Our Process
While McNair & Company offers a comprehensive array of insurance-based services, strategies and tools for addressing the complex requirements of wealth preservation – how we help you use them is what sets us apart from other advisors in the field.
Simplicity
We do the work for you.
– Evaluate your current retirement plan, a process that
includes identifying places where you may be paying hidden and unnecessary fees
– Vendor benchmarking
– Maximize tax benefits
– Protect you and your company’s fiduciaries from unnecessary litigation
– Write a Request for Proposal (RFP) and analyze proposals to make sure you obtain the best solution
– Monitor your plan investments
– Educate and motivate your employees to participate
VIEW OUR APPROACH
Focus
Results, Not Procedures
– Think of us as one of your employees — one who just doesn’t happen to have an office on site.
– Our expertise is in helping you get the results you want, and helping you understand the complex rules and regulations.
– We sit on your side of the negotiating table to find the best retirement plan solution for your company.
– Once your plan is implemented, we monitor it regularly to make sure it continues to meet your company’s goals over time.
– That leaves you free to focus on what you do best: running your business.
Balance
Minimize Costs, Maximize Value
– Like many business owners, you are likely concerned about plan costs.
– Often, we are able to uncover places where you are paying unnecessary expenses and use that money to reduce your plan’s future expenses and cover other plan fees.
– Our Retirement Plan Diagnostic is conducted at the outset of our relationship and then, on a regular basis, to determine if there are opportunities for cost savings or program enhancements. This allows us to identify strategies and elements that may have been overlooked or not kept current.
QUALIFIED EMPLOYEE RETIREMENT PLANS
Many business owners become so engrossed in running their companies, they inadvertently put their personal finances on the back burner. This may occur if most of their liquid assets are tied up in the business. However, to achieve financial independence and build personal wealth, it’s important to make personal savings a priority. By working with our team to prepare regular financial reviews, and taking follow-up action as needed, you can help develop and strengthen your personal financial position.
SEE HOW WE HELP YOU PLAN
Strengthening Personal Finances and Building Wealth
Protecting Your Business against Loss of Key Employees
All business success is dependent on its men and women whose knowledge, leadership, judgment, or connections are what make things happen profitably. The death of a key person can result in serious consequences for the business. When insuring a loss through death, Key Person Life Insurance can provide an important source of revenue replacement. Further, the insurance can be designed to accumulate reserves that may be used ultimately for retirement, a termination replacement, or the retraining of successors.
Protecting a Business Partnership
If a business partner dies, a Buy-Sell Agreement protects the business and remaining owners from inactive, uninformed, and potentially dissident shareholders and helps consolidate control in the hands of the agreed upon group. Additionally, it helps fix the value of each owner’s business interest. From the viewpoint of the heirs of a deceased business owner, a buy-sell severs their dependency on the surviving owners and the economic fortunes of a business that has lost a key person.
Preparing for Retirement
If a business partner dies, a Buy-Sell Agreement protects the business and remaining owners from inactive, uninformed, and potentially dissident shareholders and helps consolidate control in the hands of the agreed upon group. Additionally, it helps fix the value of each owner’s business interest. From the viewpoint of the heirs of a deceased business owner, a buy-sell severs their dependency on the surviving owners and the economic fortunes of a business that has lost a key person.
Developing an Exit Strategy
If a business partner dies, a Buy-Sell Agreement protects the business and remaining owners from inactive, uninformed, and potentially dissident shareholders and helps consolidate control in the hands of the agreed upon group. Additionally, it helps fix the value of each owner’s business interest. From the viewpoint of the heirs of a deceased business owner, a buy-sell severs their dependency on the surviving owners and the economic fortunes of a business that has lost a key person.
If a business partner dies, a Buy-Sell Agreement protects the business and remaining owners from inactive, uninformed, and potentially dissident shareholders and helps consolidate control in the hands of the agreed upon group. Additionally, it helps fix the value of each owner’s business interest. From the viewpoint of the heirs of a deceased business owner, a buy-sell severs their dependency on the surviving owners and the economic fortunes of a business that has lost a key person.
Retaining the Company within Your Family
In the rush of day-to-day business activities, many small business owners may lose sight of what they had originally hoped to accomplish. As your company grows and develops, it’s important to keep your priorities on track so your business activities are consistent with your long-term personal goals and objectives. Drawing upon our decades of experience working with business owners, McNair & Company can help you, in a wide variety of ways, prepare for and plan for business and personal financial success.
