Growing and Protecting Your Small Business
Three Strategies for Small Businesses to Survive and Thrive
It is tough being a small business owner these days. As more and more taxes and more and more regulations are laid on the back of the small business owner, it is becoming harder and harder to be profitable and to create long-term value for you and for your family. My name is Shawn Moran and I am the founder and president of both Westport Wealth Management and Westport Insurance Company in Charleston, West Virginia, companies that exist to help you create greater long-term value for your business, for your family, and your valued employees. As a small business owner myself, I understand the pressures and challenges that come with the territory and have developed strategies to help overcome those strategies.
There are three key strategies I would like to discuss with you.
Strategy One:
Plan for Your Own Retirement
(and not just the retirements of your employees)
The first of these is planning for your own retirement. It is so easy when you are always thinking about making payroll and contributing to the retirement accounts of your employees to neglect your own retirement. When I consult with a small business owner we look at ways to ensure that your retirement has value consistent with all of the hard work it took you to get there. We look at company retirement plans, such as a 401(k). Often we can reduce costs to you and to your employees and create more of an open architecture plan where you are no longer limited to the funds that your 401(k) company provides but rather can look throughout the mutual fund universe for best of class funds to better grow you and your employees money for retirement. We will also look at defined benefit options such as 412(i) plans where you can create a sizable income for yourself in retirement, as well as key man compensation for you and for employees for whom you would like to create a set of golden handcuffs to keep them with your company.
Strategy Two:
Keep More of Your Own Money By Lowering Your Taxes
Secondly, we will look at opportunities to lower taxes, working closely with your accountant to make sure that you are not paying any more in taxes than you absolutely have to. Small business owners have to deal with taxes on both the personal and the corporate level. There are many more potential pitfalls for business owners when it comes to their taxes, but there are also potential planning solutions available to the small business owner that are not available for everyone else.
Strategy Three:
Keep Your Family Business In The Family
Third, we will work to make sure that you have an estate plan in place so that your business and your wealth can stay in your family where they belong. We work with our clients to help them determine what they want to have happen to their businesses when they pass away: Do they want their heirs to sell or transfer their shares, or do they want them to carry on? Two estate planning problems are unique to small businesses and must be addressed for you to be able to be sleep well at night in knowing that your intentions for your business will ultimately be met. The first is that many businesses have a significant value but not a tremendous amount of cash. At death, if estate taxes are due, the liquidity is not there to be able to pay the taxes and businesses are sometimes sold at fire sale prices to generate the liquidity to pay the taxes. Life insurance, properly structured, can be a valuable tool in your succession planning, and can in some circumstances be purchased with some distinct tax advantages. The other unique problem that exists for business owners (that fully funded Buy Sell Agreements can help to solve) is when there are multiple people running the business, whether they are partners or family members. In the event of the death of any of those individuals, you could end up with a spouse as a business partner who has no expertise at all in your field. The same problem can occur upon the disability of a partner. It is important to have a plan in place to be able to buy out that partner who because of death or disability is no longer working in the business.
Call my office at (304) 346-7782 or (800) 361-1792 to arrange a Business Review Consultation. Sometimes a fresh set of eyes and an independent voice can help you uncover opportunities to move you further down the road to a more profitable business and a comfortable retirement for you and a more dynamic and enduring legacy for those you love.
Next Steps
Call my office at (304) 346-7782 or (800) 361-1792 to arrange a Business Review Consultation. Sometimes a fresh set of eyes and an independent voice can help you uncover opportunities to move you further down the road to a more profitable business and a comfortable retirement for you and a more dynamic and enduring legacy for those you love.