Tax-Loss Harvesting

Tax-Loss Harvesting“The most important thing to do if you find yourself in a hole is to stop digging.” – Warren Buffett

The Oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffett, is one of the most revered investors in the world. His oversight, with the addition of Charlie Munger’s advice, has led Berkshire Hathaway to be a company worth almost one trillion dollars in net value.

While his quote from above suggests that he believes in calling it quits when you know you have a loser investment, he also regularly cautions any investor to invest for the long term and be vigilant through the down times.

So what is the right approach for someone who has an investment that is currently underperforming?

Well, if it is December, tax-loss harvesting may be the best way for you to accommodate both approaches while staying ahead of the government’s taxation requirements and winning in April through actions made in December.

What is Tax-Loss Harvesting?

Tax-loss harvesting essentially means selling off a bad investment to offset the tax liability of positive investments you have made during the current tax year. The spoils of good investment benefit you, the investor, but the government also sees the capital gains as an opportunity to add to their coffers.

So when you have a win in investing, you need to look for ways to keep those gains to yourself for further investment or strategic use. Taking a stock that is currently operating at a loss, and selling it to offset your gains from other stocks, is the basic reason behind tax-loss harvesting. Besides reducing your taxes, tax loss harvesting also frees up cash so you can buy new assets that may be more likely to generate positive performance. Just make sure you don’t invest in something that only you love.

Some basic rules around tax-loss harvesting stipulate the timeline within which you can redeploy the money from the losing stock sale, or prohibit you from re-buying the same sold stock. You also have to be careful about buying almost identical stocks as those which you have sold.

Who Benefits?

Anyone who invests and sees losses, as well as gains, can benefit from tax-loss harvesting. While those in higher tax brackets stand to benefit more from this practice, everyone should take advantage of this legal opportunity to reduce the amount of taxes they may owe the government, assuming their situation meets the appropriate requirements.

This unique act shouldn’t be used simply as a means to save taxes owed, however. There is no point in selling off a stock that is expected to rebound or outgrow your initial investment, just to offset gains from another stock. A prudent investment strategy should be adhered to, and harvesting should only be set in motion when the benefits outweigh any potential negatives of your strategy.

When Should You Act?

To take full advantage of the tax-loss harvesting opportunity, you need to make sure that any sales of investments that have resulted in a loss are complete before the end of the current tax season. This is the only way to offset gains made in the current tax season, with your losses.

Additionally, you will need to know when the stocks of both your gains and losses were purchased. This is so you can confirm that your capital gains are accurately calculated, and then offset your gains accordingly with your losses. It should be noted that a business owner, who takes advantage of tax-loss harvesting, can potentially use a minimal amount of those losses toward their personal tax liabilities, once all potential uses for the business liability have been exhausted.

Again, you should make sure that your approach doesn’t run afoul of your current investment strategy, but down markets can provide the best times to take advantage of tax-loss harvesting. You can maximize the capital you have to reinvest in other stocks or assets by purchasing the ones with the most upside, while at bargain prices.

We prefer to help you buy or sell businesses at Apex, instead of stocks. But we know great people who can help guide you in harvesting your tax losses.  If you need a referral, give us a call and we’ll connect you.

Use Loom to Help You Save Time

Use Loom to Help You Save TimeThere are times when we read an email and think, “I could explain this in just a few minutes instead of replying back with a long email.” Or you know that vocal tone and body language will help a message land properly, but can’t do that in an email. There are video messaging apps that can help. One of them is Loom.

What’s Loom?

Loom is a video messaging tool that helps you get messages out through instantly shareable videos. 

You can record your camera, microphone, and desktop simultaneously. Your recordings are then stored in the cloud with trackable views.

You can use web or app-based versions of the software to do the recordings and basic video editing tools are available to you if you want to trim a video for its best look and feel.

Why Use Video Messaging?

