A new client, and $46,786 back from a year that already ended.
A 40-year-old eye surgeon sits down with an advisor for the first time. S-corp practice, strong income, already “doing retirement” at $2,942 a month, and a stack of operating agreements connecting him to a hospital plan, a physician group, and a surgery-center buy-in. One advisor brought the whole file to Helmsted. Here is the workflow from start to finish:
- Talk it through with Helmsted. The advisor described the new client in plain words: independent eye surgeon, S-corp PLLC, monthly retirement contributions already running, plus a hospital 401(k) and a pending surgery-center buy-in. Then dropped Helmsted the tax returns, the payroll register, the plan statements, and every operating agreement to analyze and begin the deeper discussion.
- Untangle the entities before touching the plan. Helmsted read the operating agreements and mapped the web: the PLLC, the hospital plan he was also deferring into, the affiliated physician group, and a small holding interest in a surgery center. Each one is a coverage or deduction trap if ignored, and each got named with the exact question to resolve. The untangling is what made the opportunity visible: a solo, high-income S-corp owner at 40 with no defined benefit plan, and the longest runway he will ever have.
- Find the year still open. Helmsted pointed out that under the SECURE Act, a cash balance plan executed and funded by the extended filing deadline counts for the prior year. The 2025 return was on extension, so last year was still live until September 15: $117,700 of deductible funding, about $46,800 of tax back on a year the client thought was closed, and roughly $91,000 saved across the two years. A first meeting that ends with money recovered from the past is a client for life.
- Build the timeline with the CPA. Nothing gets signed on a hunch. The report ends with a dated sequence the client’s CPA can verify gate by gate: split the payroll contributions, confirm the PA-C’s service date, get the ERISA opinion on the entity web, have the actuary certify the credit, then execute, wire, and file, each step with a date, closing at the September 15 hard deadline. The CPA sees exactly what is possible, and checks it before a dollar moves. And the new client saw the value immediately: his advisor and Helmsted, working together, found $46,786 in last year’s taxes that his previous advisor never helped him look for.
Getting creative with materials with Helmsted
The first version did not have to be the final one. The advisor continued refining the material with simple requests: simplify this chart for a client who dislikes charts, expand the section on the funding timeline where the detail matters, or describe a scenario using the client’s own language. Each change was made through a plain-language instruction. Helmsted handled the rework, allowing the deliverable to keep adapting to the client’s reality instead of forcing the client into a fixed template.
Adjust the altitude. The same analysis can become one clean takeaway for one client or a complete assumption set for another. Ask Helmsted to change the level of detail, not redesign the entire report. Expand where it matters. When one section feels too thin, tell Helmsted to go deeper on that topic while leaving everything else unchanged. Name their reality. Scenarios described in the client’s own words, such as the buy-in year or the new-associate year, are more meaningful than Scenario A and Scenario B.
One thing makes all of it work: context. To find a design like this, Helmsted needs the full shape of the practice as well as the household: every entity and how it is owned (the operating agreements themselves, not a summary), the payroll register and W-2s, plan statements for each retirement account, and the most recent tax returns along with their extension status. Helmsted can work with assumptions where details are missing, but the more you explain and walk Helmsted through the specifics, the better and more personal your report becomes.