Consultants, marketing agencies, architects, engineers, and solo-to-mid-size professional firms — your biggest tax and financial planning opportunity usually starts with how you pay yourself.
Most professional service firm owners are significantly overpaying in taxes because of how their entity is structured, how they compensate themselves, and what they’re not doing with their retirement planning. These are solvable problems.
We serve consultants, agencies, architects, engineers, staffing firms, and other professional service businesses. The issues we solve most often: S-Corp election timing, reasonable compensation analysis, retirement plan design, and exit planning.
Schedule a Consultation →Cindy specializes in tax planning for professional service business owners, with particular expertise in S-Corp structuring, owner compensation, and entity-level tax minimization strategies.
As an LLC or sole proprietor, all net income is subject to self-employment tax (15.3% on the first ~$160K). As an S-Corp, you pay yourself a reasonable salary (subject to payroll taxes) and take remaining profit as a distribution (not subject to SE tax). For businesses making $100K+ in profit, this can save $10,000–$30,000 or more annually — but the election requires careful structuring.
The IRS requires S-Corp owner-employees to pay themselves a salary that’s reasonable for the services they provide. There’s no fixed formula, but it should be defensible based on what you’d pay someone else to do your role. We document this carefully and build it into your overall compensation strategy.
Start thinking about it 3–5 years before you want to exit. Exit value is affected by entity structure, buyer financing, revenue concentration, key-person dependencies, and whether the business can run without you. We help clients optimize for exit value well before the transaction happens.
Schedule a free conversation. We’ll match you with the right partner and tell you exactly how we can help.