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We have been asked to explain our product and services on multiple occasions. For those interested, you may find this episode to be a good listen, as it fully explores our services and how our involvement can significantly benefit your client. While this particular episode deals with land sales, the concept is universal to the sale of personal property, business and other appreciated assets.
Hello XPX! If you or your Middle Market clients are not happy with their current banking relationship, I’m happy to discuss anything from solving day-to-day problems to complete acquisition financing. Comerica is the largest bank headquarter in Texas. We take a holistic business approach, always putting our customers and our community first, and providing our clients a very high-touch banking experience. Specialties Include: M&A Financing Traditional C&I Lending SBA Loans Owner-Occupied Commercial Real Estate Machinery & Equipment Working Capital Lines of Credit Leasing Treasury and Cash Management Services And if you’re in Austin, I’d also make a great 4th for Pickleball!
Our motto is “Speed is our weapon”. Every day I see this come to life with my clients from day 1 to closing. Here’s how we can help: Pre-qual listings within 24-48 hours upon receipt of your CIM, 3 years taxes and YTD financials Pre-qual buyers with our approving credit manager within 48 hours from receipt of their complete package Underwriting completed in 7-10 business days Larger M&A deals exceeding SBA 7A cap of $5MM can be accommodated with our companion conventional loan up to $4MM, for a total of $9MM financing 100% expansion financing for established buyers with a similar business Closings within 45 days for non-real estate transactions, 60 with real estate We also pay referral fees upon successful closing of all 7A referrals. Call me to discuss a specific transaction or for additional information. 203-461-5097
After a tsunami of a year facilitating 1031 Exchange transactions, we found there are many misconceptions among investors about 1031 Exchanges. Here are five of the most common areas of investor confusion. Reverse Exchanges Are Quick & Simple: Identifying replacement property in a hot market was a challenge for 1031 Exchangers this past year, causing many sellers to pursue a strategy of purchasing a replacement property before selling their relinquished property. Known as the Reverse Exchange, in this scenario, the investor first buys a new property of equal or greater value than the relinquished property and then has 180 days to sell their relinquished property. With a Reverse Exchange, you cannot own your replacement property and relinquished property at the same time, requiring an affiliated entity (a Qualified Intermediary) to hold the title of the relinquished property or the new replacement property. While Reverse Exchanges can benefit sellers in hot markets, they take longer to arrange, include more steps, and have, additional costs and fees compared to the more common Delayed Exchange. Vacation Homes/Secondary Homes Qualify for an Exchange: Residential property can only be considered “like-kind” if held for investment purposes. The rules are very specific. You can sell your vacation/secondary home through a 1031 Exchange if you rented it for more than 14 days per year and your personal use was no more than 14 days per year (and less than 10% of the total nights rented over the two years leading up to the sale). When renting a vacation home you purchased as part of a 1031 Exchange, you must charge rates at fair market value. You cannot rent to a “family member” for $1.00 per night! 1031 Exchanges are a “tax Loophole”: Since 1921, 1031 Exchanges have been a vital part of U.S. tax policy. Exchanges have been available in their current form since 1986. Like-kind exchanges encourage capital investment for the highest and best use of real estate, thus improving communities and increasing the local and state tax base. Section 1031 like-kind exchanges give businesses and entrepreneurs more incentive and ability to make real estate and capital investments. Far from being a tax loophole, the 1031 Exchange, which has enjoyed political support from Republican and Democrat legislators for decades, is a powerful economic tool that allows investors to grow and transfer their wealth to future generations in the most tax-efficient manner. Partners in an LLC Can Simply Separate in the Middle of an Exchange: The “Drop & Swap” alternative is an exit strategy for the sale of real property held in an LLC where two or more partners in the LLC have differing ideas about what to do with the proceeds in another property and continue deferring taxes to “drop” the partnership interests in the LLC and “swap” for Tenant-in-Common (TIC) interests. But the Drop and Swap strategy is not simple, and careful planning is required. It is recommended to prepare the property being sold for separate exits before signing a listing agreement with a real estate brokerage. Considering Replacement Property Options Can Wait Until Closing of the Relinquished Property: You’ve heard the adage, “timing is everything,” and that certainly holds true regarding the timeline requirements of a 1031 Exchange. Many first-time exchangers, aware of the 45-day replacement property identification rule, often wait too long to explore their options, only to discover their deadline passes before selecting a property. And their exchange fails. That’s why it’s critical that you work closely with your 1031 Exchange investment professional and Qualified Intermediary to ensure you take the necessary actions at each stage so that your exchange is successful. Get clear on conducting a proper 1031 Exchange, feel-free to contact me. Disclosure: The commentary in this blog post reflects the personal opinions, viewpoints and analyses of the Safe Harbor Asset Management, Inc.’s employees providing such comments, and should not be regarded as a description of advisory services provided by Safe Harbor Asset Management, Inc.’s or performance returns of any Safe Harbor Asset Management Inc.’s Investments client. The views reflected in the commentary are subject to change at any time without notice. Nothing in this blog constitutes investment advice, performance data or any recommendation that any particular security, portfolio of securities, transaction or investment strategy is suitable for any specific person. Any mention of a particular security and related performance data is not a recommendation to buy or sell that security. Safe Harbor Asset Management, Inc. manages its clients’ accounts using a variety of investment techniques and strategies, which are not necessarily discussed in the commentary. Investments in securities involve the risk of loss. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.
