Episode 228: How We Help Business Owners Build Tax-Efficient Wealth | A Peek Into Canadian Wealth Secrets

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Are you a high-income Canadian or incorporated business owner wondering why your wealth plan feels more like a mystery than a strategy?

Too often, professionals like you are sold financial products without ever being taught how the pieces of a wealth plan actually fit together. In this episode, Kyle Pearce and Jon Orr pull back the curtain on the origin of Canadian Wealth Secrets, revealing how their education-first approach empowers clients to confidently navigate wealth planning. You’ll hear how their journey as former educators informs a mission to replace blind trust with real understanding—giving you the tools, context, and clarity needed to take control of your financial future. If you’ve ever felt unsure about how to use retained earnings, structure your compensation, or build lasting wealth without sales pressure, this conversation is built for you.

You’ll discover:

• Why holistic planning matters more than picking individual financial products.

• How to think strategically about corporate cash, insurance, and investing with retained earnings.

• What makes their “hardware store” model a safe space for learning and choosing only the tools that truly fit your situation.

Press play now to start building a smarter, tax-efficient wealth plan—without the pressure, confusion, or jargon.

Resources:

• Ready to take a deep dive and learn how to generate personal tax free cash flow from your corporation? Enroll in our FREE masterclass here. 
• Book a Discovery Call with Kyle to review your corporate (or personal) wealth strategy to help you overcome your current struggle and take the next step in your Canadian Wealth Building Journey!
• Discover which phase of wealth creation you are in. Take our quick assessment and you’ll receive a custom wealth-building pathway that matches your phase and learn our CRA compliant tax optimized strategies. Take that assessment here.
• Dig into our Ultimate Investment Book List
• Follow/Connect with us on social media for daily posts and conversations about business, finance, and investment on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook [Kyle’s Profile, Our Business Page], TikTok and TwitterX.

Calling All Canadian Incorporated Business Owners & Investors:

Consider reaching out to Kyle if you’ve been…

• …taking a salary with a goal of stuffing RRSPs;
• …investing inside your corporation without a passive income tax minimization strategy;
• …letting a large sum of liquid assets sit in low interest earning savings accounts;
• …investing corporate dollars into GICs, dividend stocks/funds, or other investments attracting cordporate passive income taxes at greater than 50%; or,
• …wondering whether your current corporate wealth management strategy is optimal for your specific situation.

Building long-term Canadian wealth isn’t about buying more financial products—it’s about mastering the why behind your plan. For business owners and incorporated professionals, true financial freedom in Canada comes from holistic education and strategic financial planning that puts you in control. Whether you’re optimizing your RRSP room, choosing between salary vs. dividends, or exploring corporate wealth planning strategies, this episode unpacks how to align your financial systems with your goals. We dive into tax-efficient investing, capital gains strategies, and the difference between personal vs. corporate tax planning—all tailored to Canadian entrepreneurs. Discover retirement planning tools, legacy planning approaches, and real estate investing strategies in Canada that support a modest lifestyle wealth approach. If you’re serious about wealth building, financial independence, and crafting a Canadian wealth plan that supports your vision for early retirement, this conversation offers a clear roadmap. From financial buckets and insurance to passive income planning and corporate structure optimization, you’ll walk away with practical steps to move from confusion to clarity—while keeping more of your hard-earned money.

Transcript:

If you’re a high income Canadian or an incorporated business owner, chances are you’ve been sold a lot of financial products in the past, but you’ve never actually been taught how your wealth plan actually works. Today’s episode is all about pulling back the curtain on why Canadian wealth secrets actually exists, who we serve and how our education first helps Canadians just like you build smarter, more tax efficient wealth without pressure, fees or product first advice. You’ll learn why holistic planning matters, how strategies like corporate structures will actually fit together in your plan and why we see ourselves as a virtual neighborhood hardware store for wealth building.

Here to teach you the tools, not force you to actually use them. All right there, John, let’s dig in and let’s start unpacking and peeling away at the onion that is Canadian Well Secrets.

