SOLUTION
Business Exit
and Succession Planning
and Succession Planning
Business exit planning should not only preserve the business’s value but also foster harmony among your family and the stakeholders involved.
Building a Bridge to
Your Next Chapter
Your Next Chapter
At Providend, we believe in taking a long-term approach and journeying with business owners as trusted advisers who can help them create and implement both individual and business plans. This sets us apart from legal and accounting advisory firms that usually adopt a short-term approach.
Business exit planning will include the following, where relevant:
- Crafting your business succession plan
- Establishing an employee share scheme
- Preparing for a merger
- Going public through an IPO
- Selling your business to a third party
Business exit planning will include the following, where relevant:
- Crafting your business succession plan
- Establishing an employee share scheme
- Preparing for a merger
- Going public through an IPO
- Selling your business to a third party
Your Business,
Your Timeless Legacy
Your Timeless Legacy
As a business owner, enhancing and capturing the value of your business is critical to ensure that you can achieve both your life goals and financial goals. In reality, navigating a business exit wisely is complex and will be one of the biggest financial events of your life.
It is crucial for you to consider this process carefully, develop a customised strategy that enhances your business’s value, and execute this strategy as smoothly as possible. Whether it is to transfer ownership to family members, help employees in a leveraged buyout, or sell your business to a third party, each of these strategies could take years to implement in a way that best extracts your business’s value and minimise taxes.
It is crucial for you to consider this process carefully, develop a customised strategy that enhances your business’s value, and execute this strategy as smoothly as possible. Whether it is to transfer ownership to family members, help employees in a leveraged buyout, or sell your business to a third party, each of these strategies could take years to implement in a way that best extracts your business’s value and minimise taxes.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Does Providend only serve the affluent?
Currently, it is true that we serve mainly the high income earners as well as the high networth families. The reason is not so much because we look down on those with lesser income or wealth, but rather it is these families who will find our practice model of most value to them.
As much as we would like to provide advice to the man in the street, we are unable to do so because the man in the street, in truth, really should not pay us a fee for advice. Their situation is straightforward enough and many times, some general advice will suffice.
In addition, the fee-only practice is not a low cost business to run. Besides fixed headcount cost (we don’t pay commissions to our client advisers), we need to hire good people to staff the investment team function as well as the Solutions Team function. This is over and above the support functions such as Finance, People, Brand, Ops, Compliance. Our focus is on doing good a deep advisory work and for us to be commercially viable, we need to be compensated reasonably. But we have priced our fees such that our clients will still experience great value from us as compared to elsewhere.
While we cannot attend to everyone (with a small team of only 9 client advisers), we publish a lot of educational content – from webinars to articles to YouTube videos to podcasts and media interviews. We hope this can help in some ways. To receive first hand our latest insights and thought leadership articles, you can subscribe to our newsletter here.
What are the advantages of investing through Providend, when I can do it at a lower cost elsewhere?
The truth is, if all you are looking for is to execute investments, doing it yourself (DIY) will be much cheaper. You should not use Providend or for that matter, any financial adviser or wealth management firm. There are 2 options if you choose to DIY:
1. Brokerage accounts like IBKR, SAXO, Tiger, Moo Moo – If you know exactly how to create your own portfolio’s asset allocation that will give you the expected return you want and the volatility risk you can accept and you know exactly which instruments, ETFs to use and know how to continue to monitor these instruments in terms of tracking errors, performance behaviours and do not mind executing the trades themselves including rebalancing, then this is the lowest cost way to do it.
2. Digital advisers such as Stashaway, Endowus – If you only want an investment execution platform but do not want to do the work of creating portfolios and curating the instruments and also do not want the trouble of executing each trade and having to rebalance the portfolios as and when needed, then using these digital platforms would be lower cost than using any human advisers and it is the next cheapest cost option. However, one does need to spend some time understanding the investment philosophy of each of these digital advisers because they are all different. One might also need to know the different funds and instruments before buying them.
When you come to Providend, you can expect us to do all the above and more. We perform quite a bit of work for our clients beyond just investing and buying funds. Our clients come to Providend not just wanting to do investments because they know that investing is just part of the larger wealth picture. They look at us to go deep into their lives, work out a comprehensive wealth plan covering every aspects of their wealth needs, execute them and review with them regularly. When a client pay us a fee for advice, they are paying:
1. For clarity on what matters to you in life and what needs to be done (not just financially) to do those things
2. For clarity on your current financial/non-financial position and what needs to be done to enable you to do those things that matter
3. For a comprehensively written wealth plan that provides a roadmap as well as execute the plan well for you to achieve your financial goals and as a result enable you to achieve your life goals
4. For our independent advice, not conflicted by product commissions
5. For a safe pair of hands and a second pair of eyes to help you avoid costly financial mistakes
6.For ongoing conversations, work and advice to help you achieve your goals in the most reliable manner
7. For a peace of mind, for you to save time and do the things you rather do today
How we deliver the value of our advice is by taking you through a process that consists of several meetings. The first one starts with a deep conversation to understand what really matters to you. If this is what you value, then it is time to explore whether it makes sense to be our client.
We get a lot of questions about fees while comparing with robo-advisers and other DIY platforms but, at the end of the day, we think it is more important to decide if the fees that you pay is worth the value that you are getting. Because even if we charge super low fees, if there is no value in the work that we do, then there is really no point.
We do believe that we add a lot of value, otherwise, we would not have about $1 billion under management and still have clients who have been with us since the time we started. To read more about the value we deliver, you can read here.
What are Providend's fees?
As a fee-only firm, we are only paid by our clients. We do not receive any form of commissions from product providers. For fees, there are 3 types:
1. One-time advisory fee. This is based on the amount of work that clients require us to do, just like any professional service firm. After the initial exploratory meeting, we would be able to estimate the time required to do the work and give a quote to clients. If clients are agreeable, a letter of engagement will be signed and even if we need to take more time, there will be no increment in fees.
2. One-time implementation fee for the amount invested. This is based on a percentage of assets invested with us subject to a cap of $25k in the clients’ entire lifetime with us.
3. Ongoing advice fees. This is not just for investment management but ongoing wealth advice, regular progress meetings throughout clients’ life time. This is based on a percentage of assets invested with us and it is tiered based on the amount invested. The higher the investment, the lower the fees.
It would be easier for us to give a more specific quote after the initial meeting with us, for us to understand the work that is required.
Warren Buffett once said: “Price is what you pay, value is what you get.” The amount of fees don’t matter, because if you get value, then the fees you pay would be worth the while. To read more about the value we deliver, you can read here.
We are are confident of the value we bring, over more than two decades of working with clients. You can learn more about what our clients say here.
