32
Years in Bozeman
$450M
Assets under management
9
People
Great Buffalo Private Wealth works with a small number of Montana business owners on one of the biggest financial decisions of their lives. Here is how that usually shows up.
You have spent thirty years building the company. Once it sells, that value turns into cash, and cash needs a plan the same week it lands, not a year later.
We are not stock pickers and we are not a shop for people who want to trade. We build a plan around your life in Bozeman, not a market call.
Contractors, builders, and owners in the 55 to 67 range come to us at the sale. We go deep with a smaller number of families instead of spreading thin across a large book.
10 questions · 3 minutes
This quiz is educational and not personalized advice.
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The land is not yet set up to pass cleanly, and the part that usually causes trouble is not the paperwork but the conversation. Both are workable, and starting early is what keeps the choice yours.
The intent is clear and the structure is partly there. What is normally missing at this stage is liquidity: the cash that stops a tax bill from forcing a sale.
The structure, the documents and the family conversation are aligned. From here it is a matter of keeping them aligned as the family and the tax rules change.
Selling a company you built over thirty years is a single event, but what happens after it is years of decisions. Here is the order we walk through them.
Before the ink dries, we work through the tax picture with your attorney and accountant so the number on the closing statement is not a surprise.
A one-time payment becomes a plan for what you'll live on, structured so it holds up over decades instead of a single good year.
If education is part of the picture, we build accounts and a timeline around it now, while the money is still flexible.
Once the essentials are covered, we look at charitable giving in a way that fits your tax picture, not just your intentions.
Earlier than most owners think. Once you have a letter of intent, some of the best planning options are already off the table. Bringing in an advisor while you are still negotiating terms gives Ellen Marsh time to work with your attorney and accountant so the sale is structured before it is signed, not scrambled after the wire hits your account.
A business sale usually pushes you into a different tax picture for that one year, and the structure of the deal, asset sale versus stock sale, installment payments versus a lump sum, changes what you owe and when. There is no one answer that fits every business owner. That is why this gets worked out with your CPA before closing, not after.
That depends on your number, your spending, and what else you are carrying, like debt or family obligations. We do not hand you a projection and call it a promise. We build a plan around your actual proceeds and your actual life, and we tell you plainly if something does not add up, before you have already given notice at the shop.
A rollover moves money that is already liquid. A business sale usually means turning something illiquid, your company, into cash, often on a schedule with contingencies attached. The tax handling, the timing of the payout, and the risk of the money not arriving as planned are all different. It takes more planning up front, not less.
No. Cole Brandt and the team work with Montana business owners across trades and industries who are approaching a sale or transition. What matters more than the type of business is the size of the decision. If your company is a major piece of your net worth and you are within a few years of selling, that is the situation we know well.
That is a normal place to be. A conversation before you have decided anything is often more useful than one after, since it gives you time to see what a sale would actually look like for your finances and your family, without any pressure to move forward before you are ready.
When a referral comes to us, one of us calls personally and sets up a no-pressure conversation. You will hear from one of us within one business day.
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