Sell or keep the company: the questions before the numbers

If you own a company in Switzerland and start thinking about selling it, help arrives quickly: your fiduciary (Treuhänder) runs the numbers, your bank has a succession desk, an M&A adviser knows buyers. All of them answer the question of how. The question of whether stays with you, and it is rarely asked, because nobody around you gains anything by asking it.

This page is for the moment before: for the founder in Baar with an unsolicited offer from a German group, and for the doctor in Zürich who owns her practice together with her husband and disagrees with him about when to stop.

Which questions belong before the valuation?

Twelve questions that sit in no fiduciary’s brief. Not because yours does not know them, but because they are not what he is paid for. Answer them in writing, on your own, before you talk to anyone who has an opinion.

1. Do you want to leave, or do you want something to stop? Handing over the company and getting rid of a burden are two different things.
2. What will you do at nine o’clock on the Monday after the handover? “Sleep in” covers a week. What happens in week three?
3. Who asked the question first? Whoever asks usually has an answer in mind.
4. What would you feel if the offer were withdrawn tomorrow? Relief says something different from disappointment.
5. What in the company belongs to you, and what belongs to your role? The role goes with the handover. What stays?
6. How much money is enough? Do you have the number, or only the feeling that it should be more?
7. Which part of what you do today would you still do unpaid? That is the part you may want to keep.
8. Whom do you owe something, and what exactly? The employees a future, the family time, the founder before you the name over the door?
9. What happens to the company if you are out tomorrow? 76 percent of Swiss SME owners see the firm’s success as strongly tied to their own person or the managing director (UBS/CFB-HSG, Kurzstudie 01, January 2026). If that is true of you, the question is more urgent than it feels.
10. What would a buyer or successor have to promise for you to sign? And would you believe the promise? If not, what are you actually trying to protect?
11. Which option have you never seriously thought through? Keeping the company with a hired managing director, a partial sale, a sale to management, a staggered handover, winding it down.
12. Who around you knows your honest answers to questions 1 to 11? If the answer is “nobody”, that is the first thing you can change.

None of these questions replaces the valuation. But the valuation replaces none of them.

Who around you has a stake in a particular answer?

Most of the people you will talk to about succession earn something on your answer. That is legitimate and does not make them worse at their job. It only means they are not neutral.

The last row is in the table on purpose: a sparring partner is paid too. His fee simply does not depend on your answer.

The family row is not a criticism. Your wife or husband wants you to stop because they would like you healthy beside them in ten years; if you moved to Switzerland for the business, they may also want to know whether a sale means going home. These are good reasons. They are just not yours.

How do you tell that tiredness, not conviction, is deciding?

Many decisions to sell are made in a bad quarter: a key employee leaves, a large client pays late, and suddenly the offer from the spring sounds reasonable. That can be right. It can also be an escape that looks like a decision. Five signs that exhaustion is taking part:

• The thought of selling brings relief, but no picture of what comes after. You want to get away from something, not towards something.
• The answer changes with the last week: keep after a holiday, sell after a bad meeting.
• You would keep the company at once if one specific problem were solved. Then the problem is the question, not the company.
• You cannot say what you would do with the time, but you can say precisely what you no longer want to do.
• You have never thought the question through rested. Only in the evening, only on Sundays, only after an argument.

A simple test: imagine you had a capable managing director in place and three months of distance. Would you still sell? If yes, it is conviction. If you hesitate, it may be tiredness, and the tiredness deserves a look before the company does.

One note that belongs here: if the exhaustion has lasted for weeks, you sleep badly and little gives you pleasure, your first call is your GP, not me. Sparring is not psychotherapy and does not diagnose; it assumes that you are able to act. What that means in practice is set out in the questions on where sparring ends.

What do the Swiss succession figures say, and what do they not say?

What they say. According to the UBS/CFB-HSG Kurzstudie 01 of January 2026, a survey of 401 Swiss SME owners conducted in September 2025, 32 percent of owners plan to transfer ownership within five years, just under 11 percent within two years. Of the owners aged 66 to 90, 21 percent could not name a handover date. Around 15 percent expect their company to be closed or liquidated.

