The 24-month lead time — the most valuable item here

Every action in this edition was structurally decided long before it was visible. Spear's options were struck at $0.85. Boersma's plan was eight months old. Stryker's trusts are generational. The thing these people have that you do not is not scale — it is lead time they bought on purpose.

The Ontario analogue is the lifetime capital gains exemption on qualified small business corporation shares: roughly $1.25m of capital gain sheltered per person (the figure is indexed — confirm the current number), and multipliable across family members who hold shares through a trust. But QSBC status turns on asset-use tests measured over the 24 months before a sale: broadly, 90% of assets used in an active business carried on primarily in Canada at the moment of sale, and more than 50% throughout the preceding two years.

The usual failure is accumulated cash, investments or redundant assets sitting inside the operating company. That is fixable with lead time and not fixable inside a deal window — which is the whole point. A structure put in place today is not useful until roughly late 2028, and that is the argument for starting before there is a transaction to plan around.