In 2023 the Exit Planning Institute surveyed more than 1,100 U.S. business owners about how ready they were to leave their companies. Among the Baby Boomers in that group, nearly 60% said they wanted out within five years. Five percent had a formal exit planning team.

If you expect to sell your business or hand it off in the next ten years, you need that team, and a Certified Exit Planning Advisor, or CEPA, is the person to build it. Bring one in years before the sale, while there's still time to change what a buyer will pay.

What a CEPA does

The CEPA is a credential issued by the Exit Planning Institute, or EPI. Advisors earn it through a five-day online program and a closed-book, proctored exam, and they renew it every three years with 40 hours of continuing education.

The program teaches EPI's Value Acceleration Methodology, which treats an owner's exit as one plan with three parts. The business has to be worth buying. The owner's personal finances have to work once the business is gone. And the owner needs some idea of what life looks like after they stop showing up every morning. Most owners already have an accountant for taxes and an attorney for contracts, and maybe a financial advisor for the retirement accounts. Those people rarely compare notes. A CEPA puts their work on one plan and keeps it moving.

EPI's survey shows how seldom that happens now. Among the Boomer owners, 57% had no business transition plan and 87% had no plan for their own life after the transition. Thirty percent said they hadn't started because they didn't know how.

EPI sells the CEPA program, so read its numbers with that in mind. The gap doesn't have to be exact to matter. If the real share of Boomer owners with a team were five times what EPI found, three out of four owners heading for the exit would still be doing it alone.

A CEPA should also lay out every way you could leave. EPI's curriculum covers family succession, employee stock ownership plans, sales to private equity, and sales to outside buyers. Only 53% of the Boomer owners said they were aware of all their exit options. Selling to your managers or your kids can mean less cash at closing and more control over who runs the place afterward. You want to weigh that trade while you still have time to set it up.

Why the timing matters

What a buyer pays for is the business without you in it. If your business can't run for a month without you, it isn't worth what you think it is, and no advisor can fix that in the year before you sell. Under the U.S. Small Business Administration's new acquisition rules, a buyer financing the purchase with an SBA loan has to solve that dependence before closing.

Fixing it takes years of unglamorous work. Customers who only deal with you have to get comfortable dealing with someone else. The way jobs get priced and billed has to live somewhere other than your head, and someone besides you has to be able to make a decision on a Tuesday afternoon. EPI calls the result transferable value, and 78% of the Boomer owners in its survey had not done that kind of work before their transition.

An owner who starts five years out can do this in stages and still run the company. An owner who starts after a buyer calls is negotiating with whatever the business looks like that day.

The credential has limits

The letters after a CEPA's name tell you less than you might assume. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, which oversees brokerage firms, keeps a public database of professional designations. Its CEPA listing shows one prerequisite, that the candidate be 18 or older, and no investor complaint process. EPI doesn't claim otherwise. Its program page says plainly that "earning CEPA doesn't change your expertise."

So the credential tells you an advisor has learned a method. It doesn't tell you whether they've ever taken a company like yours through a sale. The CEPA sits on top of some other profession, and that profession shapes the advice. An advisor who manages investments and one who brokers business sales will look at the same exit and see different work to do, and they get paid differently for it. Before you hire one, ask how many owners they've taken all the way through an exit and how they get paid when you sell.

Where RVRBN fits

RVRBN isn't a CEPA firm, and no one here holds the credential. We're building a succession planning practice for business owners in Northeast Florida, so we have an obvious interest in owners starting this work early.

When an owner works with us, part of the engagement could be finding the right CEPA. That would mean doing the vetting described above so the owner isn't picking a name off a directory. We also build the full action plan the team works from and bring in advisors from our network to help cover the rest of the transition.

Five percent of the owners closest to retirement in EPI's survey had a team in place. The rest still have time to build one, and a little less of it every year.

If you plan to sell or hand off your business in the next ten years, start with a conversation.