Here is a scenario I run into more often than you would expect. Someone has a great estate attorney, a CPA they trust completely, and a financial advisor they have worked with for years. By all appearances, they are well-advised. And then you start pulling the threads and you realize that none of those three professionals have had a real conversation with each other in years. Maybe ever. Each one is doing their job, doing it well, and doing it in total isolation from the others.
Most people assume coordination happens automatically. It does not. The attorney drafts the documents and sends them to the client. The CPA handles the tax return and sends that to the client. The financial advisor manages the portfolio and sends that to the client. The client is the only person seeing all three, and they are usually not equipped to know when one creates a problem for the others.
What the Gaps Actually Look Like
The K-1s from a business interest should be informing the estate plan. Usually they are not. The buy-sell agreement should reflect what the business is actually worth today. In a lot of cases it has not been reviewed since the company was a fraction of its current value. The tax strategy should be coordinated with the succession plan. Often they are being developed by people who do not know what the other is working on.
These are not exotic problems. They show up in almost every first comprehensive engagement we have with a new client. Not because their prior advisors were doing bad work, but because there was nobody running point on the whole picture. The pieces were there. They just were not talking to each other.
What Running Point Actually Means
One of the things clients tell us they did not realize we did is serve as what I think of as the head coach of their financial team. We are not replacing the attorney or the CPA. They are specialists, and in many cases they are excellent at what they do. What we are doing is making sure that the estate plan reflects the current business valuation, that the tax strategy is consistent with the succession plan, that the investment structure accounts for what the attorney is trying to accomplish in the documents. Somebody needs to be in the room where it all comes together, and usually that somebody is us.
The question worth asking yourself right now is a simple one: who is running point on your team? If the answer is nobody, or I am trying to but I am not really sure what I am looking at, that is the gap worth closing. Because a plan that has excellent pieces that do not talk to each other is not actually a plan. It is just a collection of documents.
