Calfee

Calfee Financial

Our Philosophy

We provide comprehensive, global financial planning for the high net worth entrepreneur, business owner, families and their successors.

Our Philosophy

We Believe

Every entrepreneur knows what they want: to coordinate and integrate the longer term financial goals that provide growth WITH protection of wealth.

About Us

Cafee Financial® Process

Having worked with entrepreneurs for over 30 years, we understand their unique needs and have tailored our business to help them work towards their goals.

Process

Calfee Financial invests significant time and energy getting to know you and your family, your goals, needs and dreams. We view planning as an ongoing process.

Capture Core Business Value

The real value of your business is what it can provide in cash flow, security, liquidity, and long-term after tax wealth for you and your family.

Achieve Wealth Diversification

To accumulate ever less valuable assets makes little sense to us. To protect against currency debasement and inflation makes more sense to us.

Protect Wealth & Family

Too many ignore the simple question “What if…..?” We embrace it. The ability to transfer risk and diversify to protect your wealth is a primary/core result of our work.

Seeking to Grow & Preserve the Wealth of Entrepreneurs

It is the ability to identify, separate and coordinate the longer term financial, wealth, value goals that provides the growth and protection of wealth.

Compensation for the Head and Staff of
Independent, Charter and Montessori Schools

Typically, board members and organization leaders are uncomfortable with compensation negotiations. Many do not understand, appreciate or embrace the issues, possibilities and ramifications. Everyone differs as to what is ”FAIR.” With the right process, you can engineer successful, lasting and practical compensation and benefits packages for your leadership and staff.

Compensation

Identifying Under Compensation Issues Before Key Staff Leaves

Issue: A prominent K-12 independent day school retained Calfee Financial to develop a compensation package for a head of school critical to the institution’s success. With board approval, the management team agreed to develop comprehensive compensation program to retain the head for years to come.

Our process: We approach compensation issues from a planning perspective. Often we find educational personnel do not examine thoroughly their own financial future. The long-term history of the school, constituent development, importance of faculty, and financial operational constraints led us to determine that more was at stake than a competitive compensation package for the head of school alone. Interviews with the head revealed that he was extraordinarily concerned that faculty and staff compensation had fallen precipitously below competing schools.

The head agreed to development of a comprehensive plan for him only with board approval to develop concurrently a comprehensive faculty and staff compensation program that would track benchmark data and account for inflation and merit. Both the proposed compensation programs had to be financially viable for years of school budgets to come.

Calfee Financial developed the rationale for salary and benefit comparisons with local and national peer schools as well as public school pay scales and benefits (current and in retirement). Part of the process including analyzing the cash flows for the 1,000-student school. We determined that without significant endowment and annual giving increases, there was no way to balance the budget in years to come and compensate in a fair and competitive way. Staff interviews revealed entire aged tiers of faculty were developing plans to resign simply because cost of living, housing, and transportation were beyond their take home pay. We presented these findings to the entire board with comprehensive support for the financials.

Result: The board conducted a retreat to consider these proposals and after adequate discussion, approved the head, faculty and staff packages and programs as recommended by Calfee Financial.