There are lots of use cases for video messaging, and the more you use it, the more possible uses you’ll discover in your own organization. Here are some ways you can use Loom and other similar apps:

  • Video SOP — one of the reasons that SOPs don’t get written is because people are intimidated/discouraged by writing down a lot of text. But for whatever reason, people are less intimidated by having a video conversation. You can use Loom to create explanatory SOP videos what can help onboard new employees and provide a respository of knowledge in any position.
  • Email reply — as noted above, it’s acceptable to reply to an email with a video message. In fact, customers will often be impressed that you recorded something for them, even though it may have taken you less time to do so than to write an email. Somehow recorded video conveys more “work.”
  • Troubleshooting — when particular problems occur frequently enough that everyone in your office knows how to answer them for clients, it might be worthwhile to record a one-time video explaining how to solve the problem. Now your team will gain back future time by sending them this video (and others like it).

Interaction

One of the ways text messaging has evolved over time is allowing for reactions to individual messages. We can “thumbs up” a particular message without replying, allowing the party on the other end to see our thoughts without our having to write them. 

Loom also features this feedback feature on its videos. Users can react with emojis at any time during the video, and/or send direct email feedback on specific timestamps.

Those who like to speed up their videos can take comfort in the fact that Loom allows you to speed up (or slow down) the video to a speed of your choosing (within reason…10X isn’t available!).

Videos can also be password protected and Loom offers integrations with other tools like Slack to make access even easier.

Prefer phone calls to emailing? We’re here for you! Give us a call today to talk about how we can help you with a business transaction.

What are NFTs?

What are NFTsYou may have heard about NFTs in the news at some point in the past year.  These digital assets are in their first era of growth and exposure and big brands like Nike, Gucci, and Sotheby’s are jumping in on the fray.  We thought it would be worthwhile to give our readers a simple explanation of what NFTs are and how brands and businesses are taking advantage of them.

The Blockchain

NFT stands for non-fungible token.  Money, being interchangeable and indistinguishable, is an example of a fungible asset.  Your house or the Mona Lisa, for example, are unique and irreplaceable, making them non-fungible.  

NFTs are created on a blockchain.  The most popular blockchain that most people know at least something about is Bitcoin (BTC), which is primarily used as a store of value.  But many other blockchains have other use cases.  Ethereum (ETH), for example, rose to prominence for its use of smart contracts, which disintermediates buyers and sellers in various markets.  ETH is also the most popular blockchain for NFTs.

What Can Be an NFT?

Pretty much anything can be an NFT.  Let’s start in the physical world with the Mona Lisa, which we mentioned already.  While it’s true that you can go to see the Mona Lisa in Paris at the Louvre, you can also see it on your phone.  You can print it out, frame it, and put it on your wall.  You can make it the desktop wallpaper of your computer.  But you’ll never own it.

The Mona Lisa has value because we as a society have assigned it value and because most of us in the world live in economic systems in which the owners of private property can sell items of value that they own.  But since the Mona Lisa might be too extreme of an example, think of baseball cards.

Baseball cards are made of cardboard.  They were printed by computers, not designed by a famous Renaissance artist.  They are not inherently useful.  Yet our society still assigns them value, and they change hands to the tune of millions of dollars per year (if not more).

NFTs take these physical-world principles and put them into the digital space.  Think of them as digital certificates of authenticity which show the chain of custody all the way from the original creation of it on the blockchain (known as “minting”) all the way through every buyer until it’s ended up in your hands.  

Examples of Recent NFT Transactions

Yeah, okay, but who would do this, and what would it be for, you might ask.  Great question.  Some recent examples include:

Examples of NFT Use Cases

But NFTs aren’t just for global megastars and sports leagues, they can be created, bought, traded, and sold by anyone.  Foundation and OpenSea are examples of large marketplaces where NFTs are minted and sold everyday.  A fancy digital iteration that doesn’t exist in traditional art?  You can create a setting when minting an NFT that triggers secondary revenues to the original minter of the NFT everytime the NFT changes hands.  

