CEPA Archives - Your ExitMap

What to Watch Out for When Getting Outside Advice

April 28, 2026 by John F. Dini

When you bring in an outside advisor — whether it’s an accountant, attorney, consultant, or broker — you’re doing the right thing. You’re acknowledging there’s something you don’t know and going to find someone who does. That’s smart ownership.

But there’s a trap hidden in that process that most business owners never see coming.

Every Expert Has a Favorite Tool

There’s an old saying: to a hammer, everything is a nail.

Think about it this way. You go to your doctor and say, “My shoulder has been killing me — I need help.” The doctor genuinely wants to help you. But whether you walk out with a prescription, a surgery date, a chiropractic adjustment, or a set of acupuncture needles depends less on what’s actually best for your shoulder — and more on which type of doctor you happened to walk in to see.

The internist reaches for anti-inflammatories. The orthopedic surgeon schedules an operation. Each one treats your pain. Each one probably helps. But you’ll likely never realize that your treatment was shaped by who you chose to see, not by some universal best practice for shoulder injuries.

The same thing happens when business owners seek outside help.

The Advisor You Hire Shapes the Advice You Get

When it comes to something as significant as planning your exit from a business, the type of advisor you engage will heavily influence the direction you’re pointed — often without you realizing it.

Bring in an accountant and the plan will likely center on minimizing your tax burden. Hire an attorney and you’ll probably end up focused on asset protection or employment contracts. Work with a business consultant and the conversation will revolve around improving operations and boosting profitability.

None of that advice is wrong. But it may not be complete — and it may not actually align with what you’re trying to accomplish in your life.

A few years ago, a business broker added “Exit Planner” to his business card. When asked how he approached exit planning, his answer was straightforward: if an owner would agree to accept 100% seller financing, he’d help them sell. That was his tool, and he applied it to every situation.

To a hammer, everything is a nail.

What This Means for You

Before you take any advisor’s recommendation and run with it, it’s worth asking yourself: Is this the best solution for my situation — or is it the best solution this particular advisor knows how to deliver?

That’s not cynicism. Most advisors genuinely want to help. But their training, their experience, and frankly their business model all point them toward certain kinds of answers.

The best advisors — the ones worth your time and money — will ask a lot of questions before they start offering solutions. They’ll slow down, make sure they understand your real objectives, and resist the urge to jump straight to their preferred tool.

If an advisor walks into your first meeting already knowing what you need, that’s worth paying attention to. The clarity that comes from being genuinely heard saves time, prevents costly missteps, and leads to a plan you’ll actually follow through on.

The right advice starts with the right questions — not the other way around.

John F. Dini develops transition and succession strategies that allow business owners to exit their companies on their own schedule, with the proceeds they seek and complete control over the process. He takes a coaching approach to client engagements, focusing on helping owners of companies with $1M to $250M in revenue achieve both their desired lifestyles and legacies.

Business Ownership Isn’t What It Used to Be

March 30, 2026 by John F. Dini

If you’ve been a business owner for a long time, you’ve lived this shift firsthand.

Many Baby Boomer owners started out alone—just an idea, a customer, and a willingness to take a risk. Hiring that first employee was a milestone. Now, years later, some of those same businesses employ dozens or even hundreds of people.

And every one of those people comes with rights, protections, and obligations that ultimately land on you.

As a business grows, so does the owner’s exposure—to legal risk, regulatory risk, financial risk, and reputational risk. Ownership doesn’t just mean opportunity anymore; it means responsibility layered on responsibility.

Why Fewer People Choose Ownership Today

For someone starting a business now, the barriers look very different than they did 30 or 40 years ago.

Outside of purely digital or internet-based ventures, most new businesses face compliance rules, licensing hurdles, and capital requirements that simply didn’t exist when many established owners got their start. It’s no surprise that many capable people look at those risks and conclude that employment feels like the safer choice—for themselves and for their families.

Licensing alone tells the story. Today, well over a thousand professions require state-level licenses. Nearly one in three workers needs government permission or oversight to do their job—and when they don’t comply, the liability often falls on the business owner.

This includes professions ranging from doctors, lawyers, and engineers to barbers, cosmetologists, designers, trainers, and technicians. In 1950, only a small fraction of U.S. jobs required a license. Today, it’s approaching a third of the workforce.

For owners, that means more rules, more monitoring, and more risk—even when you’re doing everything right.

The Freedom Paradox

Here’s the paradox: America is still one of the best places in the world to own a business.

