From left, Jamin Brazil, Jake Soberal, Craig Fourchy and Michael Bouskos.

A crowd of 130 gathered at Fort Washington Country Club Thursday morning for The Business Journal’s inaugural Breakfast with Experts event.

The group — including some of the Central Valley’s leading executives and entrepreneurs — gathered to hear from two panels on the subject of business transitions. The first panel consisted of accounting, banking, private equity and legal experts talking about the must dos of selling, succeeding ownership or raising capital for business owners.

The panel included Ashley Jacobsen with Moss Adams, Larry Lindenau with Dowling Aaron, Rod Webster and Eric Smith with Wells Fargo and Brad Triebsch of CVF Capital Partners.

Jacobsen, a CPA, covered how business owners should prepare their books for mergers and acquisitions, while Lindenau offered similar advice from a legal perspective. Triebsch, managing partner of the Davis-based private equity firm with an office in Fresno, gave an overview of what to expect if business owners choose a private-equity route to accessing capital. Smith spoke about how business owners should handle their financial position before and after a succession event.

The expert panel gave way to a CEO panel that included Jamin Brazil of FocusVision, Jake Soberal of Bitwise Industries, Craig Fourchy of UltraGro and Michael Bouskos of HealthComp Administrators, Inc.

Jacobsen ran through a number of questions with the panel on the process of selling or accessing capital for their respective businesses.

Brazil, host of the consumer insight podcast Happy Market Research, previously sold his Fresno-based market research software firm Decipher. Along with co-CEO Irma Olguin, Jr., Soberal just recently landed a $27 million venture capital investment in Bitwise led by Silicon Valley investors. Fourchy and partners used an investment from CVF Capital Partners for a management buyout of the farm fertilization company in Madera. Bouskos and a partner sold Fresno-based Health Comp Administrators, a third-party health benefits administrator.

The event was hosted by The Business Journal in a partnership with Moss Adams, Dowling Aaron, Central Valley Fund and Wells Fargo. Breakfast With Experts will become a regular event of The Business Journal.