Owning/Managing a Business
These days, your business and management team have more challenges than ever to succeed. Reaching higher not only means planning, but planning well. If you want to take your business and your team to the next level, you need to focus on what you do best, and delegate the rest.
Any successful business owner will tell you that one of the keys to their success was recognizing what they can and cannot delegate. Business owners who micro-manage their businesses are weighed down and burdened with administration and planning that in most cases can be done more effectively and efficiently by other professionals.
Here are a few areas that can and should be delegated to financial professionals:
- Competitive Employee Benefits and Compensation Plans including administration, claims management, enrollment, group retirement accounts and more…
- Business Succession "EXIT" Planning including Buy-Sell Agreements, Buy-Sell Funding Arrangements and more…
- Business Protection Planning including protecting from the loss of a key employee due to death, disability or illness, business loan protection and more…
You need a partner you can trust to help you overcome the inherent risks of owning a business and to guide you around common pitfalls.
Our focus is helping you protect the value of your business as well as ensuring the financial security and success of you and your family. We help you discover and define your business and life goals so that you can balance life and work effectively.
How We Help Business Owners
Protect Your Business, Protect Yourself
We have learned from many years of experience that the lives of Business Owners and Professional Practitioners will go through many transitions- some planned and some unplanned. But nearly all of these transitions will involve both risk and money.
From hiring and keeping the first employee, to facing a serious disability or critical illness, to funding a retirement plan, to figuring out a succession plan when one or more children are involved in the business, to minimizing the ultimate "estate shrinkage" at death--All of these transitions can look like deep and impassable rivers or chasms on life's road.
Our role is to help you "Build Financial Bridges" to help you get across these chasms. We help business owners in three key areas:
- Voluntarily Exiting Their Business
- Rewarding Employees and Key Executives
- Protecting Their Business
Issues Business Owners Face
Understanding your business can be complicated, but if we follow a process for uncovering key issues, we can cut straight through to your priorities.
We use a Business Viewpoint Exercises that looks at your business from four critical viewpoints.
As a Business Owner
As a Business Manager
As an Employer
As an Individual Family Business Member
We pride ourselves in asking the RIGHT questions. Here are just a few questions we'll take you through:
- Is your business ready for others to manage should you leave due to disability, retirement, death or the sale of your business?
- Will the full market value of your business be transferred to your heirs in the event of your death?
- Will all of your business loans and personal guarantees be paid off in the event of your death?
- In the event of your business partners death, are you prepared to continue in business with his/her spouse and/or relatives or lawyer?
- Is your employee benefit plan designed to reduce turnover and retain your key employees?
- Are you building up retirement assets outside of your business, or is your business your only retirement asset? How will you get your money out?
Protecting Your Business
Overcoming the "Entrepreneur Paranoia"
As an entrepreneur you put yourself at risk when you started your business years ago. And like any successful entrepreneur who suffers from the "entrepreneur paranoia" you have concerns that this success could disappear tomorrow. Our focus is helping you focus on solutions that eliminate or reduce some of these fears and risks through:
- Business Loan Protection
- Key Person/Owner Protection Insurance
- Funding of Capital Gains Tax
- Funding of Share Equalization
- Business Continuation/Succession Reserve Account
- Funding of Buy/Sell Agreements
- Creditor Protected Investment Program
Voluntarily Exiting Your Business
One Day You Will Exit Your Business
We are "Business Exit Strategists". We work with owners of closely held small and medium sized business, and particularly "Family Businesses" to devise strategies and solutions to the three most likely causes of a business exit-Death, Disability or Retirement.
Using the Building Succession Bridges Process, we work with you to provide a "Financial Bridge" to get you across each of these possible reasons for your exit.
Rewarding Employees and Key Executives
People are our most valuable asset.
It was the great industrialist Andrew Carnegie who said: "Take away my factories and my railroads, take away my ships and my money but leave me my people. And in a short time I will have it all back again." Successful companies know that they have to leverage the skills of their people and those people are their most valuable asset.
We can help you retain those employees through:
- Key Executive Deferred Compensation plans
- Employee Benefit Plans
- Pensions and Group RRSPs
- Split-Dollar Insurance Arrangements