Business Owners

What we plan around

The owner’s balance sheet kept separate from the company’s, how you pay yourself and what that costs, a retirement plan that suits the company’s size, the real estate if you hold it, and the eventual sale or succession, whichever it turns out to be.

Where we usually start

With whether the business is something you intend to sell or something you intend to keep. Those two paths want different things from the same decisions, and most owners have not said which one out loud. The answer changes what we work on first.

What we do through the year

We run the entity and compensation analysis and bring you a recommendation with the numbers behind it. It goes to your CPA, who knows your filings and may see it differently.

We size and compare the retirement plan options against your compensation, your age, and your census, and we run the projections rather than describing them. If a plan needs an actuary or a third-party administrator, we bring one in.

We review the agreements and the coverage — whether a buy-sell exists, whether it is funded, what happens to the family if you cannot work. Where documents need drafting, your attorney drafts them and we stay in the conversation.

We track the owner’s balance sheet separately from the company’s, so you can see what the family owns apart from the enterprise, and watch it change.

We raise the transaction questions early, because the window before a binding agreement closes quietly and most of the planning worth doing has to happen before it.

What to expect

Two or three working sessions a year, more in a year with a transaction. We are usually the ones bringing a question to your CPA or attorney rather than the other way around, and we stay in the room after we do.

What it costs

A published percentage of the assets we manage, tiered and applied marginally. The schedule is on this site. Planning is part of the relationship.