As a business owner, have you ever thought about whether you should own or rent your company building? It’s likely you have since it’s one of the top most-Googled financial questions in the U.S. Every business has a big dream for their business and wants to make it happen. But, along the way many business owners question the money they’re paying in rent for their company building. Further, the combination of increases in rental rates coupled with lower-than-normal commercial mortgage rates (until recently) have caused many CEOs to ponder this question. Continue reading:
Live Oak Bank is the #1 SBA Lender in the Nation. We provide M&A financing as well as owner occupied commercial real estate loans with attractive terms. Please contact me to discuss specific financing needs. Thanks, Michelle Orr Vice President, Sr. Loan Officer 203-461-5097 sba_general_commercial_real_estate_brochure
CSSI will be hosting a live, no-cost 1.5-hour CPE webinar on Tuesday, Nov. 9th at 11:00 CT on ‘Expensing & Depreciation Strategies to Counter Upcoming Tax Increases.’ CPE credits are for CPAs only. Registration is open to everyone. Please indicate that Mark Gross invited you. Copy and paste link below or click link on PDF to register. Tax Changes are on the way. Tax professionals are creating cash flow for clients through little known strategies on commercial real estate or tenant space. An example and scenario filled presentation with straightforward explanations will identify opportunities to advise your clients with confidence how to reduce or defer income taxes in connection with their owning a commercial building or paying for their own tenant space. See PDF for more details about the webinar. Contact Mark Gross for a no cost preliminary analysis of cost segregation savings for any property nationwide. mgross@cssi-associate.com 630-329-9801 www.cssistudy.com
My Profession is: Tenant Representative / Office Leasing Broker / Commercial Real Estate Broker My Business is: CREATING SOLUTIONS When it comes time to find an office space for the first time, renew a lease, renegotiate a lease, or relocate; clients use me and my services to maximize their savings, increase their concessions and improve the value of their leases. My involvement creates a competitive environment, which puts pressure on a Landlord to improve the concessions package and lower the rent. This happens because the Tenant, now has a real estate professional on their side leveraging the transaction to the benefit of the Tenant. My involvement will save a Tenant TIME, MONEY and STRESS.
Mar 2, 2021
Mar 2, 2021
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As an advisor, your role is to help clients prepare to exit their business, yet many people resist thinking about the future because it involves so many unknowns, decisions, and choices. And emotions typically complicate matters further, sometimes derailing the process altogether. Here are some questions that can help you establish rapport with your clients, learn more about their concerns, and move the conversation forward. How are you feeling about your work/profession/business these days? Which aspects of work are you still enjoying, and which are you ready to leave behind? Do you envision retiring from work at some point, or are you contemplating an encore career? What part of planning for your future feels most challenging? How do you imagine your life in retirement will be different from how it is now? What process are you using to figure out what you’ll do next after you retire? What would you like to see happen with your business long term? What options have you considered for the transfer of your business? What steps have you taken to make your business more attractive to a potential buyer? What are your concerns about transitioning your firm to new ownership? What would be your ideal scenario for transitioning out of your company? What topic(s) have we touched on today that we should put on our agenda to revisit? So, what happens after you pose a few of these questions and your clients open up about emotional matters? Remember, the most helpful thing you can do is to listen attentively. You’ve created a valuable opportunity for them to talk about things they may not share with other advisors. Here are some tips for managing the conversation when clients raise emotionally loaded topics: Don’t try to “fix things” by immediately offering suggestions. Doing so sends the message that you’re uncomfortable hearing their concern. You can offer suggestions