Estate Planning as a Career

A Philosophical Shift in the Delivery of Client Professional Services

A Failure to Serve Effectively

The delivery of professional services, especially today, is at a critical crossroads. Clients are too often provided with advice that fails to be best-in-class and fails to integrate the client’s ideas for their best life, lifestyle and legacy. With business succession and family wealth transfer failure rates at nearly 70% world wide, and 3rd generation businesses virtually non-existent, there is clearly a need to change the process in how professional services are delivered to a client.

Research on the subject of business succession, estate and wealth transfer indicates that the failures are not due to governing law or tax systems but rather because our future generations are not being adequately prepared for these inevitable events. In addition, the general professional community has failed to develop an effective way to discover what matters most to their clients prior to offering their solutions.

The professional community has now transitioned into an era of independent specialists working separately on behalf of clients. This is unfortunate.

While specialization is beneficial, it leaves out the bigger picture issues of a client’s dreams and purpose. It is rare in today’s advisory environment to find professionals who collaborate together on the dynamic solutions critical to helping clients achieve the kinds of lives they have always dreamed about having. This results in “piecemeal planning,” which might provide a client with an accurate legal or tax structure, but ignores a greater and more important question: how does this fit together in the client’s life and for the client’s greatest benefit? All too often the opportunity for the best in effecti (more…)