Exit Planning Essentials Webinar
Tuesday, June 25, 2024 | 8 am - 12:30 pm
Online Event
Join us for Relay's first webinar: Exit Planning Essentials! Our speakers will cover the essential areas to focus on when selling a business to help you avoid common pitfalls and achieve a successful outcome.
Meet our speakers
Scott Brown | Regional Director - BC, MacKay CEO Forums
Increasing the Value of Your Business Before What’s Next
Increasing the Value of Your Business Before What’s Next offers proven tools and approaches and shared experiences that when implemented will help the entrepreneurial leader and their business leadership team get more of what they want from their business today while developing a healthier and smarter leadership team for tomorrow. How to proactively enhance the leaders ability to articulate value and provide greater assurance to the investor buyer with respect to continuity and growth post investment event will be explored. In the spirit of MacKay CEO Forums the discussion will include practical actions taken that enhanced the perceived value of the business and select stories of glorious successes and primary pitfalls.
Kevin Walsh | Partner, Tax, Walsh King LLP
Tax Planning to Maximize your Proceeds
Planning for the potential tax on the sale of your business is a critical component to a transaction. As with all tax matters, the number of planning opportunities are maximized the sooner you engage a tax professional.
Canadian tax law and its numerous acronyms and nomenclature can be daunting. Kevin will provide an explanation of some of the key concepts that may be helpful during the sale process.
Tax planning opportunities exist whether you sell shares or assets. Kevin will discuss how each of these scenarios may impact the tax planning that you may want to consider. Kevin will also discuss some common tax planning opportunities that exist for private corporations including utilizing the lifetime capital gains exemption and multiplication of the lifetime capital gains exemption.
Axel Christiansen | Partner, Relay Transition Partners
The Selling Process
Professionally selling a business to maximize buyer competition and create an optimal outcome for the seller requires a well-managed, disciplined process that typically takes 6 to 9 months.
In this segment Axel will:
provide an update on current market valuations and activity levels;
explain how most businesses are valued;
highlight the key steps in a comprehensive go-to-market selling process;
discuss common transaction challenges and how to avoid them.
Taking a best-practices approach to selling your business will frequently result in a faster close, higher value and better terms and conditions.
Don C. Sihota, K.C. | Partner, Clark Wilson LLP
Selling a Business – Legal Traps to Avoid
Don will discuss legal issues in selling a business, pointing out pitfalls business owners face in the sale process so you can avoid making the same costly mistakes. He will explain the difference between an asset purchase and a share purchase in the sale of a business and which is best for you. You will learn about the importance of confidentiality agreements and standstill agreements when selling a business, and how to properly deal with non-competition agreements and other restrictive covenants. Finally, Don will explain how representations, warranties, covenants and indemnities in the purchase agreement can cause the actual payment you receive for your business to be lower than the price you negotiated, and how you can prevent this from happening to you.
Dave Dinesen | Chief Operating Officer, MacKay CEO Forums
An Entrepreneurs Experience
Dave Dinesen is a serial entrepreneur who founded BackCheck, a pre-employment background screening company company, in 1997. It grew exponentially and by the time he sold the business in 2012 it was the 8th largest in the world and by far the largest in Canada. BackCheck expanded to the United Kingdom and South Asia and had 550 employees in four offices in three countries. Dave sold to his largest US competitor in 2012, invested a portion of his proceeds and joined the company’s executive team in New York. Two years later, the entire business was sold again and Dave exited fully.
In 2018 he co-founded another background screening technology company, ModoHR. The company developed industry leading online screening technology specific to the Canadian market that introduced never before seen efficiency. Dave was board chair and ModoHR was successfully sold to a strategic in 2022.
Today Dave supports the success of many entrepreneurs as COO of MacKay CEO Forums.
In a ‘fireside chat’ format, Dave will share his lessons learned in preparing for and executing the successful sale of two successful businesses.