What We’ve Learned
from Over 200 Business Owners
William Bissett and John Sanders,
Portus Wealth Advisors

Most business owners spend years building something valuable without ever asking the question that determines what it is actually worth: is this business transferable?

William Bissett and John Sanders have been asking that question alongside their clients for decades. Between them, they have worked with hundreds of business owners at every stage, from early growth through sale, succession, and everything that goes sideways in between. In November, they step out from behind the advisor’s chair and into the Charting Opportunities seat to share what they have learned.

This is not a session about theory. It is a conversation about patterns. The same mistakes, showing up in different businesses, costing owners in the same ways. And what to do about them before the pressure is on.

Who Is William Bissett?

William Bissett is the founder of Portus Wealth Advisors and holds the CFP and CEPA designations. He launched Portus in 2019 after more than a decade at a fast-growing registered investment advisory firm in Columbia, Maryland, where he also served as Chair and President of the Maryland chapter of the Financial Planning Association.

His work has been recognized by AdvisorHub as an Advisor to Watch in 2022, 2023, and 2025, and by Investment News in their 40 Under 40. He has been published in The New York Times and the Journal of Financial Planning.

Before Portus, William spent seven years hosting the Charlotte Angel Connection, a podcast through which he learned from 167 entrepreneurs and investors about what it actually takes to build a company. That experience shaped how Portus approaches business owner planning: not just as a financial exercise, but as a human one.

Today he hosts Charting Opportunities at the Triple C Barrel Room in Charlotte and produces Portus Perspectives, a YouTube series delivering four to seven minute financial planning insights for business owners that has steadily built an audience since launching in January 2026.

Who Is John Sanders?

John Sanders is a partner at Portus Wealth Advisors and holds the CFP and CVGA designations. His path into financial planning started at Campbell University, where the Director of the Trust and Investment Management Program recruited him into the program before his sophomore year. After internships in Cleveland and Dallas, he landed in the Trust Department of the Private Bank at Bank of America in Charlotte, then spent nearly a decade at GenSpring Family Offices serving ultra-high-net-worth families.

John is a native of New Bern, North Carolina, a town with deep roots in small business. His grandfather started a drug store. His other grandfather started a logging company. His father identified a need, bought a truck, and built a log trucking company still run by his youngest brother today. Small business is not an abstraction to John. It is how his family built its life. That background shapes how he works with owners who are trying to do the same.

What This Conversation Covers

Waiting Too Long to Start the Conversation

The owners who walk away from their businesses with the best outcomes share one thing in common: they started thinking about the exit years before they were ready to make one. William has said this repeatedly across the Portus Perspectives series. Most business owners do not start the conversation until they are exhausted, burned out, or pushed into it by circumstance. Starting early does not mean committing to anything. It means getting educated, building the right team, and understanding your options before the pressure forces a decision.

Building a Business That Cannot Run Without You

If every key decision flows through the owner, the business is not transferable. Buyers are not purchasing the owner’s past. They are purchasing their own future, and a business that depends entirely on its founder to function is worth significantly less than one that runs without that person in the room. William and John will walk through what transferability actually looks like and how to start building toward it, regardless of how far away an exit feels.

Ignoring the Real Estate Underneath the Business

Business owners who also own the property their company operates from create unnecessary complexity if those two pieces are not properly aligned before going to market. Lease terms, market rent, and LLC structure all become leverage points for buyers during due diligence if they are not addressed in advance. William has raised this with live client examples in the Portus Perspectives series, and it connects directly to the conversation Russell Hughes brought to Charting Opportunities earlier this year.

Letting Advisors Work in Silos

When the CPA for the business and the CPA for the short-term rental portfolio are not talking to each other or to the planning team, nobody connects the dots on a tax liability until it is almost too late to plan around it. The same pattern shows up in exit planning when the M&A advisor, the attorney, the CPA, and the financial advisor are all working independently instead of as a coordinated team. A real example of exactly this played out in William’s Portus Perspectives Episode 45. The cost of siloed advisors is not just inefficiency. It is dollars left on the table and problems discovered at the closing table instead of years earlier.

Confusing a Good Business With a Sellable One

A business that cash flows beautifully for its current owner is not automatically attractive to a buyer. The question buyers are asking is not what the business did for you. It is what it will do for them, without you. Transferability, documented systems, a capable team, and clean financials are what convert a great business into one that actually sells. William cited the statistic in Portus Perspectives Episode 55: most businesses that go to market fail to sell. The reason, more often than not, comes back to this distinction.

Why This Episode Is Different

Every Charting Opportunities guest has brought outside expertise to the conversation. Russell Hughes on commercial real estate. Dave Newell on operational design. Eileen Stephens on team alignment. Dr. Mark Brinson on building a business from the ground up.

This episode brings it inside.

William and John sit across from business owners every week. They see what the plans look like before the exit, what the transaction looks like during it, and what the financial picture looks like after. This is a conversation built from that seat, organized around the patterns that repeat, and aimed at the owners who still have time to do something about them.

Who Should Watch This?

This session is for any business owner who is:

• Running a business they have never had professionally valued and are not sure where to start.
• Three to ten years from an exit and has not yet built a planning team around it.
• Wondering whether their business would actually sell if they put it on the market today.
• Ready to close the gap between a good business and a sellable one.