Contingency planning can be an extremely uncomfortable topic to tackle

How can a business owner that's listening to this today, how can they prepare for the possibility of the negative, of those push factors affecting their eventual transition? How can they like just start to get prepared for that?

Well, one of the big things that business owners can do is think about contingency planning. It's very uncomfortable to think about your death, but it's something that we do need to work through. And it's included as part of what I talk about with my clients. When we talk about strategic business transition planning, contingency planning should be part of that. So not only the exit of an intended intentional sale to a third party or to family, but this contingency idea of what happens if you're incapacitated, if you die, what happens to the company? And then once you open your mind to that, there's a number of things that you can do to help protect the business, and that's a good thing to do.