Fragile Spouse Jeopardizes Family Business
Basic Facts
Dom was founder and president of a manufacturer specializing in aerospace components for military and commercial use. Dom, my client, and Paula, had three teenage/college age children.
Challenge
Business privacy was our first challenge and Dom’s main objective – balancing the need for having a realistic sense of the business value and cash flow while protecting his customer specifications, contracts, and other valuable proprietary information.
We could not accomplish the first challenge unless we overcame the second – managing Paula’s volatility and irrationality due to untreated alcohol and substance abuse and mental illness.
Solution/Value Added
We teamed with a collaboratively trained CPA business valuation professional to obtain reliable business valuation and cash flow estimates. The estimates reflected Dom’s expectations about future business activity which would not necessarily have been part of a traditional forensic review. At Dom’s request, the professional did not prepare a formal written report, thereby limiting Paula’s intentional or inadvertent distribution of financial and proprietary information outside of the collaborative process. Because the professional was independent, jointly retained, and contractually prohibited from having a post-divorce relationship with either spouse, Paula trusted his results. As additional support for Paula, we formally included her mother as a stabilizing influence into the collaborative process.