Premium Services Corporation
Business advisory
Advisory is ongoing and accountable: someone who knows your numbers and is still there when the decision plays out, rather than a report handed over at the end of a project. It covers structure, pricing, hiring, growth and the decisions in between.
What it actually means
Most owners have somebody for the tax and somebody for the contracts, and nobody at all for everything in between. Whether to hire. Whether the prices still work. Whether to take the contract that doubles revenue and costs money to deliver. Those are the decisions that set the shape of a business, and they are usually made alone at ten at night.
Advisory is the other kind of help, and it is not a report and not a framework. It is somebody who already knows your numbers, who you can put a decision to before you make it, and who is still there afterwards when it goes one way or the other. PSC has been doing this since 1996, and the advisory sits inside the ongoing relationship rather than beside it.
The point is not the advice. It is that somebody is still there when the decision plays out.
What gets looked at
- Structure
- What the business is, and how it is taxed. Two separate decisions, usually made once at the beginning in an afternoon and never looked at again.
- Pricing and margin
- Not the headline margin but the one underneath it: which work actually pays, and which is being carried by the rest without anybody noticing.
- Hiring
- What the person costs all in, what the business has to do to carry it, and what happens to cash in the months before the hire pays for itself.
- Growth and what funds it
- Growth is paid for before it pays. Whether it comes out of the business, out of a lender or out of somebody buying in changes what you owe and to whom.
- Transition
- Selling, closing, buying, or handing on to family. What a buyer will pay is shaped by what the books can prove, and that is not fixable in the month before a sale.
How an engagement runs
Understand
The business as it actually is: how it makes money, what has been tried, what worked, and what you are trying to get to. No assumptions and no template answer.
Assess
The numbers, the structure and the way the work runs, read together. What is working, what is not, and what has never been looked at.
Decide
A plan with priorities and actual decisions in it, rather than a document. What happens first, what waits, and what would have to be true to change the order.
Stay in it
The part that makes it advisory rather than consulting. Regular check-ins, available when a decision arrives between them, and the plan adjusted when the business does something the plan did not expect.
Who this is for
Size is not the filter. One-person businesses and ordinary households are ordinary work here, and if something genuinely is not a fit you will be told that on the first call rather than sold something anyway.
- Before you open
- Getting the structure, the books and the payroll right at the start is far cheaper than unpicking them two years in.
- The first years
- Operating, surviving, and no plan beyond the next month. The question is what a sustainable version of this looks like.
- Growing and not keeping it
- Revenue is up and less of it is staying. That is usually a pricing question or a structure question wearing a different hat.
- More than one entity
- Several companies, and a picture that only makes sense when somebody looks at them together.
- On the way out
- Selling, retiring or handing it to family, and wanting the business to be worth what you think it is when somebody finally looks.
The five questions people actually ask
- What does a business advisor actually do?The job described plainly, including the parts it does not cover.
- When should I bring in an advisor?The four moments where it is worth most, and why they all arrive earlier than people expect.
- How is business advisory different from consulting?One ends with a document. The other is still there a year later.
- How do I decide what structure my business should be?What each one is, what the choice turns on, and why it is not settled once.
- Which industries does PSC advise?The trades and sectors, and what actually changes between them.
Also asked
Can you set up my LLC?
Filing the paperwork is the easy part. Choosing what to form and how it will be taxed is the part worth thinking about, because changing it later means unpicking bank accounts, payroll and sometimes a tax identification number. Start that conversation before the filing rather than after it.
Do I need an EIN?
If there are employees or a registered entity, generally yes, and a bank will usually want one before it opens the account. What catches people out is that some changes — a change of entity type in particular — call for a new number rather than carrying the old one across. Ask before the change is filed, not after.
What is the Rhode Island annual report?
A short filing that every registered entity in Rhode Island makes once a year, inside a fixed window early in the year, to stay in good standing. Miss it and a penalty follows; keep missing it and the entity's standing is at risk. It is one of the easiest things to forget and one of the simplest to put right — worth checking whether yours is done.
Do I owe state tax if the business made nothing?
In Rhode Island a registered entity generally owes a minimum amount at state level whether or not it earned anything, which is why a company someone stopped using but never closed keeps accruing quietly. If you have a dormant entity sitting out there, mention it — that is usually worth cleaning up rather than leaving alone.
I'm hiring my first employee.
There are more registrations behind a first hire than people expect: federal and state withholding accounts, unemployment, workers' compensation, new-hire reporting, and in Rhode Island an employee-funded disability deduction that has to be in place from the first cheque. Setting it up before payday is far less work than correcting it after.
I'm buying a business.
The numbers you are shown and the numbers that exist are not always the same, and how the deal is structured changes what you inherit — debts, prior filings and payroll history arrive with the name on the door. Get someone into it before anything is signed.
I want to sell the business.
What a buyer will pay is shaped by what your books can actually prove, and that is not something anyone can fix in the month before a sale. If a sale or a handover to family is anywhere on the horizon, the preparation starts well before it, while the years a buyer will look at are still being recorded.
I'm closing the business.
There is an order to it — final returns, the last payroll and its filings, cancelling the registrations, then formally dissolving — and the last step is the one people skip. That is how someone ends up owing state fees on a company that stopped trading years earlier. Call before you stop, not after.
Bring the decision you are actually facing.
The office answers within one business day.