Yeah, yeah. No, I think this conversation actually, you know, we decided to talk about this because we were actually just unpacking, you know, strategic planning. I know this episode is going out in January. This is the time of, you know, the new time of year where you’re starting to think about planning, think about next year, think about the year after, and like what are our goals and what do we really want life to look like? And in a way, where we started to talk about is specifically, and I heard an interview with James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, and he said something very interesting, I think that we’ve done very well at over the years, and I didn’t really put my finger on it before the way that he articulated it, which was basically like, when he thinks about new initiatives, when he thinks about new goals for his business or his life, or I guess mostly his business, is that he thinks about…

what do I want my life to look like if I do that new thing? Like what will it look like when I do that new thing? do I, and if I can envision that, if I can kind of let go, if I go down this roadmap in three years, what will my life look like? Like if all of a sudden I’m doing things I don’t wanna do, like maybe this isn’t the right decision for me. But if I’m all of a sudden doing the right, like I’m doing those things three years from now and that’s actually how I wanna live my life, then this is a great decision to be made. And I think,

For us, I think we’ve done that. I think we’ve done that very well in terms of the decisions of our business. You talked about pulling back the curtain. And I think this is, what we’re really doing is pulling back the curtain because I think the decisions we made about how we do what we do here at Canadian Well Secrets, who we talk to, is very much in line with that type of thinking, is that we were first educators. We were math teachers for 20 years each. We always led from helping students understand the behaviors of math and thinking about math differently to make sure that they felt like they owned their own math learning. that thinking of like helping people make decisions for themselves and giving them frameworks to think about is where we decided like this is the type of life we want to do is help people make decisions like that. And when we have areas of expertise, when we have frameworks to share.

then we want to share that to the people who it makes a difference for. So whether that was in math education or whether that’s here in the Canadian Well Secrets because we’ve gained knowledge that you can’t unlearn. When you have these epiphanies where you’re like, my gosh, I didn’t know about that before and now that I know that I can’t unlearn it, you have a natural, and this is our life I think, is that we have a natural inclination to share that information and to be clear on that information. so when we talk about pulling back the curtain about what we do, we do, partly this is where this conversation came from, is that we helped us, we made decisions along the way to get where we are now, mostly because we wanted to envision our life to be people who helped other people make decisions with appropriate frameworks and appropriate information. And that’s why we do what we do, and that’s why we talk about what we talk about here on this podcast.

I love it. you bring me back to the classroom days. You bring me back to that scenario where we weren’t the math teachers that just wanted our students to just kind of memorize a formula and like, you’ll be OK. We did that for a number of years, by the way. We started where most math teachers begin, which is, hey, you know the algorithm. You just kind of memorize it and plug and play and let’s get it done. We call it the rush to the algorithm.

what we were seeing happening around us as you and I were building our businesses and as we were building our real estate portfolio is in the financial services space. We actually were seeing a similar approach happening, right? It was sort of like, just trust me, everything will be okay. That was happening and it’s still happening in many math classrooms where kids are sitting there and it’s sort of like, and we’re not talking about basic, know, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division. We’re talking about like when the math gets more complex and it’s sort of like,

follow the formula, make sure you know the steps and everything will be okay. It’s almost a blind trust. And I saw that and that comparison in the financial services space was very apparent. And the sad reality, just like in the education space, is that oftentimes the people that are guiding you to follow those steps and procedures oftentimes don’t actually understand the formula themselves.

All right, now, and again, this works in both spaces. In the math space, do you really understand the math that you’re trying to teach students? And I don’t mean it from an algorithm perspective, like here’s why this step works and that step works, like conceptually, like why does it make sense to utilize that formula, that algorithm over here? You can see that happening all the time in the financial space where it’s like, just do this and everything will be okay. You have a lot of people that are,

essentially blindly following certain advice and sometimes it works out and I would argue for the average t4 employee person in you know earning a decent income maybe not high net worth individuals but someone somewhere in the middle who’s being just told hey listen like invest in rsp’s and you know the tax free savings account pay down your mortgage and you know everything will

probably be okay and you’re probably right for most people. But the problem is, is when we don’t understand why we’re doing certain things, that makes it really hard. Like that’s where you just start blindly following and you’re not exactly sure whether you’re doing the right thing or not. And for us, John, as you and I were doing our own corporate wealth management planning, we were out in the space and we…

had been interviewing all kinds of different people out there. This is across all the spaces, the accounting space and legal firms, but then also specifically in the financial space to really get to the core of what people were advising, why they were advising in that way. And what we had found when we actually tried to get to the root of it, to get explanations as to why we would do one thing over the other, we weren’t convinced.