We score highly on things that matter—strong rule of law, access to credit, contract enforcement, and systems that allow businesses to fail, restructure, and start again. Those freedoms are real and valuable.

At the same time, many of the day-to-day realities of ownership are getting harder.

Taxes are complex. Exporting is cumbersome. Registering property, starting a business, connecting utilities, and dealing with regulated systems can feel slow, opaque, and frustrating. Not coincidentally, these are the areas most tightly controlled by government processes.

So while the system protects enterprise in theory, the practical burden of ownership keeps rising.

How Ownership Is Quietly Changing

One of the biggest shifts isn’t regulatory—it’s structural.

Private equity and institutional capital have stepped in to assume many of the risks of ownership. In doing so, they’ve converted large numbers of would-be entrepreneurs into highly compensated employees.

The leader of a private equity–owned company may have authority, incentives, and status—but they are still an employee, while the real risk is borne elsewhere.

This is a fundamental change in how entrepreneurship works in America, and many long-time owners don’t fully appreciate how different the landscape has become.

What This Means for You

If you’re a business owner—especially one thinking about the future—this context matters.

Ownership today carries more risk, more complexity, and more tradeoffs than it did when many businesses were built. That makes thoughtful planning more important, not less.

Understanding how the rules have changed, how capital has shifted, and how control is being redefined can help you make better decisions about growth, succession, and exit—on your terms.

The goal isn’t to romanticize the past or fear the future. It’s to recognize that ownership has evolved—and that navigating it well now requires clarity, education, and intentional choices.

Exiting Your Business Happily, Often Requires a Strong Personal Vision

January 28, 2026 by Steven Zeller

Some surveys conducted among business owners, find that approximately 75% of owners who exit their business are unhappy with the decision one year after they do so. There are several reasons for this, and some owners struggle with it more than others, but the main reason for the unhappiness after a business exit is because of their lack of “personal vision.” What will their life entail after the exit? What will be their new higher purpose (beyond playing golf)? What will be their new areas for personal growth? If they thrive on working with a team towards a common cause in the organization, how will they replace it? Do they have one or two other passions outside of their business that they could enjoyably and consistently pursue with significant satisfaction? These are some the questions that need to be asked and addressed, and if done, will increase the likelihood of a happy exit.

Exiting a business is probably the single most important decision an owner will make.

Planning for it is critical for maximizing the selling price, ensuring the company’s survival after the owner is gone, and exiting it in the most tax efficient manner – These are all important attributes. But if a business owner does not clearly understand what life will consist of after their exit, and does not embrace it, he or she will likely put off transitioning out. Doing so, could jeopardize the value and survival of the business.

So how does the business owner address the development of their personal vision for life after the exit? A good way to start is working with a skilled exit planning advisor who has the tools available to walk the owner through this planning process. As an exit planning advisor, I have a number of tools and processes that address this area of planning. But generally, a good place to start is to work with the owner and begin to drill down with more specific questions. By the way, it really helps if this is done a number of years before the goal date for the exit.

Here are some of the questions that could be asked during our dialogue:

When would you like to be free of day-to-day responsibilities?
If funding for your retirement requires selling the company, whether it is done internally or externally, when do you expect to receive the proceeds? What do you think is the company’s current value?
If your company was absolutely running the way you wanted it to, what would your job look like? How many days and hours would you work? How many days of vacation would you take? This is a transitioning related question.
After you exit your business, what material assets would you desire (home, vacation home, cars, boats, etc.)?
Epic travel after the exit – Where do you wish to travel, for what purpose, when and how long? Costs?
What would be your ideal monthly income after the exit? Costs to cover essentials, travel, hobbies, sports, charity and community, family, etc.?
How would you spend your time after your exit?
Speaking of filling their time after the exit, a good exercise is to determine how much time will be filled by all of the desires and causes mentioned above, as well as anything else. Will it equate to a filled week?

As mentioned at the beginning of this article, a business owner’s life, after the exit, needs to be filled with purpose driven causes and activities, and efforts within their passions. There are only so many days that one can go golfing and relaxing. Life will need to be filled other meaningful things in order to have a sustainably happy life after the exit.

Many owners thoroughly enjoy serving in their leadership role within the organization.

If so, will it be important to the owner and life satisfying, to continue to exercise and serve in a leadership role after the exit? If so, what are the possibilities?

Those are some of the basic topics to address for every business owner large and small.

For businesses and estates of larger significance, generating substantial liquid proceeds from the sale of the business will require more attention in relation to preserving the family throughout the generations, and applying the family wealth in a way that helps promote healthy, responsible thriving family members, and helps build their purpose. Not addressing significant family wealth outside of traditional means of inheritance, can set the family up for emotional hardships, lack of motivation, dysfunctions, conflicts, etc. in the generations that follow the business owner.

