Here's a scenario that plays out constantly. A business owner walks into an advisor’s office and says, "I think I'm going to sell in the next few years." The advisor nods, talks about investment allocations for the proceeds, maybe mentions a tax-efficient withdrawal strategy for retirement. The conversation lasts twenty minutes. Everyone feels good about it.
And then the owner sells the business two years later, writes a massive check to the IRS, realizes their estate plan wasn't updated to account for the liquidity event, and discovers that their assets are now exposed in ways nobody anticipated. The twenty-minute conversation suddenly looks like a missed opportunity worth millions.
Pre-sale business planning is one of the highest-value services you can offer a business owner, and it's one that almost nobody is delivering proactively. Not because advisors don't care, but because the planning involved sits at the intersection of tax law, estate planning, asset protection, entity structuring, and business succession. That's a lot of disciplines to coordinate, and most advisors don't have a team that covers all of them.
The good news is that you don't need to. You just need to know when the conversation matters and how to connect the client with the right specialist.
Most advisors think about a business sale the way they think about any other liquidity event. Money comes in, money gets invested, the financial plan gets updated. But that view misses everything that should happen before the transaction, which is where the real value lives.
Pre-sale business planning isn't about managing the proceeds. It's about structuring the owner's entire financial, legal, and tax picture so that when the sale happens, every possible dollar is preserved and protected. The planning touches income tax minimization, estate tax minimization, generation-skipping tax strategies, asset protection, business and wealth succession, philanthropic optimization, next-generation planning, and ensuring order and ease of estate administration.
Think about it this way: once the check clears, most of these levers disappear. You can't restructure ownership after the sale. You can't move assets into protective structures once the liquidity is sitting in a personal account. You can't undo a tax bill that could have been reduced by 30-40% with proper advance planning. The window for this work is before the sale, and it's a window that closes.
For a business owner with $25 million or more in net worth, or a rapidly growing business where the family's aggregate wealth is heading in that direction, the stakes are enormous. We're talking about the difference between a retirement that's comfortable and one that's transformational, not just for the owner, but for their children and grandchildren.
Pre-sale business planning isn't for every client. It's for the ones where the complexity and the dollar amounts justify a sophisticated, multi-disciplinary approach. Here's who you should be thinking about.
The most obvious candidates are successful business owners who are starting to think about an exit, whether that's in two years or ten. They might not use the word "sell." They might say things like "I'm starting to think about what's next" or "I want to make sure the kids are taken care of" or "I'm tired of dealing with the day-to-day." Those are all signals.
Beyond the business sale itself, look for clients with disproportionately high income relative to their planning. If someone is earning significantly more than they're spending and there's no coordinated strategy around where that money goes, that's a planning gap. High income without structure is just a future tax problem.
You're also looking for clients who are actively engaged in their financial lives, people who care about planning comprehensively rather than addressing things one issue at a time. These are the clients who will see the value in a coordinated approach and who will follow through on the recommendations.
The net worth threshold is generally $25 million or more, but that number drops significantly for rapidly growing businesses or situations where multiple family generations aggregate to that level. If you have a client whose business is doing $10 million in revenue and growing 20% a year, the planning needs to happen now, not after they cross some arbitrary wealth threshold.
This is where most advisors realize why they haven't been having this conversation. The scope is broad, and every piece interconnects.
Asset protection is the foundation. Before a sale creates a massive liquidity event, you want the right structures in place to shield that wealth from creditors, lawsuits, and other risks. This isn't just about trusts and LLCs. It's about understanding the client's specific exposure and building a layered protection strategy that accounts for their industry, their state, and their personal risk profile.
Income tax minimization is usually the largest dollar-amount conversation. The difference between a well-planned sale and an unplanned one can be millions in tax savings. That means looking at entity restructuring, installment sales, qualified opportunity zones, charitable strategies, and a dozen other tools that need to be in place well before the closing date.
Estate tax minimization and generation-skipping tax planning ensure that the wealth created by the sale actually transfers efficiently to the next generation. Without these, a business owner who sells for $50 million might find that their children inherit a fraction of that after federal and state estate taxes.
Business and wealth succession is about making sure the transition itself goes smoothly, not just the financial part, but the operational side too. Who takes over? What happens to key employees? How do partnership interests get handled? These questions need answers before the sale, not after.
Philanthropic optimization matters for clients who want to give back but don't want to do it inefficiently. Charitable strategies implemented before a sale can dramatically increase both the tax benefit and the impact of the giving.
