A Tax-Smart Exit: How to Reduce Taxes When You Sell Your Business
Most owners spend years growing the value of their business and far less time thinking about how that value will be taxed. Without proactive planning, a sale can trigger combined federal and state taxes of 40 to 50% or more, before broker commissions. The result is often a successful sale that delivers far less than the owner expected.
That's an ExitReadiness® issue. A business sale is usually a once-in-a-lifetime liquidity event, which makes tax planning one of the biggest drivers of your final walk-away number. The best strategies take time to put in place, and many options disappear once a letter of intent is signed. Planning early preserves flexibility; waiting too long limits it.
In this episode, Pat Ennis and Walter Deyhle talk with Ed Cotney, a tax attorney, Certified Exit Planner, and author of Tax Smart Exit, who has spent more than two decades helping business owners reduce taxes and exit with minimal tax exposure. Ed walks through specific scenarios, from a third-party sale to a family transfer, and explains what owners can do now to keep more of what they've built.
Key Takeaways
Plan early: it's a 1-to-3 ratio. Ed says that before a transaction, $1 of planning can solve a $3 problem. After the fact, it takes $3 to solve a $1 problem.
Take charge of your own tax bill. Most owners spend hours on margins and minutes with their CPA. Cutting income taxes by 25% is like earning a year of free profit every four years.
Have your attorney order the appraisal. A valuation you order yourself may have to be handed over in due diligence. Ed recommends having your attorney order it, so a disappointing result can stay protected as attorney work product. Confirm the approach with your attorney.
Separate personal and corporate goodwill. Ask the appraiser to break out personal goodwill. Where it exists, it can open up tax-efficient strategies, such as charitable trust structures.
Get a quality of earnings report. Most buyers borrow to buy, and lenders will ask for one. Having it ready validates your value and can save two to six months in a transaction.
Document your charitable intent now. The IRS can deny deductions for last-minute charitable moves made only to cut taxes. A simple email to your advisors years in advance creates a record of your philanthropic intent.
Family transfers take time. Moving ownership to children efficiently, while keeping control, can take five to ten years using tools like gifting and family limited partnerships. Asset protection matters as much as taxes.
Revisit your entity choice. Since 2017, a C corporation's flat 21% rate can be attractive for higher earners. Ed starts modeling it at around $800,000 of taxable income for married couples. It isn't right for everyone, so run projections with your tax professional.
Where to Start: Ed's Steps for a Tax-Smart Exit
Run the numbers every couple of years. Ask your CPA, "If I sold today, what would I take home?" Then work with your financial planner to see whether that number supports the life you want, and work backward from there.
Prepare three years out. Have your attorney order an appraisal that separates personal and corporate goodwill, and get a quality of earnings report.
Learn the tools before you need them. Owners get too busy to learn during a sale. Invest the time early so you can choose the strategies that fit your situation.
Hire an industry-experienced broker. For an outside sale, choose a business broker who knows your industry.
Ed also created a one-page, seven-point checklist for avoiding deal disasters. Contact us at email@ennislp.com for a copy.
About Ed Cotney
Ed Cotney is a tax attorney with a national reputation as a tax strategist, as well as a family wealth counselor, Certified Exit Planner, author, and speaker. For more than two decades, he has helped business owners and high-income professionals legally reduce income taxes, protect their wealth, and exit their businesses with minimal tax exposure. He is the author of Tax Freedom and Tax Smart Exit, part of a four-book series, with all proceeds going to charity.
Connect with Ed: LinkedIn · edcotney.com
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Full Episode Transcript
This transcript was generated automatically and lightly edited for readability. It may contain minor errors.
Hey there, this is Pat Ennis of ENNIS Legacy Partners. Welcome to the ExitReadiness® PODCAST. I'm here with co-host Walter Deyhle. Our mission here on the podcast is to provide you, the business owner, with subject matter expertise on topics pertaining to building sellable business value, protecting sellable business value, and planning your eventual exit from the business. We want to help you build a business that's sellable or transferable and then help you exit successfully on your own terms and conditions.
A successful exit absolutely requires the right tax plan. Without proactive tax planning, your exit could trigger a combined federal and state hit, depending on where you live, of 40 to 50%, and maybe more. But with strategic tax planning, that liability can often be reduced significantly. You've got to do it, though, and you've got to do it well in advance. Given that a business sale is often a once-in-a-lifetime liquidity event, tax planning isn't just a nice-to-have; it's the primary driver of your final walk-away number.
