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Financial planning for business owners
Business owner planning treats the company and the household as one balance sheet. Your net worth, your income, and your identity are usually tied to a single asset that no amount of diversification inside your portfolio can protect — so the work is deciding what the business is actually worth, what it costs you personally to keep, and what has to happen for your plan to survive a sale, an illness, or a decision to stop.
In short
Business owner planning connects company decisions — entity and retirement plan choice, tax structure, succession, a sale — with the household the business is supposed to support. Lock Wealth Management is a fee-only, CFP®-led firm in Midtown Atlanta that does this for owners at $800/month, which includes everything in our comprehensive household planning.
What this actually involves
Value the business honestly
What it is worth on paper is not what a buyer pays. We look at what transfers without you, what depends on your presence, and what that does to your personal retirement number.
Choose the right retirement plan
SEP, SIMPLE, solo 401(k), defined benefit, cash balance. The right choice can move six figures of tax-advantaged savings a year; the wrong one commits you to funding it for years.
Plan the exit before the exit
Most owners who intend to sell never do — usually because nobody prepared the business or the household for the change. We work the timeline backwards from the date you would like.
Separate the money from the mission
What you need the business to produce, what it can reasonably produce, and what happens if it cannot. Those three answers decide a lot of your personal plans.
Cover the key-person risks
Buy-sell agreements, the insurance that funds them, who signs if you are hit by a truck, and whether your partners could actually afford to buy you out.
Keep the household aligned
Your spouse's benefits, the children's education, your own liquidity. The plan has to work even in the version where the business does not.
Who this is for
- You own a business with real value that you cannot easily turn into cash.
- You are thinking about selling within the next one to seven years.
- You have partners and no signed agreement about what happens next.
- You use a cash balance or defined benefit plan and want to know what you are committing to.
- You sponsor a 401(k) and are responsible for the people in it.
Who this is not for
- You need a valuation for litigation or an acquisition mandate — that is a specialist engagement.
- You want someone to run the company's books or act as your CFO.
- The business needs rescuing rather than planning; we will tell you which one we are looking at.
- You would rather not hear that the number in your head is not the number a buyer will pay.
Hypothetical illustration
An owner in his late sixties had a company he assumed would sell for enough to fund his retirement. On paper the multiple looked fine. In practice nearly every important relationship ran through him, and no buyer would pay for a business that lost its founder on day one. The plan became a three-year program: document what runs on him, build a management layer, keep the household's spending low enough that he was never forced to accept the first offer.
Illustration only. It does not represent an actual client situation and is not a guarantee of results.
How our fees work
We're paid only by our clients: a flat monthly planning fee, plus an optional asset-based fee for the accounts we manage. No commissions, no product payouts, no revenue sharing.
Foundations
$250/month
Get organized, build a plan, and keep an advisor in your corner.
Comprehensive
$400/month
Broader planning across taxes, estate, and long-term goals.
Business owner
$800/month
Integrated advice across personal and business finances.
Investment management is optional and billed separately as a percentage of the accounts we manage; we walk through it during your proposal meeting. See the full process and fee details.
Questions about financial planning for business owners
Read next
- Selling Your Business: The Financial Planning Timeline Before You ExitWhat has to happen, and when, before a sale.
- Why Most Business Owners Who Plan to Sell Never DoThe reasons owners miss their own exit window.
- Cash Balance Pension Plans: A Bigger Lever for Business Owners Behind on Retirement SavingsAccelerating savings in your high-income years.
- The QSBS Exclusion: What Founders and Early Investors Should Understand About Section 1202The tax break that can change a sale's outcome.
Put the business and the household in one plan
A free 15-minute call with Ben Loughery, CFP®, CRPC™. Tell us what you are building toward and we will tell you honestly whether we are the right help.
Schedule a free 15-minute callNo cost, no obligation, and nothing to sell you at the end of it.