In this strategic episode, Matt Ruttenberg, Co-Owner of Life, Inc. Retirement Services, shares how to customize retirement plans to slash taxes and favor founders. If you struggle with one-size-fits-all 401ks that hurt your bottom line, you won't want to miss it.

You will discover:

- How to stack cash balance plans with 401ks for massive deductions

- Why founder-centric designs beat employee-focused defaults

- What deadlines let you backdate 2025 contributions until 2026

This episode is ideal for for Founders, Owners, and CEOs in stage 5 of The Founder's Evolution. Not sure which stage you're in? Find out for free in less than 10 minutes at https://www.scalearchitects.com/founders/quiz

Matt is a 401(k) expert who partners with driven entrepreneurs and business leaders to design custom retirement plan stacks that reduce taxes and boost financial freedom. With 20+ years in the industry, he’s on a mission to replace one-size-fits-all plans with strategic tools that actually work for the people building the business.

Want to learn more about Matt Ruttenberg's work at Life, Inc. Retirement Services? Check out his website at https://lifeincrs.com/

Mentioned in this episode:

Take the Founder's Evolution Quiz Today

If you’re a Founder, business owner, or CEO who feels overworked by the business you lead and underwhelmed by the results, you’re doing it wrong. Succeeding as a founder all comes down to doing the right one or two things right now. Take the quiz today at foundersquiz.com, and in just ten questions, you can figure out what stage you are in, so you can focus on what is going to work and say goodbye to everything else.

Founder's Quiz

Scott, hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once

again to the start, scale and succeed podcast. It's the only

podcast that grows with you through all seven stages of your

journey. As a founder, I'm your host, Scott Ritzheimer, and

today I want to talk to founders who've built a real company.

They've got a real team. You've got your executives around you,

and somewhere along the way, you picked up a retirement plan that

feels like it's working harder for everyone except you. I know.

You know the feeling you're, if you're listening right now, you

know the feeling you're the one taking all the risk. You're the

one who's built the thing, yet, the 401, K, or whatever it is

that you're using, you don't even know some combination of

letters and numbers seems like it's benefiting everyone else,

or just feels really expensive, or even worse, it feels like

it's actually penalizing you because of your success. And so

what we want to do is take a look at retirement plans through

the lens of what are the most founder friendly retirement

plans. And to be honest, I have no idea, which is why we're in

luck that Matt Ruttenberg is here because Matt's a 401 K

expert who partners with driven entrepreneurs and business

leaders to design custom retirement plan stacks that

reduce taxes and boost financial freedom. With over 20 years in

the industry, he's on a mission to replace one size fits all

plans with strategic tools that actually work for the people

building the business. Matt so excited to have you here.

Welcome to the show. I'm wondering if we could just jump

in with maybe a couple of the basics. What are the big, kind

of main options for retirement plans for a founder and their

organization?

Yeah, and thanks for having me on. Scott.

I really appreciate it. You know, that's a it's 401, k,

right? That's kind of the topic of conversation today, but it's,

there's, there's so much more to it. There's foreign K is about

as basic of a term as you can get. It's a tax code, right? And

but there's a lot of ways to mold and create that plan based

on your business instead of everybody else's. And that's

kind of what we're going to talk about today. But we got, you

know, 401, you know, 401, K, profit sharing, defined benefit

plan, executive benefits for those who want to just target

individuals and only focus on certain leadership or mission

critical employees that you have in the in the company. So yeah,

we're going to kind of cover the gamut today. Of all, fantastic.

Okay, great. So there's a couple of reasons

why I think this is important. One is that most of the founders

I know are notorious for investing very heavily in

themselves, but at the risk of and sometimes at the cost of

what happens after the organization's done. And so I

think it's really important that founders pay attention to this

more than most of them do. Secondarily, it's pretty hard to

compete in the labor market without a competitive 401, K

plan or some type of retirement so it's a big deal for a couple

of different reasons. Again, I want to look at this through the

lens of what makes sense for founders. And you use a very

interesting word in your title, but you talk about a stack, a

retirement plan stack, if I remember correctly, what does

that mean?

Yeah, so a retirement plan stack is, is

where you're layering different plans on top of itself to to

build out this custom approach for everybody. So we call it a

retirement plan stack. It's basically, you know, for those

listening, it's an upside down three tiered wedding cake or

pyramid. So the bottom layer is now the lowest or smallest

middle layer, and then the biggest is on top now and and

we're building these layers as profitability scales. And you

know, you mentioned a minute ago where, you know, you we get a

lot of founders and employers and business owners who have

been looking down for years and focusing on their business and

really investing time, sweat, blood, tears, money, everything

into their business, and they look up and they're like, oh, I

have a profit. I have employees, and now I have to implement

something. And I'll be honest with you, I bet half of our

clients that come in the door do that. Are there. They're waiting

until maybe their 40s, on average. I'd say, you know, a

lot of people say, start early, start early, but they have been

starting early. They've just been putting all their

investment time and everything into that business, and now this

is allows them to scale out, diversify, if you will, and take

that approach using that stack as you increase your

profitability or increase your your need to catch up for

retirement.