A tax-smart exit: that's our topic today. And our guest is our friend Ed Cotney. Ed has a national reputation as a tax strategist. He's a family wealth counselor, Certified Exit Planner, author, and sought-after speaker. For more than two decades, Ed has helped business owners and high-income professionals legally reduce income taxes, protect their accumulated wealth, and then exit their businesses with minimal tax exposure.
That's what he does. His latest book, Tax Smart Exit, has just recently been published, and so we're excited to have him with us today. We love Ed. He's very smart; he's tax smart, and he's a smart guy. So Ed, great to have you with us today. Thanks for taking the time; we really appreciate it.
Well, hello, Pat and Walter. Great to see you guys again; it's always fun to get back with folks. We first met many years ago at a conference in Denver, Colorado, and it's always great to get back in touch with you. And thank you about the book. The book has been a huge success. This is book two in a series of four that we're publishing.
Book one was about income tax planning. This book is about exit planning. The next book is going to be about wealth transfer while you're alive, and the last book is going to be about how to build enterprise value in your business. Well, great. You just answered my first question, which was how Tax Smart Exit is different from the other books you've written. Is there anything else you'd say about the difference between it and the prior books?
That's the big question right there, Pat. As we know, most business owners don't know when they're going to retire. They say, well, I'm going to be age 65, or they pick a date in the future. But with the number of private equity groups we have today and the amount of money out there, business owners get so many unsolicited phone calls. And if that call comes on the worst day of the year, and somebody's saying, "Hey, I've got people interested in your business," the next thing you know, they're selling the business at 54 years of age, because they're done.
There are a lot of reasons a business owner will move to the sale stage rather than say, "I'm just going to keep working. Everything's working right. I love my business. I love my employees. It's a great relationship." Sometimes that day comes along when you need to sell, for a variety of reasons. So we decided on this series of four books. The first book, Tax Freedom, is really for business owners to do a better job of their income tax planning and to put things in perspective.
If you're in a state like New York, Illinois, or California, once you get to about a million dollars of income landing on your tax return, you're pretty much in the 50% tax bracket at that point, state and federal. So think of it like this: as a business owner, why is income tax planning important to me, even if it's just for the next six months or six years? If you can reduce your income tax bill by 25%, okay, just reduce your income tax bill by 25%, do you realize that's a year of free profits every four years? I share that with business owners to help them think about how much time they spend every year working on margins: how do we reduce cost, how do we increase profit?
When we think about the time we invest as business owners in making the company more profitable, we spend maybe 12 minutes with our CPA, and it's typically, "Where do I sign, and how much is the check I've got to write?" We've got to do a better job of using our tax professionals proactively, and I challenge business owners all the time to ask questions. Why am I paying this much in tax? What can I do to help reduce this? I've already bought all the trucks I can stand, we've already expensed everything possible, I'm out of options, I've funded my 401(k) or deferred comp or whatever, and I still have a big tax bill.
Keep asking questions, because somewhere in there is going to be some information, or an advisor, that can help you. I try to get business owners to understand that the only one who cares about their tax bill, from an income tax perspective or when they sell their business, is them. They've got to quit thinking that the CPA, the attorney, the financial planner, the life insurance guy, the banker, or the guy at the 7-Eleven cares about their tax bill. You have to be in charge of your tax. And just like you said as we teed this up, when I sell my business, I'm going to lose a third, on a good day.
Oh, by the way, there might be broker commissions of another 6 to 10%. So now we're not talking a third; we're talking 40% of my business gone in costs, and now I've somehow got to live on 60%. These are very important things you've identified, Pat. If you can reduce your total cost or your loss on the sale of your business, what's that worth? If you can save a million dollars on your business exit, how much time would you give me to learn about tax strategies to get that benefit in your pocket?
Yeah. So here's what I want to do. I want to get into some general scenarios. What we like to do here on this podcast, Ed, as you've heard before, is provide listeners with a few practical steps, so that if they invest 30 minutes here listening, they can leave with two, three, or four things they can really execute on. So let's consider a few general scenarios, and you provide what you think would be a tax-smart action or consideration for each.
Does that sound good? That's a great idea. Okay. Let's start with a third-party sale. Let's say it's a baby boomer who's had a service business for 30 years. He has a kid in the business, but the kid doesn't want anything to do with owning it, so they're going to sell to a third party.
