Exit Planning – Two-Day, 14 CPE Credit Workshop

Program Overview

A comprehensive online learning webinar workshop series that gives you a thorough understanding of the essential components of the IEPA Business Owner Exit Planning process.  Over the past fifteen years, this proven program has trained thousands of Advisors and Business Consultants on how to engage Business Owners in a discussion about Business Exit Planning.

Price:          $350 ($25/credit hour)

Dates:         June 23rd and 24th  10:00am ET to 5:00pm ET [RECORDING NOW AVAILABLE]

Format:       14 hours of Live Webinars moderated by John Leonetti.

CPE:           14 credits [For Live Program Only; CPE not available for replay]

Program Materials Include:

  • 12 learning modules, 50 minutes each

  • Course binder materials

  • Two (2) copies of John Leonetti’s book, Exiting Your Business, Protecting Your Wealth to share with your clients

Note: This course is a pre-requisite to the Certified Business Exit Consultant® Course. Details on that course can be found HERE.

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Why Exit Planning?

The Marketplace of Baby Boomer Business Owners  There are approximately twelve million Baby boomer business owners in the United States today and every day 10,000 of these Baby Boomers turn 65 years old. What does this mean? It means that over the next 10-15 years millions of business owners will be exiting their businesses – and the majority of them have no plan in place to do so. Further, many of these owners are your existing and valuable customers who are looking to you, as their primary advisor, to assist them with this important need.  As a professional advisor, you are likely aware that the business owners that you work with (and would like to work with) face a major issue – they DO NOT know how to turn their most valuable asset, their illiquid business, into a liquid form that can be used to fund their retirement or other goals.

Exit planning is a simple concept . . . it is the idea that a business owner, a few years before they want to sell or transfer their business to someone else, will do some planning around this critically important event. Owners should know and make plans around issues such as the value of their business, who would likely want to own it after them, when they might expect to get paid for the business, whether that is enough money for them, and what can they do over this time period to address these and many, many other issues related to achieving a successful exit. And, as a professional advisor, you are perfectly positioned to deliver these planning based solutions into your existing and prospective business owner relationships, yielding you a profitable and enjoyable stream of income for your own business or practice.

Adding exit planning to your practice also gives you greater visibility, access to, and standing with a growing network of other professional advisors who are active in the business owner exit planning space. Many of these advisors have owner relationships and want to partner with you to help service the owner’s comprehensive needs in the exit planning process.

For all of these reasons, we are now making our 2-day Workshop content available to a larger number of advisors and easier than ever before to access using today’s technology and e-learning platforms.

The International Exit Planning Association (IEPA) – A Leader in Professional Advisor, Exit Planning Training  For the past fifteen years, the IEPA has trained thousands of advisors on how to have the exit planning conversation with their business owner clients and prospects, empowering these advisors to bring baby boomer owners the information that they need to exit their business and protect their wealth. In addition, the IEPA supports hundreds of advisors on a regular basis with putting exit planning into their practice.

The IEPA’s Book and System:  In October of 2008, John Leonetti released Exiting Your Business, Protecting Your Wealth – A Strategic Guide for Owners and Their Advisors. This book is now considered a leading resource for the business owner and professional advisory community on the emerging topic of exit planning. Pinnacle’s 6-step exit planning process is articulated in the EYB book and is being followed by hundreds of advisors today, walking their business owners through this process to deliver exit planning solutions to this large and growing marketplace.

“Mastering the Exit Planning Conversation”

In February of 2008, the IEPA’s predecessor, Pinnacle Equity Solutions, started offering this training through live, two-day workshops around the country. More than 1,000 professional advisors attended these classes over the last fifteen years, taking time out of their busy schedules to learn about exit planning and how to have this critical, initial conversation. The outcome objective of the live, 2-day workshop is to empower the advisors to return to their practices and begin to integrate exit planning into their businesses right away. Many of these advisors went on to become IEPA members to gain access to, and a license for, use of the IEPA’s copy-written support materials (including marketing newsletters and plan writing templates, and software tools that drive owner engagement). Many others also took the next step in their training by attending our limited-seating, Certified Business Exit Consultant™ professional designation program – for which completion of the 2-day workshop material is a pre-requisite requirement for CBEC™ attendance.

NOW, we are inviting professional advisors to gain access to the same information and to take the first, initial step forward in ‘mastering the exit planning conversation’ through our new and updated online exit planning workshop. And although this online workshop content remains pre-requisite study material for our Certification course there is no additional commitment that you need to make to gain access to this course and content so that you too can begin to put exit planning into your practice today.

Sign-up Today!

  1. Gain immediate access to the same exit planning curriculum that has helped grow this emerging industry

  2. Save you the travel and hotel expenses as well as the time away from your practice

  3. Complete the coursework on your time-frame, from the comfort of your home or office,

  4. Gain access to additional bonuses that, prior to this offering, were exclusive only  to the IEPA’s Members and Membership program

The IEPA’s Exit Planning Online Workshop – Curriculum

This training course has been refined and improved over the past fifteen years to include all of the essential components of a complete exit planning conversation that you, the professional advisor, can and should be having with business owners and referral sources. The content addresses the most important parts of a comprehensive exit planning process so that you can gain confidence in engaging the owner with this conversation. The IEPA’s 6-step process also helps you to organize the process and to bring structure to the conversation that leads to an engagement. All of this leads to your ability to have this conversation and establish yourself as a credible expert in this field, leading to greater engagements and referrals.

