WHO WE HELP
Building wealth around a growing business or career
If you own a business or sit in a senior role with concentrated equity, the wealth side of your life is usually the part that gets pushed off until something forces it. I work with clients who want to handle it on purpose instead of in reaction.
What this typically looks like
The clients I help in this stage are often running a business or holding a senior role with stock comp, deferred comp, or partnership distributions that don't fit the standard W-2 planning template. The wealth question for them isn't "how much did we save this year." It's a layered question about how to structure the personal side of the financial life so it doesn't sit in tension with the business side, how to handle the tax implications of equity events when they happen, and how to plan for an eventual transition (sale, succession, or wind-down) without scrambling at the last minute.
This work usually involves more entities, more types of accounts, more tax surface, and more coordination with other professionals (the CPA, the attorney, the company's HR or compensation team). Keystone is built to be the central coordinating engagement that makes those pieces work together rather than against each other.
Most clients in this category fit the Owner tier ($12,000).
The kinds of compensation I work around
The planning gets more interesting when compensation stops being a single W-2 number. A few of the structures that come up most often.
Stock-based compensation. RSUs, ISOs, NSOs, ESPP, phantom stock, stock appreciation rights, restricted stock awards. Each has its own tax treatment, its own timing decisions, its own holding-period math, and its own interaction with AMT. The planning question is rarely "should I sell," it's "what's the sequence that gets us through the next three to five years without a tax event we didn't price in."
Deferred compensation. Non-qualified deferred comp plans, supplemental executive retirement plans, 409A arrangements. The election window is usually narrow, the distribution schedule locks in early, and the plan often interacts with how and when you actually retire or leave. These need to be modeled on a decade-long horizon, not decided in an annual enrollment window.
Partnership and pass-through income. K-1s, guaranteed payments, profits interests, distributions that don't match actual cash, state-level pass-through entity tax elections. Most of the planning for partners is figuring out how the income shows up on the personal return, what the quarterly estimated tax approach should be, and how the business-side structure interacts with what's happening at home.
Business ownership itself. S-corp reasonable comp, owner 401(k) or cash balance pension setup, QBI optimization, entity structure review, and the ongoing question of what comes out of the business as wage, as distribution, or retained for later.
What the Owner Keystone engagement usually looks like
For business owners and senior professionals, the six-month Keystone flow usually runs like this.
The first meeting is the working inventory. We lay out everything on the personal and the business side that touches the financial life. Entities, comp structure, equity positions, tax returns from the last two years, retirement accounts, outside accounts, debts, insurance, estate documents, and whatever pending events are on the horizon (a sale, an equity grant, a liquidity event, a transition). The goal is to see the whole picture at once.
The second meeting is where I come back with the integrated model. Personal tax projection, business-side projection if you're an owner, equity scenarios, retirement trajectory, and the coordination touchpoints with your CPA and attorney. We work through the parts that need decisions this year versus the parts that can wait.
The third and fourth meetings are where the actions start getting implemented. Updating the comp election, structuring the next exercise, opening or rebuilding a retirement plan, adjusting the withholding or estimated taxes, triggering the entity-level filings, aligning the estate documents. For most Owner clients, this is where the work expands beyond what a standard "financial planner" scope would cover, because we're making decisions that touch taxes, entities, and the business at the same time.
The fifth meeting, if needed, is for closing open loops. The sixth month is often about preparing for a specific event that's about to happen, like a year-end equity decision or a Q1 tax planning move.
By the end, you have a coordinated plan that lives across the business and personal sides, with the next three to five years of major decisions already sketched out. The Owner tier fee is $12,000, and it's fully refundable at any point in the six months.
Exit planning and the long view
A lot of Owner-tier engagements end up including some version of "we're thinking about a sale in the next three to five years, what should we be doing now." That's usually a planning question, not a transaction question. The transaction side (investment banker, valuation, deal structure) is a different specialty. What I do is make sure the personal balance sheet, the tax strategy, and the entity structure are in the right shape before the deal starts, so that when the deal does happen, the aftermath is orderly.
For senior-role employees with a liquidity event coming (an IPO, a secondary, a forced exercise), the same principle applies. The planning work is what happens in the year or two before the event, not after. What's left to do after the event is usually a lot less interesting and a lot more expensive.
Questions you're probably already asking yourself
- How do I think about exercising or unwinding concentrated stock without handing a third of it to the IRS?
- What's the right vehicle for the next chunk of saving (after the 401(k) max), and how does it interact with my entity structure?
- If I'm planning a business sale in the next 3 to 5 years, what should I be doing now to prepare the personal balance sheet?
- How do I coordinate between my CPA, attorney, and financial planning so I'm not the one translating between them?
- What does retirement income look like when most of my wealth is illiquid until an event?
Coordinating with your CPA and attorney
Business owners and senior professionals already have a CPA and often an attorney. My role is not to replace them. My role is to be the one seat at the table thinking about how the personal and business financial life connect, and to coordinate across the professionals so that decisions line up instead of running on parallel tracks. If you'd rather have the tax prep consolidated with the planning work in one engagement, Talley Tax is available and runs on the same model. If you prefer to keep your existing CPA, we coordinate with them directly. There's no right answer on that, and both patterns work.
You don't need to have the answers. The Explore Call is where we figure out whether Keystone is the right structure to sort them out, and which tier fits your situation.