Why DIY Planning Can Cost More Than You Think

Neal Furlong, ChFC^®, CEPA^®, CLU^®
Senior Wealth Advisor

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Successful business owners have a knack for finding solutions to difficult problems all by themselves. The sense of individualism and self-reliance is often the spark that started the business in the first place. But as a successful business grows, it becomes increasingly difficult, if not impossible, for business owners to solve everything by themselves.  

Today, we’ll examine why it’s important for business owners to work with advisors, how those advisors can help sustain the business, and where business owners can begin building a coordinated Advisor Team. 

Why Go Through the Trouble?

To continue succeeding as the business grows more complex, many business owners need comprehensive help and guidance. Running a business typically takes up most of a business owner’s time. This means less time to focus on other important aspects of sustaining a successful business, such as tax minimization, and planning for an eventual exit from the business.  

A challenge that many business owners face is the idea that they’ve done so well by being self-reliant up to this point, so why would they pay someone else to do that for them?  

There are three good reasons why business owners should consider building a coordinated Advisor Team, even if you think you have a handle on everything you need to have a handle on.  

01 | Time

As a business owner, you’re likely spending most if not all of your time taking tangible actions to position the business to succeed. Whether that means hiring and training good salespeople, ensuring that your company is operationally fit, or looking for new ways to expand your business, you are already up to your eyeballs in work as a business owner.  

This time crunch can prevent business owners from acting on things that have longer-term consequences for their businesses. 

How a Coordinated Advisor Team Addresses Time Constraints

Let’s say you spend most of your time on business operations. If this is your primary focus, you may not have the time to consider tax strategies that could help you reduce your tax burden and use those savings to reinvest within your business.  

Establishing a coordinated Advisor Team can help take these responsibilities off of your plate without passing up opportunities that can tangibly benefit your business. For instance, having a trusted tax advisor who knows your business and the environment it exists in can help you minimize taxes, while leveraging the skills of a financial advisor can help you take any tax savings and reinvest them in your business to encourage more growth.  

02 | Specialty Knowledge

Successful business owners clearly have experience in things like identifying talent and fulfilling consumer needs. Many business owners are specialists in a certain aspect of their business, such as building relationships or identifying and implementing operational efficiencies. But sometimes, this experience doesn’t transfer to other areas of the business that are just as important as the thing the business owner is best at.  

How a Coordinated Advisor Team Helps Address Gaps in Knowledge

Business owners don’t know everything. The good news is you don’t have to know everything to succeed. 

Consider health insurance. Healthcare benefits are a driving force behind whether someone wants to work and stay at your company. Choosing the “right” plan can be a monumental challenge because of the different needs that different people have within your company. Nonetheless, business owners (and their HR teams) often need to make this decision despite not having a background in it. 

In this situation, a business owner may want to offer the best health benefits available to their employees. But as they go through the process of determining costs, what’s covered, and so on, business owners may find that the thing that they want to do isn’t in the best interest of the business’s bottom line. This can create a tug of war between the business owner’s interests: a desire to stand out and attract top talent against the financial consequences of going beyond the business’s means.  

A coordinated Advisor Team could help address the complexities in a situation like this. For instance, a financial advisor may be able to show you what your business can afford in terms of health benefits; a health benefit advisor or insurance advisor could help you identify the best plans within your company’s budget and even negotiate with insurance companies; and a lawyer could help ensure that the decisions your company makes abide by laws related to coverage. 

Each of these advisors uses their specialty to find solutions in the context of your business. Coordinating those specialists in an Advisor Team can help you get a wider view of the costs and benefits of any decision you make. This could help you take advantage of opportunities that you would have never known about and could help prevent you from making decisions that may not be in your company’s best interest.  

03 | Business Continuity

As a business grows, more people rely on it. Your family may rely on it as a means to support their lifestyle. Your employees may rely on it as their source of income and personal meaning. Your customers may rely on it for the goods and services you provide.  

If you try to take on all responsibilities and suddenly are no longer available, what happens to all the things you were responsible for? Even in the best-case scenario, where you have an abundance of time and comprehensive knowledge of all the things that you’re responsible for, an unexpected event can still undercut all of your hard work if you don’t have a contingency plan.  

While many business owners think of business continuity in terms of their death or permanent incapacitation, you do not have to die or be permanently incapacitated for business continuity to be an issue. For instance, you may have to deal with a serious personal family issue over a long stretch of time that takes you away from the business. You have not died or become permanently incapacitated in this scenario, but your absence can still have negative effects if you’re the one responsible for all the important decisions.  

It can be a grim undertaking to think about what would happen to your business without you at the helm, especially if you leave unexpectedly. But in addition to helping you plan for the worst-case scenario, doing so can have tangible benefits for your business even if you never need to execute the business continuity plan itself. 

How a Coordinated Advisor Team Helps Establish Business Continuity Strategies

At its heart, a business continuity plan aims to position the business to succeed without you at the helm. A coordinated Advisor Team can provide an objective view of all the things the company needs from you to succeed.   

For example, if you’re in charge of all vendor relationships, hiring decisions, and operational tasks, your absence would affect three core pillars of your business’s success. An Advisor Team can help highlight the load-bearing responsibilities you have for the business and then present strategies for how to take some of those responsibilities off of your plate. This often manifests in the installation of a next-level management team, which is comprised of managers who can take the business to the next level.  

In this case, even if you didn’t need to activate your business continuity plan, you would still have a next-level management team helping the business thrive while you run the business. This could free up more time for you to focus on the things you truly love about running the business and less time focused on things that you must do to ensure business success.  

On the other hand, if you did have to activate your business continuity plan, your coordinated Advisor Team would be available to not only execute the plan but also guide the people who will run the business in your stead toward the goals that you included in the business continuity plan. That’s because your coordinated Advisor Team will have built a written, prescriptive strategy for what the business and its employees should do if you could no longer run the business.  

This comprises anything from determining who will make final decisions all the way down to advising family about where important passwords for your personal accounts exist so they can access that information if needed. Essentially, a business continuity plan takes all of the ideas and strategies that live in your head every day, puts them on paper, and positions the business to survive in your absence. It speaks for you when you cannot speak for yourself. 

Where to start Building an Advisor Team

Building an Advisor Team can seem daunting. After all, there are lots of specialists and lots of fields that could affect your business. A good place to start is by broaching the topic with an advisor you already trust.   

Trusted advisors can help you network with other advisors and build your Advisor Team. More specifically, Exit Planning Advisors tend to have cross-functional relationships with other advisors because an Exit Planning Advisor’s core goal is to ensure that you eventually exit the business on your terms, no matter how you may exit it—by death, by choice, or otherwise. 

An Exit Planning Advisor could help you find, hire, and coordinate your Advisor Team based on your current situation, needs, and goals.  

As the old cliche goes, “Teamwork makes the dream work.” This is especially true when crafting a coordinated Advisor Team. Having a coordinated Advisor Team can give you more time, know-how, and contingency plans than trying to do everything all by yourself. 

We strive to help business owners identify and prioritize their objectives with respect to their businesses, their employees, and their families. If you have questions on this topic, we can help with more information or a referral to another experienced professional.