You've just sold your business. The first 10 decisions that actually matter.
The short answer: In the first year after a sale, the decisions that matter most are: do not rush, decide what the money is actually for, assemble the right advisors and name a coordinator, separate tax advice from structuring, think about your residence and where your assets sit before you move anything, choose who will hold and administer your wealth for the long term, sort out short-term liquidity, address the risk of sitting in cash, put your estate and succession plan in place, and decide what to tell your family. Everything below works through each one.
A liquidity event is one of the few moments in life when a large amount of money and a large number of irreversible decisions arrive at the same time. The proceeds are the easy part. What you do in the months that follow, who advises you, how you are structured, and who ends up holding your wealth, will shape your family's finances for decades. Here is the order in which those decisions are best made.
1. Do not rush.
The most valuable thing you can do in the weeks after a sale is slow down.
Money that arrives suddenly creates pressure to act, from banks, from advisors, from family, and from your own adrenaline. Almost none of the important decisions need to be made in the first month. Park the proceeds somewhere safe and unexciting, give yourself a deliberate pause of three to six months before any large or irreversible commitment, and treat anyone manufacturing urgency with suspicion. The structures and the investments can wait. Mistakes made quickly are slow and expensive to undo.
2. Decide what the money is actually for.
Before you think about products or structures, get clear on what this wealth is supposed to do.
Is it your retirement, a legacy for your children, capital for the next venture, the seed of a family foundation, or some mix of all four? The answer drives everything that follows: how much liquidity you need, how much risk you can take, whether you need a trust at all, and where things should be based. Write it down in plain language before you meet anyone selling a solution. Advisors who skip this step and go straight to recommending a structure are selling, not advising.
3. Assemble the right advisors, and decide who coordinates them.
A serious liquidity event needs a small team of specialists, not a single all-rounder.
At a minimum you will want a private-client lawyer, a tax advisor, an investment manager, and, if you are setting up long-term structures, a fiduciary or trustee. These are genuinely different jobs and they are rarely done well by one firm. Just as important, decide who coordinates them, so the advice connects rather than arriving in four silos. That coordinator might be you, a trusted lawyer, or a family office. Without one, you get four good answers to four separate questions and no coherent plan. A founder who sold in Berlin and a family relocating from Dubai will need different specialists, but both need someone holding the whole picture.
4. Separate tax advice from structuring.
The person who tells you how to reduce tax should not automatically be the person who builds and runs the structure.
Tax planning and fiduciary structuring are distinct disciplines, and bundling them creates a conflict of interest. A provider that both designs a structure and earns ongoing fees from administering it has a reason to recommend something more complex than you may need. Get independent tax advice in every country you and your assets touch, and treat the structuring decision as a separate question with its own scrutiny. A clean structure you fully understand beats a clever one you do not.
5. Think about residence and where your assets sit, early.
Where you live, where you plan to move, and where your assets are legally located will drive your tax and structuring more than almost anything else.
A founder who sells a US company and then moves to Portugal, or a family relocating from Hong Kong to Singapore, faces completely different questions from someone staying put. Residence rules, exit taxes, the situs of your assets, and the treaties between countries all interact in ways that are easy to get wrong. If a move abroad is even possible in the next few years, raise it before you build anything, because a structure that works perfectly for a resident of one country can become actively harmful the moment you cross a border. This is the single most common and most costly thing people get wrong.
6. Decide who will hold and administer your wealth for the long term.
One of the most consequential early choices is who will hold and administer your assets over decades, and it deserves far more scrutiny than it usually gets.
If you set up a trust or a holding structure, someone has to act as trustee or administrator, often for the rest of your life and beyond. This is a relationship that should outlast your advisors, several market cycles, and changes in your own circumstances, so the qualities that matter most are independence, a singular focus on fiduciary work, and continuity of the actual people involved.
Two points are worth weighing carefully. First, a provider bundled inside a bank or a larger financial group may have incentives that are not aligned with yours, for example a quiet pull toward steering your assets into in-house investment products. An independent provider whose only business is fiduciary administration does not face that conflict. Second, ask who will still be answering your calls in ten or twenty years. High staff turnover is a real and underrated risk, because much of a trustee's value is the institutional memory of your family's affairs, and that memory walks out of the door when people leave.
7. Sort out short-term liquidity and cash management.
Before any long-term plan is in place, make sure the proceeds are held safely and you can reach what you need.
A large cash balance in a single bank account is not as safe as it feels. Deposit protection schemes cover only a small fraction of a typical sale's proceeds, so spreading cash across institutions, or holding it in government money-market instruments, reduces the risk of a single bank problem. Separately, work out how much you need in accessible cash for the next year or two of living costs, taxes, and commitments, and ring-fence it. The investment decisions come later. Not losing the money in the meantime comes first.
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8. Address the risk of suddenly holding everything in cash.
Selling a business swaps one concentration risk, a single company, for another, a large pile of cash being eroded by inflation.
There is no rush to invest, but there is a real cost to sitting in cash indefinitely. Decide on a deliberate, staged plan for putting capital to work that matches the purpose you defined in decision two, rather than reacting to whoever pitches hardest. Be especially wary of complex or illiquid products marketed specifically at newly liquid sellers, who are a favourite target. A simple, diversified, well-understood portfolio is the right default, and you can always add complexity later if there is a genuine reason to.
9. Put your estate and succession plan in place.
A sale is the moment your estate planning stops being theoretical, so update or create your will and think about how wealth passes to the next generation.
If you have moved countries or hold assets in several, you may need wills or equivalent arrangements in more than one jurisdiction, and you should check they do not contradict each other. Beyond the legal documents, treat succession as a human problem: how much your children inherit, when, and with what guidance. This is where a structure such as a trust genuinely earns its place, by allowing wealth to pass in a controlled way rather than as a single lump sum dropped on someone at twenty-one. Start the conversation early, because these decisions take time and are best made calmly.
10. Decide what to tell your family, and when.
How and when you talk to your family about the money is a real decision, not an afterthought.
Sudden wealth changes relationships, expectations, and the way children grow up, and secrecy tends to cause more problems than honesty. You do not have to disclose every number, but a deliberate plan for what you share, with your partner, your children, and the wider family, prevents resentment and confusion later. Many families find that a neutral third party experienced in family governance helps these conversations go better than they would around the kitchen table.