Business Planning

Your business is your biggest asset. Plan it that way.

For most owners, the business is the single largest line on the net-worth statement and the hardest one to convert into cash. It pays the family’s bills today, but it also has to fund retirement, protect partners, retain key employees, and someday change hands. Business planning treats the company as the financial asset it actually is.

At BRIA Capital Group, we work with Tampa Bay owners on both sides of that equation: the company’s strategy and the owner’s personal plan, run together so decisions in one don’t break something in the other.

What this covers

A few terms come up constantly in these conversations. Quick definitions:

• Qualified retirement plan. A plan that meets ERISA and IRS rules (401(k), profit-sharing, defined benefit). Contributions are generally tax-favored; the plan must pass nondiscrimination testing.
• ERISA fiduciary. The person or committee legally responsible for running the plan in the participants’ best interest. This is a real liability, not a title.
• Buy/sell agreement. A contract between owners that controls what happens to a partner’s share at death, disability, divorce, retirement, or voluntary exit.
• Key person insurance. A life or disability policy owned by the company on an employee whose loss would meaningfully hurt operations.
• Deferred compensation / NQDC. Pay an employee earns now but receives later. “Non-qualified” means it sits outside ERISA, so it can be selective, but it’s an unsecured promise from the company.
• ESOP. Employee Stock Ownership Plan, a qualified plan that buys the owner’s shares and holds them for employees. A tax-efficient internal sale path for the right company.
• Profit-sharing. Discretionary employer contributions to a qualified plan. The allocation formula decides who gets what.
• Golden handcuffs. Benefits that vest over time, structured to make it expensive for a key employee to leave.

Why it matters for Tampa Bay business owners

Florida has roughly 3.4 million small businesses, more than 99% of all firms in the state, employing roughly 3.6 million people (SBA Office of Advocacy, 2025 Florida Small Business Profile). Pinellas, Hillsborough, and Pasco counties hold a sizable share of that, and Wesley Chapel sits right in the middle of it.

A few realities worth naming:

• National survey work consistently finds that most closely-held business owners do not have a written succession plan, even though the business is their largest asset.
• The Connelly v. United States Supreme Court ruling (June 2024) changed how life-insurance-funded entity-purchase buy/sells are valued for estate tax. A lot of old agreements need a fresh look.

- Florida has no state income tax, which makes the federal-level structuring (entity choice, retirement plan design, exit taxation) carry even more weight. - For 2026, the IRS raised the 401(k) elective deferral limit to $24,500 and the SIMPLE IRA limit to $17,000. These are real numbers an owner can put to work.

How we work with business owners

The mistake we see most often is the personal plan and the business plan running on separate tracks. The CPA optimizes the tax return, the attorney drafts the buy/sell, the insurance agent sells the policy, and nothing is coordinated. The owner finds out at a crisis (a partner’s death, a sale offer, a disability) that the pieces don’t fit together.

Our job is to sit in the middle of that. Specifically:

• Build the owner’s personal financial plan first: income needs, savings target, eventual exit price required to fund the plan.
• Then design the business strategy around that: retirement plan, buy/sell, key person protection, executive benefits, succession path.
• Coordinate with your CPA on tax structure, your attorney on documents, and (when the time comes) an M&A advisor on the transaction itself.
• Revisit the plan annually. Headcount, revenue, partners, family, all of that changes.

Where to start

You don’t have to do everything at once. A useful first pass looks like this:

• Clean financials. Three years of accurate books, owner compensation normalized, add-backs documented. Everything downstream depends on this.
• Retirement plan review. Is the current plan (or lack of one) still right for the headcount, payroll, and owner savings goal?
• Buy/sell stress test. Pull the document. Read it. Confirm the valuation method still makes sense and the funding is in place and current. Post-Connelly, this matters more than it used to.
• Key person risk inventory. If you list the three people whose loss would hurt the business most, what’s protecting the company against that?

From there we build out, retirement plan design, executive benefits, succession runway, in the order that fits your situation.