Before the wire clears: preparing for a concentrated equity event

An IPO, an acquisition, a secondary sale, a buyout of your partnership interest—whatever form it takes, a concentrated equity event is the rare moment when years of illiquid work become a number with a date attached. Most of the value of good planning is created before that date, not after it.

The window that matters is the one before

Once a transaction is announced—or once you are in serious discussions—your flexibility narrows quickly. Elections close. Gifting strategies that were straightforward last year become complicated or unavailable. The tax character of the proceeds is largely set by decisions made months or years earlier.

This is why we encourage clients to treat the twelve to eighteen months before a likely event as a distinct planning phase, with its own agenda. Not because anything is certain—deals fall through—but because the cost of preparing early is small compared to the cost of preparing late.

What to settle in advance

Your balance sheet, in one place. It sounds basic. It is rarely done. Before a liquidity event, every account, entity, policy, and obligation should be visible on a single page. You cannot make good decisions about new money while the old picture is still fuzzy.

The estate and gifting questions. If transferring wealth to the next generation is part of your intent, the time to act is while the equity is still valued as private, illiquid stock—not after it has a public price. These conversations take months with counsel. Start them early.

Your tax posture. Residency, holding periods, charitable intent, the timing of other income—all of it interacts with the event. A coordinated review with your CPA before the transaction is worth more than any deduction discovered after it.

What the money is for. The most underrated preparation is not technical at all. Families who have talked through what the proceeds are meant to do—security, philanthropy, the next venture, the next generation—make calmer decisions in the weeks after the wire clears. Families who have not often feel oddly unmoored by the largest check of their lives.

What can safely wait

The investment plan for the proceeds. The specific vehicles. The pace of deployment. These are real decisions, but they are not urgent ones, and they are better made with the actual numbers in hand rather than a projected term sheet. Cash is a perfectly respectable position while the dust settles.

What should not wait is assembling the team. The attorney, the CPA, and the advisor who holds the whole picture should be in the same conversation before the event, not introduced to each other after it.

The quiet work

Most of what we do ahead of a concentrated equity event is unglamorous: confirming basis records, mapping which entity owns what, pressure-testing the estate documents against the new numbers, and making sure that when the proceeds arrive, there is already a structure ready to receive them.

Done well, the day the wire clears is anticlimactic. That is the point.