The $15M Business Exit Window: What Every Christian Business Owner Should Know Before It Closes

You built the thing. Nights, weekends, the season where payroll came out of your own pocket before you paid yourself. You know that math better than anyone, because you lived it. And now you're close enough to an exit that people have started asking about it at church. "So, are you thinking about selling?"

Here's what almost nobody in that conversation understands: the tax rules governing your business, whether you sell it, pass it down, or give it away, just changed. And that change may not last. Congress permanently raised the federal estate and gift tax exemption to $15 million per person (roughly $30 million for a married couple, assuming the surviving spouse's estate properly elects portability of any unused exemption) under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. "Permanently," in tax law, is a word that has a way of getting revisited. Estate tax exemption levels are set by statute and have changed with some regularity over the decades. No one, including me, can predict future legislation with certainty.

If you're a Christian business owner sitting on a company that represents most of your net worth, this window represents one of the widest estate and business-transfer planning opportunities available under current federal law. It's also, if you're honest, a little disorienting, because succession planning forces you to answer questions you've been able to avoid while you were still building. Who gets this? What do I owe my family? What do I owe the people who worked alongside me? And what does faithfulness actually require here, beyond just "leave as much as possible to the kids"?

The Real Problem Isn't the Tax Code. It's the Decision Underneath It.

Most articles about the exemption increase jump straight to the numbers. I want to start somewhere else, because I've watched enough owners walk through this to know the tax question is rarely the hard one.

The hard question is: what is this business for, once you're not the one running it?

For some owners, the business is the retirement plan: sell it, live off the proceeds, done. For others, it's meant to become a family legacy, passed to a son or daughter who's already half-running it. For others still, the business has become a vehicle for something bigger than the family, a way to fund generosity at a scale their paycheck never could.

None of those answers is wrong. But you can't build the right structure until you've actually named the goal, and I'd guess most owners reading this haven't sat down and written it out. That's the first practical step, before you talk to a single attorney or CPA: write one sentence that answers "what is this exit supposed to accomplish, beyond a number in my account?" Everything downstream (the entity structure, the trust work, the timing) should serve that sentence, not the other way around.

Three Faith-Aligned Exit Paths (And What the $15M Window Changes About Each)

Once you know the goal, the path tends to sort itself into one of three broad categories. Each one interacts differently with the higher exemption, and each one carries its own version of the stewardship question.

1. Family transfer. This is the path most owners picture first: the business passes to a son, daughter, or key family member who's earned it, not just inherited it. The $15M exemption matters enormously here because it lets you gift or transfer a much larger share of the company's value out of your taxable estate during your lifetime. Two tools come up often in these conversations: a Grantor Retained Annuity Trust (GRAT) and an intentionally defective grantor trust (IDGT). Both are designed to move future growth on a gifted or sold asset out of your estate, but neither is guaranteed to work. A GRAT only succeeds if the asset outperforms an IRS-set hurdle rate; if it doesn't, the assets simply return to your estate. An IDGT sale carries similar performance dependency, plus real valuation risk. These are tools worth understanding, not guarantees worth counting on.

The faith question underneath this path isn't really about tax efficiency. It's about honoring your family without enabling entitlement. (If you haven't done any estate planning at all yet, start with the basics before layering on business-specific trust work.) A family transfer done well prepares the next generation for stewardship, not just possession, with real accountability, real vesting, and real conversations about whether the child actually wants this life, not just the inheritance attached to it. I'd rather see a founder transfer 30 percent of a company to a genuinely capable, called successor than 100 percent to someone who never wanted the job.

2. Employee ownership (ESOP). If your business has been built alongside people who've given it years of loyal, unglamorous effort, an Employee Stock Ownership Plan is worth serious consideration. An ESOP lets you sell some or all of the company to a trust that holds shares on behalf of your employees, often with meaningful tax deferral for you as the seller under Section 1042. That deferral comes with real conditions: it applies only to C corporations, generally requires the ESOP to end up owning at least 30 percent of the company, and requires you to reinvest the proceeds into qualified replacement property within a defined window. It's a provision that predates the current exemption fight but can pair well with it for owners layering multiple strategies, with the right CPA involved.

