Bruce Helmer and Peg Webb

Small businesses aren’t as small as you might think. They drive 44% of the U.S. GDP and employ more than 60 million Americans, according to U.S. Chamber of Commerce estimates.

Yet despite their impact, many small-business owners overlook financial planning, often waiting until it’s too late. In fact, 78% of business owners expect to fund their retirement by selling their business, but 60% haven’t met with a financial adviser, according to BizEquity. That’s a risky approach, and one that can leave many business owners unprepared for the future.

Financial planning isn’t just about investing — it’s about creating a strategy to ensure your business success translates into long-term personal financial security. Whether you’re looking to grow, manage risk or plan for an eventual exit, a sensible financial plan can help you make informed decisions and avoid common pitfalls.

Why small-business owners need a financial plan

A well-crafted financial plan provides business owners with clarity, stability and control. Here are three key reasons how a plan can benefit you:

• 1. Managing cash flow — You know that cash flow is the lifeblood of any business, but it’s also crucial for personal financial stability. Poor cash flow management can lead to business failure, but it can also impact your ability to save for retirement, pay down debt or reinvest in growth. Planning helps balance income and expenses while ensuring liquidity when it’s needed.

• 2. Preparing for growth — If you’re like many business owners, the value of your business represents the majority of your net worth. Growing that value takes intentional planning. A solid financial plan integrates business expansion with personal wealth-building, ensuring both are moving in the right direction.

• 3. Managing risk — Entrepreneurs take risks every day, but some risks can be mitigated with smart planning. Many business owners have a dangerously high concentration of their wealth tied to their business. If market conditions change, or if personal circumstances force an unexpected exit, an unprepared business owner could see years of hard work disappear. A strong financial plan builds buffers against these risks and creates options for when things don’t go as planned.

Aligning business and personal financial goals

A common mistake business owners make is treating their business and personal financial goals as separate. The truth is, they are deeply connected.

On the personal side, owners may have retirement goals, a desire to build generational wealth or aspirations for charitable giving. On the business side, they may focus on profitability, achieving scale economies and eventually transitioning the company. A smart financial plan aligns both — ensuring that as the business grows, so does the owner’s personal financial security.

For example, a business owner reinvesting all profits into expansion might overlook the need to build a retirement fund. Without a separate savings strategy, they risk being entirely dependent on the business’ sale, which isn’t always guaranteed. A strong financial plan can help set milestones that support both business success and personal wealth accumulation.

The importance of diversification

Many small-business owners have the majority of their wealth locked up in their business, leaving them vulnerable to financial downturns. Diversification helps mitigate this risk.

Consider utilizing tax-deferred accounts such as a SIMPLE IRA or 401(k) to grow retirement savings without immediate tax burdens. Tax-advantaged accounts such as a Roth IRA or Health Savings Account (HSA) provide additional tax-efficient savings opportunities. Taxable investment accounts can also provide flexibility, offering liquid assets that aren’t tied to strict withdrawal rules.

By strategically spreading investments across different tax treatments, you can balance their immediate cash flow needs with long-term financial stability.

Liquidity strategies

Many business owners assume they need to sell their company outright to generate retirement income. However, there are other ways to create liquidity without giving up full control.

• Strategic partnerships or partial sales — Selling a portion of the business to a like-minded investor or colleague can provide immediate capital while keeping an active role in operations.

• Minority or majority recapitalization — Bringing in outside investors allows owners to extract cash from the business while maintaining influence.

• Employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) — Transferring ownership to employees can provide significant tax advantages while allowing the business to continue thriving.

Each of these options has unique tax and structural considerations, so working with a financial expert is essential in determining the best approach.

Plan today for the future you want

At its core, financial planning for a small business is about preparing for the future. A thriving business is a wonderful achievement, but it’s only truly successful if it translates into lasting financial security.

If you’re a business owner, ask yourself:

• Do I have a plan for steady income in retirement?

• Is my personal wealth growing alongside my business?

• Have I explored tax-efficient strategies for diversification and liquidity?

A well-structured financial plan doesn’t just protect what you’ve built — it helps you make the most of it. Take the time to craft a strategy that supports both your business and personal financial goals. Your future self will thank you.

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The opinions voiced in this material are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual.

Bruce Helmer and Peg Webb are financial advisers at Wealth Enhancement Group and co-hosts of “Your Money” on WCCO 830 AM on Sunday mornings. Email Bruce and Peg at yourmoney@wealthenhancement.com. Securities offered through LPL Financial, member FINRA/SIPC. Advisory services offered through Wealth Enhancement Advisory Services, LLC, a registered investment advisor. Wealth Enhancement Group and Wealth Enhancement Advisory Services are separate entities from LPL Financial.

