You formed an LLC to protect your business. You created (or are thinking about) a living trust to protect your family. Here's the question almost nobody asks until it's too late: do the two actually work together?

For most business owners, the answer should be yes — by making your trust the owner of your LLC membership interest.

What happens if you don't

Your LLC membership interest is an asset, just like your house or your brokerage account. If you personally own it when you pass away, it generally goes through probate — even if everything else you own is in a trust.

That means the business that supports your family could sit in court-supervised limbo for months: bank signatories in question, contracts in doubt, no one clearly authorized to make decisions. For a business that depends on you, that delay can do real damage. Vendors, employees, and customers don't wait for probate.

How trust ownership fixes it

When your trust owns your LLC interest, there's no gap and no court. The successor trustee you chose steps in immediately with clear legal authority. The business keeps operating, payroll keeps running, and your family keeps the value you built.

You lose nothing in the process. You're still the trustee of your own trust, still the manager of your LLC, still in complete control day to day. The change is invisible until the moment it matters.

Doing it right (this is the part people skip)

Moving an LLC into a trust isn't just signing one document. Done properly, it involves:

  • An assignment of membership interest transferring ownership to the trust
  • Checking your operating agreement — many have transfer restrictions, and multi-member LLCs often require partner consent or trigger buy-sell provisions
  • Updating the operating agreement and records to reflect the trust as member
  • Coordinating with your buy-sell agreement if you have partners, so the two documents don't contradict each other
  • Confirming nothing disturbs your liability protection or tax treatment (a revocable trust is generally tax-neutral, but the details deserve attention — especially for S-corporation elections, which have strict rules about trust shareholders)

This is exactly where having one attorney who handles both estate planning and business planning pays off. When the trust lawyer and the business lawyer are different people who never talk, things fall through the cracks. When they're the same person, your plan works as one system.

The bottom line

If you own an LLC and a trust — or you're planning either — make sure they're introduced to each other. It's typically a modest, flat-fee project, and it's one of the highest-value pieces of planning a small business owner can do.

Own a business? Mention it in the questionnaire and Britt will look at how your business and estate plan fit together.