Business owners preparing to sell frequently discover, too late, that a lack of coordination among their advisors has cost them time and money. Michael Gold, founder and CEO of Gold Family Wealth in Westport, Connecticut, says the pattern is one of the most persistent problems he has seen in twenty-five years of practice.
A Year Lost to Poor Planning
“People do not think about the end in mind early enough,” Michael Gold says, describing situations in which business owners have had to delay a sale by a full year simply to re-characterize assets and avoid excessive tax drag. Those delays, he notes, almost always trace back to advisors who worked in isolation rather than as a coordinated team.
The scenario is common enough to concern Michael Gold Westport given how much wealth is about to change hands. Close to three-quarters of privately held business owners expect to transition or exit within the next decade, a shift tied to an estimated ten to fourteen trillion dollars in potential exit-related wealth.
Closing the Gap Before the Clock Runs Out
Gold’s solution is to coordinate a family’s existing advisors rather than bring in additional specialists, an approach his Westport firm calls orchestration. Gold Family Wealth‘s dedicated practice for complex families relies on advanced modeling and multigenerational governance frameworks to stress-test tax outcomes across different liquidity scenarios well before a sale is finalized.
“You have to look under the hood. You have to look at every aspect to see if there are any gaps, and if so, how severe they are, and what are the solutions to address them,” Gold says of the process his firm uses with clients approaching a major transition.
For Michael Gold, the lesson is simple. Technical competence among individual advisors was never the missing piece. Coordination between them, applied early, is what prevents a family from losing a year, or more, to problems that could have been caught in advance. Refer to this page for related information.
Find more information about Michael Gold Westport on https://x.com/GoldFamilyWlth