Band Kings of Leon included software in an album they released as an NFT which allows the current holder four front row seats to every tour for life.

Nike recently filed a patent to allow for blockchain authentication of ownership of physical sneakers.

Perhaps the most fun and interesting use case of NFTs currently is in the Zed.run virtual horse racing marketplace.  You can buy virtual horses as NFTs and then run them (and win crypto) in various races which are running 24/7.  Seriously.

Bubble?

While some might throw up their hands and say they simply don’t understand, there are lessons to be learned (and money to be made) even during bubbles.  It’s too early to tell whether NFTs are a long-term trend or just a modern day version of Dutch tulips.  

The IRS has not yet offered guidance on them, but if you buy an NFT (which is a crypto asset) using crypto, the IRS has offered guidance on that, and as such it falls under capital gains (if your NFT appreciates).  Some speculate that the IRS may choose to classify it under the collectibles bracket, which is at an even higher rate than the current capital gains tax.

What’s clear is at the moment NFTs can be created, made scarce, bought, sold, and even serve as a source of residual income.  That makes them just like many other collectible objects which you may not care about or even understand the market for.  But hopefully after reading this you understand NFTs better, even if you have no desire to ever own one.

We don’t have any NFTs for sale here at Apex, but we have plenty of businesses that will be great assets for years to come.  Give us a call if you’d like to check a few out.

Questions Buyers Ponder About Price

Questions Buyers Ponder About PriceWe’ve done a series of articles on general business questions that buyers will ask about the health of the business.  In Part 1, we asked, among other things, Why Sell?  In Part 2 we asked more granular questions, like the demographics of core customers.  In Part 3 we lead with a look back, asking what the seller would do differently with the knowledge he/she has now.

In this article we will look at questions that a buyer will consider when looking at the price you are listing the business for.  The answers to those questions will determine if he/she is willing to pay what you’re asking.

Capital Investment

What rate of return do I want?  Businesses, ultimately, are investments.  They probably don’t feel like investments the way that a stock portfolio or a 401k can, but they are.  In fact, they are often the most important investments of your life, in part because they offer a chance for outsized returns.  

A Main Street business buyer doesn’t normally have hedge fund expectations.  But that same buyer expects much more than one can get in traditional investments, in part because running a small business is significantly more risky than holding an index fund ETF.  Some might want a rate of return as low as 10%, some might not be willing to take the plunge for less than 20%.

Action item for seller’s diligence: Can I show a consistent rate of return on my own invested capital, or can I provide an estimate based on someone meeting my selling price?

How quickly do I want to repay my acquisition costs?  Buyers may have liquidated financial vehicles, borrowed from family and friends, or simply used their own savings if they don’t take out an SBA loan.  The buyer will need to calculate how long it will take them to pay back that outlay in relation to your asking price.

Action item for seller’s diligence: Have standard, accelerated, and best-case scenarios for repayment of acquisition costs based on your current cash flows, less any liabilities that the incoming buyer will not have.

Growth

How steady are sales and margins?  Here projections for new products and services will not be as useful as they are, at best, good estimates.  A buyer is going to look at your history over years.  Just as our buyers in the early teens used to look at how a business weathered 2008 and 2009, you better believe they will be paying attention to your 2020 and early 2021 numbers to see how your business weathered an unexpected global event.

Action item for seller’s diligence: Have your sales and margins charted year by year.  This is also a great internal auditing tool to share with your team to see if those numbers can’t be made better.

What are the biggest risks?  We’ve actually asked this question in other ways in our Questions for Buyers series, but this is more focused on financial risks.  For example, a buyer might consider the risk that a key employee will leave, but that may be less of an immediate financial risk than a key vendor going out of business.

Action item for seller’s diligence: Have some of the financial risks plotted out with your estimate of the likelihood it would happen, with the necessary consequences.