Preparing and Planning for Success
BUSINESS FINANCIAL PLANNING
As professionals with many years of experience in corporate retirement plans, our role is to serve as your company’s advocate – helping you connect your goals with the resources you need to accomplish them.
We offer comprehensive services for a variety of defined contribution plans, including 401(k) Plans, Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs), Profit Sharing or Stock Bonus Plans, 403(b) Plans, and Simplified Employee Pension Plans (SEPs).
Our approach is based on a business model supported by three core pillars: Simplicity, Focus and Balance.
Our Approach
As specialists in guiding business owners through the journey of succession planning, McNair & Company serves as your financial advocate to assure that your experience is as simple and smooth as possible.
In addition to offering you solutions that range from estate and tax planning to business advisory and wealth management, as well as looking after all aspects of the sale of your business, McNair & Company serves as your central facilitator to ensure that all necessary details are properly coordinated with your other advisors, including your accountant and attorney.
SEE HOW WE HELP YOU ADD VALUE
Professional Guidance for your Journey
Helping You Achieve Your Goals on Many Levels
We know that your life and your life’s work are inextricably linked. So we take the time to gain an in-depth understanding of your personal, family and business goals, as well as the psychological factors and emotional hurdles that come into play. This way, we can help you find solutions and resolutions that accommodate all of your stakeholders’ needs.
A Professional Process
To effectively manage the complexities of succession planning, we follow a proven process designed to help you ultimately reach your destination by taking it one step at a time.
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Identify and review priorities
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Establish goals and objectives
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Identify a buyer or successor
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Develop the succession plan
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Integrate personal planning goals into the plan
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Establish transfer methods (e.g. retirement income streams, buy-sell agreement, deferred compensation, trusts, ESOP, Family Limited Partnerships, etc.)
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Implementation
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Review and monitor the plan
During each step of the process, we work closely with you to:
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Create a dialogue and process for you to begin to address the issues of succession
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Coordinate planning with your other advisors
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Establish goals and timelines
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Plan for your retirement and family’s cash flow needs
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Plan for the tax-efficient allocation of assets if your choice is to sell the company
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Select appropriate wealth transfer strategies to minimize transfer taxes
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Implement and fund the plan
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Communicate and update the plan periodically
EXECUTIVE COMPENSATION PLANS
In today’s competitive business environment, key executives are one of your company’s most valuable assets. Competition to recruit, retain and reward top performers has grown to the point that traditional compensation methods are not enough.
Top executives are seeking ways to cope with tax issues and retirement needs amid restrictive legislation that dramatically limits the amount of income that can be deferred or contributed to the company’s qualified retirement plan. These executives are seeking wealth-building opportunities.
For this reason, a growing number of companies are turning to nonqualified deferred compensation arrangements, split-dollar plans, phantom stock plans, and golden handcuffs to augment their key executives’ retirement benefits packages and overcome many of the regulatory restrictions that apply to qualified retirement plans.
Recruit, Retain, Reward
As professionals with many years of experience in executive compensation strategies, The Matrix Financial Group’s role is to serve as your company’s advocate – helping you define your specifications and compare existing programs with your current goals, with recent developments, and with the competition.
We help you orchestrate the plan; assemble the required specialists; coordinate arrangements with your legal, accounting, and internal advisors; and guide every aspect of your plan’s development.
The intended end result is a custom-built solution structured around your unique requirements – whether it’s:
• Retaining key personnel;
• Restoring executive benefits lost to government limits on qualified retirement plans;
• Rewarding executives and aligning their behavior with the company's long and short-term goals;
• Recruiting key executives to your company; or
• Retiring executives as part of a well-coordinated succession plan.
Professional Guidance
Our advisors work with you to identify your company’s specific executive compensation needs and any underlying issues that may also need to be addressed.
COMPREHENSIVE SERVICES
1. Needs Assessment
2. Retirement Plan Design
A review of your existing executive plans for performance against goals can help you determine:
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If they provide proper incentive for management to achieve top performance.
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If they are aligned with current compensation plan goals.
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Whether they are performing to expectations and how that performance is being measured.
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If they have remained current with interest and investment rates over time.
3. Cost Savings Recommendations
Based on a review of your existing executive plans (compared to the industry’s most current data), we will determine if there are opportunities for cost savings or benefit enhancements by identifying strategies and elements that may have been overlooked or not kept current. Our subsequent recommendations can result in substantial enhancements to earnings or cash saving.
4. Integrated Plan Development
Our approach to both new and existing plans focuses on three separate but linked elements:
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Non-qualified plan design
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Plan funding
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Plan administration
Financial & Estate Planning for Executives
As part of our planning services, McNair & Company offers financial and estate planning services for your high-net-worth executives.