He has absolutely decided; we've helped him decide that he's going to sell to a third party, and he wants to do it within three years. How can that owner, he or she, be tax smart in planning that transaction? Give one, two, or three things that person should be thinking about. That's a great question. If I'm three years out from selling my business, the first mistake we don't want to make is going out and getting an appraisal or valuation done on the business. When you go into the sale process, as part of the buyer's due diligence, you're going to have to surrender all the appraisals and valuations you've acquired, so the buyer can do their due diligence and figure out the value of your company.
The reason I tell business owners not to order that is because it becomes a mandatory thing to surrender. Now, if your appraisal comes in perfect or better, fantastic. That's not a mistake, is it? But overwhelmingly, business owners think their business is worth more than the valuation actually shows. And at that point they're like, "Golly, now we've got this valuation, a record that's going to be used in due diligence down the road. I may be shooting myself in the foot."
So here's a way around that problem: ask your attorney to order the appraisal. Under attorney-client privilege and work product, the attorney orders the appraisal, and when it comes in, the attorney and the client review it. If that thing is a disaster, thank goodness the attorney has it as work product; it will not be surrendered in due diligence for the sale of the business. Conversely, if it comes back perfect, print out an extra 100 copies, stand on a street corner, and pass them out. So that's a very big piece of the puzzle.
That's important because when due diligence gets here, we want due diligence to be working for us. We want to be in charge of due diligence, and we want to make certain the processes, procedures, culture, and all those things are perfect. But if I've got a bad appraisal from two or three years ago, even though I've worked hard over the next two or three years to make things better, it's still going to be ammunition for the buyer to whittle down the value of my business when that sale comes along. So that's one important thing, and in the new Tax Smart Exit book, we talk about how to use the attorney and the appraiser this way in chapters five and six. The second point, which goes hand in hand with the appraisal, is that I ask the appraiser to bifurcate the corporate and the personal goodwill of the business.
Remember, when we sell our business, overwhelmingly it's going to be an asset sale. Occasionally we get a stock sale, but most S corporations, and LLCs taxed as S corporations, will typically have an asset sale. Once we've got the attorney piece going and we've protected everything from being handed to the buyer, we're in a good situation, and if the appraiser bifurcates the goodwill, that gives me more tools to create tax-efficient exits. The reason to bifurcate personal and corporate goodwill is this: when the seller says, "Okay, I'm six months from going to market, I've got a broker identified, we're getting things ready to go," and the appraisal shows this much as personal goodwill, I can allocate that personal goodwill into charitable trust structures that will bypass capital gains exposure, get it outside the seller's taxable estate, create an income tax deduction, and create an income stream for the rest of the seller's life. In other words, instead of losing $2 or $3 million in taxation, even if I just had $3 million in personal goodwill and allocated it to a charitable remainder trust, that's $3 million that's not going to get hammered.
That's a big deal for most people. But when the personal goodwill isn't properly bifurcated in the appraisal document, we have to go back and redo the appraisal. So when you order your appraisal, and this is chapter six of the Tax Smart Exit book, make certain the attorney instructs the appraiser to bifurcate the goodwill. Sometimes there may be no personal goodwill, but if there is, it's a powerful tool for us to work with. And the third thing, Pat, if we're whittling it down to three things that are so important and that sellers just don't understand, because, like you said in the beginning, this is normally the one time you go to market, the largest financial transaction of your life and the largest tax transaction of your life:
When we think about the deal itself, overwhelmingly the buyer is going to be borrowing money to buy your business. Overwhelmingly, the buyer is going to do a leveraged purchase. And no matter where that buyer goes to get money, the first thing the lender is going to ask for is a quality of earnings report. Time and time again, I see business owners say, "I don't want to spend money on a quality of earnings report." You don't have to, but I like a quality of earnings report, because one, it helps validate that your appraisal is right on point.
Two, it lets you have the quality of earnings report ready to go, so when the buyer comes along, you can say, "Here's the QoE, ready to go." You'll save two to six months in your transaction, because you were serious and ready about going to market and you made it easy for the buyer to make the acquisition. That's what the seller has got to do: control the appraisal exposure, get the information protected, get the appraisal done right, and get a quality of earnings report. A quality of earnings report costs a few bucks, but it's an investment in the sale of the practice or business. How's that for three?
That was excellent. Hey, Ed, let me take that same scenario and add one other feature. Let's say the business owner is very strongly inclined to give a chunk of the proceeds to charity. What steps should they take ahead of time to reduce their tax bill? Great question.
