Page 26 - Investment Advisor April/May 2023

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they need and what they don’t need. But
every client in the ultra-high-net-worth
realm … [works with] a dedicated advi-
sory team, CPA, estate planning strate-
gist, planner and portfolio manager — a
full team wrapped around them. This
goes for not only the matriarch and
patriarch but generally for all the family
members around them.
Similarly, with the high-net-worth
[segment], the client may not need a
dedicated person because they may not
need planning around all these areas
every year, but they do get that team,
too. That’s available to them as needed.
Also, if we can’t work strategically with
someone [around a specific issue] then
we kind of build [the solution] in-house.
We’ve found that there’s a big push
towards intergenerational wealth trans-
fer in the industry today. Everyone’s pre-
dicting this for the baby boomers, and
there are a lot of our families saying,
“Hey, I want you to make sure you’re
providing the exact same services to my
generation two, my generation three, etc.,
to make sure that they’re supported.”

What services are growing
significantly?
We have found that the tax area is grow-
ing rapidly. The industry is shifting —
with a lot of people in the tax realm
retiring or leaving this business in gen-
eral. Across the industry, it’s been a
couple of hard years.
What we are finding is that our cli-
ents are yearning or flocking to us say-
ing, “Can you take over the taxes for us?”
And the answer is, “Yes, we can.” But it’s
requiring us to put a significant invest-
ment into ensuring that we can solve
this tax piece for them — not only the
planning, but also the compliance piece,
the preparation of the tax return.
This demand has ramped up over the
last two years or so. You kind of came
out of the pandemic with a lot of CPAs
that were burned out and decided to
ultimately move on. Clients have been

24 INVESTMENT ADVISOR APRIL/MAY 2023 | ThinkAdvisor.com