Last reviewed: September 29, 2026.
For the first time in years, owners planning a transition have something rare: tax rules that are settled and, in several places, more favorable than they were.
I’m not a tax professional and this is not tax advice. It is a situation a small business owner can take to their own tax professional. Don’t have someone doing tax planning for you? Send a note. The people worth recommending are fiduciaries, so there is no referral fee in it.
The list, and then stop.
The 2025 tax law made the pass-through (QBI) deduction permanent. It set the federal estate and gift exemption at $15 million per person starting January 1, 2026, indexed after that. It locked in the individual brackets. It made 100% bonus depreciation permanent. And it expanded qualified small business stock treatment for certain corporations.
That is the list. This note does not walk the structures, the elections, or the steps. There are several levers. They interact. The order you pull them is the whole game.
Move one lever and the after-tax check moves with it. Move them in the right order and two owners can sell identical companies for identical prices and keep amounts that differ by six figures, sometimes seven. The buyer rarely cares which version you pick.
The price is the last decision.
Owners fixate on the price because it is the number everyone can see. The broker quotes it. The buyer negotiates it. You tell your spouse. You may even brag about it. You earned it.
The tax bill was mostly settled before anyone got to that number: by the entity type, by who the buyer turns out to be, by whether the deal is one closing or several, and by what was already moved to family, to a trust, or to key people before the sale was ever discussed. By the time a letter of intent shows up, most of the levers are set. The ones still loose belong to the buyer.
Buyers have their own reasons to want a structure. Their preferred structure is rarely the seller’s. If you do not bring a plan, you get handed theirs in the last sixty days, when the remaining choice is to accept it or walk away.
Design the transition, then find who fits it.
Most owners plan the exit backward from an offer. Someone shows up. The number looks right. The calendar, and the difficult employees, become the buyer’s.
The better sequence is the other way around. Design the transition first. Then go find the buyer, the family member, or the management team that fits that design. It costs more up front. It pays off.
Settled does not mean simple. Permanent means the rules are not going to change out from under you. It does not mean they apply themselves. For years, waiting to see what Congress would do was a reason to put this off. That reason is gone. The law you will sell under is the law on the books.
The outcome still depends on what entities make up the business and on what, if anything, has already been moved. Change one of those and the right answer for the others changes with it. Some of the better options carry clocks measured in years. The clock starts the day you act, not the day you decide. None of that belongs in the last 60 days.
In the NFIB Small Business Economic Trends survey for August 2026, 16% of owners named taxes their single most important problem, tied for second with inflation. Owners think about taxes constantly. Thinking is not a plan. A plan is a sequence of decisions, in order, with a date on each one.
Transition Blueprint Day.
This is an off-the-menu day for this situation. One day, onsite, for your specific business: a sale, a family handoff, or a management buyout. We look at the org chart, the ownership schedule, the entities, and how ownership actually moves: to whom, in what pieces, over what period, and where the tax hits land.
It starts with what you want out of the transition. The options are almost endless, and only some of them feed that intent. Just the owners are in the room. You leave with a strategy you can explain. The written Transition Blueprint follows about a week later, including the gaps on the professional team and people we have worked with who can fill them.
I run the day. The price is $4,750 as of late 2026, plus travel. Fixed fee. One page of terms. No retainer. No percentage of anything.
We are not brokers. A broker is paid when a deal closes, and paid more when the price is higher. That is a fine arrangement for selling a business. It is a bad arrangement for deciding whether to sell, to whom, or when. A staged handoff to family, a management buyout over several years, or a sale built for the after-tax check either pays a broker nothing or pays them later and less. You will not get straight advice on those choices from someone whose fee depends on the fastest close.
There is no percentage of the sale and no referral fee from the attorneys and CPAs we name. If the blueprint says do not sell, that is the job done.
The Transition Blueprint Day is not on the website yet. If 2026 is the year you have been putting off, send a note from sweetspotba.com.
Who the heck is SweetSpot Business Advisors?
We are the ones who ask the annoying question before your CPA and your attorney have to fight about the answer. SweetSpot Business Advisors helps owner-led companies, most of them in Texas, figure out how, when, and to whom ownership should move, and in what order, so the tax event is as small as the law allows and everyone walks away still speaking.