Brenna Saunders is a partner and wealth manager on Creative Planning's ultra-affluent team, and the job sees her working with some of the highest net worth families at the fast-growing firm.
As Saunders tells ThinkAdvisor, the work is both gratifying and challenging on a day-to-day basis, and she appreciates the fact that serving this client segment means her work as an advisor has a broader impact in her local Kansas City region and across the U.S.
Working with the UHNW group, she explains, means helping some of the most influential and affluent families in the country decide how they are going to put their wealth to work for the benefit of charities and communities. It also means helping families discover and define their own beliefs about wealth — how it should be put to work and how it should be passed down through the generations.
Reflecting the complexity of the job, Saunders' team includes in-house CPAs, estate planning attorneys, tax attorneys, money managers and the firm's chief investment officer. After preparing comprehensive wealth management plans for her clients, she assists them in implementing their plans and continues to work with them to update their approach as their financial situations change.
As Saunders explains in the Q&A dialog below, the world of UHNW advice is undergoing a steady evolution, and supporting ultra-wealthy clients involves pushing for innovation across investment management, business ownership planning, estate planning, next-gen education, risk management and more.
Ultimately, Saunders says, it's a great time to be a wealth advisor, especially one working in this client niche, but the job of serving clients and helping to grow the business always keeps her on her toes.
THINKADVISOR: How did you come to work with the UHNW client segment? Is this something you've always done or a more recent development?
Brenna Saunders: I've been in the advisory industry since 2000, but my client-facing career started here at Creative Planning about 16 years ago. I definitely got thrown into the deep end, because I was starting as a client-facing advisor right in December of 2007 as everything was falling apart. It was a baptism by fire, for sure.
I did start working with the UHNW group pretty early on. I started with your typical millionaire-next-door clients, but within a year or so, our CEO, Peter Mallouk, asked me to join his team, which focuses on serving our ultra-affluent clients. The team has evolved over time as the firm has grown, but the core approach remains the same.
One interesting trend has been to see how potential clients with substantial wealth are gaining more confidence in working with us as we have scaled up over time. Today, there is a lot more visibility into the firm. UHNW clients have heard of us, and that means we can attract more and more great clients.
About how many UHNW clients do you serve, and what goes into defining this client segment at Creative Planning?
So, to start with, we don't necessarily have a bright-line distinction between ultra wealthy and high net worth, but roughly speaking, within the ultra affluent team we are supporting several thousand clients. They tend to have between $10 million and $25 million in terms of net worth.
It's interesting because sometimes, on the lower end of that scale, the client's situation can still be relatively straightforward, meaning they might not need the specialty support, but that's not always the case. In other cases, their wealth is coming along with a lot of complexity and that means they need more in-depth planning support than you might expect at their asset level.
Another important factor is that someone could only have a few million to invest with us, but they are certainly UHNW given their outside wealth, so we have to think about all the estate planning complexities that can come up even if the money isn't all with us. That's why there is some fluidity in terms of what our standards would be.
Do you specialize in a client niche or industry, and are your UHNW clients still primarily first-generation wealth earners?
It's pretty diverse in terms of industries, but one very common theme is that many clients in this space have owned businesses at some prior point which they have sold, or maybe they sold a piece and still have an ongoing interest in a successful business. Those liquidity events are a common thread.
As you know, we have been through a bit of a roller coaster in recent years in terms of estate tax law. So, even if the first generation earner is still the controlling client, it is also very common for Gen 2 or Gen 3 to be working with us in some limited capacity.
I wouldn't say that we have a ton of clients that have done that 100% wealth transfer. It's more of a mixed phase. Today, what is more common is that the original wealth creator starts to do some of their transfers prior to their passing, and I think the reason is that we have the anticipated estate tax exemption sunset at the end of 2025. That has people thinking about the current historically high estate tax exemption.
What is the most challenging part of winning new UHNW clients?
These clients are pretty similar to the mass affluent in some ways, but the hardest part compared to maybe the core practice comes from the fact that it is very common for people to make their choice about an advisor based on a recommendation from a trusted sources — for example a friend or a neighbor.
For example, it's very common to see a mass market client come to us and they already have maybe five or 10 acquaintances working with us, so the referral power is real. In the UHNW market, it is just less common for these people to know someone working with us already, because there just aren't a ton of UHNW people out there in general. This is a small subset of the population.
With any advisory relationship, there has to be a high level of trust, so it's a bit of a Catch-22 in the UHNW space. You need an even higher level of trust and its harder to make those connections and get that trust.
What is one task/issue you help clients with that most people probably wouldn't expect about serving the UHNW client segment?
Of course there is all the traditional estate planning, tax planning and things of that nature. Maybe one interesting or unexpected area would be our security recommendations. It sounds silly, but there are so many things we do as individuals that put us at risk of things like identify theft or fraud.
So, it's not a super complex thing. Even something as simple as freezing your credit can do a lot of good for an UHNW client. That's something we talk to all our clients about, and it often surprises them.
