For Founders Who Built It
The exit is a beginning, not a finish line.
Whether you're taking chips off the table, recapitalizing, or heading for a full sale, the decisions you make in the 24 months around a liquidity event determine what you keep, what you build next, and how the next generation inherits it.
Most advisors optimize for what you have.
We optimize for what you're about to have.
The typical wealth manager meets you after the wire hits. By then, the most valuable tax elections have expired. The trust structures that could have saved $15M are off the table. The deal terms that looked fine to your M&A attorney just cost you $25M in avoidable taxes.
We engage before the liquidity event — sometimes years before. Because the architecture you build around the exit is worth more than the last 5% of the purchase price your banker is fighting for.
Fair warning
We turn away more families than we take on.
If you want quarterly rebalancing and a Christmas card, there are excellent firms for that. If your primary concern is not losing money, we're not the right conversation. We work with founders whose instinct is to deploy capital with conviction — people who see wealth as fuel, not a scoreboard.
Our clients built companies. They understand concentrated risk, illiquidity, and the difference between a good structure and a lazy one. If that's you, keep reading.
The Engagement
From first conversation to generational architecture.
Before the exit
The $30M window that closes at signing.
QSBS elections. Equity swaps. Installment sales. Charitable remainder trusts funded with pre-exit stock. Recapitalizations that let you take chips off the table while retaining upside. These are the specific plays we run 12-24 months before a liquidity event. Every single one becomes unavailable or dramatically weaker after the deal closes. Your M&A attorney is negotiating the purchase price. We're engineering what you actually keep.
The Transition
Earn-outs, escrow holdbacks, equity rollovers — decoded in real time.
That earn-out that looks like $30M on paper? It's structured with milestones your acquirer controls and taxed as ordinary income. The equity rollover? Liquidation preferences sit above your position. We sit next to your M&A counsel during the negotiation — not after — and translate every component into what you actually keep. The difference between good and bad deal terms is the difference between keeping $80M and keeping $55M.
Post-Exit Architecture
Capital that compounds, structures that protect, income that replaces.
We build a machine — passive income streams that replace your operating income permanently, asset protection structures that make you untouchable, dynasty trusts that keep the IRS from taking 40% every time someone dies. Your portfolio, your tax plan, and your estate plan aren't three separate conversations. They're one integrated architecture. Because that's how compounding actually works.
The Founders Lodge
The part nobody prepares you for.
The calendar empties. The identity you built over 15 years belongs to someone else. Everyone tells you to relax. That lasted about three weeks. The Lodge is where post-exit founders go to feel alive again — Le Mans in an Aston Martin, fly-fishing in Alaska, surfing Teahupo'o, heli-skiing the Bugaboos. Then dinner with a dozen people who actually understand the silence after the exit.
Two founders sell identical companies for $100M. One keeps $75M. The other keeps $58M.
The difference is 18 months of planning. Nothing else.
THE PROBLEM
Six advisors. Zero coordination.
Your tax attorney has never spoken to your estate attorney. Your wealth manager doesn't know about the PPLI your insurance broker sold you. Your real estate counsel has no idea what your CPA filed last quarter.
Leave any one area unattended — and the wheel comes off.
Most founders have all six.
Almost none have them talking to each other.
Invitation Only
The Founders Lodge
You spent 15 years running at 200mph. Everyone's telling you to slow down. Take up golf. "Enjoy it." You tried. It lasted about three weeks.
The Lodge is for founders who want to feel alive — not retired. Race an Aston Martin at Le Mans. Surf Teahupo'o. Heli-ski the Bugaboos. Then sit down at a table with people who actually get it — the silence after the exit, the identity crisis nobody warned you about, and the hunger to build something new.
No LinkedIn posts. No conference panels. No name tags.
Every advisor says they're different. Ask them what they've built.
Insights
Thinking out loud
Deal Navigation
The Other Side of the Cap Table
7 min read
Own the Machine
15 min read
Founders Lodge
The Loneliest Room in the House
8 min readWorth a conversation.
30 minutes. No pitch deck. You tell us where you are in the process. We'll tell you honestly what we'd do differently — and whether we're the right fit.