CPA Daniel Honan recommends a parent LLC taxed as an S-corp with separate child LLCs for each location. This structure protects each site from the other's lawsuits, lets you give equity to local managers without diluting the whole business, and means only the parent files taxes. You need separate bank accounts, insurance, and payroll for each location to make it work.
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In this video, I'm going to show you the most common way to structure your multi-location painting business. If you clicked on this video, you're probably wondering these 3 questions. Number 1, should I keep everything under one company or should I have each location have its own LLC? Number 2, how do I protect my first location if the second location gets sued, has payroll issues, or runs into financial problems? And number 3, how do I structure all of this in a way that keeps taxes cleaner without creating a giant administrative mess? If those are the questions on your mind, this video is for you. If we haven't met, I'm Daniel Honan, CPA, former painting business owner. Over the past 10 years, I've worked with over 500 painting business owners across the country, helping them know their numbers and save big in tax and build stronger businesses. And what I've seen is this: a lot of painting business owners think that they have a tax problem, but really they have a structure problem. And when the structure is wrong, Expansion gets messy fast. You open a second market, you hire a local team, and maybe you give a general manager a piece of the upside. Before long, you've got confusion around ownership, payroll, taxes, liability, and who owns what. So let's walk through one of the most common and practical ways to structure a multi-location painting business. The structure I most often like for a multi-location painting business is this: you have a parent holding company. This parent A holding company is an LLC taxed as an S-corp. And underneath this, you have your locations. These are child LLCs. So the parent LLC owns these child LLCs. All the profits flow up into the parent LLC, which is good because then you only have one tax return. However, you still have the separation between the different companies. So each LLC is its own LLC, its own business. And if one company is sued, then it doesn't impact the other LLC, so you have that legal protection. So you get the benefit of both worlds. You're getting the legal protection for the LLC since they're in separate LLCs, and then you're getting a streamlined tax situation because you only have one tax return at the parent level. So you have your tax return up here, and you have one S-corp, which is the parent LLC, and all the other LLCs don't have tax returns. They're disregarded entities, and they flow up into the parent LLC, who is the S-corp. Why do this? First, liability protection. If one location gets sued, has a bad contract dispute, or a workers' comp issue, or some other legal problem, you've created separation between that location and others. Now, that doesn't mean you're bulletproof. You still need good contracts, insurance, clean books, and, and you need to actually respect the entity structure. But separate LLCs help contain the mess. Second, equity flexibility. Let's say you bring in a killer local general manager in one of the locations and you, and you give them some equity. This structure gives you more options. Instead of giving them equity of the whole company, you may be able to give them equity or economic interest tied to only that specific location they're running while protecting the value of the parent company and the other locations. Locations. So that's a big deal because a lot of owners expand, bring in local operators, and accidentally give away a piece of everything when they really only meant to incentivize one market. Third, tax simplicity. This is where people get— often get confused. When structured correctly, the child LLCs can be disregarded entities with the parent company serving as the main taxpaying entity, taxed as an S corp. What that can mean in practice is one S corp tax return, one W-2 for the owner from the parent company, and one cleaner flow of profit up to the parent. That is usually much cleaner than having a bunch of separate businesses with separate tax returns, separate payrolls, and separate admin all over the place. So from a high level, this structure can give you better liability separation, cleaner ownership planning, and less tax and admin clutter. Quick pause. If you enjoy this content, check out my book Profitable Painter. It's written specifically for painting business owners who want to scale profitably, understand their numbers, avoid profit leaks, and make smarter decisions with more confidence. Inside, I walk you through frameworks like gaps and scale so you can understand what's holding your business back and what to do next. You can grab it for free by clicking the link in the description below. Now, just because this is a strong structure doesn't mean it's automatically the right one in every situation. There are a few things you still need to think through. Number 1, not every second location needs its own entity right away. If you're just testing a nearby market, still running it yourself, sharing the same crew base, and it's really more of an extension of your first location than a truly separate branch, you may not need a separate LLC on day one. But once it starts to look like a real location with its own team, local leader, customer base, and operational risk, that's usually when the conversation gets more serious. Number 2, legal protection only works if you act like the entities are actually separate. That means separate books, separate bank account, clean documentation, clear ownership, proper contracts, proper insurance, no sloppy commingling of money. If you treat everything like one big pile of cash, the structure starts to lose its value. And number 3, expanding into another city or state can create tax and compliance issues even if your entity chart looks Great on paper, you may need to think through state registrations, payroll accounts, workers' comp, local licensing, sales tax rules where applicable, state requirements, and nexus issues if you're operating across state lines. This is where owners get themselves into trouble. They focus only on the LLC setup, but then they forget that expansion also creates compliance obligations. And number 4, keep real estate and active operating companies separate. If you own a shop, warehouse, or commercial building, that often deserves a different conversation and usually should not be just stuffed inside the operating company structure without careful planning. Point is this, your tax structure and your legal structure should work together. You don't want a structure that saves a little tax but creates a liability nightmare. And you don't want a structure that looks legally clean but creates unnecessary tax returns, payroll headaches, and admin burden. The best structure is usually the one that gives you the right balance of protection, clarity, tax efficiency, and scalability. So to summarize, if you're building a multi-location painting business, one of the most common ways to structure it is with a parent holding company taxed as an S corp with separate child LLCs for each location underneath it. That can help you protect one location from the risks of another, create cleaner options for local ownership or equity incentives, and simplify taxes and admin by centralizing the tax structure. But getting this right is super important for both taxes and legal protection, This is not something I'd recommend guessing on. The right answer depends on your state, your ownership goals, and how separate the locations really are and where you're trying to go long term. So get help. At Profitable Painter CPA, this is something we've helped many companies think through as they grow, expand, and try to protect what they're building. In the next video, I cover how to structure your personal and business assets to maximize tax and legal protection. Click the screen now to watch.