Fantastic. So walk us through this stack.

What's the most founder friendly way that a founder can set up

their retirement stack?

Yeah, and most, most of the time we are brought

into the situation when we're looking at this like we want to

take care of the founders, like you just said. You can look at

this two different ways. You can look at a 401 K, or, let's just

say, let's just use the word 401 k as an overall term for

retirement plan. But people look at 401 K's is either an employee

benefit. Or a tax strategy. We tend to lean towards the latter.

We look at it as a tax strategy. And the goal for us is, when

we're designing the stack, is to to try to get most of those

dollars to the founders, or to the to the business owners, the

leaders of the company, and then, because it's a it's a

qualified retirement plan from the IRS. We were going to take

care of those employees, but at a minimal level, okay? And

bottom layer 401, k, right? Second layer profit sharing. And

top of that, we go into defined benefit plans where we're

getting into six digits of contributions. And then we can

even add a fourth layer, or replace the top layer with an

executive benefit where we're really targeting those mission

critical we need to hold on to those folks. We cannot let those

folks go. We need them to be a part of our organization. So we

want to take special care of them. Now, every layer is

designed a very specific way to maximize a layer above that,

there's there's there's there's thresholds, there's gateways on

every layer to make sure that we can maximize the layer above it

and make sure we're minimizing what we are ultimately giving to

employees. So for example, if we choose the wrong match program

or contribution level at the bottoms, 401, K level, you're

going to be giving too much in profit sharing. You're stacking

on top of profit sharing where we instead, we want to put those

dollars towards profit sharing, right? We want to do something

on the layer above that, so, so and so forth. But it gets, it

gets very connected, and it's all very connected to make sure

that we are taking care of the owners.

Right. It sounds really complicated, and

for some folks, especially when it comes to money, type stuff

and personal monies type stuff and their employees, money type

stuff, it can be paralyzing. How do you help folks to simplify

how they understand these different layers and what

purpose they serve?

Yeah, great, great question. And there's a

lot of there's a lot of content out there, there's a lot of

articles and resources, but nothing really scratches the

surface or goes past the surface. So it's all about I

look at this two ways. And you know, business owners care about

or they prioritize two things in their financial world, it's

taxes or growing their business. They put their own personal

retirement in the back burner because they're trying to take

care of this business. So my first question we ask everybody

is, what's the priority? What is your absolute number one goal of

implementing this? Is it you? Is it taxes? You know, it's, is it

for you as a founder, you're getting hit with taxes, and you

need to, you need to get that down quite a bit. Or is it

because you, maybe you live in a state with a mandated 401, K

plan, you have to have a retirement plan in place. Your

employees are bugging me and saying, I want to do that. What

is the priority? Is it you or is it the employees? Or is it or is

it both? And then the second question we ask is, How much is

it do you want to earmark towards your retirement, or this

plan in general. And when we ask those two questions, we go down

the path of design. And design is always first, how do we

design this plan for you? And then the second question is, we

start talking about the investments inside of it,

because there's a lot of things that you can do on the second

hit. So we do one step at a time, understanding what it is

why we're designing this plan for you. And then we go down

that path and say, what do we need to do to take care of these

employees? Right? You walk you. It's a vast world. 401, K,

simple. Ira Sep, Ira, do I do the state mandate? There's too

many options. So the goal is to really narrow it down and go

down one path.

Yeah. So as we're doing that, one of the

things that I've experienced as I've worked with this in the

past is it can be a little bit of a headache to set up. It can

be a little overwhelming, but it can be pretty easy to automate

after you have after you've done so how do you help folks to ease

the ongoing reporting burden and make it as seamless as possible?

Yeah, and I want to kind of take a step back

to explain something why we're going into this. There's two

kinds of plans out there. There's prototype and non

prototype. Prototype is the mass majority of those plans out

there that you can plug into, like, maybe your payroll

provider has a 401, K option. Or they're the the turnkey plans

that you might see that are kind of more on the plug and play

method. Those are boilerplate, right? They produce one adoption

agreement or plan document is they create one document for

your for all their clients, and then you plug your name in, not

as much customization there. Or you go to the non prototype,

which is like, instead of going, let's say, to LegalZoom to

download your legal documents, you're hiring the attorney to

customize that document for your exact situation. And that's

where we come in. Now the Easy, easy button, if you will, is to

go plug into whoever is cross selling you this. 401, K plan,

or this retirement plan. So that could be a number of softwares

that are already using, like your maybe bookkeeping software,

your your your payroll software, things like that. Because

they're easier, they feel easy to plug in. You're like, do they

have all my info? Let's just go. They tend to be a little bit

more expensive a lot of times. But then it's easier to set up,

but then it takes a little bit more effort on your end of the

back end, and it tends to be a little bit more cumbersome. But

the number one thing here is payroll integration. Payroll

integration is extremely important when you are trying,

when you're wearing multiple hats as a business owner. This

is, this is one of the biggest complaints we hear when they

when we get connected with a client who already has a plan in

place. So what I mean by that is, there's ways to connect your

payroll with your 401, K. And what I mean by that there's two

different kinds of integrations. There's 360 degree and there's

180 degree. So 360 is pretty straightforward. If you update

one side one system, it updates the other system and vice versa.