that there was any sort of clarity on the firm side of things. So we had a lot of people that were suggesting one thing or another, but they couldn’t quite articulate why it made sense for us given our very specific scenario. And that sent us down a rabbit hole and out came Canadian wealth secrets. As we did that work for ourselves and as we did that work for others in our network, we started to recognize that

high net worth individuals and incorporated business owners with retained earnings. So again, we’re talking about people that have additional capital more so than maybe some others that are in say a T4 income and saving 10 % or 15 % and then the rest is spent. We’re talking about people that are actually like accumulating capital over time and building their net worth. There are some different moves that are going to make sense for different people.

and we went all in on it, right? First solving our own problems through doing so we did a ton of learning and the educators in us made us want to continue sharing that out to the community, just like we used to do in the math ed space and continue to do through one of our businesses over in that space. So that’s kind of why we’re here. This is why we do what we do. And we’ve managed to do this with an education first philosophy with the opportunity for us to be able to help as many people as possible through a pretty, pretty, you know, I would say a unique revenue generation model.

Yeah, yeah, like I think when you say education first, like when we were asking ourselves, like what do you think is our, you know, like we do what we do here, we have two different businesses, actually three different businesses, and when we think about how we generate income in one business versus another, if you are listening to this in life, you know, the day it comes out or the week it comes out, even the month it comes out, a few episodes ago we talked about different flywheels.

and you have an operating flywheel and then you want to use the operating flywheel and siphon off and put that in your say your wealth engine flywheel and in the transition there is actually going to help you become financially free. And then we were thinking about the operating flywheel and we kind of said like, what is our competitive advantage? Like what are we really doing here for people? why do people reach out to us and not someone else? And I think you hit the nail on the head and when we said like,

because I think we come from it with like, we take our own experience because we are trying to talk to people who are just like us, business owners, you know, who have significant retained earnings that we’re not sure exactly what to do with and we help solve problems around structure, planning, safety, liquidity, around using those retained earnings in strategic ways.

And that’s what we’ve tried to do. And I think what our competitive advantage is we take frameworks, we take thinking, take strategies, we take laws, and we try to educate first how to think about those things so that everyone can make appropriate decisions. And really if you said, what are we really doing? I would say we’re an education-based company that helps teams and helps individuals think about their finances in a way that solves some of those problems around.

what they’re doing with that significant retained earnings issue. We just talked with a client of ours who’s a long time client and that’s what he said. He’s like, my problem was the same as yours. Like I have significant retainer because my business did really well but I didn’t know what to do with it. It was just sitting there and then inflation’s eating away at it. What am I going to do with this? We educated him. We talked about what he could be doing with it. And I think that’s sometimes like that’s our main priority. That’s all we try to do.

is to help people. So when we say book a call, you know, that’s all we want to do with folks is to say like, let’s look at your unique situation because everyone’s different. But you do want to solve problems around what you’re doing with your retained earnings. So let’s talk about what you are doing with it with them, and then what you could be doing with them. And then that does lead down the road like you you kind of hinted at this is like we have a income model revenue model. Because it’s like how do these guys make money? They must be making money somewhere, right? What we are

There’s no secret here. We’ve got our flywheels moving. We want to make those flywheels move. But we are coming at it from an education point of view, which does lead to some people taking up some of the options that we have.

Absolutely. really, just to kind of highlight for those, and some of you who are listening have probably done some research around things, but there’s really three ways that you can get revenue generating in the financial services space, right? There’s like one is a fee based model, right? We had explored this, John, like you and I, we have a fee based model in our consulting business over in the education space. So that model, they come on and they essentially decide whether they want to

go with consulting and mentorship over a year, three year period, whatever that might be, and they’re gonna pay a fee for that. The other two options in the financial space, one is based on assets under management. So if you’re actually managing someone’s investments, you’ll actually like that advisor or that firm is going to actually get a percentage of the assets under management, right? Somewhere around one, sometimes all the way up to 2%. That’s typically how that happens.