Scripture is direct about this: the worker is worthy of his wages. I think about that principle often when owners talk about the people who helped them build the company. An ESOP is one exit structure I've seen owners use to try to live that principle out structurally: shares held in trust on behalf of employees, allocated and vested over time, turning "I built this" into a real, if gradual, ownership stake for the team. It's not the fastest exit, and it's not the simplest, but for an owner who's spent years saying employees are like family, it's a chance to prove it structurally, not just say it in a holiday speech.

3. Strategic sale. Selling to a third party (a private equity buyer, a competitor, a strategic acquirer) is often the fastest way to liquidity, and it's frequently the right call, especially if no family member or employee group is positioned to take over. The $15M exemption changes the math here mostly on the back end. Once the sale closes and you're sitting on a large lump sum, you have a much bigger window to move wealth to heirs or ministry with minimal transfer tax drag, compared to owners who faced this decision under the lower exemption levels of a few years ago.

The temptation in a strategic sale is to let the deal terms dictate your values instead of the other way around. I've seen owners take the highest offer from a buyer whose plans for the business (and its people) they never fully vetted, because the number on the page was too good to slow down and ask. A faithful exit asks what happens to your employees, your customers, and your reputation after you're gone from the building, not just what lands in your account.

Generosity as the Fourth Option

Here's the piece that rarely gets mentioned alongside the exemption headlines: a business exit is one of the single best generosity-planning moments you'll ever have, because you're converting an illiquid, hard-to-give asset (equity in a private company) into something transferable, right at the moment of sale.

Two tools are worth understanding, in plain terms.

A donor-advised fund (DAF) lets you contribute appreciated business interests before you have a binding agreement to sell, not merely before closing. That distinction matters: once a definitive purchase agreement is signed, the IRS generally treats the resulting gain as yours even if the shares move to a donor-advised fund before the deal actually closes. Timed correctly, in many cases you avoid capital gains tax on the portion you give while receiving a charitable deduction based on fair market value. You then direct grants from that fund to ministries and causes over years, not all at once. I've written more about how this works mechanically in The DAF Playbook, if you want the fuller picture of how a DAF grows your giving over time. It's a way to increase what actually reaches the causes you care about, simply by giving the asset before it becomes a taxable gain instead of writing a check after.

A charitable remainder trust (CRT) works differently. You contribute business interests into the trust before the sale. The trust then sells the asset without immediate capital gains tax at the trust level. You, or your family, receive an income stream from the trust for a set period or for life, with the remainder eventually passing to charity. It's a strategy that can turn "give it all away" and "provide for my family" from competing goods into a single structure that does both.

Neither of these is automatically the right move for your situation, and both involve real complexity around timing, valuation, and irrevocability that requires a CPA and estate attorney working alongside your financial planner, not a blog post. But if you're already planning an exit and generosity is part of your calling, the sequencing matters enormously. Give the asset before the sale is legally binding, not the proceeds after. When the structure fits, the outcome can be meaningful for you, your family, and the ministry alike, but the right answer is fact-specific to your situation, your timeline, and how the deal is structured.

The Practical Takeaway

If an exit is realistically on your horizon in the next three to five years, the smallest next step isn't calling an investment bank. It's this: write down your one-sentence answer to "what is this exit supposed to accomplish," and then bring that sentence, not just your financials, to the first conversation with your planning team. The structure follows the calling, not the other way around.

And don't wait for the "right time" to have that first conversation. The exemption window is historically wide right now, but windows like this have closed before, sometimes with less warning than you'd expect. In my experience, starting the planning conversation early, before any deadline is looming, tends to produce more thoughtful decisions than starting under pressure.

Want Some Help Thinking This Through?

I did too. That's part of why I started Openhanded Wealth, to walk with folks like you through decisions that feel complicated, but don't have to stay that way. You can learn more about how I work with clients here. If you've got questions, reach out. I'm a real person, and I won't pressure you into buying products you don't need. You don't have to navigate this alone.

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