Unlocking Private Company Wealth: A Tutorial for Business Advisors

Type: Webinar
Date: February 24, 2015 (Tuesday)
Time: 12:00pm – 2:00pm (Central)
Sponsor: American Society of Appraisers
Speaker: Z. Christopher Mercer, ASA, CFA, ABAR

Webinar Description
This webinar presents the concepts found in Chris Mercer’s newest book, Unlocking Private Company Wealth. The book is included in the cost of the webinar and will be shipped to registrants after the webinar.

Chris will walk through key portions of the book and talk about the implications for business owners while relating the content to business advisers. He will discuss not only ideas and concepts that will enhance the quality of conversations you have with business owners, but will provide real-life examples of these concepts in action.

Webinar Summary
It is important for business advisers to understand how to talk to their business owner clients about private company wealth. An increasing number of closely held and family business owners are facing ownership or management transition. Therefore, the time is now to begin talking with them about the critical issues surrounding these transitions so that you will be part of the team working with them to help them achieve their goals. This webinar will help you do just that.

• Managing the wealth in private businesses. Most owners think about managing their businesses and don’t think about their largest asset as part of their investment portfolio.
• Creating a budget for managing wealth. Business owners routinely pay asset management fees to wealth managers who handle their liquid wealth or profit sharing funds, but cringe when asked to spend a few thousand dollars or more to manage their private wealth. The One Percent Solution gives you a vocabulary to help business owners create the needed budgets for managing wealth.
• What is the rate of return on a business owner’s investment? Advisers need to know the importance of talking in terms of investment rates of returns, as well as how to calculate them for their clients.
• Strategies for managing private company wealth. Advisers must be familiar with strategies like dividend policy (every company has one), special and leveraged dividends, share repurchases, leveraged share repurchases, and more. These strategies can be successfully employed to take wealth outside private businesses for diversification purposes while still retaining the businesses. What about minority investments by private equity funds? or ESOPs? There are a number of strategies advisers need to be familiar with to be able to help client business owners.
• Bad things happen to good companies. Don’t you want to help your clients get ready to minimize or eliminate many of the bad things that could happen to their companies?
• Identifiable earnings create transferable value. These two terms will facilitate discussions with owners.
• How will the next investors look at your business? This is a critical question, because while your clients may be the current investors, if they retain their businesses, they actually “buy” them and become the next investors.
• Is your business ready for sale? Many owners don’t want to hear this question, thinking they aren’t yet ready to sell their companies. We will talk about a number of reasons that businesses actually change hands, and many of them are unexpected or precipitous. Help clients address this critical question of readiness. A business that is ready for sale is a lot more fun and profitable to work in.
• 25 questions for business owners. Unlocking Private Company Wealth concludes with a chapter that asks 25 questions of business owners. If you adopt these questions and a questioning attitude, the value of your services will increase to your clients.

Learning Objectives

• The participant will learn five ideas that will change the nature of conversations they have with their business owner clients.
• The participant will learn the concept of the One Percent Solution and how that applies to the wealth management of their private company owner clients.
• The participant will learn the tools for managing private company wealth, including dividend policy, leveraged share repurchases, ESOPs, minority interest private equity investments, among others.
• The participant will learn 25 questions to ask their private company owner clients to help them consider management and ownership transition issues.

Webinar Audience
Business Valuation appraisers and MTS

Register
You can register at this link: http://www.appraisers.org/Education/View-Class?ClassID=3318.