Sellers can sometimes get hung up on multiples and what they think they should get for their business and when you offer action items like we have above, they might resist doing them.  But what the most successful sellers know is that these are action items that not only telegraph the confidence a seller has in his/her or business, but pass that confidence on to the buyer as well.  This is why my number is my number is what the answers to these questions communicate.  The better your answer, the likelier a buyer will agree with your number.

Are you pondering what size business you can afford?  Or how much you want to sell your business for?  Our team can help you answer either of those questions.  Give us a call today!

The $15/Hour Minimum Wage Debate

A provision to gradually increase the federal minimum wage to $15/hour was recently removed from a budget reconciliation bill in Congress.  While that pay increase doesn’t look like it will be coming at the federal level this year, the debate around the topic isn’t going away and has already led companies like Amazon and Target to announce their own moves to at least $15/hour for all new employees.  In the same vein, the State of California has announced a state minimum wage of $15/hour effective January 2022.  Whatever the starting pay is for your employees, you should know and understand the talking points of this debate.

Stats and Guesses

As part of the legislative process, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) put out some projections on the effect of the move toward $15/hour:

  • The cost to the government would be $54 billion dollars over a ten-year period
  • 30 million Americans would get a pay raise
  • Of those 30 million, 900,000 would be lifted out of poverty
  • Possible job cuts as a result of this could be close to 1.4 million workers (.9%)
  • Labor costs/Purchasing power (depending on your perspective) would increase by $333 billion over the same ten-year period

While the CBO is a nonpartisan body, that doesn’t shield them from criticism, and these numbers received their fair share of disagreement from both sides of the aisle.  What is clear already is that more than 29 states have minimum wages that are higher than the federal minimum wage, which was last adjusted in 2009 to $7.25/hour.

Your Business

We’ve talked before about different ways to financially reward employees and why hiring for cultural fit is an important part of making sure that your team isn’t only money motivated.  While not every business has the resources to simply double starting pay, and while the vast majority of our clients don’t have a single team member on minimum wage, it’s important to realize that such a dramatic change will affect everyone and every business.  Questions you should be asking include:

  • Do any of my key vendors employ minimum wage workers?  Have they forecast how our prices would change if that minimum wage would change dramatically?  Do I have contingency plans in place in case they decide to cease operations?
  • Using answers from the first set of questions, how would you deal with increased costs?  Would you pass that on to the customer?  If so, what percentage?  How does your business change as a result?
  • How closely are the lowest-paid members of your team compensated in relation to the minimum wage?  What adjustments would you need to make to their salaries as a result?

Sometimes we can forget that changes we don’t think will affect us or our businesses will indeed affect us and our businesses, and in profound ways.  Rather than passively wait for changes to occur, the best business owners proactively attack challenges before they become problems.

Are you and your team happy with the compensation plan you have in place?  Have you thought about that plan in relation to a possible future sale?  Give us a call to talk about it.

What to Look For (and Avoid) in a Business Broker Listing Agreement

Business Broker Listing AgreementBehind all our business broker listings, there is a business broker listing agreement. This spells out mutual responsibilities between us and our clients. As with any contract, this is something that deserves your undivided attention, as we’ve said many times before that a business transaction may be one of the most important events of your life. In this article we’ll discuss the various provisions of any given business broker listing agreement and what you should consider before signing one.

Why Have a Business Broker Listing Agreement?

The short answer? To protect you, your business, and your broker. Remember that ultimately, contracts are not there in case everything goes right, but in case even one thing goes wrong.

Key Elements of a Business Broker Listing Agreement

While every agreement may vary, these are the elements you must have for any serious agreement to list your business.

