Last reviewed: September 14, 2026.
Waiting until the sale is how the tax bill gets ugly.
I am not a financial advisor. I have watched owners sell or transfer a company with no plan, celebrate the number, then learn the tax line the hard way.
The windfall is real. So is the cut. The lesson is cheaper if you take it before the letter of intent.
A trust is simpler than owners think. The specialist is not optional.
A trust lets you manage business assets with a different tax treatment than holding the stock personally. If you are still running the company, you can keep control over how assets are managed and distributed.
Done right, it can also sit between the company and a lawsuit. You have already been sued. The question is what happens when the judge is bad and they win.
If you are leaving, a funded trust can make the handoff to the next generation or a buyer cleaner than an outright personal sale.
You need a trust lawyer, not a generalist.
Rules in this area move. Hire someone who lives in trusts, not someone who does them on Tuesdays.
Then fund it. That means actually transferring ownership of the business into the trust, which has a different tax basis than you do. An empty trust is stationery.
The $10 million example is why this is not theoretical.
Sell without a trust. The process takes longer than you expected. You still used SweetSpot to prep the sale and you still got a strong price. You net $10 million. After tax you can lose around $4,000,000.
Same sale, trust already in place, same prep, same payout. You can keep much more of that $10 million. The gap between roughly $6 million and closer to $8 million is $2 million of retirement. That is a lot of fun, even in 2026.
Do not take those numbers as a quote. Take them to a wealth manager or an accountant. Starting the trust now is how you avoid learning the spread on closing day.
The next useful step.
A trust does not make an unready company ready. If you might transfer or sell in the next year, inspect that first.
The free 12-Month Sale Readiness Self-Assessment is a starting signal, not a verdict. We still do not draft the trust.