For the founder whose balance sheet lives inside the operating company.
The asset, and the architecture composed around it.
For owner-operators of capable, profitable, closely held companies, the operating business is rarely just an asset. It is the dominant asset — in most years the largest the family will ever hold — and it behaves under rules unlike any other on the family’s ledger. The capital extraction is taxed differently. The succession is contested differently. The valuation moves with operating performance, with industry cycle, with strategic interest, with the founder’s presence in the chair. None of these are matters the public-market portfolio is asked to manage.
The architectural work for the business owner is, accordingly, the work composed around the operating company — the holdco, the family trust, the share class structure, the buy-sell, the insurance funding the buy-sell, the second balance sheet quietly diversifying away from the concentration. None of it can be added at the eleventh hour without cost. All of it compounds when composed in time, with corporate counsel and tax counsel at the table from the first conversation.
Senatus serves as the architectural mandate that holds the personal and corporate sides of the family’s position in coherent relation. The CPA continues as the family’s tax counsel. The corporate lawyer continues as the family’s legal counsel. Senatus convenes the table and remains accountable for the integrity of the whole — through every operating chapter and every transaction that follows.
Four points at which the architecture compounds.
Each is the kind of work that rarely competes with the urgent matters of the operating company. Each, attended to in time, materially shapes the family’s position twenty years on.
The personal-corporate boundary, drawn before it is tested.
What is held personally, what is held corporately, what is held in the holdco, what is held in trust. The decisions made early determine creditor exposure, deductibility, optionality at sale, and the family’s position under s. 84.1 of the Income Tax Act when the time comes to extract surplus or transition the company. Coordinated with corporate counsel and tax counsel, set in writing, reviewed against the family as it grows.
Owner extraction, composed across decades rather than fiscal years.
Salary, dividend, capital extraction, capital dividend account — the four mechanisms weighed together against the family’s long-horizon tax position rather than chosen in isolation each year. RDTOH, GRIP, CDA, and the lifetime capital gains exemption multiplied across the family under s. 110.6 are managed as instruments within a single coherent strategy. The cumulative after-tax outcome over a decade is materially different from the default sequence most owner-managers run.
The second balance sheet, diversifying away from the concentration.
For most owner-operators, ninety per cent of the family’s capital sits inside one asset. The second balance sheet — held outside the operating company, composed with patience over the years the company is being built — is the structural answer to that concentration. Investment policy, entity structure, custody, and tax position composed for it specifically rather than as a residual of the operating decisions.
Succession or sale, sequenced years before required.
The estate freeze. The shareholders’ agreement and the buy-sell. The funded coverage that turns the buy-sell into liquidity rather than a claim on operating cash. The pre-sale purification ahead of a possible exit. The succession architecture for transfer to the next generation. The earlier each is composed, the lower the cost and the wider the optionality — and the more the operating company is freed to be operated rather than negotiated.
Year one for the architecture. Then the cadence of an operating relationship.
The engagement begins with a documented architectural review of the family’s position around the operating company — the entities, the share classes, the agreements, the policies, the personal-corporate boundary, the second balance sheet. The review is circulated in draft to the family’s existing CPA and corporate counsel before any work is undertaken; nothing proceeds without their voice in the document.
From that foundation, the relationship operates on a continuing cadence: quarterly working sessions, an annual structural review, and proactive coordination ahead of every consequential operating decision — valuation, financing, equity raise, acquisition, succession event, or exit conversation.
“We had built the company. We had not built the architecture around it. The work of the engagement was to put one in service of the other — patiently, with our existing accountant and corporate lawyer at the table throughout. The first time I looked at our position with the new structure in place, I understood what had been missing without ever having been able to name it.”
If the operating company is the dominant asset, the next step is a private conversation.
Senatus accepts a limited number of new relationships each year, predominantly through private referral. A member of the Private Office will respond, in confidence, within twenty-four hours.
Request a Private ConversationTwelve adjacent audiences.
Most principals belong to more than one. The architecture is composed for the family in front of us; the descriptions below are how families most often arrive.