Looking for a Financial Advisor for Business Owners? Meet Michael Acosta

Are you a business owner? A financial advisor who specializes in serving entrepreneurs can help you make smarter money moves and free up more time to focus on growing your business.

You’ll likely find dozens of financial advisors in your community well-suited to help you reach your money goals with a personalized plan. But it may be more difficult to find a financial advisor who truly understands the unique financial planning needs and challenges you’re facing as a business owner.

Fortunately, many financial advisors offer virtual services so you can meet online no matter where you (or they) live. This means you can choose to hire a financial advisor who lives hundreds of miles away if you decide their knowledge and experience working with entrepreneurs could help you achieve better outcomes.

👨‍💻 Smart Money Insights for Business Owners

This page is organized into sections to help you quickly find the information you need and get answers to your questions:

1. Q&A with Financial Advisors Specializing in Serving Business Owners
2. Get Answers to Your Questions About Financial Planning for Business Owners
3. Browse Related Articles

Get to Know:

✅ Michael R. Acosta, CFP®, ChFC®, CSLP®

– Financial Advisors Specializing in Serving Business Owners –

Q: What should business owners be doing to prepare for exiting their business if they have an expected 5-year time horizon?

Michael: Beginning with the end in mind is the key to all exit planning. We often work with owners who have a very clear vision of a particular path, such as selling their business to an employee, but they’ve never tested the waters of simulating that specific path, so the upsides and downsides are just guesswork.

Really test-driving those types of inside sales, 3rd party sales, ESOPs, etc., through simulations and then understanding the post-exit financial plan that follows is the only way to really find out which path is for you. The sooner, the better.

Q: Are there strategies or actions business owners can implement to continue to maximize the valuation of their business?

Michael: For most small and medium-sized business owners, the most important and easiest way to increase the value of their business is counterintuitive – it’s to get yourself out of it. The more heavily involved an owner is in the day-to-day operation of the business, the more that business’s value is tied to the owner’s presence.

Having key employees step in to take responsibility away from the owner using documented, transferable processes will immediately increase value because the business suddenly becomes a much more turnkey proposition to a buyer. Key employees are what drive transferrable value.

Q: If there isn’t a market for the sale of the business, how can business owners still achieve a successful exit of their business while maximizing their retirement savings?

Michael: A majority of small/medium-sized closely held businesses aren’t sold through a formal 3^rd party sales channel.  Instead, most of these businesses are sold to a ready market that already exists within the business – the inside buyer.  This buyer could be an existing partner, a key employee, a family member, or a combination of all three. 

The upside is the owner can identify and grow these individuals into the role, thus creating their own market for the sale of their business.  The downside is that the inside buyer typically doesn’t have enough cash to buy the business outright and doesn’t have enough collateral to secure 3rd party financing, which simply means that in almost all of these cases, there is an opportunity to use a number of different creative financing options using the future cash flow of the business itself.

Important Disclosures:

Financial Advisor and Registered Representative of Park Avenue Securities LLC (PAS). OSJ: 6115 Park South Drive, Suite 200, Charlotte, NC 28210. Securities products and advisory services offered through PAS, member FINRA, SIPC.  Financial Representative of The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America®(Guardian), New York, NY. Park Avenue Securities is a wholly owned subsidiary of Guardian. Consolidated Planning, Inc. is not an affiliate or subsidiary of PAS or Guardian. CA insurance license # 0M50974. Guardian and PAS do not offer student loans to finance education nor do they offer legal to tax advice. 2023-149396 Exp. 01/2025

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