Business Innovators Radio - Interview with Paul Seglund with Pacific Coast Wealth Builders

Episode Date: December 8, 2023

Paul is a seasoned independent Wealth Manager with a focus on providing retirement income planning requirements for people to live their desired lifestyle. Another specialty is helping Business Owners with Exit Planning Strategies to maximize this important asset. A devoted outdoors enthusiast living in the Western US as an avid skier and biker, Paul resides in Boise with new wife Anne and spends time with their children and also participates in Motorsports activities as a race official and writer.Learn More:https://seglund.net/Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-paul-seglund-with-pacific-coast-wealth-builders

Welcome to influential entrepreneurs, bringing you interviews with elite business leaders and experts, sharing tips and strategies for elevating your business to the next level. Here's your host, Mike Saunders. Hello and welcome to this episode of Influential Entrepreneurs. This is Mike Saunders, the authority positioning coach. Today we have Paul Seiglin with Pacific Coast wealth builders with us. Paul, welcome to the program. Hey, good morning, Mike. Thank you very much.

You are welcome, looking forward to chatting with you. Before we dive into what you do and serving your clients, I want to hear about your story, with your background, and how did you get into the industry? Well, I joined the industry. I was a financing economics major at Sacramento States way back in the 80s. I spent some time in the capital equipment business, and I was approached by Merrill Lynch, when they had a plan to bring on successful people from other industries to become a financial advisor.

So I finally decided to use my finance and economics background to launch my business. I tailored to business owners and benefit plans throughout my career and have also brought on other clients in the meantime for retirement income planning and overall financial planning for their families or businesses. That encompasses business exit planning strategies because a lot of the business owners demographically are looking at exiting the businesses and retiring at this point too. Yeah, no, that's a big opportunity exit planning because I feel like business owners just think I started my business, I grew my business, and in five to 10 years, I would love to just retire and be done. So let's figure out a price tag and give me a big old check. And as you know,

that's very simplistic, but what's the amount of that check that you want to ask for? So how do you value your business? And that's a whole approach. And then how do you polish up the business so it can be valued at the highest. And then should you get that big check or should it be, you know, a smaller one with a monthly payment? So what is your approach in serving your business owner clients in helping them understand those options for exit planning? Well, you mentioned it exactly. That's what I was going to say is we're trying to maximize by taking on a project well ahead of time, two to five years before a business sell or transition, we want to maximize the value and also increase the marketability of their business.

So they do have a selection of buyers, suitable buyers that would come in. And if you'd get one big check, there's a lot of tax ramifications for that. But if you can spread it out and maybe with some targets that the business owner can meet. That could be another way to maximize the value and minimize the taxes under this transaction. So we help the business owners with all aspects of that. Yeah, what do you find is? Yeah, bringing the whole team in.

And you personally might not be the legal advisor, but you've got the person on the team that brings that in because it's like the three-legged stool. if you only give advice in one area, then you could be off balance. What are you finding some of the main kind of low hanging fruit when you're working with a business owner regarding kind of optimizing their value? Because you could say, hey, as the business stands right now, it would be worth X. But if you could do one, two, three, and four, boy, in about a year, two years, 18 months, boy, we could get that value up. What are some of those opportunities that you're watching for? Well, you want to, and it's similar to family financial planning, but you want to protect your assets.

So, you know, your key people have a funded buy, sell agreement, have benefit plans in place. That shows to a prospective buyer that you've got all the bases covered and you've thought everything out to have a, you know, well-run business, you know, part of the key for that. And, you know, just going through the whole process, it makes, it makes the business owners, you know, they're so busy all the time. They don't have time for some of these aspects. So we come in and help them out to try to get everything in a cohesive plan for the company on the financial side and benefits side and employee retention, you know, because somebody sells a business. Sometimes the people leave and whatnot, the buyer's kind of left hanging in the lurch.

So you want to make it attractive for the people to stay, too. So you have these plans in place that the people, you know, there's kind of limited hiccups in the process. It kind of reminds me of when a football team wins the Super Bowl, then within weeks, all their top players and coaches or poached to other teams and then they fall apart. So same as what you mentioned. You know, you get everything ready to go and sell and then the company falls apart. So talk a little bit about how the type of benefit plans and buy sell agreements help to solidify that so that when the company kind of transitions through that, then it remains

solid. So what are some of those benefits? Well, the benefit plans, do you have? retirement plan, the suitable retirement plan for the company with good ratios, good participation rate, not top-heavy, that sort of thing. You can look at deferred compensation to keep their key people on on protecting the business assets, like I said, having a buy-sell agreement. A lot of people put these in place, but they're never funded. And a lot of people that, you know, maybe they started out initially with a $1 million

business valuation well over the course of five or ten years or whatever, that business may have grown to $10 million. And so they do need to protect the business interests by keeping abreast of having the right funding for the buy-sell agreement. Same with key person insurance. You want to make sure that, you know, the key people are. covered in case something happens to them or they leave. Yeah. And that also would, I would suspect, help that business owner in the 12 to 18 to 24 months leading up to the exit. When you have those

kinds of things in place, that helps them even recruit some top talent if they needed one or two more key people to really round out their team because some top talent might be looking at this company, the other company and another company. So what's going to make this one stand out? Well, you know, that can be part of their package that they're showing and that might help them to land that, that top talent. Yeah, it really does. You nailed it on the head with that.