The first thing we want to do, Walter, is prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the seller has a recorded philanthropic intent. Let me explain why. I have a short email, and Pat, I'll send you this, that says, "Dear attorney, CPA, financial planner: if I ever sell a major financial asset in my life, such as my business, I plan to integrate some form of charitable tax planning strategy." Why is that important? It's a big deal.
Sometimes people get into these transactions and see the tax bill when they've already got a letter of intent done, maybe the purchase agreements are being drafted, and escrow dates are identified, and they say, "Oh gosh, I'm very philanthropic. I want to support my church or my favorite charities. Surely there's something I can do at the last minute." Not so fast. Remember, the IRS has rules about the timing of repositioning assets for charitable tax planning purposes. We've got the Ferguson case and a couple of other cases on point where the IRS denied the charitable income tax deduction, because in the commissioner's eyes, the only reason the seller did something philanthropic at the last minute was to mitigate taxes.
By having this email in the hands of your attorney, your CPA, your financial planner, and half the town if you want, you've created evidence. So when the IRS says, "You don't have any philanthropic intent," well, it just so happens that 14 years ago I sent this email to my CPA and my attorney saying I have philanthropic intent, and even though I may not have donated giant sums of money or stock over the years, when I sell this one major asset in my life, I plan to integrate charitable planning. You want to take that argument away from the IRS. Again, I'm back to control.
So that's a great thing, Walter, to be able to do. Now, again, we want to be early with the client and start teaching them which tools align best with their exit. For example, if somebody said, "Ed, I've got a client who's 35 years old, selling a business, and he wants to use a charitable remainder trust as part of his exit," that tax deduction is going to be terrible, because he's too young. Whereas for somebody older, the charitable remainder trust would probably bring a better tax benefit to the table.
So the very common charitable remainder trust may not be the primary choice; we may want to go to a pooled income fund, or a donor-advised fund if we're just trying to make an outright gift. Here's the thing, Walter, and you probably see this all the time, too: most business sellers are so busy, particularly as they get close to the transaction, that when we try to help them understand these tools, they're too busy to learn. And we end up not being able to do anything, because it's last minute: hurry, hurry. There's this roller coaster going on with the buyer's due diligence, my family life, dealing with the company, and getting the employees ready for the transition.
"Oh, by the way, here's how we can solve a $3 million tax bill." "I ain't got time for it." I'm sorry, I can solve a $3 million tax bill, but I need time, and I need time with you to educate you about which tool is best. So, Pat, that's one of the best secret sauces we have for you and Walter: helping people understand that they have to invest time and energy in understanding the tools. You may never use the tools you learn about, but there are commonalities among them, and you can start to say, "Well, this is kind of like that over there, and maybe this works better with my particular company." How's that, Walt?
Yeah, that's exactly what I was looking for, because we've had situations, not so much at ENNIS, but back when I was at GRF, where clients were famous for showing up and saying, "Hey, guess what? I just sold my business." They can still make a nice charitable contribution, but they've really missed opportunities, like you said, with the trust, to maybe get a lifetime income stream going or to avoid the tax on that portion of the appreciation in the first place. So yeah, that's exactly what I was looking for. Thanks. Hey, let's move to another scenario.
Well, let me hit one thing real quick. Walter just hit the magic button right there. Business owners ask me, "Why is it important to do an exit planning strategy on the front side versus the back side?" It's a 1:3 ratio. For every $1 on the front side, I can solve a $3 problem. When it's behind the transaction and I'm trying to solve it after the fact, it takes me $3 to solve a $1 problem.
So the efficiency and effectiveness are on the front side of the transaction, not the back. You can still do something good; it's just not as good. That's good. I like the way you put that, and I'm going to remember it. That's going to be the takeaway: one to three. Yes, sir. One to three. That's good.
Okay. Another scenario: family transfers. We've got a few of those going on, so let's talk about that. Let's say there's one kid in the business and three kids out of the business. The one in the business wants to be an owner, they've been evaluated and assessed, and they seem to have the skill set to be a successful owner.
So the business owner is going to move toward a family transfer over the next three to five years. One of the big challenges is helping the owner think about their transition out, what their role is going to look like, and their life after the business, so they're not miserable. So it's going to be gradual. I say that because most of the family transfers we work with are gradual, just like the ones you work with. So how can those folks be tax smart?