but do so later. Don’t say anything that conveys the message that their feeling or concern is unwarranted. “There’s really no need to feel that way” or “I’m sure it will be just fine” may sound reassuring to you but could be experienced as dismissive by your client. Don’t immediately offer a logical counterpoint to your client’s emotion. Remember, feelings don’t have to make sense; they’re “as is”. Put another way, if feelings made sense, they would be thoughts. People report concerns and characterize their feelings differently from one another, so it’s in your best interest to seek amplification and clarification by inquiring as follows . . . “I want to make sure that I understand exactly what you mean by ___. Can you tell me more?” “People sometimes mean slightly different things when they talk about ___. What does ___ mean for you?” “Before I suggest anything, I’d like to learn more about it from your perspective.” It’s possible that during early conversations your client may hint at mixed feelings about exiting their business. That’s perfectly normal, but you need to bring it out into the open. You want to foster an atmosphere such that your client keeps you apprised about where they’re at. If they keep their ambivalence to themselves, it has greater potential to blindside you and complicate the sale. You can say: “In my experience, it’s normal to have some mixed emotions about selling. Those thoughts may not always be top of mind, but when they do pop up let’s be sure to talk about them. Believe it or not, they can help inform our process and alert us to aspects of the sale that are important to you.” You may also find that your client is overly risk averse. If so, consider saying the following: “Our work together won’t be comprehensive if we only plan for what could go wrong. That’s just half the equation. It’s fine to be conservative and err on the side of caution, but to be truly realistic we should also consider a range of possibilities both good and bad.” Author’s Note: The concepts in this article are derived from Robert Leahy’s book, Overcoming Resistance in Cognitive Therapy. New York: Guilford
For five decades, the southern United States has been an attractive location for automakers to open plants thanks to generous tax breaks and cheaper, non-union labor. However, after decades of failing to unionize automakers in the South, the United Auto Workers dealt a serious blow to that model by winning a landslide union victory at Volkswagen. In an effort to fight back, three southern states have gotten creative: they passed laws barring companies from receiving state grants, loans and tax incentives if the company voluntarily recognizes a union or voluntarily provides unions with employee information. The laws also allow the government to claw back incentive payments after they were made. While these laws are very similar, each law has unique nuances. If you are in an impacted state, you should seek local counsel. In 2023, Tennessee was the first state to pass such a law. This year, Georgia and Alabama followed suit. So why this push? In 2023, the American Legislative Exchange Council (“ALEC”), a nonprofit organization of conservative state legislators and private sector representatives who draft and share model legislation for distribution among state governments, adopted Tennessee’s law as model legislation. In fact, the primary sponsor of Tennessee’s bill was recognized as an ALEC Policy Champion in March 2023. ALEC’s push comes as voluntary recognition of unions gains popularity as an alternative to fighting unions. We recently saw this with the high-profile Ben & Jerry’s voluntary recognition. Will this Southern strategy work to push back against growing union successes? Time will tell. Brody and Associates regularly advises its clients on all labor management issues, including union-related matters, and provides union-free training. If we can be of assistance in this area, please contact us at info@brodyandassociates.com or 203.454.0560.
Almost since time began, the nimble small business has been axiomatic. Large corporations are like big ships, the common knowledge goes. They take a long time to change direction.
I once had the thrill of interviewing Jerry West on management. He was “The Logo” for the NBA, although back then they didn’t advertise him as such. Only the Laker followers knew for sure. In 1989 the “Showtime” Lakers were coming off back-to-back championships. Pat Riley was a year away from his first of three Coach of the Year awards.