 

BUFFALO, N.Y. — Hilary Knight was more impressed than surprised in discovering she was leading PWHL forwards in ice time three months into the league’s second season.

At 35 and one of the PWHL’s oldest players, the face of U.S. women’s hockey has always valued being someone capable of playing in every situation. In averaging nearly 22 minutes per game, the Boston Fleet captain also finds the playing time reassuring in putting to rest any questions following a drop in production last year.

It helps that Knight is injury free after being slowed by an ankle issue she chose not to address until last summer. What’s also true is Knight can focus more on playing after no longer being consumed by feeling a need to shoulder the burden of ensuring the launch of a league she helped establish went off without a glitch.

“We can all kind of just go out there and play a little bit more than before, right?” Knight told The Associated Press during the Fleet’s Takeover Tour stop in Buffalo last weekend. “You’re not having to worry about all the overhead, what’s going to happen and feeling responsible for a missed bus or whatever wrinkle arises.”

It’s liberating knowing the PWHL is in good hands. And the four-time Olympian and inaugural winner of the IIHF’s female hockey player of the year in 2023 is enjoying the chance to skate pain-free again.

“I feel like I don’t have as much tread on the tires considering how many minutes I have,” Knight said. “You know, it’s more fun where you can actually play the game that you’re used to playing at the level you want to play at.”

Last season, she finished tied for 31st with 11 points, and 14th with six goals while playing all 24 games. Knight failed to register a point in eight playoff games as Boston lost the final series in a decisive Game 5 to Minnesota.

Through Wednesday, she is tied for fifth with 17 points and tied for fourth with eight goals through 19 games, while her ice-time average ranks seventh among skaters when factoring in defensemen.

She has a point in all but six games this season, and has two game-winning goals, coming in consecutive outings as part of a 6-1 run that pushed Boston into third-place in the standings.

“This year, she’s really been able to settle in to be the hockey player we all know that she is,” Fleet general manager Danielle Marmer said.

Knight’s leadership in establishing the team’s culture was invaluable in a season Boston closed 4-0-1 to clinch a playoff spot. Marmer praised Knight for finding a defensive role by clearing pucks and blocking shots, particularly in a grueling semifinal series against Montreal, in which Boston won all three games in overtime.

“And that’s why she’s a winner,” Marmer said. “Even when she’s not putting pucks in the net and finding a way there, she’s finding a way to impact us in a way that allows other people to step up and put pucks in the net.”

Knight brings with her 19 seasons of U.S. national team experience in which she won Olympic gold in 2018 and three silvers, along with nine golds at the world championships. Barring injury, she’s already a lock to make her record fifth Olympic appearance next year in Italy.

Knight is the Fleet’s unquestioned leader.

She consults with coach Courtney Kessel on when the team might need a break from practice. She can keep the team loose with a joke or bring a competitive focus when the moment calls. Teammates are impressed how Knight seamlessly handles her many off-ice responsibilities — interviews, autograph sessions and promotional appearances.

“She’s truly a professional. I’ve learned so much from her,” said Fleet and U.S. national team goalie Aerin Frankel. “I think she’s an all-encompassing person and player. And when she puts her mind to do something, she does it.”

Age hasn’t slowed Knight. Two years ago, she scored her third world championship gold-medal-winning goal as part of a hat-trick in the United States’ 6-3 win over Canada. At the worlds last year, Knight finished tied for the tournament lead with 10 points as the U.S. lost the title game to Canada.

For all she’s done, Knight feels disappointed in failing to produce for Boston in the playoffs last year.

“It’s really fun to score. And if it’s something you’re supposed to be doing and you’re not doing it; it’s definitely tough,” she said.

And yet, her determination showed through in saying nothing, including her ankle injury, was going to prevent her from playing.

“That was sort of the mental battle of last year, wanting to show up for the team … with the understanding that I wasn’t where I would like to be,” Knight said. “But I was going to do everything I could in my capability when I was out there.”

By MARK KENNEDY

NEW YORK (AP) — David Johansen, the wiry, gravelly-voiced singer and last surviving member of the glam and protopunk band the New York Dolls who later performed as his campy, pompadoured alter ego, Buster Poindexter, has died. He was 75.

Johansen died Friday at his home in New York City, according to Rolling Stone, citing a family spokesperson. It was revealed in early 2025 that he had stage 4 cancer and a brain tumor.

The New York Dolls were forerunners of punk and the band’s style — teased hair, women’s clothes and lots of makeup — inspired the glam movement that took up residence in heavy metal a decade later in bands like Faster Pussycat and Mötley Crüe.