Whenever you're going to do an inside transfer, a lot of business owners want to do it, but sometimes the numbers just don't work for them. When you can get it to work, it's always because of proactive planning, a good team around you, and a good child or children to work with. Some of the technical things we have to balance as planners are how to move ownership interests to the child in a way that lets Mom and Dad keep the control they need, so we can effect a wealth transfer that works well. That's where you'll hear about things like discounting models using family limited partnerships, and the annual gifting model, where you transfer a certain amount to the kids each year and run the books so that the money we move to the kids, we can deduct over here. It takes time.
So when people say, "Hey, I want to transfer my business to the kids," is it something we can do in the next week or two? More like the next five to ten years, if you want to do it with any efficiency and control. So you're right: transferring a business internally takes a lot of time, and there are a handful of ways to get there. I've even seen some pretty good models where people overfund life insurance policies on Mom and Dad, so there's an abundance of money set aside. Then, when the business is transferred to little Johnny and little Suzie, they don't have the burden of paying Mom and Dad back a heavy load, because Mom and Dad were able to max out deferred compensation benefits and overfund their life insurance policies.
That way they have plenty of money to support themselves, and the business can support little Johnny and little Suzie. The other thing that's really important is that when I transfer the business to my kids, if they're married, if there's a divorce, all those things come into play. How do we make certain the transfer is done in a way that protects the business if something goes wrong with the child, like a car crash that ends up in a great big lawsuit? We have to put those protections, or guardrails, around the transfer of the business to the kids. It's not just a tax planning strategy, which is a big deal; the asset protection play is just as important in an internal transfer.
Yeah, it's interesting how much of the planning around internal transfers isn't necessarily tax planning. I had a client in the exact scenario Pat described. The father owned the company and died in the summertime and left it to the one son who was running it, but the son had three siblings who each owned 25%, and by Thanksgiving they weren't talking to each other. Yeah, there's a lot of coaching required here. One question I get a lot is, how do I train my kids for the wealth transfer, whether it's the business or other assets?
Probably the best book I've ever read on this is by a guy named James Hughes, H-U-G-H-E-S: Complete Family Wealth, the second edition. It's a fantastic book. He doesn't start by talking about how family limited partnerships work and things like that. He comes at it from the perspective of family culture: how do we help our children understand the affluence and what's necessary to run this business? Because I think all three of us agree that, as business owners, one of the most powerful things we can do is create jobs.
Creating jobs is one of the most important things we can do with our time, talent, and treasure. And if we're transferring this beautiful business we've created internally, we want to equip our kids, the leaders of the new company, to run it into the next generation. One of my clients right now is on Gen 4 of the business his grandfather created in 1921. In the Tax Smart Exit book, I had him contribute a chapter about everything they've had to do generationally to prepare, and now we're working with Gen 4 to get them ready to take over the reins. So there's a decent amount of tax planning that goes on there, Walter, you're correct.
But the psychology of moving the business, and how we get the kids to take control and ownership in the right way, is so important, and in my opinion, the soft stuff does not get enough attention. Yeah. Hey, let me change gears a little. In your first book, you talk about choice of business entity, which, when you go to sell your business, is a critical factor. Do you mind sharing your thoughts about how you think about which type of entity makes the most sense, and what you see as optimal?
That's a great question, Walter. Sometimes I hear, "We're going to start a business, and we're going to set up an LLC." And I say, "Well, did you check with your Secretary of State's office to see whether an LLC is allowed for that particular business?" "What? I went online and found a company that can do my documents for $99." Okay, great, I'm glad you've got a business entity, but if it's not allowed in your state for, say, an architect, you may not have an entity that actually serves an asset protection role.
What I try to tell people is, one, make certain you've hit all the bells and whistles: do you have the right structure, authorized by your Secretary of State? Number two, what are you going to deliver? This is where you want to start running projected tax returns with your tax professional to see which of these makes sense. And I'll tell you, from a personal perspective, I was anti-C corporation for years: double tax, triple tax, quadruple tax, C corporations bad, bad, bad. Then the rules changed in 2017, and I didn't know it.
There's a point in time when you have to step back and say, wow, those rules changed significantly; should we be a C corporation? When I'm doing continuing education for attorneys, accountants, and financial planners, I'll ask, "How many people love C corporations?" It's a short list of hands that go up. It is more complicated, but the tax planning opportunities there are just through the roof when you need them. I like to bring C corporations out when I see more than about $800,000, married filing jointly, landing on the tax return.
