Business Succession, Transition & Sale
A practical guide for Taiwan SME owners facing succession: what to do when the next generation will not take over, how businesses are valued, the sale process and buyer types, how to prepare before selling, and what to ask your accountant and lawyer.
A practical guide for Taiwan SME owners facing succession: what to do when the next generation will not take over, how businesses are valued, the sale process and buyer types, how to prepare before selling, and what to ask your accountant and lawyer.
Who Will Buy My Company? Five Buyer Types Explained
Most owners assume only a competitor would buy them. In reality there are at least five buyer types: strategic buyers, vertical integrators, private equity and family offices, individual searchers running search funds, and your own management team. Here is what each optimizes for — price logic, funding, speed, employee impact, and how long you stay — with comparison tables and a decision framework. Not legal or financial advice.
What Is a Search Fund? A Guide for Taiwan SME Owners
A search fund is an acquisition model: an entrepreneur raises search capital, spends one to two years finding a small company to buy, then runs it as CEO. Stanford GSB has tracked the model for forty years, yet it remains rare in Taiwan. This guide covers how it works, how it compares with strategic buyers and private equity, the honest upside and risk for sellers, and what to ask a searcher who contacts you.
Selling Your Business: When to Tell Employees and Customers
The hardest part of selling a business is not price — it is when to tell employees and long-standing customers. Too early and people leave; too late and trust never recovers. This guide applies one principle, release information in step with certainty, and breaks down timing, speaker, and depth for critical managers, all staff, and key accounts, with a sequencing table. Legal and employment obligations are noted as existing, never interpreted.
How to Sell a Business: The Full Process, Stage by Stage
From serious start to closing, a typical SME sale takes 9 to 18 months. This guide breaks the process into six stages with typical durations, the documents each one demands, and the reasons deals collapse, plus a full comparison table. Process description only, not legal or tax advice.
When Your Kids Will Not Take Over: Four Options for Owners
Your children declining to take over is not a failure — it is a decision problem with four real options: hire a professional CEO and keep ownership, sell to a strategic buyer, sell to a financial buyer or search fund, or sell to employees or wind down deliberately. This guide compares them on control, price, timeline, and employee impact, and tells you the first step to take.
12 Questions to Ask Your CPA and Lawyer Before You Sell
Most owners walk into their first meeting with an accountant or lawyer without knowing what to ask, and pay for it twice — in fees and in outcomes. This is a checklist of 12 questions to ask before selling: four for your accountant, four for your lawyer, four for both, with why each matters and what a good answer generally sounds like. Questions only, no tax or legal advice.
Preparing to Sell Your Business: The Two-Year Plan
Most owners start preparing on the day they decide to sell, while buyers are reading the previous two to three years — a two-year gap. This is the pre-sale playbook: the six structural issues buyers discount, and a month-by-month 24-month timeline.
How Much Is My Business Worth? 3 SME Valuation Methods
There is no single number. This guide breaks down the asset, market and income approaches to valuation, what each is good for and where each goes blind, with a comparison table, the six factors that actually move a multiple, and the seven data sets to assemble before a formal valuation. All multiples cited are US or global public data.
Financial Records and Valuation: What Buyers Verify
Buyers pay for earnings they can prove, not earnings you explain. This is what financial due diligence verifies, why unprovable profit gets discounted rather than debated, and what an owner can legitimately do about it. Not tax or accounting advice.
Family Business Succession Planning: A 5-to-10-Year Timeline
Succession is not a date. It is a five-to-ten-year transfer across five stages, with a full timeline table showing what the successor does, what the owner does, and where it stalls.