deal in any security or financial product. It is provided for information purposes only and on the understanding that the recipient has knowledge and experience to understand and make an evaluation of the information, the risks associated therewith, and any related legal, tax, or other material considerations. To the extent that the reader has any questions regarding the applicability of this information to their specific situation, they are encouraged to contact David Silver or consult with the professional advisor of their choosing.