Three services. In order, on purpose.
Tax consulting is the practice. Tax preparation and investment advisory are downstream services that exist for clients who need them — not because they’re separate revenue streams, but because the strategy sometimes requires them to be executable.
Tax consulting.
The work most owner-operators have never actually received: proactive, multi-year, integrated tax strategy. Built for the year ahead, not the year behind.
Tax consulting is the work that happens before the return. It’s the conversation in July about whether you should accelerate a capital expenditure into Q4 or defer it. The meeting in September about whether to convert a portion of the SEP into Roth, and how much. The decision in October about whether your reasonable comp should change based on this year’s profit trajectory. The exit framework that gets started 3–5 years before the transaction.
It’s also the work that connects the dots between the business and the household — because for most owner-operators, those aren’t two separate tax pictures, they’re one. Decisions made on the business side cascade through to personal returns, and vice versa. Most clients come to us with two professionals managing those two sides separately. The first thing we do is connect them.
Engagements are annual tax advisory retainers. Quarterly strategy meetings. Implementation support when entity changes, plan rollouts, or transactions are involved. Renewed annually so the fit can be re-evaluated by both sides.
Tax preparation.
Annual returns — federal, state, entity, personal — prepared for our consulting clients as the back-end output of the strategy we built earlier in the year.
We don’t take prep-only engagements. We don’t accept new clients who just want their return filed. Filing without strategy is exactly the problem we exist to solve — doing more of it isn’t the business we’re in.
For our consulting clients, return preparation is included as part of the annual engagement. The filing reflects the decisions we made together throughout the year. There are no surprises in March because the work was done in the months before.
If you’re looking for a tax preparer without strategy, we’re happy to recommend firms we trust for that work. What we do is different, and pretending it’s the same wouldn’t serve you.
Investment advisory.
Offered when the tax strategy requires coordinated control of the accounts. Tax-led. Not a wealth management practice with tax as a side dish.
Most firms in our category are RIAs first. We’re the inverse. We don’t take advisory engagements outside of an existing tax consulting relationship — not because we’re uninterested in the work, but because the entire reason we’d manage accounts is to make the tax strategy executable. Without the strategy, we don’t add enough value to justify the fee.
When advisory makes sense, it usually does so because the tax plan requires sequencing decisions that are hard to make from outside the account — multi-year Roth conversions, asset location across taxable / tax-deferred / Roth, tax-loss harvesting at scale, retirement plan investment policy when we’ve also designed the plan itself. The investment work is the execution layer of the tax plan, not a separate business.
Fees are a percentage of assets under management, billed quarterly. Disclosed in detail before any engagement. Full ADV available on request.
Three services. One conversation to figure out which apply.
30 minutes. We’ll talk about your situation and which of the three (or which combination) is the right fit. If it’s none, we’ll point you somewhere useful.
- For: Business owners $200K–$1M in annual profit
- Format: 30 minutes by video or phone
- Cost: Free. No prep required