Can you Offer Too Many SKUs to Your Customers? The short answer is YES! A SKU, or Stock Keeping Unit, defines each different product version that you sell and keep inventory of. There may be different SKUs of the same overall item based on size, color, capacity (think computer or cellphone memory), features, and many other parameters. For build to forecast businesses, that number of variations can quickly explode and become difficult to manage. Your customers are busy and want ordering simplified. Of course, they may need (or want) more than one variation of a product. That is reasonable and a common aspect of business – one size does not fit all! But there is a point where too offering too many SKUs is not value added either for your customer or your business. In his April 30, 2013 article “Successful Retailers Learn That Fewer Choices Trigger More Sales” in Forbes, Carmine Gallo discusses his experience and a study about “choice overload” by other authors. He writes about a retailer that “has discovered that giving a customer more than three choices at one time actually overwhelms customers and makes them frustrated…when the customer is faced with too many choices at once, it leaves the customer confused and less likely to buy from any of the choices!” Choice overload is well-documented in consumer studies but can apply in B2B as well. While customer satisfaction is important, another key concern is the often-hidden costs associated with a business offering and managing a large number of SKUs for a given product type. These costs include holding inventory, S&OP (Sales and Operations Planning) team time, small production runs, and scrapping inventory. Holding inventory takes up space, which may come with a cost or utilize racks that could be used for other products. Scheduled inventory counts take up employee time and may result in blackout periods when the warehouse is not shipping product. The more SKUs there are, including extra SKUS, the greater the potential impact. The Sales team’s forecasting and the Operations team’s purchasing reviews that are part of the S&OP process can occupy more of their valuable time if they need to consider these times. If small orders or forecasts require a new production run, this could be costly and create excess inventory. Whether from this new production or past builds, eventually it will make sense to write off and scrap old inventory, another cost impact to the company. How do you know which SKUs to focus on if you wish to look at reducing your total number of SKUs? Start by examining SKUs that have: Low historic sales over a period of time Small variations between SKUs that customers do not value Older technology or model when newer option SKUs are available This requires a true partnership between Sales and Operations. It starts with educating both teams on the costs involved – neither group may be aware of the money and time impact to the company. Periodic (such as quarterly) reviews of SKUs that meet the above descriptions should become a fixed part of the calendar. A review of the data and other available for sale options should result in the identification of SKUs which may not be needed. At that point, it is helpful to have a customer friendly EOL (End of Life) Notice process by which you inform customers of last time buy requirements for this SKU and alternates available. It is usually best to provide some time for the last time buy in the interest of customer satisfaction, although that may not always be necessary. At a company that designed and sold electronics, a robust SKU rationalization process was implemented to help address these issues. A representative from the Operations team analyzed SKUs that met a version of the above criteria and suggested candidates for the EOL process. Next, a member of the Sales team reviewed them and, where appropriate, issued product change or EOL notices to customers, providing them time for last time buy orders when needed. These steps helped reduce the work involved in maintaining these SKUs while not leading to any customer complaints. A final note – sometimes it makes sense to continue offering low selling SKUs – to support customers buying other items (hopefully in larger quantities). It may be worthwhile to encourage them to keep coming back to you for all of their product needs and this may be a way to accomplish that. But it helps to understand that this is truly the case and not assume that this customer would not be equally happy with another, more popular, SKU. Steven Lustig is founder and CEO of Lustig Global Consulting and an experienced Supply Chain Executive. He is a recognized thought leader in supply chain and risk mitigation, and serves on the Boards of Directors for Loh Medical and Atlanta Technology Angels.
When it comes to careers, business owners are a minority of the population. In conversations this week, I mentioned the statistics several times, and each owner I was discussing it with was surprised that they had so few peers. According to the Small Business Administration (SBA), there are over 33,000,000 businesses in the US. Let’s discount those with zero employees. Many are shell companies or real estate holding entities. Also, those with fewer than 5 employees, true “Mom and Pop” businesses, are hard to distinguish from a job. The North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) Association, lists businesses with 5 to 99 employees at about 3,300,000, and 123,000 have 100 to 500 employees (the SBA’s largest “small business” classification.) Overall, that means about 1% of the country are private employers. Owners are a small minority, a very small minority, of the population. Even if we only count working adults (161,000,000) business owners represent only a little more than 2% of that population. So What? Where am I going with this, and how does it relate to our recent discussions of purpose in business exit planning? It’s an important issue to consider when discussing an owner’s identity after transition. Whether or not individual owners know the statistics of their “rare species” status in society, they instinctively understand that they are different. They are identified with their owner status in every aspect of their business and personal life. At a social event, when asked “What do you do?” they will often respond “I own a business.” It’s an immediate differentiator from describing a job. “I am a carpenter.” or “I work in systems engineering,” describes a function. “I am a business owner” describes a life role. When asked for further information, the owner frequently replies in the Imperial first person plural. “We build multi-family housing,” is never mistaken for a personal role in the company. No one takes that answer to mean that the speaker swings a hammer all day. Owners are a Minority We process much of our information subconsciously. If a man enters a business gathering, for example, and the others in the room are 75% female, he will know instinctively, without consciously counting, that this business meeting or organization is different from others he attends. Similarly, business owners accept their minority status without thinking about it. They expect that the vast majority of the people they meet socially, who attend their church, or who have kids that play sports with theirs, work for someone else. There are places where owners congregate, but otherwise, they don’t expect to meet many other owners in the normal course of daily activity. This can be an issue after they exit the business. You see, telling people “I’m retired” has no distinction. Roughly 98% of the other people who say that never built an organization. They didn’t take the same risks. Others didn’t deal with the same broad variety of issues and challenges. Most didn’t have to personally live with the impact of every daily decision they made, or watch others suffer the consequences of their bad calls. That is why so many former owners suffer from a lack of identity after they leave. Subconsciously, they expect to stand out from the other 98%. “I’m retired” carries no such distinction. This article was originally published by John F. Dini, CBEC, CExP, CEPA on
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