A business forecast shows €90,000 left after other expenses, before paying for the founder’s work. The founder sees a profitable company. A buyer sees a job that still needs someone to do it.
Both are looking at the same numbers. The difference is whether the founder’s work has been given a price.
That is an easy omission to make when you own a business. You are the person building the forecast, doing the work and deciding what to pay yourself. Your living costs can quietly become the measure of what your labour costs the company. But being able to live on a small salary does not make the job cheap to replace.
Put a price on the person who does everything
Take a fictional service business operating through a Dutch BV, a private limited company. Its annual forecast has €210,000 in revenue and €120,000 in other operating costs. Both figures exclude VAT. The costs include everything in this simplified business except the founder’s pay and related employment costs. That leaves €90,000 before paying the founder and before corporate tax.
The founder delivers the service, wins clients and runs the business. Suppose hiring someone capable of taking over that work would cost €85,000 a year in total. This is an illustrative estimate including gross salary and other employer costs, not a statutory salary requirement or a claim about typical pay.
After allowing for that replacement cost, only €5,000 remains before corporate tax.
The business has not suddenly become a failure. It can support a substantial job. But the forecast does not show €90,000 of profit on top of properly priced work. Most of that apparent surplus is the budget for the work itself.
This is a planning exercise, not an extra deduction you can invent in the tax return. In an actual BV’s accounts, the director’s salary is already a business expense. If your profit and loss statement already includes owner pay, do not subtract a whole replacement salary again. To test the economics, replace the recorded owner employment cost with a realistic estimate rather than counting both.
That distinction matters when a founder says the company could pay a large dividend. Money left before paying for the work is not the same as profit left after it. A dividend rewards ownership; a salary pays for a job. Owning both sides of that arrangement can blur the boundary.
The Dutch salary rule makes that boundary harder to ignore
In the Netherlands, a substantial shareholder who works for their company is subject to the customary salary rule. A director-major shareholder is often called a DGA. The broad purpose is to require pay that fits the level and duration of the work, even when the person doing it also controls the company.
For 2026, the statutory reference amount is €58,000. The starting point is the highest of that amount, the salary for the most comparable employment and the pay of the highest-paid employee in the company or a connected company. A lower comparable salary can support a lower amount when properly substantiated. The Dutch DGA salary guide covers those rules in more detail.
The €58,000 figure is not a ready-made price for your labour in a business forecast. Nor is the €85,000 replacement cost in our example a payroll calculation. One is a tax reference amount; the other is an estimate of the company’s total cost of replacing a person. Mixing them would undo the point of the exercise.
You also cannot sidestep the Dutch rule simply by saying you need less money at home. An owner’s modest personal budget tells you little about the value of the work. For a Dutch BV, I can help assess the salary treatment through tax advice for businesses. The commercial question about replacement cost still needs its own answer.
Sometimes that answer is uncomfortable: there is no single employee who could replace the founder. Delivery could go to a specialist, sales to someone else, and management would remain. The useful figure is then the cost of covering those responsibilities, with realistic working hours, rather than the salary of a convenient job title.
What are you trying to build?
There is nothing wrong with owning a company that gives you satisfying, well-paid work. You may prefer it to a salaried role. Control over clients, hours and decisions has value too.
The problem begins when income from that work is mistaken for a return that the business could generate without you. The €90,000 forecast looks very different if you want to reduce your hours, hire a replacement or sell. Paying someone else to do the work exposes a cost that your own willingness to keep going can conceal.
I would make that cost visible before committing to a bigger office or an expensive expansion. If almost all the surplus pays for the founder’s job, growth needs to create enough additional margin to pay for additional people. More revenue alone will not do it.
A useful test for your next forecast is to write your own name beside the work you currently do, then estimate what it would cost to remove that name. The amount left afterwards tells you much more about the business you own than the amount left before you pay yourself.