McNair & Company goes beyond the traditional scope of services in our commitment to ensure that your executive compensation strategies not only meet your company’s financial goals, but are competitive with other companies that may be seeking the same key performers. Our services include:
Plan Design
Our goal is to ensure that your plan design reflects your company’s goals as well as those of your valued executives...
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For existing plans, we are available to conduct a comprehensive audit of your current program and/or funding arrangements.
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For new plans, we work with you to integrate a new strategic design with existing plans – that have been validated, revised, and enhanced.
SEE HOW OUR DISCIPLINED PROCESS WORKS
Plan Funding
Matching Funding Strategies to your Plan Objectives
As your advocate, we provide a thorough and objective evaluation of possible funding methods using conservative assumptions and a strategic (versus product-driven) approach.
Integrating Funding Decisions with Your Corporate Methodology
Each method is analyzed using several scenarios that you define. These are then presented under the same parameters you use to make other corporate financial decisions.
Implementing Funding Decisions and Selecting Providers
Following that decision, we work with your tax, legal and accounting advisors to put in place a funding program consistent with your stated objectives.
Plan Administration
A critical part of any nonqualified program is effective and ongoing plan administration and management that:
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Provides your executives with account statements and access to benefit values.
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Provides the corporation with the data and plan reporting necessary to enhance management oversight.
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Manages asset-liability tracking on an active, ongoing basis through expense projection and reconciliation.
McNair & Company provides access to the appropriate combination of third-party plan administration services to accomplish all of these tasks for your organization. We then assist in monitoring the effectiveness of those relationships through technology and comprehensive Annual Reviews.
The best nonqualified designs can fail because of inadequate or ineffective funding arrangements that do not immunize the corporation against the liabilities created by these plans. Accordingly, our professional process is designed to address all aspects of your plan’s mechanics so that it performs as intended.
BUSINESS SUCCESSION PLANNING
You have spent a lifetime building a successful business. As you look ahead at your retirement and the divestiture of your company, do you want the final years of your career to end in a slowdown or decline? Or would you prefer to exit on a high note – making thoughtful provisions for your clients, employees and family; retiring on your own terms; preserving the value of your business; and continuing your company’s legacy for generations to come?
Although the choice may be obvious, the solution can be elusive. What most business owners don’t realize is that handing over the baton to a new owner, a key employee, or family member is a process, rather than a single event. And the more time allotted for planning, the better the outcome will be, particularly with regard to minimizing the tax consequences of transferring business ownership.
A business succession plan can maximize your business’s value and secure your own financial future when the time comes to sell, transfer or wrap things up. When planned properly, your transition should be smooth both emotionally and financially, not just for you and your family, but your employees and your successor as well.
Maximize Your Business's Value
We help you define your organization’s benefit plan and investment objectives, and review your existing program using our Retirement Plan Diagnostic.
SEE HOW OUR PROCESS WORKS
1. Retirement Plan Diagnostic
2. Retirement Plan Design
Based on our review and analysis, we design the plan. With existing plans, we recommend opportunities for cost savings or benefit enhancements by identifying strategies and elements that may have been overlooked or not kept current.
3. Fiduciary Shield
We help you meet your fiduciary responsibilities and control risk by developing a formal Investment Policy Statement. The Investment Policy Statement is based on your plan design and benefit structure, and establishes clear, objective criteria for selecting and monitoring investment managers and asset management strategies.
4. Request for Proposal Manager
We sit on your side of the negotiating table to walk you through the Request for Proposal process. We help you manage the flow of information and analyze and compare proposals to guide you in making informed and knowledgeable decisions about providers such as custodians and third-party administrators.
5. Education Experience
We manage every step of the transition from your current retirement program to your new program. We enroll your employees and educate them about the benefits of their new program. We engage their interest and participation through regular education and financial planning briefings.
We manage the health and welfare of your retirement program over its lifetime, advising you of regulatory changes, program enhancements, and investment due diligence. We regularly perform Diagnostic Reviews to continually gauge your program’s performance in light of changing regulations, market conditions, and your company’s situation.
6. Wealthcare Monitor
Part of our value to you is our capability to deliver significant resources with focused solutions based on your company’s needs. Through our years of experience working with corporate retirement plans, we have acquired a broadband knowledge of pricing and plan providers across multiple platforms.
This enables us to offer a comprehensive suite of services and allows us to guide you in making smart, objective decisions in a wide range of areas, including: