If you may sell or transition your company in the next five years, the planning that protects what you walk away with should begin long before the buyer conversation does. Canyon Strategic Wealth coordinates the wealth side of a business exit for Utah owners.
Assets under management shown as of May 2026. Canyon Strategic Wealth, LLC is a registered investment adviser; CRD #325175. Registration does not imply a certain level of skill or training.
For most business owners, the company is the single largest asset they will ever own — and selling or transitioning it is the largest financial event of their life. Yet the planning around an exit usually starts far too late, and focuses almost entirely on the deal itself.
There is no shortage of help for the transaction. Business brokers and M&A advisors find buyers and negotiate terms. Attorneys paper the deal. What is routinely missing is the person responsible for the owner's wealth — the tax exposure on the sale, the estate consequences, the structure of the proceeds, and the plan for the life that comes after.
That is the work Canyon Strategic Wealth does. We are an independent, fiduciary registered investment adviser and a virtual family office based in Bountiful, Utah. We do not sell businesses; we coordinate everything around the owner, so that when the sale closes you keep more of what you built and know exactly what happens next.
Owners naturally frame the exit as a deal: find a buyer, agree on a price, close. The instinct is to focus on valuation — how much the business is worth.
But the number that actually matters is not the sale price. It is what reaches your family after taxes, and whether the proceeds are structured to support the rest of your life. An exit with a strong headline price and no wealth planning behind it can leave a remarkable amount of money on the table — and leave the owner, the day after closing, with a large sum and no plan.
The reframe is this: stop asking only what the business is worth, and start asking whether you are personally ready and whether the proceeds plan is built. Those questions take years to answer well — which is why exit planning starts early.
The most valuable exit planning happens over years, not weeks. Here is how the work unfolds as a sale approaches.
The most valuable window. There is still time to structure ownership for tax efficiency, evaluate strategies such as qualified small business stock or trust planning, strengthen the company’s financials, and clarify what you personally want the exit to fund.
Tighten the plan. Coordinate entity structure and estate documents, model the after-tax proceeds under realistic scenarios, and begin addressing any concentration risk on your personal balance sheet.
Prepare for the transaction. Align your CPA, attorney, and M&A advisor around a shared strategy, finalize pre-sale tax and gifting moves while they can still be made, and build the post-sale investment and income plan.
Execute with coordination. As terms take shape, we model their after-tax impact, weigh the timing of income and deductions, and make sure the proceeds land into a structure that is ready for them.
The plan continues. The proceeds become the engine of your retirement, your charitable goals, and your legacy — managed, monitored, and coordinated with your tax and estate plan for the decades that follow.
A sale touches every part of your financial life at once. These are the pieces we hold together.
Coordinated with your CPA — entity structure, the treatment of the sale, the timing of income and deductions, and strategies such as qualified small business stock where they apply.
A sale can be the ideal moment to move value out of your estate. We work with your attorney to align trusts, gifting, and beneficiary planning before the window closes.
Before a sale your wealth is concentrated in one illiquid asset. We plan the transition to a diversified balance sheet — and the protection around it.
We build the plan that turns a lump sum into durable income, so the day after closing you know exactly what your money is doing.
We work alongside your M&A advisor or business broker and your attorney — we do not replace them — so the wealth strategy and the transaction strategy stay aligned.
This work is built for owners for whom the business is a major share of their wealth, including:
Not every owner has five years of runway, and exit planning still adds value at three years, at one year, even during a live deal. But the earlier the conversation starts, the more options remain on the table.
If a sale or transition is anywhere on your horizon, a discovery call is the place to begin. It is complimentary and carries no obligation.
As early as you reasonably can — ideally three to five years before a sale. The most valuable strategies, particularly around tax structure and estate planning, need time to put in place. That said, exit planning still adds real value at twelve months out, or even during a live transaction.
No. Canyon Strategic Wealth is not a business broker or M&A advisor. We coordinate the wealth side of your exit — tax, estate, proceeds structure, and the post-sale plan — and we work alongside the broker or M&A advisor who runs the transaction itself.
Tax outcomes depend on your specific situation, and Canyon does not provide tax advice or prepare returns. What we do is coordinate closely with your CPA, well before a sale, on the planning that drives the tax result — entity structure, the timing of income and deductions, estate and gifting strategy, and provisions such as qualified small business stock where they apply. That coordination, done early, is where the meaningful tax savings tend to come from.
The wealth-side planning is just as important, and in some ways more complex. We help you weigh a third-party sale against an internal or family transition, and we coordinate the tax, estate, and income planning for whichever path you choose.
Yes — that is often where the relationship matters most. After the sale, the proceeds become the foundation of your retirement income, charitable plans, and legacy. As your virtual family office, Canyon manages and coordinates that ongoing, long after the deal is done.
Canyon is a fee-based fiduciary firm. Most of our compensation comes from straightforward advisory fees for managing assets and providing planning. As a fee-based firm, we may also receive a commission on certain insurance or annuity products when a client chooses to implement one; whenever that is the case, we disclose the arrangement and the conflict of interest it creates.
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