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Small Business Planning

Small Business Planning

Align your business goals with your personal goals

Actively managing the value of your business
to exponentially grow your wealth

“Failure to provide for the perpetuity of your business beyond your working lifetime means simply that you overstated your profit, for when you go, the whole company goes with you” – Leon Danco, author of Beyond Survival: A Guide for Business Owners and their Families.

Being a small business owner is both exciting and extremely demanding. As we know from our own experience as crossborder business owners, the challenges compound when those businesses operate across borders.

If you are a business owner, you likely decided to start your own business with the purpose of controlling your destiny, of choosing who to work with: colleagues, clients and employees; to challenge yourself and to follow your passion. Managing the administrative complexity of a crossborder business is unlikely to be the reason decided to become an entrepreneur.

We have the knowledge and experience to help you understand how to best manage and position your business, and the ability to coordinate the work of your business advisory team to free up time for you to focus on what you do best, without having to sweat the business management details.

We can help you align your personal, financial and business goals to allow you to successfully grow your business, build its value, and eventually transition it to the next generation, your employees or a third party buyer.

We can help you:

  • Understand your business structure options.
  • Coordinate the work of a business team of specialists in fields such as corporate law and tax, human resources, accounting, contract law and other relevant areas in the USA and Switzerland.
  • Set up qualified retirement plans for your US business.
  • Design and implement an integrated business plan that drives business value.
  • Align your business finances with your personal and family goals.
  • Get organized to achieve work-life satisfaction.
  • Understand your different transition options when you are ready to transfer your business.
  • Understand, consider, and incorporate the interests of all stakeholders: you, your family, your key employees, and your buyer, for a successful transition away from your business ownership into the next stage of your life.

Are You Ready to get
the help you are looking for?

Work with a team of experienced and specialized advisors who truly understand your situation and needs.

Schedule a Complimentary Discovery Call Today

Still Have More Questions?
No Problem. Read the FAQs.

Swiss American Wealth Advisors provides US tax return review services as part financial planning, but it does not prepare tax returns. One of our founders, Marina Hernandez, is also a credentialed tax professional. Her tax preparation firm, MHTax, prepares US tax returns for a few of our clients. This service is independent from Swiss American and our clients are not required to use it.
Swiss American Wealth Advisors provides Swiss tax return review services as part of financial planning, but it does not prepare Swiss tax returns. For clients of both Swiss American and MHTax, MHTax offers coordination with a Swiss tax firm to prepare both the US and Swiss tax returns using a unified client portal and document exchange system. This service is independent of Swiss American and requires separate engagements with the tax preparation firms.
Yes. Although we manage investment assets for most clients, we do not require a minimum asset level to work with us and occasionally we work with clients with no asset management needs. Our minimum annual fee contemplates that some of our clients are looking exclusively for financial planning services because they are just starting to build their wealth, their wealth is invested in their businesses, it is tied to real estate or in employer pensions that cannot be externally managed.
Yes. While most of our clients want us to provide services beyond financial planning, we of course also work with clients who are looking to delegate only the management of their investment accounts. Typically, these are clients who like to work with an organization that has the expertise, experience and structure to manage their investments in an international compliant manner.
We work hard to make sure your money is safe. We are members of a fee-only Registered Investment Advisor (RIA) with approximately $2.5 billion in assets under management serving over 3,500 families. We work only with top financial institutions like Charles Schwab and Fidelity as our independent custodians, and we use leading industry technology for investment management and financial planning. We hold multiple professional credentials, and we are held to a fiduciary standard, which means that we are required to always provide advice that is in your best interest, even when it’s against our own.
To minimize conflicts of interest and seek better alignment with our clients, we do not accept sales commissions or referral fees from investment product providers or independent professionals. We only receive compensation in the form of wealth advisory fees paid by our clients as detailed in their wealth advisory agreements. Our clients pay us a transparent fee for our advice.
We believe that a disciplined investment approach using portfolios that are well diversified across asset classes and regions can deliver superior long-term results. We build our portfolios with highly liquid and low-cost ETFs from established providers like Blackrock or Vanguard. We pay attention to asset location and follow a tax efficient rebalancing process to maximize after tax returns. We also offer ESG portfolio solutions for clients interested in considering environmental, social and governance factors with their investments. ESG portfolios have been the fastest growing segment in our investment offering.
Yes. We work with foreign families of different origins living in the USA, and with American families who at some point had ties to Switzerland but returned home or moved to third countries and wanted to keep working with us. Although we believe that our combined decades of experience on US-Swiss crossborder issues allows us to provide the best value to clients with those ties, our multicultural and multilingual backgrounds attract multinational clients who do not feel understood or well served by domestic focused advisors.

We believe that every person deserves access to quality financial education that can empower them to make good financial decisions. For individuals and families who are unable to retain our professional services, our public benefit initiatives support free financial education through the Crossborder Planner [free newsletter and blog], and the Crossborder Academy [free webinars], covering topics like tax reporting, tax planning, saving for retirement, benefiting charities or caring for the next generation.

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