If you for if you only have a 180 degree, you have to update

everything on one of the ends, and then it feeds over to the

other one. So it's one less or two or three less steps that you

have to do every single payroll cycle, which is making sure that

everyone's doing the same contributions that they did

before, making sure that it's been updated if anyone changed

it, making sure the funds are sent over to the 401 K platform.

These are different things that you do with payroll integration,

and that is a big deal for business owners. Is it the most

important piece of the plan? No, I would say the design is more

important, because if the design is incorrect, you're going to be

giving too many, too many dollars to the employees because

the design is incorrect, versus having to pay that a little

extra to have that payroll integration involved. And by the

way, it's 2025 going on to 2026 payroll integration is not is

not unheard of it. Most of these companies are integrating with

other 401, K platforms. So you can say, I have a foreign I have

a payroll company that has a foreign K plan built into it.

However, I want to use this foreign K A lot of them connect.

Most of them connect still. So you're not stuck inside this

small, you know, scope of what's available. Just to get the

payroll integration technology's there, it's not difficult to

find which ones connect with each other, right, right?

So there's a ton of customization in this,

and there's a, you know, a couple right ways, a lot of

wrong ways to do it. If you were to say to kind of that average

person listening today, that average founder when a typical

situation, what would you say are the things that they should

be looking for and asking for in finding the most founder

friendly plan for them?

Yeah, and founder friendly is the, is the

key word there, right? So we get a lot of phone calls from staff,

HR reps, you know, for those who have, you know, larger employee

pools, the HR reps. So when we get those phone calls, a lot of

it's based around, it's shopping, it's price shopping,

it's what kind of plans you have available. Who do you work with?

Things like that. Whereas when it's founder friendly, the

entire design is built around the founder, not the employee,

not the HR rep, not the manager. So when we're having these

conversations, we really try to end up having the conversation

with the owner, not because they're the final word, it's

because we really need to know what they want and what they

need. They're the ones stroking the check for the taxes, not the

HR rep. Right. Right. For larger companies, several 100 to

several 1000, it's a little bit different, because that is the

mass majority. That's usually the priority. But when you have

50 below, you know, under 50, under 100 you can get more

creative and gear it around the ownership and the founders side

of it. So it's, it's all about, you know, we like to know what

is, what is your pain point? What is, where are you hurting?

Are you getting these big tax bills? Like I said, we try to

build these around taxes, not an employee benefit, and we need to

know that. That information.

Yeah, Matt, that's so good. There's this

question that I have ask them. I guess I'm interested to see what

you'd have to say, especially with your perspective here. And

the question is this, what is the biggest secret you wish?

Wasn't a secret at all. What's that one thing you wish

everybody watching or listening today knew?

Not all 401K's are created equal, that

everybody, there's a lot of people, a lot of tax

specialists, financial advisors, think all 401k's are created

equal, and a 401K is a 401k is a 401K, and they can only do the

23,500 and that's the max. And that is far, far, far, far from

the truth. I'll have conversations with the gamut

everybody I just mentioned, and they get wide eyed and say,

really, I didn't know you could do that. We're able to get

millions of dollars. For for companies with under 50

employees into a plan with their owners pre tax contributions.

You're not stuck. You're not stuck at the 23,500. You're

doing, you're doing, implementing all these layers,

and you're able to add these different things, and we're

talking several six digits per founder into the plan that we're

able to get this into so and again, the goal is to get them

the money, not the employees. We take care of them. We make sure

they're taken care of and they're on the right path for

retirement. But this is their baby. This is their business. We

need to take care of the founders.

Yeah, Matt, there's some folks listening

today, and they're like, shoot, that's exactly what I did. I

handed it off to my HR person. We thought we were doing right

by our employees, but I don't know if this is working for me,

and I'm wondering if there's a better way to help everyone out.

How can they reach out to you? How can they find out more about

the work that you and your team do?

Yeah, please head over to 401k.expert. That's

the URL. It takes you to the landing page, where you can kind

of see some case studies in there connects to want someone

on our team to go over and educate. We educate, we don't

sell. We are trying to make sure that everybody knows what's

available is our number one goal. And then deadlines. What

are the deadlines for all this? What can we do for 2025 you can

do stuff for 2025 all the way out until September, or Yeah,

September 15 of 2026 to write off 2025 so reach out and we can

educate you on that.

Despite what the calendar says, 2025 is far

from over. That's great news for folks looking at their potential

tax bills this time of year, Matt, it was really a privilege

and honor having you on. Thanks for being with us. Those of you

who are watching and listening probably don't know this, but

Matt is doing this completely blind, and he's an absolute

champ. He's done a fantastic job. So thank you, Matt.

Appreciate you being here and and for those of you who are

watching and listening, you know your time and attention mean the

world to us. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as

I know I did and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.