The online course consists of twelve training modules. Each module is approximately 50 minutes in duration and covers a specific area of exit planning. The modules include:

Welcome and an Overview of The Marketplace for Exiting Owners – The marketplace of exiting owners is currently in the millions and is growing. We’ll learn about the types of owners who are in need of an exit plan as well as how to find and approach them. We survey the current marketplace of advisors as well as introduce The IEPA 6-step process and where exit planning likely fits into your practice.

Initial Meetings/Questions for Owners – This module also focuses on the size and type of businesses that are the best fit for exit planning as well as what business owners are most concerned about and the questions that advisors are not asking their business owner clients. A series of questions and fact finding tips are offered for when you meet the owners and begin the conversation.

Exit Goals of the Business Owner – This second module dives deeper into the IEPA 6-step exit planning process with Goal Setting as the first step and objective in the process. We discuss how to position the process of asking the right questions at the right time to find out what the owner most wants to achieve with their exit.

Mental and Financial Readiness for an Exit – This step in the exit planning process addresses the issues of whether the owner can the owner afford to exit as well as what is the emotional process that the owner is going through? In other words, what does the business mean to the owner and what might prevent a successful exit?

The Four Types of Exiting Owners – This module introduces simple charts that help build the system to define the type of business owner you are dealing with and what their optimal exit option is. This will allow you to organize the first few steps in the process and further engage the owner in the next step of discussing exit options.

Valuations for each Exit Option & Why They Vary – There is a range of values for each business exit option. This module will teach why this is the case as well as how to explain this to owners as part of the process. We also introduce the idea of [potentially] introducing professional business appraisers into the process at this point in time.

The Five Major Transaction Options – This module covers the details and elements of the five (5) major exit options that owners should be evaluating for their business transfer. These include:

  • Sale

  • Private Equity Group Recap

  • Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP)

  • Management Buyout

  • Gifting Strategies.

External Transfers

Selling a Business: The M&A Process and Private Equity – This module illustrates the steps involved with selling a business and how and when this fits into the exit planning process. A variation of business sales is the Private Equity Group recapitalization which is a different type of business sale with specific features and attributes that may make it more appealing to your achieving your exiting owner’s goals.

Internal Transfers:

Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs), MBOs and Gifting – We dedicate an entire module to the study of Employee Stock Ownership Plans and internal transfers. The reason for the focus on ESOPs is because it is one of the least understood, yet potentially most powerful parts of an exit planning conversation. The ESOP provides the owner with a lot of options and flexibility to choose from and, therefore, makes many exit planning conversations more dynamic. The MBO and Gifting options are likely to be considered by many owners who are looking for insiders to take over and run the business in the future – this may or may not include family members, an important consideration in this type of planning.

Deal Structuring & Taxes – This module begins our 6th and final step in the IEPA’s process, which is the execution of an exit plan, including technical areas that need to be addressed in the conversation and planning. This module will illustrate different deal structures as well as the the tax implications of different exit options. It informs the advisors as to traps to avoid and how to measure and explain the impact of deal structuring and taxes to an owner’s exit plans.

Estate Tax and Legal Agreements – As part of protecting an owner’s wealth, we want to understand both the estate tax exposure and implications in an exit plan as well as what type of legal agreements are necessary to complete any one of the five (5) exit options / transfers listed above.

Service Providers & The Advisory Team – The final part of an effective exit plan is the team that is assembled to assist the owner. You will learn about the ‘core’ exit planning team members (and where you fit on this team) as well as the role of the quarterback in getting the exit planning process [and potential transaction] through to its completion.

Pulling it All Together – The final module will incorporate all of the learning points into a case study that is included with your online purchase. Bill Brown from the Exiting Your Business book, is the fictitious owner who resembles our ‘target’ business owner in need of this exit planning service. You will see and apply the training to Bill’s case to build your confidence and to complete your initial training in having the exit planning conversation.

Bonuses!

In order to make this online course the best it can possibly be we will also include in your purchase all of the following:

  • A summary of handouts that follow the lesson plans so that you can take notes as you go through the course.

  • Five copies of John Leonetti’s book, Exiting Your Business, Protecting Your Wealth – A $149.75 value! This book is a great tool to use with business owner clients and prospects, as well as referral sources and centers of influence. The main idea  is that by having a business owner or referral source read this book, you will engage them in the process and system that you want to work with them on for their exit planning needs.

  • Copy of Sample ESS Summary Deliverable, plus access to the IEPA’s online ESS Summary Report software. Until now, our software and proprietary materials have been offered exclusively to IEPA Members. But with your purchase of this workshop you will receive one (1) use of our ESS Summary Report software (additional fee applies) so that you can complete your initial training with the execution of a Summary Exit Plan for a business owner.

Advisors in the IEPA network are charging an average of $15,000 to $20,000 for full exit plans and $3,000 to $5,000 for a Summary Plan. By offering all of the content and tools in this program, you are in a position to get an immediate return on your investment with the potential for so much more. Again, the IEPA sees a large marketplace of owners who are in need of this service and is interested in empowering more advisors to deliver this service.

We look forward to getting started with you today!

REGISTER NOW

The International Exit Planning Association, LLC is registered with the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy (NASBA) as a sponsor of continuing professional education on the National Registry of CPE Sponsors. State boards of accountancy have final authority on the acceptance of individual courses for CPE credit. Complaints regarding registered sponsors may be submitted to the National Registry of CPE Sponsors through its website: www.NASBARegistry.org.