If you own a small business in Michigan, your estate plan has to do more work than the average plan. It has to handle your house, your retirement accounts, and your kids’ future. It also has to answer a much harder question: what happens to the business on Monday morning if you’re not there?
Most generic plans don’t answer that question well. That’s why working with an estate planning attorney as a small business owner is a different conversation than the one your neighbor is having.
The Business Is Not Just Another Asset
A car or a checking account can be retitled in an afternoon. A business can’t. It has employees, vendors, customers, leases, licenses, and often a bank loan with a personal guarantee attached.
If you die without a plan in place, those obligations don’t pause. Payroll still runs. Rent is still due. And the person inheriting your ownership interest may have no legal authority to sign a check, hire a replacement, or even talk to your bank.
What a Business-Owner Plan Should Address
A good plan for a Michigan business owner usually covers a few specific items:
- Succession: who takes over operationally, and on what timeline
- Buy-sell agreements: if you have partners, how their shares move when one of you dies or becomes disabled
- Funding: where the money comes from to buy out a deceased owner’s share, often through life insurance
- Trust ownership: holding the business inside a revocable trust so it avoids probate and transitions cleanly
- Powers of attorney: someone with clear authority to run the business if you’re incapacitated, not just dead
Each of these has Michigan-specific rules, especially around LLC operating agreements and how membership interests transfer at death.
Why “I’ll Deal With It Later” Is Risky
The hardest cases we see aren’t the ones where someone planned poorly. They’re the ones where someone planned for their family but forgot the business existed as a separate problem. The family inherits a company they can’t legally operate, while creditors and the IRS keep their normal schedule.
A short, focused planning conversation now is much cheaper than the alternative. If you own a Michigan business and haven’t updated your plan since you started it, that’s the one to put on the calendar this month.