The third option is through some of the products in the financial services space only are paid out through commissions. And that’s typically insurance-based products. And when we looked at those three models, we were trying to think like, how can we give as much help? How can we educate as best as possible? And then based on the people that we are trying to actually serve, our primary target audience is high net worth.

and incorporated business owners, when we look at those two buckets and we say, what is the most common strategy that they first of all don’t quite understand, and then second of all, could help them along this journey and ultimately a good chunk of them will likely need at some point in the future. So the key is they might need it now, maybe they need it next year, maybe they’re not there yet, but ultimately the more successful they become,

the more logical some of these structures would make sense. And that lands us in the insurance space, right? There’s insurances that people do need. Some people just need disability insurance. That’s going to pay a commission. If you get auto insurance, that pays a commission. Home insurance, all of those things actually pay a commission. So when we look at the people that we’re working with and how so many of them have at least a good chunk in a safety bucket or in a fixed income bucket,

that may be trapped inside their incorporated business, the perfect swap for them is to get into high early cash value insurance. And therefore, we see that if we run our numbers appropriately and we help as many people in those niches as possible, over time, we’re going to be able to generate enough revenue that we can actually be able to run this podcast.

fully fund our YouTube channel to try to share as much knowledge and information to the entire Canadian Well Secrets community as possible and not go bankrupt, right? So that’s the key. Like we need to make sure that we generate enough revenue as possible. Otherwise we can’t do it. So we like to use the hardware store as the analogy of how we run things here. So a lot of people are always wondering, they’re like, I don’t know if I should. Otherwise we can’t do it. ⁓

you know, book a discovery call because like, you know, there’s probably a fee associated or something. Like we like to think of ourselves as a virtual local hardware store, not the big box kind. Like we’re talking about the one down the street. I’ve got a home hardware just up the road here. And when you walk in there into that hardware store, the first thing they do is they try to figure out why are you here? What is your problem? Where and how can we help you overcome that problem? Now,

They don’t go and immediately grab a tool or grab something and just hand it and say, this will fix your problem. Now get out of here, buy it here and move on. They actually will walk you through some of the things that you’re going to need to do in order to fix that thing. Whether it’s a leaky drain, whether it’s a new faucet, you need something around the home. They’re going to like teach that and they’re not going to send you a bill for teaching you those things. That’s exactly how we try to run Canadian Well Secrets. So when people hop on calls with us, our biggest goal on that first call

is getting you at least one big takeaway that you can apply to your situation to optimize your situation. And for some people, that big tool could be a permanent policy, sometimes that’s the case. But in many cases, it’s not. We hear people who are doing things in a poor way, they’re taking too much out of the corporation unnecessarily. That’s like, all right, let’s restructure this. Should you be taking a salary or a dividend based on your situation?

What kind of investor are you? Where are your investments right now? And how do you build up things like your emergency fund and your safety bucket, your fixed income bucket? We try to analyze that entire situation so that you get at least one big takeaway, but ultimately in most cases, it’s a much bigger takeaway than one simply.

Yeah, I think we, because we come at it from the, you know, the hardware store analogy is that, is that we’re here to help you think about these big issues that in the reality is if you’re listening to the podcast, you’re trying to solve some problems and you’re trying to learn as much as you can to probably optimize tax or, or, you know, be strategic about some of your money and investing, or maybe it’s in your businesses. But, but what we’re, you’re, we’re trying to do is.

is bring a call to action around some of these big issues that maybe you haven’t, you’ve overlooked, or some of these issues that maybe you haven’t have strategies for, and then provide you strategies specifically that meets your needs. And like Kyle said, sometimes, you know, because you’re at the hardware store, it makes sense to use that strategy to solve that problem, and that tool is sitting there to you, utilize and buy from the store.

If you walk out of the store without buying the tool, it’s no big deal to us. We’re here to educate and provide. And sometimes that tool makes sense for some people and sometimes it doesn’t. You know, sometimes it doesn’t make sense for people that we’re talking to and we’re gonna provide you your next steps. It’s kinda like you get to the hardware store and you’re like, we don’t have that right here, but down the road is what you really need and you should go over there and get it. And that’s, we’ve done that lots of times. Like we would rather lose clients than let someone use a strategy they want they don’t understand or.

it’s not the right strategy for them. like, so that’s an important component of what we’re trying to do with our hardware store.