“When you’re an artist, the main thing you want to do is inspire people, so if you succeed in doing that, it’s pretty gratifying,” Johansen told The Knoxville News-Sentinel in 2011.

Rolling Stone once called the Dolls “the mutant children of the hydrogen age” and Vogue called them the “darlings of downtown style, tarted-up toughs in boas and heels.”

“The New York Dolls were more than musicians; they were a phenomenon. They drew on old rock ‘n’ roll, big-city blues, show tunes, the Rolling Stones and girl groups, and that was just for starters,” Bill Bentley wrote in “Smithsonian Rock and Roll: Live and Unseen.”

The band never found commercial success and was torn by internal strife and drug addictions, breaking up after two albums by the middle of the decade. In 2004, former Smiths frontman and Dolls admirer Morrissey convinced Johansen and other surviving members to regroup for the Meltdown Festival in England, leading to three more studio albums.

In the ’80s, Johansen assumed the persona of Buster Poindexter, a pompadour-styled lounge lizard who had a hit with the kitschy party single “Hot, Hot, Hot” in 1987. He also appeared in such movies as “Candy Mountain,” “Let It Ride,” “Married to the Mob” and had a memorable turn as the Ghost of Christmas Past in Bill Murray-led hit “Scrooged.”

Johansen was in 2023 the subject of Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi’s documentary “Personality Crisis: One Night Only,” which mixed footage of his two-night stand at the Café Carlyle in January 2020 with flashbacks through his wildly varied career and intimate interviews.

“I used to think about my voice like: ‘What’s it gonna sound like? What’s it going to be when I do this song?’ And I’d get myself into a knot about it,” Johansen told The Associated Press in 2023. “At some point in my life, I decided: ‘Just sing the (expletive) song. With whatever you got.’ To me, I go on stage and whatever mood I’m in, I just claw my way out of it, essentially.”

David Roger Johansen was born to a large, working class Catholic family on Staten Island, his father an insurance salesman. He filled notebooks with poems and lyrics as a young man and liked a lot of different music — R&B, Cuban, Janis Joplin and Otis Redding.

The Dolls — the final original lineup included guitarists Sylvain Sylvain and Johnny Thunders, bassist Arthur Kane and drummer Jerry Nolan — rubbed shoulders with Lou Reed and Andy Warhol in the Lower East Side of Manhattan the early 1970s.

They took their name from a toy hospital in Manhattan and were expected to take over the throne vacated by the Velvet Underground in the early 1970s. But neither of their first two albums — 1973’s “New York Dolls,” produced by Todd Rundgren, nor “Too Much Too Soon” a year later produced by Shadow Morton — charted.

“They’re definitely a band to keep both eyes and ears on,” read the review of their debut album in Rolling Stone, complementary of their “strange combination of high pop-star drag and ruthless street arrogance.”

Their songs included “Personality Crisis” (“You got it while it was hot/But now frustration and heartache is what you got”), “Looking for a Kiss” (I need a fix and a kiss”) and a “Frankenstein” (Is it a crime/For you to fall in love with Frankenstein?”)

Their glammed look was meant to embrace fans with a nonjudgmental, noncategorical space. “I just wanted to be very welcoming,” Johansen said in the documentary, “’cause the way this society is, it was set up very strict — straight, gay, vegetarian, whatever… I just kind of wanted to kind of like bring those walls down, have a party kind of thing.”

Rolling Stone, reviewing their second album, called them “the best hard-rock band in America right now” and called Johansen a “talented showman, with an amazing ability to bring characters to life as a lyricist.”

Decades later, the Dolls’ influence would be cherished. Rolling Stone would list their self-titled debut album at No. 301 of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, writing “it’s hard to imagine the Ramones or the Replacements or a thousand other trash-junky bands without them.”

Blondie’s Chris Stein in the Nolan biography “Stranded in the Jungle” wrote that the Dolls were “opening a door for the rest of us to walk through.” Tommy Lee of Motley Crue called them early inspirations.

“Johansen is one of those singers, to be a little paradoxical, who is technically better and more versatile than he sounds,” said the Los Angeles Times in 2023. “His voice has always been a bit of a foghorn — higher or lower according to age, habits and the song at hand — but it has a rare emotional urgency.

The Dolls, representing rock at it’s most debauched, were divisive. In 1973, they won the Creem magazine poll categories as the year’s best and worst new group. They were nominated several times for The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame but never got in.

“Dirty angels with painted faces, the Dolls opened the box usually reserved for Pandora and unleashed the infant furies that would grow to become Punk,” wrote Nina Antonia in the book “Too Much, Too Soon.” “As if this legacy wasn’t enough for one band, they also trashed sexual boundaries, savaged glitter and set new standards for rock ‘n’ roll excess.”

