Unusually, Exit Strategy Planning focuses on achieving the optimum value for the entrepreneur at the point of eventual exit, rather than concentrating on an array of start‐up and development philosophies that so often take up the major part of texts on strategic planning. The book is clearly different in its approach, while still embracing many of the widely used business‐planning models. The emphasis is on recognizing that business planning merges building capital value as well as building annual income. The author’s own background of accountancy, law and business practice is evident throughout the book. His work on insolvency and reconstruction provides a fascinatingly unusual perspective from which to write about successful planning.
For a business strategy to maximize the post‐taxation return on investment, at the time of eventual exit, the plan must provide for the implementation of the appropriate ownership structure to facilitate a range of potential exit strategies. As taxation charges are often affected by events enacted many years earlier, the impact of not planning a tax‐efficient exit strategy could ultimately prove to be very expensive. The scope of tax planning is often reserved for specialist accountancy courses; however, the impact of an ill‐considered plan can greatly reduce the entrepreneur’s “final pay‐day”.
Many core management texts do not address the end of ownership in the business with such clarity. The inputs from experts in the fields of management buy‐outs and insolvency are especially evident in the earlier sections of the book, which makes some of the book’s ten technical appendices demanding for non‐accountancy‐conversant readers. Exit Strategy Planning addresses business‐planning issues with the most profitable onward sale of a going concern at the optimum timing for the seller in mind and seeks to avoid an unplanned, possibly forced sale of a business with little or no future.
The first of the book’s three sections identifies the need to implement the appropriate foundations or business structure, with special emphasis on the requirement for fiscal planning. The need to marry the legal and financial frameworks of the business to enable the optimum return to be made is clearly established and evidenced. This section, while very important to devising the technicalities of the exit plan, makes reference to a variety of corporate agreements and related detailed taxation relief. This could deter some people from reading the following sections on business planning that will be relevant to all business students. The issues of “business value” are also explored, identifying differences in the meaning of terms used by both accountants and lawyers.
The second section identifies a range of strategies that entrepreneurs can adopt to build their businesses with a view towards its eventual disposal. Some basic models of business structure are presented with a view to start‐up, building and succession. Chapter 6 reviews “impediments to sale”, that can also serve as a valuable check‐list for assessing the health of any venture.
The third section is concerned with short‐, medium‐ and long‐term planning, all with a view towards the exit strategy. The content of these two sections is closer to that contained in many texts on strategic planning. However, the approach taken clearly recognizes that many aspects that will impact on the timing of the optimum exit point are outside the entrepreneur’s own control, thus requiring a flexible exit strategy. Easy to follow diagrams in the introduction provide a valuable insight into the author’s logic for the framework and chapter content of the book.
In conclusion, the book is written with the businessperson in mind, as too is the related Web site. The book will be valuable to many levels of student for a variety of reasons. All postgraduates and undergraduates of business strategy will be challenged to consider the ultimate motivation of the entrepreneur. Business life cycles are presented from an unusual perspective and all readers will appreciate the complexity of effective fiscal planning. Higher National Diploma students will benefit from easy to read sections on business planning and be able to see, in a practical way, how business structures, accountancy and law need to be fully integrated. Business entrepreneurs, who have concentrated on building the business revenue and have not yet tailored a planned capital exit strategy, will also come to recognize this need, which will probably necessitate the assistance of accountancy and legal experts.
