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My Next Move

Your Best Year Is Their Best Year Too

Liquidity Event

A decade of building compresses into one taxable year. What happens in the two to five years before the close decides how much of it you keep.

A business sale on the horizon. An IPO lockup expiring. Equity accelerating in an acquisition. A vest wave, a structured settlement, a significant inheritance. Different events, same shape: years of value arriving in a single tax year, with the IRS positioned as your largest counterparty.

Everything you built converts at once. The bracket maxes immediately. Deductions phase out. Timing options vanish. The event you worked years for gets taxed as if it happened in a hurry, because on paper, it did.

The spike touches everything around it. Estate exposure expands overnight. Charitable windows open and close inside the same twelve months. Cash finally exists, and every unmade decision suddenly has a price attached.

Here is the part most owners learn too late: the leverage lives in the years before the close. Two to five years out, structure changes outcomes. Six months out, what remains is arithmetic.

One year compresses a decade of equity buildup. One year of tax decisions defines the rest of your life.
Eric Cooper, Founder

Why this doesn't solve in isolation

A liquidity event is the moment every other category converges. It cannot be handled as a transaction.

Capital Gains

The event is, mechanically, a capital gains realization, and every repositioning tool has a deadline relative to the close.

Estate Taxes

Pre-sale gifting moves value at yesterday's valuation. Post-sale structuring sets up everything the wealth does next.

Income Taxes

Event-year brackets, NIIT, and state exposure decide the real number on the wire.

Sooner's approach

Sooner starts where the leverage is: the preparation window. QSBS qualification, entity restructuring, valuation discount development, charitable pre-funding, installment architecture. These are decisions that only exist before the letter of intent.

Eric holds the CEPA designation for business exit work, and Sooner Business Advisors runs value acceleration alongside the ReWild Group, so the exit readiness work and the tax architecture happen in one sequence, not two silos.

Through the close, we coordinate with your M&A counsel, valuation specialists, and tax counsel. After it, the same sequence turns to what the proceeds are for.

The cost of waiting

Late engagement gets measured in seven figures. QSBS qualification forecloses. Valuation discounts go undeveloped. Charitable structures miss their funding deadline. Installment options collapse into a lump sum.

The close date doesn't move for your tax strategy. The strategy has to move first.

Ninety seconds tells you where to start.

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