Wealth planning built around your business.
Comprehensive financial guidance for business owners navigating growth, succession, and the transition to personal wealth.
Integrating your business and personal financial life
For most business owners, the line between personal and business finances is blurred by design. Your business is your largest asset, your primary income source, and often the foundation of your retirement plan. We help you manage that complexity by coordinating business cash flow, personal savings, tax strategy, and long-term planning into a single coherent picture.
Whether you're in growth mode, preparing for a sale, or planning for the next generation, we bring the depth of planning your situation demands.
Services for business owners
From day-to-day planning to once-in-a-lifetime transactions, we support business owners, from sole proprietors to mid-market companies, across every dimension of their financial life.
Business Succession Planning
Structuring ownership transitions, whether to family, key employees, or a third-party buyer, to preserve value and minimize tax.
Liquidity Event Planning
Preparing for a business sale well in advance to maximize after-tax proceeds and deploy capital effectively.
Retirement Plan Design
Establishing and optimizing defined contribution and defined benefit plans to build tax-advantaged wealth inside your business.
Tax-Efficient Compensation
Structuring owner compensation, distributions, and deferred compensation to minimize your overall tax burden.
Personal Investment Management
Building and managing a diversified personal portfolio that complements your business exposure without duplicating it.
Estate & Legacy Planning
Coordinating business interests with estate planning to protect what you've built and transfer it on your terms.
Key Person & Buy-Sell Planning
Ensuring your business and your family are protected if something unexpected happens to you or a business partner.
Cash Flow & Income Planning
Managing the variability of business income to support a stable personal financial plan through every business cycle.
Planning your exit before you need one
The most expensive mistake business owners make is waiting until they're ready to sell before thinking about the transaction. The decisions that determine how much you keep, including business structure, asset vs. stock sale, installment arrangements, and Qualified Small Business Stock exclusions, need to be made years in advance to have their full effect.
We work with business owners well before a liquidity event to position the business and its ownership structure for the best possible after-tax outcome. That includes coordinating with M&A attorneys and CPAs, evaluating third-party sale vs. internal succession options, and making sure the proceeds translate into a lasting personal financial plan, not just a large deposit that gets mismanaged post-close.
- Pre-sale tax positioning and deal structure analysis
- Qualified Small Business Stock (QSBS) planning
- Installment sales, earnouts, and seller financing strategy
- Family and key-employee succession structuring
- Post-exit investment and income planning
Separating personal wealth from business capital
Business owners often conflate their personal and business finances, drawing more when business is good, less when it isn't, and hoping it evens out. It rarely does. Without a deliberate structure separating business capital from personal income, it's difficult to build real personal wealth independent of the business, manage tax liability efficiently, or plan accurately for the future.
We help owners establish a clear framework: how much to pay yourself in salary vs. distributions, how to build personal liquidity buffers that can weather a slow business cycle, and how to deploy excess business cash in a way that serves both the business and your personal balance sheet.
- Salary vs. distribution optimization for S-Corp and LLC owners
- Personal liquidity planning independent of business performance
- Managing variable income through conservative spending frameworks
- Coordinating business and personal cash flow across tax years
Building retirement wealth inside your business
Business owners have access to some of the most powerful retirement savings vehicles available, but choosing the right one, and structuring it correctly, requires matching the plan to your business profile. A Solo 401(k) can allow a self-employed owner to defer up to $70,000 per year. A SEP-IRA is simpler but capped differently. A defined benefit or cash balance plan can allow high-income owners to defer $100,000 or more annually, with a significant tax deduction in the year of contribution.
Getting this right matters enormously over time. We evaluate the full landscape of plan options for your situation and implement the structure that maximizes your retirement contributions, reduces your current tax burden, and integrates with your overall financial plan.
- Solo 401(k): highest contribution limits for self-employed and owner-only businesses
- SEP-IRA: simple, flexible, no annual filing requirement
- SIMPLE IRA: designed for small businesses with a handful of employees
- Defined Benefit & Cash Balance Plans: for high earners seeking outsized annual deferrals
- Profit-sharing plan design and annual contribution optimization
Keeping more of what your business generates
For business owners, the tax return is one of the most important financial planning documents of the year, and one of the most underutilized. The difference between a well-structured and a poorly structured owner compensation strategy can easily be tens of thousands of dollars annually, compounded over the life of a business.
We work closely with your CPA to identify and implement strategies that legally reduce your tax burden at both the business and personal level, coordinating the timing of income, the structure of deductions, and the use of tax-advantaged accounts to build wealth more efficiently year over year.
- Entity structure review: S-Corp, LLC, and C-Corp tax treatment
- Qualified Business Income (QBI) deduction optimization
- Section 179 and bonus depreciation strategies
- Roth conversion planning in low-income business years
- Charitable giving strategies, including Donor-Advised Funds and appreciated asset gifting
- Deferred compensation and benefits structuring
Owners at every stage of the journey
We work with founders, operators, and transitioning owners across a wide range of industries and business sizes. Whether you're still building, preparing to exit, or navigating what comes after, we're here to make sure your financial life keeps pace with your business.
Start a conversation →Let's talk about your business and your future.
Every business owner's situation is different. Tell us where you are and we'll help you think through what comes next.