Start Managing Your Money Before Your Business Sale Is Complete

Something happens the moment terms are agreed.

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The seller walks into due diligence and legals, and from that day forward every conversation is about risk. Is this clause fair? Am I taking on too much? What’s the warranty cap, and what sits in escrow, and for how long? It is all-consuming — and it should be, because the exposure is real and the document you sign will govern the next several years of your life.

But in exactly that window, something gets quietly forgotten.

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The money.

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Not the number on the term sheet — that’s front of mind, every day. I mean the actual money. What it does the day after close, where it lives, who manages it, and how it’s structured.

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Almost every seller I work with takes their eye off that ball. And here’s the part that should worry you: they don’t just delay those decisions. They make them by default, without ever realising a choice was being made.

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Managing the money is a job, not a side gig.

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Here’s what most sellers never stop to consider: the money doesn’t manage itself.

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Running a family office of R100 million or more is a job — a real one, with its own discipline, its own risks, and its own full-time demands. It is not something you get to on weekends once the deal is done. Preserving that capital across two generations, structuring it offshore, layering in tax planning and fiduciary arrangements, funding a family indefinitely without eroding the base it all rests on — that is not portfolio management. It’s closer to running an institution.

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And yet most sellers hand that job to whoever happens to be in the room.

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Without a process, your wealth manager becomes the broker who’s run your personal share portfolio for a decade, or the private bank that heard about the deal and got in early. That person may be entirely competent at what they do. But what they do — running a personal portfolio — is not this. If your current adviser isn’t set up for the job, you should probably replace them. And you can only work that out if you understand what the job actually requires.

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One more thing worth noticing.

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Choosing your money manager because they were the first serious option in front of you is precisely the mistake we spend our lives warning sellers about on the buyer side. Relief overrides strategy. You accept the first credible thing that appears, because you’re tired and it’s a decision you can finally cross off. It costs you just as much here.

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You will make the decision anyway. Don’t make it badly.

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Here’s the thing about the money side: it doesn’t wait for you to be ready.

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If you haven’t chosen, the choice gets made for you — and it gets made at your weakest moment. By the time the funds land, you’ve spent the better part of a year in due diligence, and you are depleted. That is the precise moment you’re asked to make the largest capital allocation decisions of your life, while being courted by people who are extremely good at selling.

You’ll also be courted by everyone else.

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The moment a deal becomes known, they arrive — the friend’s start-up looking for seven figures, the nephew’s property scheme, the school’s capital campaign, the former employee with an idea he’s been sitting on for years. Every one of them is individually reasonable. All of them together: impossible. Meanwhile, the money sits in a current account, doing nothing, while you work it all out. Nobody invoices you for that. It costs you anyway.

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And almost nobody does the arithmetic.

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R100 million, at a real return of four percent, produces R4 million a year. If the life you’ve imagined for yourself after the exit costs R6 million a year, you are liquidating capital from year one. Most sellers have never modelled this, so they’re genuinely surprised when someone finally does.

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The doors close while you’re looking the other way.

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There’s a reason all of this has to happen early: the decisions that matter most get made before the money ever lands, and they can’t be unmade.

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Your tax outcome is written into the sale and purchase agreement, months before close — share sale or asset sale, who held the shares, what was allocated where. Bring in a specialist afterwards, and you’re not being advised, you’re being informed of your bill. The structures work the same way: trusts and family vehicles are dramatically more efficient, and sometimes only possible, before the liquidity event — once the cash is sitting in your personal name, moving it becomes a donation, or a loan, with its own consequences. And offshore takes weeks, sometimes months, to arrange properly, while the rand doesn’t pause for you to get organised.

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None of this can be started the week after close. All of it can be started the week you sign the mandate.

 

The right time to start is the day you sign the mandate.

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This is the shift I want every seller to make.

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The moment you appoint an M&A adviser and commit to a process, that’s the moment the wealth side starts too. Not at close. Not when the funds clear. Now — because you have a runway, usually six to twelve months while the deal is executed, and that runway is exactly enough time to do the work.

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Use it to:

• Interview wealth managers properly, rather than taking the first one who calls

• Understand what a family office structure actually looks like at your level

• Get tax advice on the sale structure while it’s still a draft

• Work through offshore, jurisdiction and currency

• Sort out the fiduciary arrangements

• Have the conversations with your family that the money will otherwise have for you

 

By the time the deal closes, the machine should already be running. All that’s left is for the money to arrive and flow into it.

This is also somewhere I can help. Over the years I’ve built close relationships with a number of wealth managers who do exactly this kind of work, and choosing between them cold is hard. If it’s useful, I’m glad to point you toward the ones who fit what you’re actually looking for.

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Life doesn’t end after a sale. It changes.

 

Whether you stay in the business or walk away entirely, you now have a second job, and it started the day you signed. Most sellers only find that out afterwards.

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Until next time,

Rick Grantham, Deal Leaders International