  • Duration. This is the amount of time your business is listed for. As we’ve said in a previous article, selling a business can take between two months and two years.
    • Under twelve months: this is often pitched as offering more flexibility for the seller, but really, it puts undue pressure on a broker and as we’ll point out below, it may not really offer you the flexibility that it promises.
    • At least twelve months: this is pretty standard, as this recognizes that (and mentally prepares you for the fact that) this is a marathon, not a sprint.
    • Keep in mind that just because your engagement has passed doesn’t mean you won’t owe a commission to your broker. We keep records of everyone we introduce to a potential seller and if they conclude a transaction within a certain time period of the end of the engagement, a commission may still be owed. That’s why you need to be very clear on the details here, not just for your sake, but for your broker’s.
  • Right to Sell. In this section you are going to give us the exclusive right to represent you in a business transaction. We’ve talked before about the sorts of things we do to market your business.
  • Representation. Are you who you say you are? Do you actually own the assets you are purporting to sell?
  • Protection/Indemnification Clause. Should anything go wrong during the transaction, this section addresses the legal and financial rights and obligations of all parties.
  • Dispute Resolution Terms. Should significant problems arise during the transaction, how will these problems be cured? Will you use arbitration or litigation?  In which jurisdiction will the dispute be dealt with?
  • Commission. This varies per broker and agency but here at Apex we settle this at closing.

We’re Here to Help

In a world in which we so often click past “terms and conditions” because we don’t want to bother to read them, it can be hard to sit down and work through a document like a business broker listing agreement. But you don’t have to do it alone! We’re here to help and are want you to be comfortable as you pursue a transaction. Give us a call today!

Deal Points: Getting to the Finish Line

Getting to the Finish LineIn any business transaction, there are going to be key deal points that are deal breakers for the buyer or the seller. As brokers, we’re going to represent our client to the best of our ability. We also have one eye on the greater picture, the deal itself. And sometimes, we can come up with creative solutions to get a deal to the finish line and make both parties happy.

Real Estate

Sometimes a seller wants to include the real estate of a business along with the sale. But if it’s bundled together, it becomes too much for the buyer to take on. Sometimes the financing won’t cover it. Sometimes because the cash flow isn’t there. Owners will sometimes not pay themselves rent on the property and thus create an unattractive proposition to buyers who don’t have the luxury of owning the building the property is housed in.

A win/win solution can be to carve the real estate out of the deal and make the seller a landlord. In this way, the buyer doesn’t have to deal with the cost of the real estate. And the seller is incentivized to make sure the buyer succeeds so he gets additional cash flow via the tenancy.

Royalty

We’ve discussed the risks of an earnout on numerous occasions.  Sometimes a seller who isn’t happy with this option can ask for a royalty on a specific product or in a specific division of the company. The principle of the earnout is the same: money later instead of at the time of closing.  

This can be a win for a seller who doesn’t want to go down a  traditional seller financing route (for whatever reason) and for the buyer who can see that the seller believes in the product/company enough to defer compensation and base it on performance.

Assets

Over the years, the seller may have acquired assets that are either superfluous to the business (additional trucks that are simply being kept as “spares”) or not part of the buyer’s vision for the company. The seller doesn’t have to “take a loss” on these assets. He/she can simply carve them out of the transaction and sell them separately. The buyer wins by not paying for assets that he/she doesn’t feel the business needs going forward.

Spinoff

Sometimes a buyer might only be interested in a particular part of the business. This could be the fastest growing segment of the business. Or it might feature a method or technology that he/she is particularly interested in. This presents an opportunity to spin off that part of the company either as an entity owned solely by the seller or in some kind of partnership (allowing the buyer to fully buy out the seller at some point.)  This can allow the seller to take some money off the table and/or use some of those proceeds to package up the rest of the business for sale on its own.

There are many bespoke possibilities to get to the finish line of a transaction. But you can’t get there if you’re overly focused on “winning” a deal point and ignore its role in the transaction as a whole. That’s where we can (and do) help. Want to know more? Give us a call!

Office Space and Remote Work in the “New Normal”

Apex Business Advisors: Office Space and Remote WorkThe COVID-19 epidemic has had far reaching consequences for businesses worldwide, some of which remain to be discovered. But when businesses were forced to close, commercial real estate took a big hit. As the lockdown continues and businesses adjust, a new normal has begun to take shape. This may shape the direction of commercial real estate and how companies work for a generations.

