Business owners struggle to separate personal and business expenses

investmentnews.com:

Zach Mersberger’s passion for helping small and medium-sized business owners stems from his own first-hand experience of building out his own firm.

Before his family-owned firm Mersberger Financial Group merged with Merit Financial last year, he took on a leadership role in 2016, a time that, upon reflection, felt like coming into a family, first-generation business.

“When [my brother and I] joined, we were strategically trying to take those steps from a genuinely small business to an enterprise that had a lot of the infrastructure that a larger business would have, and then start to grow the business, both organically and inorganically,” he says.

Going through that process, he admits, allowed them to go through a number of challenges that they had to figure out and solve for. He also realized that while they might not be quite unique because every small business likely runs into the same challenges, his profession as an advisor would help him stand out, prompting him to specialize in helping small to medium-sized business owners.

“We had really good insights on how to successfully solve those challenges. Going through it led to the realization that it would be applicable to a lot of other industries and business owners, and this could be something that could give us credibility, because we’ve encountered these challenges ourselves and we’ve successfully gotten through them.

“It was easy to go out and connect with other business owners,” Mersberger added. “If they were encountering a challenge, it was easy for us to say, ‘Hey, we’ve been there, done that. Here’s how we handle that. We can sit down with you and help you figure this out.’”

Mersberger says some of these challenges consist of cash flow management, succession