And then there's the piece that often gets overlooked: family harmony and next-generation planning. Large wealth transfers strain families. Having a clear, communicated plan reduces conflict and sets expectations appropriately. It also creates an opportunity to educate the next generation about managing wealth responsibly.
The biggest barrier for most advisors isn't knowledge. It's confidence. You know this conversation should happen, but you're not a tax attorney or an estate planning specialist, and you don't want to open a door you can't walk through.
Here's the thing: you don't need to walk through it. You need to open it. Your job is to ask the right question, identify the need, and connect the client with someone who can deliver the plan. That's not overstepping. That's exactly what a trusted advisor does.
Start with questions that surface the gap. In your next meeting with a business owner who might be approaching a transition, try something like this:
"If you sold the business tomorrow, do you know roughly what you'd net after taxes? Not the sale price, the amount you'd actually keep."
Most owners have never done that math. The gap between the sale price and the after-tax proceeds is often shocking, and that shock is your opening.
Or try: "Beyond the financial plan we have in place, is there a coordinated strategy around your estate, your asset protection, and the tax implications of a future sale? Or are those being handled separately?"
The answer is almost always "separately" or "I'm not sure." That's the moment where you say, "That's exactly the kind of thing our Virtual Family Office can help coordinate."
You're not positioning yourself as the expert in pre-sale planning. You're positioning yourself as the advisor who knows when a client needs it and has the team to deliver it. That's a much more powerful position.
Let's be practical about what happens next, because the value of identifying the need only matters if you can follow through.
Through the Virtual Family Office model, you have access to specialists who focus specifically on pre-sale business planning for high-net-worth clients. These aren't generalists. They're teams that do this work daily, with deep expertise in the legal, tax, and structural components that make pre-sale planning effective.
Here's how the process typically unfolds. You identify a client who fits the profile and have the initial conversation. Once the client is interested, you reach out to the VFO Liaison at ERT, who facilitates an introduction with the specialist team. A complimentary introductory call gets scheduled, usually 30 to 60 minutes, with you, the client, and the client's accountant if they have one.
That call is the diagnostic. The specialist assesses the client's situation, identifies the planning opportunities, and outlines what a comprehensive engagement would look like. If the client has an accountant partner already involved in the relationship, that accountant is part of the conversation from day one. This collaborative approach ensures that tax planning, legal structuring, and financial planning are all aligned.
After the introductory call, if the client wants to move forward, they enter a design engagement phase. This is where the specialist digs into the details: reviewing balance sheets, existing estate documents, tax returns, and organizational documents. They develop a comprehensive plan covering every dimension we discussed earlier, from asset protection through family harmony.
From there, implementation is straightforward. The specialist team handles the execution of the plan, working alongside you and the accountant to ensure everything is coordinated. And after implementation, they continue to maintain and update the plan annually, keeping it current as the client's situation evolves.
When a client engages in comprehensive pre-sale planning through the VFO, the specialist fees are substantial because the work is substantial. Fees typically range varying based on complexity. Implementation fees are additional and are structured as flat fees based on what the client needs.
What does that mean for you? Through the VFO model, specialists can structure outside advisor and accountant fees into the overall engagement. That means you and your accountant partner can be compensated for the ongoing coordination and relationship management that makes the whole thing work, all fully disclosed to the client.
But the bigger revenue story isn't the planning fees. It's everything that flows from the engagement. Pre-sale planning almost always surfaces needs for additional insurance, updated investment strategies, new AUM from concentrated stock diversification, and ongoing financial planning adjustments. Each of those is revenue you keep 100%.
When you layer in an accountant partnership, the opportunity multiplies. The accountant brings credibility on the tax side and often identifies clients you'd never reach on your own. The advisor brings the financial planning relationship and the VFO access. The client gets a level of coordinated care that neither professional could deliver independently.
The most expensive mistake a business owner can make isn't a bad investment or a bad hire. It's selling their life's work without a plan that preserves and protects the value they've built. And the most common reason that happens is that nobody, not their advisor, not their accountant, not their attorney, ever sat them down and said, "Let's coordinate all of this before you sign."
You can be that person. Not by becoming a tax attorney or an estate planning specialist, but by being the advisor who sees the full picture, asks the right questions, and has the team to deliver. That's what the Virtual Family Office model is built for.
Pre-sale business planning is one of many specialties available through the VFO. But for advisors who work with successful business owners, it might be the single most impactful conversation you're not having yet.