It's not only employee retention, but continually attracting the right people by offering good benefits to the people and just having a good well-run business. you know, that attracts good team members. I was just on a call this morning with someone that wasn't happy getting ready to leave because the business owner refuses to put some of these, you know,

plans in place. And, you know, he's going to lose a key person on one of their divisions. Yeah. So it's not just hyperbole. It's actual fact in the real world. So these kind of things really do help out in all of those areas. So let's shift gears over into the, you know, we talked about the business side of your

serving your clients. What about the pre-retiree, the man, woman couple that is looking at retiring? I think that the big R word risk, you know, and risking, you know, volatility or risk with taxes, I think some of these things that people don't even think about, you know, they just think, oh, I'm going to retire and, you know, nobody has a pension anymore, you know, per se, or I'm just going to, you know, file for Social Security and there's what I'm going to get. But I know that there's some things that kind of punch holes in the bucket of retirement. Talk a little bit about what you do to educate your clients on that and move through there.

And you didn't mention the big one that everybody has been concerned about over the past couple years, inflation. Social Security is announced that they're going to increase. I can't remember the exact number, but I think 3.11% for 2024. Well, if inflation is higher than that, they're actually getting behind. But you take a look at, since there aren't that many pensions, what I try to do is help clients design their own pension. You know, you can do that depending upon the person you have the retirement plans or other aspects that can help people design their own pension that will give them lifetime retirement income while also protecting their assets. We try to mitigate taxes either through tax-free investing or tax deferral.

there can be advantages to both. And, you know, we also look at municipal bonds for somebody that's in higher tax brackets that can mitigate risk and get a higher level return through that kind of strategy. So there's multiple irons in the fire, if you will, to help people, you know, with their retirement income retirement planning and reducing their risk. profile. Yeah, I think that a lot of times, just like you mentioned, inflation, today, inflation might be out of control tomorrow.

It might not, I mean, not literally tomorrow, but in a year or two, inflation might come on down. And then there's another, you know, issue that rears its ugly head. So there's always something to be watching for and planning for. And like you said, there's a lot of options. And there's not one strategy that is that cookie cutter template for everyone. You know, everyone's situation is different. So what I would wonder is what are some of the things that you are watching for here in the near future that you're going to help guide your clients through?

What are some of the outlooks that you're looking at in the financial future? Well, we always will have the volatility aspect. So, you know, you have that. I think we're going into an election year, which historically has been a, you know, a good year for market returns. However, you know, interest rates, we're thinking that interest rates are going to come down, but they've already come down about one full percent when you look at the 10-year treasury bond. So we might be, you know, back at the low point on treasury yields again. So you want to be cognizant of that, possibly going back up too.

But, you know, there's multiple aspects. And every year I do the top ten surprises like Byron. lean used to do. And it's kind of interesting to go through that exercise to really kind of nail down what you think may be happening for the new year and how you might be able to help clients avoid the pitfalls that typically happen. So what I would wonder also is I think a lot of times people, we all feel empowered behind our computer.

You know, oh, well, I've read this news article or I heard this thing. let me just go Google this and I'll figure this out with your retirement. That's kind of a thin ice that you're skating on because you can be looking at, you know, a hundred and different opinions, right? You know, inflation is high. What should I do? Well, there's not one thing. So talk a little bit about being able to work with a financial professional like yourself

to kind of sift through all of that, assess what someone really needs and then kind of clearly show the path forward. Yeah, like you said, everybody's a little bit different, so everybody has to take a unique approach. I have a new client that's a Catholic priest, so he doesn't have any beneficiaries per se. But, you know, a family with, you know, especially a blended family with multiple kids, has a lot of, have a lot of balls in the air and a lot of things to consider. and making the right decisions.

So, you know, you tailor something for, you know, the one person and something different for a family with, you know, two incomes or maybe a business involved or multiple pieces of real estate, which we've seen how real estate has been driven up in value quite a bit. You know, what should they do if they have multiple. properties just to reduce their risk. There's so many aspects. And I think that's what keeps us interested in this business is there's so many moving pieces that you find it fascinating in addition to what can also happen in the market.

And then we also enjoy helping people reach successful conclusions too. And, you know, Paul cannot be the expert in all things. So we touched on earlier with your work with business owners. I'm sure you bring the kind of the 360 degree approach, holistic approach, team approach to all of your clients. So talk a little bit about working with some of the other, you know, the legal or the tax people that would kind of bring that area of expertise to what you're serving your clients. Right. I have some strategic partners. and we work throughout the West,

but we try to find people that can handle various aspects and various needs for people. Some of the, you know, there's different disciplines within law. So, you know, state planning attorneys may be good for someone, but may not work so well for someone else. And same with CPAs. They may have expertise in small businesses, but not medium-sized business.

or the capabilities of doing so. So I try to, what's nice about being independent is I try to find who is the best partner on any given situation to help someone. And I feel lean on, you know, the investment companies and insurance carriers. They've got a wealth of expertise of specialists in legal and tax issues and a estate planning issues, which is a big requirement right now. We've got some tax law changes coming on the books next year that may impact people that are, you know, pretty moderately wealthy, I guess, what the term would be, but, you know, their tax

consequences could shoot up after the first of year. It seems like the old saying is always true. the only thing constant is change. You know, just let's see what. Well, there's that too. Yeah. Death taxes and change. So if someone is listening to this thinking, maybe let's see what these changes currently in the upcoming future are going to impact me.

Let's take a look at some of my options. What's the best way they can learn more than also reach out and connect with you, Paul? Well, I'm happy to take anybody's phone call to see if there's a fit. For us, my phone number is 541-647-8157. I'm also reachable on our website, seglin.net. And my email is Paul at seglin.com. And I'm happy to speak with anybody that may be seeking some help. Awesome.

Well, Paul, thank you so much for coming on. It's been a real pleasure talking with you today. Okay. Thank you very much, Mike. You've been listening to Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders. To learn more about the resources mentioned on today's show or listen to past episodes, visit www.com.