Pre-Covid

Before Covid-19, commercial real estate continued record year-on-year growth. With steady cash flows, it provided an attractive investment alternative for conservative investors to corporate debt. The returns were significantly higher, but with only slightly more risk.

While remote work had been steadily growing, it wasn’t growing at anywhere close to the demand for commercial real estate space. And remote work didn’t show any signs of hockey stick growth in the near future. There were companies that publicly stated seeing great value in their teams physically working together and had no interest in moving to remote work.

Changes

Needless to say, those companies who resisted remote work found themselves with no choices in the face of governmental orders. Overnight, people who had no idea that “Slack” was a software program or that “Zoom” was something you used to meet with others got acquainted with both of them, and many other programs.

Then days turned into weeks and many of those managers’ concerns turned into unexpected surprise. Their teams were perfectly capable of working online, despite having never done so before. It wasn’t perfect, and maybe it wouldn’t be a forever solution, but a line had been crossed that couldn’t be uncrossed.

This led to serious thoughts for business owners who routinely cut five and six figure monthly rent checks. Why pay for all this space if my team can effectively work from home? It left them free to rethink the future of their office space.

Post-Covid

One of those shifts in office space could be re-imagining it as a place for meeting clients and for occasional team meetings. There could be some dedicated shared space for various team members who still wish to come in to a separate office. For some companies, this wouldn’t necessarily change their footprint that much. For other companies, it would be game-changing. Freeing up revenue to spend on attracting customers or building products during a particularly challenging economic climate.

With a change in the footprint of their office space, there will need to be more acceptance of the culture of remote work and incorporation into how the company does business. No more painful minutes spent learning Zoom on the fly. There will be established systems and procedures that existing and new employees have to understand. And they will be trained to make sure that the new remote version of the company is as good or better than the pre-Covid version.

Instead of waiting for things to go “back to normal” (whatever that means) the best business owners are proactively managing the situation as it unfolds. They’re not content to be passive receivers of changes. They are dealing with the changing landscape with flexibility. They’re anticipating all that might come with the knowledge of what’s happened in first half of 2020.

Are you thinking about making changes to how your team works and how your office is configured? We know people who can help. Give us a call!

Business in 2020: Catching a Falling Knife

Here at Apex, we’ve been proactive in advising our clients as 2020 has unfolded. We began the year by discussing issues that might come in an election year. As the first wave of lockdowns occurred we encouraged people to look at federal funds (and followed up with detailed information on PPP). As the lockdowns continued we shared our long term outlook (don’t panic) while offering short-term changes that could help businesses adapt to the continuing chaos.

But now it’s the second half of 2020 and there’s no “normal” in sight.  What now?

We’ve heard many business owners say “2020 is a write-off.” While we understand that thinking, there’s also a danger in the phrase… It assumes that events know when December 31st comes and hence switch off just because it’s a new year. A new year may be something that we as humans pop champagne over, but the universe is indifferent. It just keeps going. Hence, with months of an unprecedented business climate, we should have more wisdom under our belts, and more importantly, we should use that wisdom.

Our position at Apex is unchanged. We look at the fundamentals and the transactions that we continue to handle. Our business has not stopped. There are still buyers and sellers looking to do deals. Every industry is different. While food and beverage and entertainment may be tougher to sell at the moment (yet some of them still continue to move), some businesses have temporarily put their listings on hold as they experience record years.

However, your position may have changed.

Leaving the Corporate World

You may have been someone who was already looking to leave the corporate world and enter business ownership, but now you have cold feet.  Is having a job any more secure in this environment? While business owners are indeed facing challenges, they do so knowing they have the most control over their destinies. They can live and die by that self-determination, and that’s preferable to waiting for an ax to fall. Does COVID-19 really change whether a business is the best vehicle to determine your own destiny?

