Decades of building a business deserves a plan for what happens when you step away. Frank Pabst, CEO and Primary Attorney, leads our business succession practice, helping Texas business owners design ownership transitions, draft buy-sell agreements, and coordinate with personal estate plans. Frank acts as the driver and lead designer for every succession strategy, ensuring that business law and estate planning experience work together to protect your company, your family, and the team that helped you grow.
Nicky Pabst, our COO, leads the firm’s operational engine and administrative team, ensuring that your business asset inventory is organized and the logistical transition of ownership interests is handled with boutique-level care. Whether you intend to keep the business in the family, sell to a partner, or eventually transition to a third-party buyer, the strategy begins with a conversation.
Schedule Your Free 15-Minute Peace of Mind Consultation or call (512) 641-2676
What Business Succession Planning Involves
Business succession planning answers a question most owners prefer not to think about: What happens to your business when you stop running it?
The question has more than one answer because the trigger could be retirement, disability, death, divorce, a buyout offer, or simply a change in priorities. Each trigger pulls a different lever in the company’s governing documents, its insurance arrangements, and the owner’s estate plan.
Under Frank’s legal guidance, succession plans address:
Ownership Transfer & Management Succession: Defining who takes the lead and who owns the equity.
Valuation Methodology & Funding: Establishing how the business is valued and how a buyout is paid for.
Tax Consequences: For 2026, the federal estate tax exemption is $15 million per person. Frank navigates this landscape to protect business growth from future shifts in the law.
Document Coordination: Aligning the business’s operating agreement or shareholder agreement with the owner’s personal will and trust.
Without a plan, the business often ends up at the mercy of probate, surviving family members who never intended to run the company, or co-owners with conflicting visions. The cost of inaction shows up as lost value, fractured relationships, and forced sales at the wrong time.
Buy-Sell Agreements as the Foundation
Buy-sell agreements are the contracts that determine who owns the business when a triggering event happens. Frank architectures these as the foundation of nearly every Texas succession plan we design.
Trigger events typically include:
Death or Disability
Retirement
Divorce or Bankruptcy
Voluntary sale by an owner
Frank ensures three pieces hold every agreement together:
- Valuation Methodology. Defining how the business is valued at the trigger (Fixed price, multiple-of-earnings, appraisal, or insured value). Without a defined method, valuation becomes a fight.
- Funding Mechanisms. Coordinating life and disability insurance so the right dollars reach the right party at the right time to fund a buyout.
- Structure Choices. Determining whether a Cross-Purchase, Entity Redemption, or Hybrid structure is the most tax-efficient path for your specific entity.
Texas Business Entity Types and Succession
The right succession plan depends on the entity type. Frank coordinates your strategy based on the specific requirements of Texas business forms:
Limited Liability Company (LLC): The operating agreement governs membership transfers, voting rights, and management succession.
S Corporation: Coordinating trusts to ensure they qualify as S-corp shareholders to preserve the S election.
C Corporation: Addressing double-taxation concerns in redemption versus cross-purchase decisions.
Limited Partnership: Managing the succession of general and limited partner interests, common in real estate.
Sole Proprietorship: Designing the conversion to an entity structure to make the business plan-friendly and separable from the owner.
Coordinating Succession with Your Estate Plan
Business succession planning that ignores the owner’s personal estate plan creates conflict. If the buy-sell agreement says one thing but the Will says another, litigation is the predictable result.
Even straightforward Travis County probate involves administrative delays; we design plans specifically to avoid court oversight. Succession planning at our firm is coordinated with your estate plan from day one. Frank ensures the buy-sell agreement, the operating agreement, the Will, the Trust, and the powers of attorney all point in the same direction. Nicky’s team manages the administrative intake of these documents to ensure no governance gaps are left behind, such as granting a successor trustee the authority to vote business interests.
(512) 641-2676