Close to three-quarters of privately held business owners expect to transition or exit their companies within the next decade. Taken together, those exits could unlock an estimated $10 trillion to $14 trillion in wealth. For Michael Gold, founder and CEO of Gold Family Wealth in Westport, Connecticut, the scale of that shift makes early preparation essential.
Inadequate planning, Gold notes, consistently costs families millions through unnecessary taxes, legal structures that don’t fit, and investment approaches disconnected from what the family actually wants to achieve.
Process Before Product
Michael Gold’s practice serves ultra-high-net-worth families, and he describes its method as “disciplined, rigorous process control.” The frameworks his firm has built for complex families include advanced modeling, enterprise-wide mapping of potential exposures, and coordinated planning across multiple entities.
The work starts with discovery, not recommendations. “We need to really understand the client from a 360 degree view,” Gold says, describing a review that covers a family’s businesses, relatives, net worth statement, investments, tax exposure, and children. “Then we can see what gaps, red flags and/or missed opportunities exist.”
Winning Before the Battle
Michael Gold Westport often points to his favorite line from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, which holds that every battle is won or lost before it is ever fought. For a business owner planning an exit, that means the outcome is largely set by decisions made years earlier, well before any buyer appears.
The Westport advisor also stresses that planning must lead somewhere. “You have to plan, but then you have to move,” he says. Families who wait for perfect certainty can miss the window that good preparation was meant to open.
For owners facing a sale or succession, the message is clear: start early, look at every part of the family picture, and act once the groundwork is done. The families who do that work ahead of time keep far more of what they built. See related link for more information.
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