Exit Planning, Done Right
Your Exit Doesn't Start At The Closing Table. It Starts Now.
Exit planning prepares your business for a future sale, transfer, or transition while maximizing value and aligning with your goals. Adam Gould, CEPA, guides Bay Area owners through valuation, value-building, and a tax-smart exit.
How Does Exit Planning Work?
Exit planning is the process of preparing a business for a future sale, transfer, or transition while maximizing value and aligning with the owner's personal and financial goals. In practice it means understanding what your business is worth today, enhancing its appeal to buyers, and analyzing your options so the transition is smooth and fits your goals.
When Should I Start Exit Planning?
Ideally, several years before a planned exit. Early planning allows more time to improve business value, reduce risk, and prepare for tax considerations. For the tax structures specifically, 18 to 24 months ahead is the sweet spot, and QSBS trust planning loses much of its power inside roughly 12 months of a deal.
What Does A CEPA Do?
A Certified Exit Planning Advisor helps owners build a company that is stronger, more transferable, and more valuable. Whether you're a founder protecting future liquidity, a family business planning succession, or an operator who just wants the right people around the table early.
A business that can't run without you isn't an asset,
it's a job you can't quit.
Understanding and enhancing your business value
The first step is knowing your number. Adam helps you understand your current value, identify the drivers that make a buyer pay more, and close the gaps that reduce offers, all before you go to market.
Owners who do this work early negotiate from strength rather than guessing.
Most owners think exit planning means hiring an investment banker the year they want to sell. By then, 70 to 80 percent of the value has already been decided by the systems you built, the team you developed, and the customer base you diversified. Or didn't.
That's why the next paragraph matters more than most owners realize:
exit planning needs a quarterback.
Your tax strategy, legal structure, business value, personal goals, family dynamics, and wealth management all touch each other.
When each advisor optimizes their own discipline in isolation, owners end up running the highest-stakes transaction of their life on fragmented advice and crossed wires.
Dogpatch is the lead advisor. We don't replace your CPA, your attorney, or your banker. We assemble them, sequence them, and make sure they're all working on the same plan…
The difference between an exit and an intentional exit.
“75% of business owners profoundly regret selling their business within 12 months of the sale.”
Source: PwC, via the Exit Planning Institute.
Roughly 80% of your company's value isn't on the balance sheet…
It's in four intangible capitals.
When a buyer looks at your business, they're not just buying revenue. They're buying the systems, people, customers, and culture that produced it and whether those things can survive your departure.
The Exit Planning Institute calls these the Four Intangible Capitals. Dogpatch can help evaluate and strengthen all four, on a clock, long before any buyer is in the room.
Dogpatch runs an Attractiveness and Readiness assessment across these four capitals.
It's how we know what to fix, in what order, and what it's worth.
"QSBS is the most generous tax break available to startups — but the planning has to start early. Almost every dollar of benefit is decided in the first 24 months."
The Team Behind the Plan
For most owners, the strategy is the team.
A successful transition rarely turns on a single brilliant decision. It turns on the quality of the bench around the owner when the decisions start coming in fast. Dogpatch coordinates a network of specialists across three domains — brought in at the right moment, never all at once, never too late.
Business & Deal
Business valuation
Strategic planning
Risk management
M&A advisory
ESOP services
Banking & financing
Tax, Wealth & Estate
Tax planning
Wealth management
Personal financial planning
Estate planning
Charitable gift planning
Net proceeds analysis
People, Family & Continuity
Family business specialists
HR & benefits
Management training
Insurance & contingency planning
Family counseling & transition coaching
Succession & continuity support
Dogpatch doesn't bill for any of these specialists.
We coordinate them — and we know which ones an owner actually needs at each stage of the Value Acceleration process.
Founder Track
For early-stage founders, exit planning starts at incorporation — not at the term sheet.
If you're a founder, exit planning isn't about selling someday. It's about protecting upside, preserving optionality, and making sure a future liquidity event doesn't get mugged by taxes.
The single most powerful tool on the board is Qualified Small Business Stock (QSBS) — a federal tax provision that can let founders and early holders exclude up to $10 million in capital gains on qualifying stock, and up to $15 million on stock acquired after July 4, 2025 under the updated rules.
That's a per-taxpayer exclusion. Which means with the right structuring — what's known as QSBS Trust Stacking — separate irrevocable trusts can each qualify for their own exclusion, multiplying the total benefit across a family or estate plan when the structure is set up correctly and early.
Done right, QSBS turns a cap table into a tax-efficiency machine instead of a tax bill with a press release attached. Done late, or done wrong, most of that benefit is left on the table.
This is why sophisticated founders are talking to a CEPA-led team years before any liquidity event — acquiring or exercising stock as soon as practical, tracking holding periods carefully, and coordinating tax, estate, and legal specialists who know how to structure trust stacks for maximum flexibility.
The Stakes
The largest wealth transfer in American history is already underway. Most business owners aren't ready for it.
Over the next two decades, an estimated $124 trillion of wealth will pass between generations in the United States — the largest transfer on record. More than $10 trillion of that sits inside privately held businesses, much of it owned by baby boomers preparing to step back. McKinsey estimates that by 2035, roughly 6 million U.S. small and mid-sized businesses will face an ownership transition.
The owners who plan deliberately — who measure their company's attractiveness and their own readiness, who build the bench early, who treat exit planning as a decade-long process rather than a deal-year scramble — will capture meaningfully more value, pay meaningfully less in tax, and leave with meaningfully fewer regrets.
The other 75% will sell, and wonder a year later why it didn't feel like winning.
6 Million
U.S. SMBs facing transition by 2035 (McKinsey)
$124 Trillion
Great Wealth Transfer through 2048 (Cerulli Associates)
75%
Owners who regret the sale within 12 months (PwC, via EPI)
Start with a conversation, not a transaction.
The first step isn't a pitch — it's a 60-minute readiness assessment. We'll tell you where the gaps are, what they're worth, and what a real plan looks like.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Exit planning is the process of preparing a business for a future sale, transfer, or transition while maximizing value and aligning with the owner's personal and financial goals.
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Ideally, business owners should begin exit planning several years before a planned exit. Early planning allows more time to improve business value, reduce risk, and prepare for tax considerations.
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A CEPA helps business owners evaluate exit options, improve business attractiveness, coordinate tax-efficient strategies, and prepare for a successful transition.
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Exit planning can benefit founders, entrepreneurs, and business owners preparing for retirement, succession planning, or a future business sale.
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Most tax savings are won before the sale, not after. Depending on your structure we may use QSBS (Section 1202) exclusions and trust stacking, charitable strategies, installment timing, and staged diversification of stock you receive. The earlier we plan, ideally well before a signed LOI, the more we can save.