The Salient Way

The purpose of our first meeting is to have an open discussion around one key question: What's your ideal scenario for your family's wealth?  We seek to understand your vision, your family values and all the pieces of your family wealth.  This lays the groundwork to determine whether there's a mutual fit for us to move to the next step. 

Just as you're interviewing us, we're evaluating whether there's a strong mutual fit for a potential long-term relationship.  Instead of being all things to all people, we're a few things to a few people.  We work on an exclusive basis, limiting the number of new families we work with each year, and always based on confidential introductions from existing clients. 

Once we've mutually agreed to work together, we'll convene to learn everything we can about your family and your affairs.  Perhaps for the first time, you'll enjoy a relaxed environment in which an interested third party captures all the information necessary to understand your total picture.  This includes your family dynamics, all of the legal documents and financial or investment strategies you've already implemented and the complete make up of your assets. 

When you have one source that understands every facet of your wealth, you gain an advisor who can walk in your shoes, creating solutions you would create if planning was your life's work. 

We believe effective planning is a collaborative process.  In addition, we believe that self-made people prefer to be a member of their own planning team as opposed to the recipient of static recommendations. 

We sit on the same side of the table with you to test solutions and sketch out pictures, allowing you to succinctly evaluate both your challenges and your opportunities.  Perhaps for the first time, conversations have a planning orientation, not a product orientation.  As a result, your unique vision of your family wealth starts to take shape on paper. 

Due to the thorough and collaborative nature of our process up to this point, your final plan feels refreshingly simple and obvious.  You completely understand the strategies and their potential outcomes.  

As a result, you have a pervasive sense of confidence and control about your decisions. The confusion or hesitation you may have felt in previous planning experiences is noticeably absent.

Once you make a planning decision, there are numerous details that can stall or derail the process behind the scenes.  We build relationship with your existing longstanding advisors and help ensure everyone understands your vision.  We create a written Implementation Agenda with clear tasks for each professional advisor involved.  Then we take ownership for managing each detail to fruition, and confirming its accurate execution, before checking it off the list.  

You'll find that your existing advisor welcomes our participation because they quickly see we have your best interest in mind.  

While much of the industry is focused on a one-time cycle of interaction with a family, our process is rooted in ongoing contact, consistent attention to your affairs and a multi-generational focus.  We meet multiple times throughout each year and are typically the first point of contact for any financial decision. 

For many families, we work with surviving spouses, or help adult children navigate the challenges of managing the family wealth.  This guides the preservation of your wealth and your wealth vision into future generations.  In addition, our firm is built to last as we mentor new generations of advisors to ensure continuity beyond all of our lifetimes. 

Lastly, we commit to growing our firm in a careful, intentional manner through confidential introductions from existing client families to their peers.  We engage a limited number of new families each year, and this exclusivity ensures our firm stays focused on high level solutions to high level problems.  In doing so, we commit to always having the time and intellectual capital to pay attention when you need us most.