The Exit Planning Institute® (EPI) has named Casey Clark, CEO and co-founder of Cultivate Advisors, and Scott Bushkie, managing director and founder of Cornerstone Business Services, as keynote speakers for its 2027 Exit Planning Summit. The event is scheduled for May 2-4, 2027, at the Gaylord Pacific Resort & Convention Center in Chula Vista, California. Registration is open on the summit's website.
The selection of Clark and Bushkie matters because the summit is the largest exit planning conference in the world, with more than 1,000 expected attendees, including Certified Exit Planning Advisors (CEPA®), business owners and professional advisors. Their keynotes are designed to move the audience beyond theory and into practice, a priority EPI president Scott Snider framed as "Advisor Activation." Snider said both speakers have spent their careers building successful exit planning-focused practices and that their addresses focus on helping advisors understand how to make a greater impact on the business owners they serve.
Clark's session, "Why You Must Value Accelerate Your Own Business," is set for Monday, May 3, from 8:30 to 9:30 a.m. PT. It will highlight how advisors can apply value acceleration principles to their own practices and how building the right team is pivotal to achieving all three legs of the stool while fully activating their CEPA designation. The implication is that advisors who fail to apply those principles internally may struggle to credibly guide owners through an exit.
Bushkie's session, "The $10 Million Conversation: Finding the Enterprise Value Hiding in Your Book of Business," will run Tuesday, May 4, from noon to 1 p.m. PT. He will challenge advisors to look differently at the opportunity already in front of them, exploring how identifying enterprise value within an existing book of business can unlock deeper owner conversations, stronger advisory relationships and significant opportunities for practice growth. For an industry where many advisors already possess the technical knowledge, the session points to a practical gap: recognizing value that is already present but unrecognized.
The full agenda for the 2027 Exit Planning Summit speaker is available on the Exit Planning Summit website. The keynote lineup suggests EPI is positioning the 2027 gathering around activation rather than abstraction, with sessions that ask advisors to test their own practices against the advice they give clients. That emphasis could shape how attendees approach owner conversations and practice development long after the conference ends.