100%. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. you know, this is where like oftentimes, you know, we’ll have somebody come in, they maybe they’re a T4 employee, maybe they’re earning a decent amount of income, but they don’t have enough growth investments happening yet in their world. And oftentimes we’re saying, you know, they might come to us saying, Hey, we want to, we want to build up a permanent policy for this for X, Y or Z.

Many times we’re actually pushing them off from that idea if they haven’t taken advantage of other opportunities like, for example, a high T4 earner who isn’t utilizing the RRSP because maybe they got some bad advice from someone that, you know, the RRSP is like a big scam, right? And it’s like, no, it’s not a big scam. It’s right for some people, but it may not be right for you depending on a number of things, right? If your first big investment you want is going to be real estate, maybe the RRSP isn’t a good move for you, but

your high income earner and you don’t need all of those dollars for your own lifestyle, then oftentimes it is gonna be a good move. But it really comes down to the specific situation. So what we wanna try to provide for people and continue to provide for them is this opportunity for them to get a sense of where they are and to really unpack how they might move forward confidently. And that’s the number one goal here. And something that we’ve found, we’ve worked with some people

And some, I’m not going to call them clients because they haven’t actually implemented any strategies through Canadian Well Secrets, but I still call them clients because they continue to book calls every so often for check-ins and we’ll have these check-in calls, see how they’re doing along their journey. And a lot of times people would say, and they go like, well, why would you do that? If they’re not actually earning your firm any money, why would you do it? Well, I’m going to tell you one big reason why we do it. First of all, we enjoy doing it. We love the educating.

But then secondly, some of those individuals who are not official clients of Canadian Well Secrets, they haven’t set up any of these structures or strategies that we’ve gone through with many of our other clients, they end up sending us some of the greatest referrals to our business, which is really important.

Well, one of the things that we think about the go back to the flywheel analogy of like what really happens here in the background is that the more people that we can help, whether we earn, know, they buy it from our hardware store or not, the more knowledge we gain, the more frameworks we can wrap our minds around because like we said, every unique situation is different. So when we meet with people,

we learn about their situation, we learn about the strategies that they could be putting into place that helps us get better at recommending ideas to the next individual that comes along the way, which means like, also allows us to rethink about those strategies, analyze them so that we can share them back to you here on the podcast. And then that in turn allows us to share those stories and the most stories all of a sudden allows us to meet more people.

And the flywheel moves, right? The flywheel moves because we meet people, we share their stories, we help them, we share their stories back to the podcast and it moves. some of those people will buy from the hardware store when it makes sense, only when it makes sense. And we hope they buy from us because we want to help them. And if they don’t buy from us, they’re not a big deal because we know that the flywheel will keep moving because we’re learning and we’re committed to that learning because we’re educators first. And that’s the big thing about how I think what we’re doing, what we’re doing here at Canadian Wheel Secrets.

100%. Absolutely. you know, ultimately at the end of the day, what we’re trying to do is we’re actually trying to help you build a holistic wealth plan. Ultimately, it’s about understanding. Like you have to understand your own situation. You have to understand the tax rules and how different buckets work. And that’s what we’re there to do and to help you do along the way. Now, while as of recording this episode, we have not yet introduced

the opportunity for us to manage assets. We have had that request from so many people out in the Canadian Well Secrets audience. Now, the reality is I wanna, you know, make sure this is nice and clear for everyone that it is cheaper for you to manage your own assets, specifically your assets that are in the open market, right? Like if you’re out there, it’s cheaper for you to go and find low M-E-R-E-T-S and invest them. However,

there’s a lot of people out there that don’t want to take on that responsibility and they want someone else to do it. So we are heavily looking into adding that as an opportunity for our owners, our business owners, because the reality is, even though one of our greatest structures that we utilize is building in corporate owned life insurance policies with plans for leverage and all kinds of wonderful things around that.

That’s a huge, huge part of everyone’s plan. The reality is oftentimes they have much larger buckets of other investments. They might have investment portfolios that can be, you know, five million, sometimes 10 million. They can be quite large and they don’t necessarily want to be focusing on that themselves. They don’t feel good about a set and forget. And they currently may have it under management somewhere else. And they’re looking for us to take over for them. So that is something.

