Owning a business concentrates wealth in one place. It also concentrates risk, taxes, and the complexity of selling the business or planning an exit strategy. We help business owners build financial lives that are not entirely dependent on the business — and plans that align what the business is worth with what personal wealth can accomplish.
Most business owners do not have a 401(k) match or an employer pension. The retirement savings structure is a choice — and some choices shelter far more than others. SEP-IRAs, solo 401(k)s, and defined benefit plans each have different contribution limits, eligibility rules, and administrative requirements.
A defined benefit plan can allow some business owners to shelter this amount or more annually — significantly more than a standard 401(k) allows. Whether this makes sense depends on your income, business structure, and how close you are to retirement. We run the numbers across plan types before recommending one.
The structure of a business sale is often decided before a buyer arrives. Getting it wrong is expensive — the gap between a well-structured exit and a poorly structured one can be several hundred thousand dollars in tax on the same transaction.
Installment sales, charitable structures, and timing the sale across tax years add more variables. We help you think through the structure before you are in the room with a buyer.
Business income, owner compensation, and investment returns all get taxed differently. The structure that minimizes your tax bill in a given year does not always align with what a future transaction requires.
An S-corp distribution strategy that saves payroll tax today can complicate a later installment sale. A large retirement plan contribution this year reduces taxable income — but affects the cash available to reinvest in the business. We work alongside your CPA to coordinate the business and personal tax picture, not just one side of it.
A sale event is different from accumulating wealth over decades. The money arrives all at once, often in a single tax year, sometimes with earnout payments that follow over several years after. Deploying it well requires a different approach than a standard portfolio.
We help clients spread the tax impact across years where possible, set a target asset allocation based on what the portfolio now needs to do — not what the business was doing — and build a drawdown plan for the retirement that the sale was meant to fund.
If you are the business, losing you — to death, disability, or serious illness — is both a personal financial crisis and a business continuity problem. Covering that risk is an insurance question more than an investment one, so it sits outside our core work. We don't sell the policies, but we help you size them right and keep them tied to the rest of your plan.
A written agreement without funding is just paper. The policy backing it needs to be sized to what the business is actually worth — not an outdated estimate.
Insurance defaults don't account for your specific business value or the real cost of replacing a key person. We coordinate with specialists in our network to get the numbers right.
Retaining key employees in a closely held business is harder without the equity packages that public companies use. Deferred compensation plans, phantom equity, and non-qualified arrangements can close that gap — but each carries different tax, legal, and business implications.
Deferred compensation plans can let key employees set aside income now and receive it later — often in a lower-tax year, such as after a retirement or a business sale. This kind of structuring isn't our core work, so we bring in the compensation and insurance specialists we work with to build it — and we make sure whatever they design fits your financial plan and the business's cash flow.
Tell us where you are with the business. We will show you how it connects to the rest of your financial picture.
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