For Sellers
The Smarter Exit for the Right Seller
When a seller uses an installment sale they structure their outcome favorably across multiple dimensions.
Instead of accepting the trade-offs that come with a traditional sale, an installment sale gives sellers control over what matters most: who takes over the business, how they’re taxed on the proceeds, and how they generate income going forward.
01 · Internal Succession
Installment sales facilitate access to debt capital for internal successors. You receive certainty that your company will remain in the right hands.
02 · Tax Efficiency
Instead of surrendering nearly 30% of your value to taxes at close, installment sales allow you to defer taxes while earning predictable income.
03 · Automatic Predictable Income
Installment sales automatically convert equity into a structured, tax-advantaged income stream. You continue earning from the asset you know best.
Legacy Amplification
Your capital enables internal succession and more than just legacy preservation.
Enabling a sale to an internal successor truly preserves the culture, the relationships, and the reputation you spent decades building, while converting your equity into predictable, tax-advantaged, long-term income.
Without installment sales, exit options can narrow quickly and the outcomes often fall short. Most options involve some combination of loss of control, unnecessary complexity, a significant tax hit, or simply not acting at all.
01 · Institutional Sale
You deal with sophisticated investors driven by financial incentives, resulting in meaningful trade-offs for you and your employees.
02 · ESOP
Complex to establish, cumbersome to maintain, and burdened by repurchase obligations. Uneconomical at certain business sizes.
03 · Inaction
The business declines as the owner ages. No clear succession plan leads to employees leaving and enterprise value deterioration.
Defer Taxes, Earn More
You spent years building equity. At sale, nearly 30% of that value disappears to taxes.
Installment sales allow you to spread your tax liability across the life of the note, deferring the tax impact over time rather than absorbing it all at once.
The power of tax deferral means that your deferred balance continues working for you, potentially generating hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars in additional income over time.
The below example is illustrative of the additional income that could be earned on the sale of a business with $10M in enterprise value:
Your Equity, Working for You
Stop operating your company. Start collecting from it.
In a cash sale, you convert decades of built up equity into a single, taxable lump sum with potential reinvestment uncertainty.
Installment sales automatically convert your equity into a structured, tax-advantaged income stream. You continue earning from the asset you spent years building and know best.
All of this is professionally managed by Haven Mercer, with minimal operational burden on your part.
How Does Haven Mercer Help?
Installment sales can be a powerful tool, but only with the right infrastructure in place.
We are a centralized, trusted partner that manages the entire installment sale lifecycle, so that sellers can step away from operational responsibilities while continuing to receive predictable income with confidence.
Through Managed Credit Ownership Transitions (MCOTs), we serve as the lender on behalf of sellers who use installment sales to transfer ownership internally.