By the end of their first run, the Dolls were being managed by legendary promoter Malcolm McLaren, who would later introduce the Sex Pistols to the Dolls’ music. Culture critic Greil Marcus in “Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century” writes the Dolls played him some of their music and he couldn’t believe how bad they were.

“The fact that they were so bad suddenly hit me with such force that I began to realize, ’’I’m laughing, I’m talking to these guys, I’m looking at them, and I’m laughing with them; and I was suddenly impressed by the fact that I was no longer concerned with whether you could play well,” McLaren said. “The Dolls really impressed upon me that there was something else. There was something wonderful. I thought how brilliant they were to be this bad.”

After the first demise of the Dolls, Johansen started his own group, the David Johansen band, before reinventing himself yet again in the 1980s as Buster Poindexter.

Inspired by his passion for the blues and arcane American folk music Johansen also formed the group The Harry Smiths, and toured the world performing the songs of Howlin’ Wolf with Hubert Sumlin and Levon Helm. He also hosted the weekly radio show “The Mansion of Fun” on Sirius XM and painted.

He is survived by his wife, Mara Hennessey, and a stepdaughter, Leah Hennessey.

Amy Lindgren

The storm is still raging in terms of cuts in the federal workforce, but we’ve come to the last of three columns on the topic of navigating a buyout offer or potential layoff.

These articles haven’t been focused on the current situation for federal workers — partly because it’s changing by the hour, and partly because it’s so far from normal. Instead, the advice highlights what most people could do when faced with a buyout offer or potential layoff.

As a quick recap, Part 1 in this short series described steps for responding to the buyout offer itself, while Part 2 looked at factors to consider when weighing whether or not to accept. Today we’ll pivot to the broader scope of what to do before anything is initiated, when you only suspect trouble may be coming.

These tips are presented in categories that have a lot of overlap; just mark the steps that feel like to-do items for you and jump in on those that are time-sensitive.

On the job

• Review your employee manual or work agreement to understand rules that might apply. There’s no guarantee, but this knowledge could provide leverage for future negotiations.

• Download what belongs to you, such as kudos letters and training certificates. Now is also the time to make (appropriate) work samples, to use later in an interview or portfolio.

• Eliminate personal items from paper and digital files. Family photos and personal contacts will all be toast if you store them on a company device that gets shut down on short notice.

• Gather contact information for colleagues. This will pave the way for later networking. Within ethical bounds, individual clients and vendors could also fit this step. To be safe, you could ask each one for permission. In either case, do refrain from copying lists — that could be considered theft of company property.

• Gather your things. No need to be obvious, but it’s good to have less stuff at work at this stage. Desk drawers, book shelves, break room, locker, bench space, your car or truck if it’s company-issue … making a list will help ensure nothing gets left behind. It could also protect you somewhat if your things are boxed up on your behalf by someone else.

• Review current health insurance. How much would it cost if you continued this plan after a job loss and had to pay for it yourself?

Personally

• Manage your health care. If you won’t be leaving for awhile, you can hustle now to schedule preventative appointments — which is an appropriate use of your paid sick time, by the way.

• Secure extra financing, such as an additional credit card or a home equity line of credit. You may not envision needing this but it will be harder to do when unemployed.

• Accelerate other plans if logical. Changing homes or finishing a degree are two examples of things that might be better accomplished before job cuts are announced.

• Consider changing your withholding to increase your take-home pay. Only do this if you can use the excess to fund emergency savings or pay down expensive debt.

• Consider taking a side job, to provide a cushion, no matter how small.

Moving forward — if cuts seem imminent

• Start shopping for your own phone, computer, printer, or any other equipment you rely on that’s currently provided by the company.

• Ask for letters of recommendation from your boss or key colleagues. Letters are better than securing a promise to be a reference, but both are valuable.

• Create a personal directory of company contacts such as your boss, HR, and others you may need to reach after leaving.

• Update professional memberships. If the membership is in your name, it belongs to you. Switch the contact information to reflect your personal email and phone, then create a new password.

• Prepare your materials. Update your résumé and swap LinkedIn recommendations with co-workers if possible.

• Set meetings. Networking, financial advisers, career strategists, the unemployment office — basically anyone who can help you hit the ground running are people you want to meet with.

Or…

If nothing has been announced but you suspect your boss needs to make cuts, consider offering yourself for a layoff. This will help you customize the terms and effectively structure your own buyout. Just don’t quit on your own, unless you have a definite place to land. Otherwise, you’ll likely lose the chance for severance, unemployment, or other benefits that are dependent on being forced out.

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Amy Lindgren owns a career consulting firm in St. Paul. She can be reached at alindgren@prototypecareerservice.com.