Closely Held or Family Businesses
Your Business | Your Family | Your Self
Its funny how quickly the lines between these three concepts start to blur when you’re in business. While we typically try to view these as separate components of our lives, family members often become employees and employees start to feel like family. Even our own identities start to look like the company’s.
In the same way, the most basic words in finance have entirely different meanings for you than your neighbors. Investments are more than the stock market, income is not a weekly paycheck, assets aren’t always tangible, and retirement isn’t just your quitting day.
Clark & Company Corporate Suite’s services to closely held businesses are all about understanding the natural integration of these three facets of your life. We offer a comprehensive planning approach aimed at helping you get the most out of your business at every stage from its formation to your eventual exit. This often means teaming up with the advisors and professionals that you already know and trust to get the job done right, but we have a powerful network of high-quality professionals that we can tap when we need a specific expertise.
Tax Reduction Strategies
When you walk away from a W-2 position to go off on your own, one of the first things you learn is that the corporate tax structure is far more complex than you probably thought. Writing that quarterly check to the Treasury from your own pocket is usually much more painful than when your employer just withheld it for you – out of sight out of mind.
Fortunately, there are ways to manage this burden. While there are several approaches we can take with you to help reduce your annual tax bill. Through a combination of expense planning, careful management of non-corporate assets, and strategic implementation of qualified retirement plans, we are able to help our clients write off and defer significant portions of their taxable income while reaping the benefits of tax-loss harvesting where available.
Attracting and Retaining Talent
We are currently in the midst of one of the most competitive job markets in history. Finding quality talent is hard and creating a sense of loyalty is even harder. The modern job market demands more than just a paycheck and we can help you adapt. Our job is to help you make your people feel valued. Between helping cultivate the right culture and choosing the right perks or benefits, we’re here to make your business the one that people want to work for and find it hard to part with. Whether it’s working with you to build a better dialogue with your team, simply vetting and implementing the insurance and retirement benefit staples that many have come to expect, or designing a one-of-a-kind set of golden handcuffs for your top talent, we have the knowledge and resources to help you get it done right.
For those who already have benefits in place, regular review is imperative. It’s important to be sure that not only are your employees getting the most bang for YOUR buck but also to be sure that you’re able to take the fullest advantage of the incentives available to you as the employer. These benefits can often come with significant opportunities for owners to benefit from the plans and reduce their tax burdens, making it a win for everybody.
Protection
When you go off on your own, you put it all on the table. As you grow, risk management must become a greater and greater focus as you seek to protect all that you built. While insurance is typically the first idea when “risk management” is mentioned, there are always several avenues to consider. These can include not only insurance but also self-insurance, asset diversification, developing the proper incentives, cash retention, and much more. We have the knowledge, tools, and relationships to guide you to your best fit. That can mean finding ways to address new risks that you don’t yet have a plan for, or even finding better ways to look at the risks you’re managing and save you time, money, stress, or all of the above.
Exiting Your Business
Retirement looks a lot different for you than your employees. As owners, its rarely as simple as hanging up your hat once you decide you’re done. You need to decide what to do with your business and the possibilities can be daunting. Some wish to make it a part of their legacy and leave it to a family member. Others have a buyer in mind; whether its family, an employee, or even a competitor, and some just want to take it out to the open market and sell to the highest bidder.
Whichever path is chosen, there is a common list of questions that tend to pop up for everybody. What is my business worth? Can my business run without me there? How do I pick the right buyer and how do I make sure they have the funds? If I leave the business to the kids, should I make it a gift or make them buy it? How do I protect my family from huge taxes on the transaction and in my estate?
We have years of experience in these exact problems and have worked on designing exit plans for companies across the country. In doing so we have been able to bring home countless unique ideas and techniques that we learned in collaboration with legal, tax, and financial professionals from across the map. You can trust your exit plan to a team with experience that runs deep with knowledge from far outside our local sphere. We can even help you stir up a bidding war for your business and help connect buyers with funding.
Tax Reduction Strategies
When you walk away from a W-2 position to go off on your own, one of the first things you learn is thatthe corporate tax structure is far more complex than you probably thought. Writing that quarterly check to the Treasury from your own pocket is usually much more painful than when your employer just withheld it for you – out of sight out of mind.
Fortunately, there are ways to manage this burden. While there are several approaches we can take with you to help reduce your annual tax bill. Through a combination of expense planning, careful management of non-corporate assets, and strategic implementation of qualified retirement plans, we are able to help our clients write off and defer significant portions of their taxable income while reaping the benefits of tax-loss harvesting where available.
Attracting and Retaining Talent
We are currently in the midst of one of the most competitive job markets in history. Finding quality talent is hard and creating a sense of loyalty is even harder. The modern job market demands more than just a paycheck and we can help you adapt. Our job is to help you make your people feel valued. Between helping cultivate the right culture and choosing the right perks or benefits, we’re here to make your business the one that people want to work for and find it hard to part with. Whether it’s working with you to build a better dialogue with your team, simply vetting and implementing the insurance and retirement benefit staples that many have come to expect, or designing a one-of-a-kind set of golden handcuffs for your top talent, we have the knowledge and resources to help you get it done right.
For those who already have benefits in place, regular review is imperative. It’s important to be sure that not only are your employees getting the most bang for YOUR buck but also to be sure that you’re able to take the fullest advantage of the incentives available to you as the employer. These benefits can often come with significant opportunities for owners to benefit from the plans and reduce their tax burdens, making it a win for everybody.
Protection
When you go off on your own, you put it all on the table. As you grow, risk management must become a greater and greater focus as you seek to protect all that you built. While insurance is typically the first idea when “risk management” is mentioned, there are always several avenues to consider. These can include not only insurance but also self-insurance, asset diversification, developing the proper incentives, cash retention, and much more. We have the knowledge, tools, and relationships to guide you to your best fit. That can mean finding ways to address new risks that you don’t yet have a plan for, or even finding better ways to look at the risks you’re managing and save you time, money, stress, or all of the above.
Exiting Your Business
Retirement looks a lot different for you than your employees. As owners, its rarely as simple as hanging up your hat once you decide you’re done. You need to decide what to do with your business and the possibilities can be daunting. Some wish to make it a part of their legacy and leave it to a family member. Others have a buyer in mind; whether its family, an employee, or even a competitor, and some just want to take it out to the open market and sell to the highest bidder.
Whichever path is chosen, there is a common list of questions that tend to pop up for everybody. What is my business worth? Can my business run without me there? How do I pick the right buyer and how do I make sure they have the funds? If I leave the business to the kids, should I make it a gift or make them buy it? How do I protect my family from huge taxes on the transaction and in my estate?
We have years of experience in these exact problems and have worked on designing exit plans for companies across the country. In doing so we have been able to bring home countless unique ideas and techniques that we learned in collaboration with legal, tax, and financial professionals from across the map. You can trust your exit plan to a team with experience that runs deep with knowledge from far outside our local sphere. We can even help you stir up a bidding war for your business and help connect buyers with funding.