That's when you run a parallel analysis of a flow-through and a C corporation, and there are some significant things you've got to play with. When you have a client who has maxed out everything they can do, all the normal things, funding their 401(k)s and so on, then we have to ask, are we just stacking income for tax at this point? Because if you're making a million dollars a year and living on $400,000 in California, you're stacking about $300,000 into taxation that you don't need. Whereas if we'd parked that in the C corporation, the C corporation pays a flat tax of 21%. So anytime you can get your personal tax rate down to 24% while your corporate tax rate is 21%, and run that balance, that's a very effective optimization.
But most CPAs don't want to do a C corporation, and again, a C corporation is not for everybody. So business entity selection is a big, big thing to ask about before you pull the trigger. Yeah. Okay, Ed, as we start to wrap up: is there anything you came into today's conversation wanting to say that we haven't asked you about, anything you think would be a great takeaway that anyone listening can just take and act on? Any words of wisdom before I ask for your contact information?
Yeah, Pat. When we wrote Tax Freedom, for income tax planning, and then Tax Smart Exit, for exit planning, Tax Smart Exit was initially only 17 chapters, and I just didn't like the way it was ending. Chapter 17 was a fantastic chapter where we use SLATs and IDGTs and Section 453 installment structures and things like that. Chapter 17 was one of the few times we pulled everything together, because what I told all the contributors was, just write on this one topic and don't add anything to it, since I try to help people learn from a silo perspective: what does this tool do? Understand this tool before you start learning about another one and trying to blend them together.
It just didn't land right, so I said, we really need a good exit chapter here. So chapter 18 is basically how to avoid deal disasters, and I turned that into a single front-and-back page that I sent to you. I would encourage all your listeners to get it. It's a short, seven-point list of what I need to be doing right now to avoid deal disasters and get ready to sell my business, whether that's in two months or six years. It doesn't matter.
What are the things I can do right now? That's why I want Pat to be able to distribute it to you; just take it, look at it, and try to apply it. The other thing I recommend is that sellers meet with their CPA every couple of years and have this discussion: if I sell the business today, what are the numbers going to look like? What's my take-home? Take that data to your financial planner.
This is where we start talking about, okay, if my net with no tax planning is going to be this, is that number going to be enough to support the lifestyle I want for my spouse and me? You have to start thinking about this stuff. And if you start saying, well, that's not going to be a good number, then how do I increase the value of my business? What do I have to do to make the EBITDA work? When you figure out what your lifestyle needs to be, you can reverse engineer it, with your CPA and your financial planner working together to run the numbers.
And when you start getting ready, do your homework on your business broker. Find a business broker who has experience in your industry. It's like taking a guy who's really good at selling barber shops and having him sell a car dealership; it's not necessarily the same thing. So look for an industry professional as a business broker to help you walk through an outside sale.
I really wanted chapter 18 to be a good summary of the steps to take, and that's why I turned it into a little sheet to hand out. You don't have to read the whole book, and I'm a terrible reader; I hate reading all day long. So both Tax Freedom and Tax Smart Exit are on Audible. You can get them on Amazon, Walmart, iTunes, and Spotify; you can get them anywhere, and it's a great book. All money from the books goes to charity, so there are no proceeds going to anybody whatsoever.
We're having fun with this thing. But you're exactly right: a business owner has to be thinking about selling the business every single day, because divorce, bankruptcy, litigation, you name it, can happen at any moment. And when you're not ready and not prepared, you're going to have a huge tax consequence that could have been avoided with just a little bit of planning and getting your team to work together. Excellent. Those are some great closing thoughts right there.
Thanks so much. This has been hugely helpful. Listeners, if you want the sheet Ed just mentioned, just contact me at email@ennislp.com and we'll get it out to you. And Ed, if someone wanted to contact you directly, how would they do that? Real easy. My website is edcotney.com.
And my cell phone is 530-913-0562. I'm in California, so I'm three hours behind all you guys on the East Coast, and I get a lot of East Coast phone calls. It's funny how the phone rings early in the morning for me; they're calling at five o'clock in the morning, and it's 8:00 for them. They're happy as a clam because they've already had breakfast, and I'm still trying to find the rooster to get him to start crowing. So, 530-913-0562.
Fantastic. And listeners, if you want help maximizing and protecting the value of your business or planning for that eventual exit, which is inevitable, because you're going to exit, we're 100% sure of that, plan in advance: not just tax strategy, but everything else too. Contact us at ENNIS Legacy Partners through our website, ennislp.com, or exitreadiness.com. And thank you for listening. If you've benefited from today's conversation, please consider liking it and sharing it on social media. And until next time on the ExitReadiness® PODCAST, this is Pat Ennis and Walter Deyhle signing off.
