Often, we are so involved in reacting to opportunities to invest or give that we don’t stop and consider the most important outcomes we seek to facilitate in people’s lives, including our own. We help our clients create an inventory of all of their capital, not merely financial capital.
Wealth may be denominated in many forms beyond financial capital—family capital, relationship capital, human capital, structural capital, social capital and spiritual capital.
We help our clients recognize these denominations of wealth and expand their focus from the tools of financial wealth toward a broader-based awareness of these different forms of wealth in their lives.
We help create the difference between being a spectator and a participant in the wealth management process. It requires developing a set of capacities different from the technical disciplines of financial planning, risk management, investing, accounting, and tax specialization.
These capacities do not deny the importance of these technical disciplines, but allow our clients to engage them with a purpose that advances the possibility that they live a life that is not only profitable, but prosperous, fulfilling and productive.
We provide the leadership capacity to coalesce the technical disciplines of wealth management in a context relevant for each wealthholder. Relevant context requires discovering the opportunities and strengths, and dangers and weaknesses, as well as the circles of competence and places of greatest potential for each individual.
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It is important to understand how each of your advisors sees you and the other members of your wealth advisory team.
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Do they see you as a customer or a client? If you and your advisors are brought together by isolated transactions, or the time you spend together is dominated by the details of a singular transaction, then you are in the province of a typical vendor/customer exchange that is occurring “in the moment.”
What are your advisors’ time horizons in the capacities in which they work for you?
If you look to your CPA to simply file timely tax returns, his or her time horizon with you will quickly be shortened to one year and your opportunities to benefit from longer range tax planning will suffer.
If you focus on quarterly and annual investment results, your investment advisors will shorten their time horizons to match yours and become much more likely to encourage short-term trading than long-term investing in your investment accounts.
If you only look to your attorney for documents such as a will, trust or partnership agreement, then you will be indirectly coaching your legal counsel not to invest any time thinking dynamically on your behalf in a strategic manner that extends beyond the documents you need at that moment.
If in contrast, your advisors help you construct frameworks and manage processes, then you are benefiting from the depth of professionally intimate relationships that take you strategically “beyond the moment.” These frameworks and processes will contribute to helping you achieve greater clarity, liberty and inspiration to make wise choices that will help you enjoy the benefits and avoid the pitfalls of your wealth.
And finally, how do your advisors behave with your other advisors? Do they act as gatekeepers or facilitators? Who among your advisors provides the interdisciplinary skills and acumen in a leadership role to facilitate the collaboration of your wealth planning and management advisors?
As a strategist, the Family CFO has the capacity to see connections, the ability to focus on the future, to understand it, interpret it and inspire others to help create it. The strategist is able to paint pictures and help bring them to life.
For individuals and families requiring assistance with the considerable demands for increased time, resources and collaborative expertise essential for investable wealth greater than $10 million, we offer the rich benefits of strategy and wealth counsel using our Family CFO Wealth Management Services. We create and manage a proprietary whole-system integration of client-enabling technologies to help our wealth management clients make wise choices that help them enjoy the benefits and avoid the pitfalls of their wealth.
