The tax strategy business owners under $1M aren’t getting anywhere else.
Your CPA files. Your advisor manages money. Neither one engineers the year before it happens — which is where the real dollars are for owner-operators. We do.
Two types of firms claim to do tax work for owners. Both miss the same thing.
We built CACIV because we kept watching profitable, well-run businesses get failed in the same way — by two different kinds of firms, each missing the half of the job the other one ignored.
Manages your money. Files your return as a value-add. Tax work is reactive — find a few deductions, plug in the numbers. Their incentive is AUM. Tax is a feature, not the product. And it shows.
Files returns. That’s the deliverable. Backward-looking by structure — documenting what already happened. The strategic conversation about entity, compensation, and retirement plan design either never happens or gets squeezed into March.
Strategy is the product. We engineer the year before it happens — entity, comp, retirement plan, charitable design, quarterly windows. Prep and advisory exist downstream because that’s when they actually move the bill. The work neither of the other firms is doing.
What “tax consulting first” looks like for owner-operators.
Not a list of services. A sequence. Each decision sets up the next, and most of them have to be made in the months before December 31st — not the week before April 15th.
Entity & compensation design
S-corp vs. LLC vs. C-corp. Reasonable comp. Owner draws. Payroll vs. distribution mix. The single biggest lever on a business owner’s annual tax bill — and the one most CPAs set up once and never revisit. Reviewed every year because the answer changes with profit, payroll, and plan.
Benefits design & analysis
Retirement plan structure (SEP, Solo 401(k), Safe Harbor, Cash Balance, DB overlays). Health insurance and HSA strategy. Accountable plan reimbursements. Section 125, group benefits, executive bonus design. The optimal mix shifts every time profit, payroll, or family composition changes — reviewed annually, not set once and forgotten.
Multi-year tax strategy
Roth conversion windows. Asset location. Charitable timing. Capital expenditure sequencing. Tax-loss coordination. The decisions that show up on next year’s return because we made them this year. Quarterly meetings, not annual ones.
Business exit & transition planning
The single highest-stakes tax decision an owner ever makes — and the one where coordination between two professionals matters most. Entity restructuring ahead of a sale, installment design, QSBS qualification, family transition, charitable structures, state residency planning. Started 3–5 years before transition, not 3 months.
Tax preparation
Annual returns for our consulting clients. The filing reflects the strategy we built earlier in the year. We don’t take prep-only engagements — because filing without strategy is the problem we exist to solve.
Investment advisory
Offered when tax strategy requires coordinated control of the accounts — Roth conversion sequencing, asset location, retirement plan investment policy. Tax-led. Not a wealth-management practice with tax as a side dish.
When the work is done right, the fee pays for itself in the first plan year.
A multi-entity industrial owner came to us with two professionals already in place — a CPA filing the returns and a financial advisor managing the personal accounts. The returns were technically correct. The portfolio was reasonable. And the household was still paying tens of thousands of dollars more in tax each year than they had to, because no one was coordinating the two.
Entity structure had been set once and never revisited. Compensation strategy was inherited from a payroll provider, not designed. Retirement plan was a SEP defaulted into a decade earlier — appropriate then, leaving six figures of annual deferral capacity on the table now. And the personal accounts and the business accounts were being managed as if they had nothing to do with each other.
A multi-year tax strategy connecting the entity, the comp structure, a properly-sized retirement plan, and the household’s investment accounts — all working in the same direction. Tax advisory retainer for the ongoing strategic work. Coordinated AUM on the household accounts because the conversion sequencing required control of asset location.
Details generalized to protect client confidentiality. Outcomes vary based on entity, profit profile, and engagement structure. Past results are not indicative of future results.
30 minutes. No pitch. Just a real conversation about what the year ahead could look like.
We’ll look at where you are, what you’re already doing, and whether tax consulting is a fit. If it is, we’ll talk about engagement. If it isn’t, you’ll leave the call with something useful anyway.
- For: Business owners with $200K–$1M in annual profit.
- Format: 30 minutes by video or phone.
- Cost: Free. No prep required. No pressure on the call.
- Next step: Pick a time on the calendar →
A practice built on the work everyone else forgets to do.
CACIV Consulting and Tax exists because the standard model is broken. Investment firms sell you a portfolio. Tax preparers sell you a return. Neither one sits down in Q3 and asks the questions that actually move the needle for an owner-operator.
For 26+ years, Chad Centorbi has worked in the space the rest of the industry skips: multi-year tax strategy for businesses with real complexity. Owner-operators whose entity, compensation, and retirement plan decisions are the single biggest lever on their household tax bill — and whose CPA hasn’t touched those decisions in years.
Not a business owner? We still might be a fit.
A meaningful part of our practice serves pre-retirees with $500K+ in savings and Boeing employees approaching retirement. The strategy work is different in shape but identical in principle: the tax decisions you make in the years before retirement are the ones that compound for decades after. Both audiences have their own free guides.
The year ahead is mostly still unwritten. Let’s make sure it’s written on purpose.
30-minute discovery call. No prep. No pitch. We’ll talk about your business, your current tax setup, and whether there’s real work to do here.