Selling a Business

You might have been someone looking to sell a business. You still need to do what’s necessary to prepare that business for sale. And that includes guiding it through challenging circumstances. As we’ve discussed before, companies who showed good performance in 2009 and 2010, following the 2008 financial crisis, made for even more attractive acquisition targets. Those companies showed resilience, not just doing well when the sun was shining, but when the storms hit. Has COVID-19 changed your desire to sell your business, or just demanded more perseverance and resilience from you?

Falling Knives

In this second half of the year, we aren’t waiting for events to “happen to” our clients. We are encouraging them to take matters into their own hands. If it feels like you’re trying to catch a falling knife, get some gloves on and reach those mitts out. Success in life doesn’t come to those who passively wait in fear for the next disaster, but those who, amidst setbacks and challenges, fill sandbags for what may come next. They keep their eyes on their environment close and far, watching for opportunities.

Feeling paralyzed about what to do in 2020? Talk to one of our advisors. While this is all of our first time through COVID-19, it’s not our first major financial shock. We have great advice and guidance for you.

Paycheck Protection Program: The Latest

PPP Loans UpdateSome time ago, we noted that funds were going to be available for small businesses and in the intervening weeks the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) story has developed significantly. We wanted to give you some updates, as well as encourage you to apply if you need to, as there is still money available after an originally botched launch.

First Round: $349 Billion

Government isn’t ordinarily known for efficient launches of large scale programs, so we shouldn’t have expected anything different in stressful circumstances. Some of the lowlights included:

  • The funds ran out in 13 days.
  • Many small businesses were only able to apply one week after the program opened.
  • Some very large companies with significant financial resources, like Shake Shack, Ruth’s Chris, and you can’t make it up, the Los Angeles Lakers, received loans. After massive public backlash, they all returned the money, though we suspect that they wouldn’t have if no one had found out.

It was a banner day for the banks, who netted 10 billion dollars in fees alone, and all for underwriting SBA-guaranteed loans, which means almost no risk.

Second Round: $321 Billion

Alas, the website crashed the day the second pot of funding was made available. After enough complaints, banks with under $1B in assets were given some windows to apply (unsurprisingly, the largest banks had been getting preferential treatment). After the blowback from the first round, there are still some clouds hanging over this round of funding:

  • Secretary Mnuchin noted that all loans over $2M will be audited, but didn’t say who would be doing that auditing. Banks? The SBA?
  • Treasury did provide guidance on how loans could be forgiven:
    • Loan proceeds must cover payroll costs, mortgage interest, rent, and utility costs over the eight week period after the loan is made.
    • Employee and compensation levels must be maintained.
  • But it didn’t give guidance as to how the retained portion of the loan would be categorized on a balance sheet.
  • The IRS managed to mobilize in time to let us know that expenses normally deductible would not be so if they were used to trigger forgiveness of a loan.
  • But the IRS hasn’t given guidance on how a forgiven loan amount will be dealt with either, but knowing the IRS, they won’t have our interests at heart.
  • Thankfully a non-government agency, the American Institute of CPAs, has put together a helpful guide to help you track and calculate your path to PPP loan forgiveness.

There haven’t been the absurd cases (like the Lakers) in this round, but what seems to be clear is that without guidelines, loans are not merely being given for rescue. Some companies are taking the loans to fund growth. It could be argued that the intention of the funds was to rescue small businesses that were on the verge of going under, but there doesn’t seem to be restrictions in the funding policy requiring clear proof of that, and given the current business atmosphere, there doesn’t really seem to be a moral problem with making sure your business survives during a time which may be tough on many.

Our Recommendation

As of the time of this article, there’s still more than $100M available in funding. As we’ve said previously, our long-term outlook for the economy, not just in the US, but worldwide, is positive. We also think that political circumstances are such that decisions concerning the finer points we’ve highlighted above are likely to go the way of small business owners.

We encourage small business owners who think they could put this funding to good use, even if not in immediate danger of going out of business, to give their bankers a call to see if it makes sense to apply. If you’re one of the many business owners unhappy with their banking relationship, give us a call. We’ve got some solid names to share with you.