There are other issues to consider in having a happy business exit. These issues have to do with the nature of the owner’s inner world.

More than four decades of research has demonstrated that successful low to mid-market owners have distinct psychological attributes necessary for fostering their success. Unfortunately, these same attributes often lead to cognitive and emotional leadership struggles owners may not readily or easily identify. However, symptoms of the challenges are often readily identified through the business decisions they do (or do not) make. While a small percentage of owners handle the exit phase of the business exceptionally well, most experience internal struggles along the way, and a few find the struggles impossible to overcome.

Exiting a business is a very significant event for most owners.

Realizing the importance and giving attention to this step in the exit planning process, and doing so well ahead of the actual exit, will help position him or her to have a healthy, meaningful, happy life, after the exit occurs.

Steven Zeller is a Certified Business Exit Planner, Certified Financial Planner, Accredited Investment Fiduciary, and Co-Founder and President of Zeller Kern Wealth Advisors. He advises business owners with developing exit plans, increasing business value, employee retention, executive bonus plans, etc. He can be reached at szeller@zellerkern.com.

Creating the Perfect Business Exit Timeline!

January 8, 2026 by David Lupberger

When is a good time to start planning the eventual exit from your business?

Simply, you will be leaving your business and hopefully, this will happen in a planned and deliberate fashion. This is something every business owner will address. Unfortunately, things do not always happen in a planned fashion. Those of you in the remodeling industry deal with project-driven plan and schedule changes on a weekly basis. This is nothing new to you!

If we follow the advice from the book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey, we want to implement Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind! We can follow that recommendation due to another meaningful quote from Steven Covey “your most important work is always ahead of you, never behind you!”

Even if you are 40 years old and plan to work another 15 to 20 years, build your business with the end in mind! Plan for healthy and profitable growth, but also plan for the unplanned. Address the future of your business in good times but also address what will happen in case you are critically injured or die tomorrow. This is referred to as business continuity planning. Plan to do both. Let us begin to address the potential business exit timeline with the possible time frames that come with each milestone below:

Your Exit Timeline

If forced by circumstances beyond your control, you could likely exit your business within a year. Some business owners are here today and – literally – gone tomorrow, but usually not by their own choice. But leaving in style – with adequate cash and having achieved whatever other goals you have set— that takes time, far more than most owners expect.

So, you can leave whenever you choose if you are willing to settle for a less-than-ideal payday, or you can leave in style. The questions is: “do you want to control your own exit, or will it just be something that ‘happens’ to you?” Most owners prefer to control their own destiny but may not have an idea when to get started. Let us look at some tasks common to all exits, and how long they take to complete.

Design and Create Your Exit Plan:

Timeframe: 90 days to one year- While it is possible to create an exit plan in as few as 90 days, most plans require almost a year to create. Most owners need time to ponder and weigh alternative paths, and to think through the many issues that arise when they move through a comprehensive exit planning process for the first time.

Close the Gap:

Timeframe: depends on amount of growth in value needed, but often five to ten years- There is likely a gap between the value you want to receive for your ownership interest and the value you are likely to receive if you transfer the business today. Many owners are in denial when it comes to objectively quantifying the size of the value gap, and exactly how they are going to close it within their planned departure timeframe. The surest way to create sustainable growth is to create a written growth plan for your business with deadlines and accountability as part of your overall exit plan. There are a variety of ways to integrate growth plan development and implementation into your daily/monthly/yearly business management activities.

Tax Planning and Implementation:

Timeframe: three to ten years- Part of reaping full value for your company involves minimizing taxes. Keep in mind that one of the headwinds you may face is increased tax on income and capital gains. Fortunately, planning can not only manage taxation upon the transfer of ownership interest, it may help save taxes on an ongoing, annual basis.

The Ownership Transfer Transaction:

Timeframe: one to ten years- It is possible to transfer your entire ownership by simply transferring all your ownership in exchange for a promissory note right now in one grand transaction, with a big celebration that follows. This is a form of financial suicide. What will you do if the note payments stop coming and you have been absent from the business for a couple of years already? A methodical, possibly incremental approach to preparing the business, preparing yourself and preparing the next owner (especially if he/she is a child or employee) for a successful future tends to create a better outcome for all involved. Take the preparation and execution of the ownership transfer in whatever size bites you can manage, whether that is attaching one area per month or per year – you know your business well enough to know how quickly the recommended action items in your exit plan can be completed.

