This guide designs, drafts, funds, and maintains a business succession plan for a closely held company. It begins with the diagnostic that identifies what the owners actually want, then works through entity-specific constraints that shape every later choice. It compares redemption, cross-purchase, and hybrid structures against the estate tax treatment of redemption obligations and insurance proceeds. It sets out the four valuation methods with the drafting decisions each requires, catalogs the triggering events that belong in every agreement, and works through funding in detail including the transfer-for-value hazard. Separate sections address estate tax liquidity relief, lifetime transfer techniques and the inclusion rules that defeat them, securities compliance, employee ownership and third-party sale, and the annual maintenance discipline without which every other section is wasted.