Do you want to understand your
HNW clients’ deepest concerns?
Would you like to help
them to address those concerns?
Learn how with the
Family Wealth Ways Lab for Advisors
I have never, ever met an advisor to HNW clients who didn’t have horror stories about families’ assets being destroyed by poor planning, bad decisions, and internal conflicts.
Do you want to help your HNW clients to avoid these situations?
If you said, “Ah...not really,” I understand.
You may feel you have no role to play. Or you may view getting involved with those situations as a horror story of its own.
Even if you take a holistic approach to your clients, you may see wealth literacy, family governance, and other practices that preserve family wealth as too complex, costly, and unnecessary.
In fact, many of your clients feel the same way.
So, the question becomes...
Why bother?
Here’s why:
Providing some type and level of family wealth services can help you to:
- Broaden and deepen your client relationships
- Retain AUM upon intergenerational transfers of wealth
- Provide on-ramps to trust and estate services
- Differentiate your firm in the marketplace
But what type and level of services could move you toward those goals?
Before we turn to that question, consider this:
PwC’s 2022 High Net Worth Investor Survey found that 66% of clients want increased personalization in their wealth advisory relationships.
However, only 1 in 5 clients prefer in-person meetings for advisory interactions. The remainder – 80% – prefer phone calls, video meetings, mobile apps, or emails.
Yes, you read that right.
Two out of three clients want more personalization, but only one in five prefer in-person interactions.
So, how do you make your services more personalized as clients move online?
Let’s get personal
Personalization in wealth management now goes beyond discussing a client’s risk appetite and target retirement date. It goes beyond trust and estate planning and beyond socializing with clients.
It goes to the heart of your relationship with clients and to their deepest concerns.
Those concerns focus on their children and other family members.
How do we know?
Well, there are those horror stories that I mentioned.
And there is this observation that a seasoned trust officer shared with me:
“The thing that keeps truly wealthy people awake at night
isn’t last quarter’s sales or next quarter’s returns.
It’s nagging questions about their children.”
Questions like:
How can I calibrate the impact of my wealth on my children?
How can I prepare my heirs for their future responsibilities?
How can I help them build happy, productive lives?
Advisors who formally address these questions tend to do so only for their ultra HNW clients.
Yet HNW clients face the same wealth-destroying family issues: poor communication, financial secrecy, sibling rivalry, unrealistic expectations, warring factions, and lack of wealth literacy.
Under such circumstances, even the sale of a jointly owned vacation home or the prospect of a pre-nup can destabilize a client’s family.
All of this translates to opportunities for you to be of greater service to your clients within the scope of your practice.
The Family Wealth Ways Lab for Advisors will enable you
to learn which type and what level of family wealth practices
your HNW clients want and how you might deliver them as a service.
What is the Lab for Advisors?
The FWW Lab for Advisors is a structured engagement - a project that guides you and your team through a classic market-offering development process.
The market offering – if it emerges – will be a service that represents genuine opportunities for you and your clients.
This is called a lab because it combines internal research and client feedback in a stage-gated approach that enables you to:
- Assess your firm’s knowledge of and interest in family wealth practices
- Discover your HNW clients’ pain points and their relative desire for specific practices
- Gauge the match between your interests and your client’s needs
- Ascertain your firm’s access to relevant in-house and external resources
- Define the business case and a starting point for a service
- Develop and test a market offering based on the outcomes of this process
The Lab for Advisors constitutes a low-risk process of gathering and analyzing the data you need to decide which – if any – practices could work for you and your clients.
This Lab also examines options for delivery and, if it makes sense, aims to stand up a market offering within 120 to 180 days.
Benefits to your firm
The Family Wealth Ways Lab for Advisors:
- Engages key members of your firm in an exciting and profitable area of wealth management
- Provides vital information regarding your clients and their concerns
- Takes a disciplined approach to services that can be hard to nail down
- Prompts you to think in new ways about your client relationships
- Minimizes your risk by providing stop-or-continue decision and progress-payment points
Who this Lab Is (and Is Not) for
As a new experience, the FWW Lab caters to Innovators and Early Adopters as defined by the technology/product adoption curve developed by Everett Rogers in the early 1960s.
Advisors in those segments continually seek a competitive edge and market advantage. They also aim to achieve continual professional and personal growth.
If you are not something of a pioneer, if you are tied up in red tape, or if you are totally satisfied with your current client relationships, then the FWW Lab will not be for you. It is not for later adopters (at least at this point) or for firms that tend to be bureaucratic, slow-moving, or operated only on returns as opposed to relationships.
This is for advisors who see the challenges that significant assets can create for HNW families as an opportunity to be of service while creating new value for their firms – for a very reasonable, low-risk investment.
Lab for Advisors FAQs
Who is eligible to engage in the lab?
The Lab for Advisors is open only to managers, marketers, and professionals at wealth and investment management firms, trust companies, private banks, single- and multi-family offices, TAMPS, and accounting and law firms.
Some exceptions can be made, for example for automobile or franchise dealer-networks or certain associations. However, this offering is not available to personnel at other types of companies or to individuals or families.
When and how do you get paid?
You pay nothing unless you engage in the Lab. Exploratory calls or meetings are complimentary. If you green-light the lab, you pay for half of the first phase upfront and the remaining balance at the end of that phase. This arrangement continues through each stage-gated phase of the Lab.
If you do not continue to the next phase, based on the results of the previous phase(s) or for any other reason, you own nothing further.
How do I schedule my 30-minute
exploratory call or meeting?
Simply go to my calendar here and book a time.
Who am I?
You can learn more about me, Tom Gorman, at familywealthways.com and you can peep the books I’ve written at my Amazon Author Page. Check those sources, and you’ll readily see that my professional life is (literally) an open book.
Let’s talk
To connect and learn more, schedule a complementary, zero sales-pressure, 30-minute exploratory phone call or Zoom meeting with me here.
During that session, you can ask me your questions and tell me a bit about your practice. Then we can determine whether there is a good fit and what steps we might consider.
Thank you for your interest in the Family Wealth Ways
Lab for Advisors!