Dun & Bradstreet counted 90’667 Swiss SMEs with an open succession in March 2025, 13.7 percent of all firms with up to 249 employees. The 2022 succession study by CFB-HSG and Credit Suisse (more than 150 companies, surveyed in March and April 2022) records that in 80 percent of completed handovers the predecessor withdrew for reasons of age or health. Handing over management and ownership at the same time takes about six years on average, a staggered handover about fourteen (SECO SME Portal, September 2022).

What they do not say. They count companies, not people. Read plainly, the 80 percent means that in four out of five handovers it was age or health that gave the push in the end, not a freely chosen date. The 21 percent without a date can also be read differently: not undecided, but decided not to decide yet. And most of these figures are collected or co-funded by parties for whom successions are a business: banks and credit-information firms; the university and SECO only summarise their results. That does not make the figures wrong. It only explains why the question “should I at all?” is not at the centre of them. What you want is in no statistic.

Whom do you talk to first, and in what order after that?

Talk to the fiduciary first and you have a valuation, and have quietly turned towards a sale. Talk to your daughter first and you have made an offer, even if it was only a question. Talk about it in the office first and you have a rumour. For international owners in Zug and Zürich there is an extra layer: your advisers are often Swiss and your family often is not, and each side assumes things the other has never heard.

1. With yourself, or with someone who gains nothing. The twelve questions above, answered honestly. A counterpart for this has no mandate and no seat at the family table.
2. With your spouse or partner. Before the children, before the fiduciary. What you will do on the Monday after is a shared question, and so is where you will live.
3. With possible successors in the family, one at a time. As a question, not as an offer. Mix question and wish and you get an answer out of loyalty.
4. With the fiduciary. Now, with a brief: run the numbers on the options I am seriously considering. Not: tell me what to do.
5. With the lawyer, the M&A adviser, the bank. Once you know what you want and on what terms. Then they work for your answer, not for theirs.
6. With key people and employees. As late as possible, but before anyone outside hears of it. The board earlier, depending on your structure, but not before step 2.

The order also protects the relationships: a daughter who is asked after the fiduciary notices.

What a sparring partner does here, and what he does not do

A sparring partner is the counterpart for step one. He asks the twelve questions in a way you cannot sidestep, tests your assumptions and says what he sees, even when it contradicts your preferred option. At the end you often have a clearer position and a brief for your fiduciary in your own words. Often a single 60-minute session is enough; nobody is obliged to come back.

What he does not do: he does not value your company, calculate tax, draft a contract or look for buyers, and he gives no legal, tax or financial advice. That stays with your specialists, and he tells you when it is time to bring them in.

The conversation takes place where you are undisturbed: at your home, in your office in the evening, or walking by the lake, so nobody in the company needs to know (home and office visits). Confidentiality is a written contractual commitment with three limits: a legally binding order of a court or authority, acute danger to life and limb, and the welfare of a child. It is not professional secrecy of the kind lawyers and doctors have; the full wording is open on the page. Sessions are in English or German.

The fee is fixed and depends on the format and the length of the conversation, never on who you are. I tell you what it is in the confidential conversation – before the first session, not after. A session lasts 60 minutes, 90 on request, on site or online; travel is included within 60 minutes’ drive of Wetzikon, and no VAT is added. The 20-minute confidential conversation is free. If you want to think the succession through over several months, you can ask for an accompanying format over three months. All formats are on the sparring page.

Two situations have their own page: an offer with a deadline and the time after the sale. Where we can meet in Zug, in Zürich and on the Gold Coast is on the region pages.

In short

Selling or keeping is first a question to you and only then a question to the numbers. Almost everyone who helps you with it earns on one particular answer; that is legitimate, but you should know it. If you answer the twelve questions rested and hold the conversations in the right order, you give your specialists a clear brief instead of the decision itself.