Exit timeline
Working backwards from when you want out to what has to be true each year in between — earnings quality, customer concentration, management depth, and clean records a buyer can diligence.
Services
We model the alternatives, coordinate the valuation, prepare the filings, and sit alongside your attorney while the documents get drafted. For an owner, the estate plan and the succession plan are the same plan.
Where We Fit
We do not draft wills or trust instruments. Drafting and executing the legal documents is your estate attorney’s work, and it should stay there.
What we do: model the tax outcome of the alternatives before anything is drafted, coordinate the business and asset valuations the plan depends on, prepare and file the estate, gift, and fiduciary returns, and work alongside your attorney so the documents and the numbers agree.
This division matters more than it sounds. A trust that reads correctly and funds incorrectly does not work. A gifting strategy drafted without a defensible valuation invites the exact challenge it was meant to avoid. An estate plan built around a business nobody has valued is a set of assumptions, not a plan.
If you don’t have an estate attorney, we will say so plainly and help you find one rather than working around the gap.
Forms We Prepare
A Decision You Face
For most owner-operated businesses in South Florida the answer is no — and the planning should be aimed somewhere else. It is worth establishing that before anyone sells you a structure.
For 2026 the federal basic exclusion amount is $15 million per person, meaning $30 million for a married couple with portability elected. The generation-skipping transfer exemption matches it. Estates below that threshold owe no federal estate tax.
Florida imposes no separate state estate or inheritance tax, so for a Florida-domiciled decedent the federal number is generally the whole test. That is not true of every state, and it is a reason relocation and domicile deserve attention in their own right.
Portability is not automatic. A surviving spouse only inherits the unused exclusion if a Form 706 is filed for the first spouse’s estate electing it — even when that estate owed nothing and had no other reason to file. This is the single most common avoidable estate-tax error we see, and it typically surfaces years later when it can no longer be fixed.
If the estate tax is not in play, the work moves to problems that are:
Trusts reach the top federal income tax bracket at a very low level of retained income — a few thousand dollars, against hundreds of thousands for an individual. That compression makes distribution timing a live annual decision for any trust holding income-producing assets, and it is a large part of what Form 1041 planning actually consists of.
Business Succession
Succession is not a death topic. Retirement, illness, injury, a partner leaving, or an unsolicited offer all trigger the same set of questions.
Working backwards from when you want out to what has to be true each year in between — earnings quality, customer concentration, management depth, and clean records a buyer can diligence.
Identifying who can actually run it, whether they are family, management, or a third party, and building the compensation and equity history that supports the transfer when it happens.
Getting the conversation with children and stakeholders done deliberately rather than at a funeral. Who is in the business, who is not, and how each is provided for.
The agreement is only as good as what stands behind it. Valuation clause, trigger events, and whether the funding mechanism — insurance, sinking fund, or note — actually exists.
Where the cash comes from for taxes, for buying out a departing owner, and for the family’s income during a transition, when the asset itself is illiquid.
Commissioning and coordinating the business valuation the plan rests on, and making sure the same number is used consistently across the buy-sell, the gifting strategy, and the estate filings.
Whether the current structure supports the transfer. Separating operating business from real estate, recapitalisations, and the entity changes that make a staged handoff possible.
The short document that says who signs, who has banking authority, and who runs operations if you are unavailable tomorrow. Most owner-operated businesses do not have one.
Who Runs This
Questions about anything on this page go straight to the person who runs this work — not a contact form queue.
Daniel Cohen, CPA, CFP
Senior Manager, Estate & Trust
[email protected]