By Dan Beenken

This past week we had the fourth session of our breakfast series featuring Steve Wells – co founder of American Food and Vending along with Robert Hodges, the estate planning practice lead attorney with BrownWinick. 

I have to admit, the topic of estate planning isn’t one to create much excitement. I feel like that happens a lot in life, planning your way through the boring stuff (taxes, estate planning, my annual physical) sure helps to keep the crazy from showing up. So here we go, and here is to hoping you do some of this boring stuff so you aren’t stuck in your own episode of the Jerry Springer show down the road. Because no one really wants to be hit with a chair

Without further ado, my top three:

1. Take some time to think. Robert did a great job of giving our audience 3 things to think about – and the order is important here:
   1. Get the Right Stuff to the Right People
   2. Create a solution that avoids a legacy of your family fighting
   3. Avoid taxes
      
      As I said, the ORDER IS IMPORTANT. Allow greed to creep in and use tax avoidance to guide everything, and you’ve let “the tax tail wag the dog” as the kids say.  You are bound to leave your family fighting for what they think they should have gotten, fighting for decision making control of the business, and honestly, just fighting. 
2. Don’t kill the Golden Goose. I hear this one a lot in the family consulting space – for good reason. You kill the goose, the golden eggs stop showing up too. A great takeaway from our session was the need to protect the goose (family business). What kills the goose? Family fighting and power struggles related to how to run the goose…errr business. A great tip from Hodges on this one was don’t be afraid to split up your shares into classes – give the voting stock to those “in” the business and non-voting to the passive family members. Protect those that are keeping that Goose going!
3. Fair and equal are not the same thing. This is another mantra I hear often, and it bears repeating with the lens of estate planning. Sometimes in an effort to keep things equal, we end up splitting business ownership to a level that isn’t practical and all of a sudden, the Golden Goose is in tiny little pieces.