We are heavily looking into during 2026. Our only hesitation currently is that we want to make sure that we can provide the best service possible in all of the services that we actually provide. So if we are going to take assets under management, we are going to make sure that it is going to be the right move for you and for our firm so that everybody is winning in that response or in that world. So.

What will happen if you hop on a discovery call over with Canadian wealth secrets? Well, first of all, we’re going to run through your entire situation. We’re going to look at your personal side, your corporate side. We’re going to try to figure out your investment structure, not just the returns, but actually what you’re invested in and really try to determine, you know, what sort of mix do you have currently? So how much do you have in fixed income buckets? How much do you have in equity or growth like buckets? We’re to talk about corporate cashflow optimization.

How are you currently paying yourself? Is it a salary? Is it a dividend? Is it a mix of both? Do you currently have insurances, the right insurances in place? So before we talk about corporate owned actual whole life insurance, we’re gonna talk about, do you have enough term insurance in the meantime? Do you have a disability policy in place in case you, if you are the key person in your business, can no longer work or critical illness or maybe a combination of both? There’s some different strategies and structures that we can look at there.

Then we’re going to look at legacy and estate planning. Are you set up appropriately? Do you want to be passing along this as a legacy to others in your household? And if so, there’s usually a strategy that’s going to allow you to get similar returns to whatever you’re doing now, potentially more depending on the optimizations we do without losing to tax drag while you’re living, without losing cashflow while you’re living, and of course without losing money to tax.

down the road. There will be tax to be paid, less of that tax will be going directly to the CRA and having the right structures in place can ensure that it’s minimized and that actually more money is left to the estate otherwise. And then finally, how are you going to take your retirement income? How do we create a distribution strategy that isn’t planned or isn’t revolving around the idea of not running out of money and not running out of money alone?

So what that means is if you pass away and you’re 95 and you have $10 in the bank account, it was a success. Like we’re talking about how do you maintain net worth while still having the retirement lifestyle that you’re after so that you don’t see that money, that pile that you’ve been growing your entire life slowly depleting or quickly depleting depending on the market conditions while you are in retirement. So what I’m hoping you get out of this episode is that we hear our education first.

that we are not fee-based, we do earn most of our revenue in this side of our business through commissions on commission products through insurance. So that’s important for you to know. So when you meet with us, we’re gonna be looking at your scenario and we’re gonna be really just trying to determine how can you optimize your situation. That may or may not mean.

that you have an opportunity to take advantage of any of those structures that we’re after. But we are gonna look at it and we’re gonna try to help you figure out what’s gonna be best for you based on the current rules that we’re living in through the Income Tax Act and through the CRA. And then ultimately at the end of the day, we’re here to help guide you along the way. You need a secondary opinion on something, not advice, but opinion. If you have questions about how you’re structured corporately or not,

And if there’s any other wealth building questions that you might have along the way, Smith maneuver, restructuring your mortgage, anything like that, we’re here to help give you some guidance. Again, we’re not gonna call it advice, but to ensure that you are educated on how you can best position yourself for wealth building, tax efficiency, and of course, legacy and estate planning down the road.

So with that, if you are curious and you want to dig down and want to go deep with us, head on over to CanadianWealthSecrets.com forward slash pathways. And you can take our short assessment that will give you a sense as to what, what of the four stages you are currently successful in and which stage you should be focusing your attention into. And of course, if you want to reach out and book a call with us, you can do so at any time over at CanadianWealthSecrets.com forward slash discovery.

And finally, if you are an incorporated business owner and you have not checked out our free masterclass, you should head over to canadianwealthsecrets.com forward slash masterclass and get yourself signed up today. And just as a reminder, this is not advice. This is for education purposes only. Do not construe any of this information as legal tax investment or financial advice and

Kyle Pierce is a life licensed insurance accident and sickness insurance agent licensed in many provinces across Canada and is also a security licensed individual.

Canadian Wealth Secrets is an informative podcast that digs into the intricacies of building a robust portfolio, maximizing dividend returns, the nuances of real estate investment, and the complexities of business finance, while offering expert advice on wealth management, navigating capital gains tax, and understanding the role of financial institutions in personal finance.

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