With Greg Rozdeba (Co-Founder & CEO, Dundas Wealth) & Martin Ochwat (COO, Dundas Wealth)
Your corporation is generating cash. But every time you try to pull money out — salary, dividends, anything — it feels like the CRA is waiting with its hand out.
In Episode 8 of Keep What You Build, Martin Ochwat sits down with Greg Rozdeba, Co-Founder & CEO of Dundas Wealth, to map out the full picture. This isn’t a sales pitch — it’s the honest, high-level overview Greg gives business owners who come to him asking one question:
Where does all my profit actually go?
Because in a sense, you are. Your corporation pays tax on its profit. Then you pay personal tax on whatever you move from the corporation into your own hands. Greg’s framing is that the problem isn’t that getting money out is hard — the mechanics are simple. It’s how much you pay depending on which method you use, and in what order.
The episode uses a construction business as the worked example: roughly $500K of profit, an owner at Ontario’s top marginal rate, and a very different outcome depending on how the money comes out.
It’s the most common instinct — and it works, until the passive income rules catch up with you. Once your corporation’s passive investment income climbs past $50,000 a year, your federal small business deduction starts to grind down: $5 of business limit lost for every $1 of passive income above the threshold, fully eliminated at $150,000.
Two details worth getting right, because they’re widely overstated:
Ontario (and New Brunswick) CCPCs keep their provincial small business deduction — only the federal portion is affected. “You lose the deduction entirely” is true federally, not in Ontario.
Capital gains count at the 50% inclusion rate, so a $100K gain adds $50K to the calculation — and gains on active business assets are excluded entirely. Selling your operating company doesn’t grind your SBD.
The two headline methods, and why most owners end up somewhere in the middle:
Deductible to the corporation, creates RRSP room and CPP contributions — but it lands in your hands at your full personal marginal rate.
Paid from after-tax corporate profit, taxed more favourably personally, but no RRSP room and no CPP — a different set of tradeoffs, not a free lunch.
Salary and dividends together, with life insurance layered in — what Greg sees work most often once a business is consistently profitable.
The Capital Dividend Account is the part of this conversation that surprises people. It’s a notional account that tracks certain tax-free amounts flowing through your corporation — and balances in it can be paid out to shareholders as a tax-free capital dividend.
One of the largest contributors to a CDA balance is a corporate-owned life insurance policy: when the death benefit is paid to the corporation, the portion above the policy’s adjusted cost basis credits the CDA — which is how a substantial sum can reach a family tax-free. Greg walks through the mechanics in the episode, and there’s a full deep dive on the CDA here.
When you eventually sell qualifying shares of your business, the LCGE can shelter a significant portion of the gain — one of the biggest single tax events in an owner’s life.
If you’ve lent money into your own company, repaying that loan is a return of your own capital — not new income.
The capital you originally put in can come back out — a route many owners forget they have available.
Not every strategy is about extraction. A large part of the episode covers using corporate dollars efficiently on things you were going to pay for anyway: group benefits, health spending accounts and wellness spending accounts, business investment and the deductions that come with it, key person insurance and funded buy-sell agreements, and permanent policies whose cash value you can borrow against — alongside retirement structures like IRPs and IPPs.
If you’ve never had someone map your corporation’s full picture — how you’re paid, what’s sitting passive, what your CDA balance actually is — that’s exactly the gap this episode is about. Book a free strategy call below and we’ll walk through it with you, honestly, including when the answer is “keep doing what you’re doing.”
This episode is general information, not tax or legal advice. Figures are current as of 2026 and vary by province and situation — confirm your own numbers with your CPA before acting.
Book a free, no-obligation strategy call. We’ll map how you’re currently paying yourself, what’s sitting passive in the corporation, and which of these tools actually apply to your situation — with an honest recommendation, even if it’s to change nothing.
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