Conclusion:

Think about your exit as a process, not an event. Everything you have done in your life that was significant took time and multiple steps or stages. Your exit plan is no different. Your exit planning timeline is your bridge to the future that you envision for yourself, your business, and your family. Take control of your future and begin creating your timeline today.

For a free PDF on The Five Critical Elements of a Successful Exit Plan, contact me at david@remodelforce.com. I will forward that PDF report to you.

David Lupberger, CEPA is the President and Owner of Remodel Force. He is a nationally recognized speaker, author, and consultant who helps remodelers and contractors grow longer-lasting, more profitable businesses by developing lean and mean business systems. David believes that consistent results occur only with proven systems. He has worked with hundreds of contractors over the past 30+ years to increase their sales by expanding existing client relationships and develop lifelong clients.

Quality of Earnings and Technology Costs

December 11, 2025 by John F. Dini

When a Quality of Earnings audit identifies deferred technology, the price can be magnified many times. Are you deferring technology costs?

A few months ago, a subscriber to our planning tools called with a tech support question. “Your software doesn’t work,” he said. After some investigation, we identified the problem. He was using a version of the underlying engine, (a part of Microsoft Office) that was four or five generations past end-of-life. When asked about his willingness to upgrade he said, “I don’t want to be forced into getting a subscription.”

(As a side note, no software developers try to develop for compatibility with end-of-life products.)

I understand completely. When Microsoft introduced Office 365 in 2011, I was as irritated as most folks were. We maintained generally up-to-date software but usually skipped a release or two. Upgrading applications happened when we began buying the next round of PCs with newer Windows operating systems. I protested the need to pay for software every year.

Clearly, we lost that battle a long time ago. Nonetheless, I can understand our client’s issue. He runs a solo practice, and his software works just fine for his relatively limited needs.

What are “True” Technology Costs?

I don’t think the same argument is typical in larger businesses, although I still hear it regularly. True hardware and software costs should be measured by employee productivity.

Begin with hardware. Keeping an old computer alive isn’t efficient. (And this is from someone who drives a 17-year-old car!) Here’s how a managed services client of mine described what’s commonly known as the “break/fix” portion of his business for a customer who didn’t want to “subscribe” to managed IT services.

“We get a call that the printer isn’t working and dispatch a technician. We haven’t looked at that particular PC in eighteen months. Employees have loaded new programs. They’ve done some, but not all of the required updates. The technician performs the updates, reinstalls the printer drivers, and gets it working after about 2 hours.”

“When we invoice the tech’s time, the customer has a fit. ‘I could have bought a whole new computer for that much!’ he says.”

No fooling. That’s why break/fix has become pretty much the domain of a walk-in trade for storefront technicians. Most IT companies can’t afford to do it anymore.

Indirect Technology Expense

More importantly, what did the malfunction create in indirect costs to the company? What’s the cost of the employee who was idle, the job that wasn’t printed, and the boss’s time to fight over the invoice?

Let’s say for a simple illustration that an office employee’s fully loaded cost is $52,000 a year, or $1,000 a week. Buying a new PC every three years is about $500. How much time does the employee have to save to pay for the newer computer?

The answer is a bit less than 7 hours… a year. That’s 2 minutes a day. So, the real question becomes “Will a newer computer save this employee 2 minutes a day?” It may not be immediately obvious, but if the tech support company is charging five times the employee’s salary ($150 an hour,) saving even one incident over the next three years more than covers it.

Technology Costs in Quality of Earnings Audits

Technology costs have become an integral expense item for almost every business. That hasn’t escaped the notice of buyers, especially professional buyers.

You can expect a Quality of Earnings (QoE) audit to encompass software licensing and subscriptions, hardware and equipment, IT support and maintenance, cloud storage, telecommunications (bandwidth and redundancy,) cybersecurity, and data protection insurance.

If a company is still working with the old “If it fails, then we’ll replace it,” you can expect a substantial downgrade of its EBITDA. A dozen new PCs, a server, new software licenses, cloud storage, annual costs for a bigger Internet pipe, and a second broadband carrier could easily cost $100,000.

Depending on the multiple being paid, each $100,000 deducted from the EBITDA means 3, 4 or 5 times that amount deducted from the price. That will get the seller’s attention, but by then it will be too late.

Technology costs for current (not cutting-edge) equipment and software are money well spent both now and at the time of a sale. Expect and budget them on a regular cycle. Deferring the expense might just be the definition of “Penny wise and pound foolish.”