Part 2 | Integrating Wealth Management Into Your Advisory Team

So Michele.

Michele Martin: Thanks, Hubert. I appreciate the introduction and it's great to be here with you today. The goal of our webinar today is to actually demonstrate and discuss how early collaboration really helps amongst wealth management, valuation professionals, trust your CPA, trust and estate lawyers, and your trust and estate CPA, and then also real estate professionals. We'll talk about how real estate plays into this, but what we are trying to accomplish here is to show how it really helps to provide unified, not fragmented advice and improve our coordination along the way. So we'll share some ideas and thoughts and some stories to share with you, which Hubert said we have no shortage of. Having been working with primarily business owners for most of my career, this is an area that's really near and dear to my heart and watching families go through generations, plan for their business, whether it's succession of their business or actually selling it, it's a time for families to really be able to see the value that their advisors bring to the table.

A lot of times along the way, what I've found is that clients will have great advisors, but maybe giving them good advice, but maybe not for the situation at hand. The thing we're going to really address today is whether all that good advice truly works together and magnifies exponentially the benefit of having advisors on your team and advisors who understand what your needs are and how to bring in additional expertise. Hubert, I think you've got a great example of that, right?

Hubert Klein: Well, yes. I think the important part is we had talked about what a cohesive long-term strategy is and how that works and the power of that cohesive long-term strategy. Michele, you had the slide that we talked about earlier today, but one of the people in my firm who I consider a mentor and someone I value and trust would always tell us the Belgian horse story. I was always like, yeah, okay, the Belgian horse story, but it's true. My understanding, a Belgian horse can pull 8,000 pounds, which is more than its body weight. If you have two Belgian horses together, they can pull up to 20,000 pounds, which is more than 16. I though you just doubled, but because of the synergies of working together, and if you have two trained Belgian horses who learn how to pull together in a synchronized fashion, can pull 30 to 32,000 pounds.

I think that's what we're trying to get across today is the synergies with the advisors and the team and everybody working together in this integrated cohesive strategy model is how we are going to turn the one-off advice and one advisor says this and the other advisor says that. How do we turn ourselves into the Belgian horses and all work together for the benefit of the client to pull more weight? So that's my analogy.

Michele Martin: I'll add an analogy residing in Minnesota as I do, one of the prides of our state is the Mayo Clinic and the way they execute on care. And one of the key things in their model, if you've ever been part of getting treated at Mayo, is that they bring all the advisors, all the physicians together. They do their diagnostic testing, the results come back fairly quickly, but they also work together versus think about oftentimes if you've had a family member or you yourself has experienced it where you're going from specialist to specialist and Mayo Clinic literally within a couple days can execute on diagnosis in what oftentimes may take someone months to do in our normal situation. So I view that as the gold standard and a way for us to think about what we're really trying to do as advisors for our clients.

Hubert Klein: And I guess Michele, the key takeaway we want people to know is it's a team approach. It's not a one-off. I think we had talked about everybody talks to other people who give them advice of what they did and we understand that. I think one of the things Michele says, you will listen to what people tell you, but at the end of the day, you want to get to the decision and the process that works for them because what may work for somebody else doesn't always work for the client at hand, even though it worked for the other family. So that's why we're going to go through these concepts today and we are aware if we see questions that there are other planning ideas and things of that nature, but it's a tailored package for the individual that Michele's team is working with.

Michele Martin: You hit it on the head, Hubert. A lot of times I will tell my clients there's a perfect answer for you if we were to look at this in isolation, but that may not be the right answer for you based upon your goals, your objectives, personal preferences, and quite frankly, something that, as you said, is an outside factor that may not be considered when you're doing the advice that you hear from another source or advice that you receive in isolation. We're maybe beating a horse to death here, but it really is important because oftentimes clients or you may not know what you don't know. And so one of the things that's really important for us is to gather that information and understand all the factors that are contributing to your situation and the decisions that you're going to make going forward. So it looks like we have another polling question here.

Have you been part of. Go ahead.

Hubert Klein: This is one I'm interested to see the answer to. So when we get the results, let's spend a few seconds talking about that.

Michele Martin: It's interesting, Hubert, on this one. As we grow as professionals, we continue to hone our skills by getting exposed to different situations, different transactions, doing our due diligence, our CPE and studying changes in legislation. But the one thing I would say is the best learning I've ever had is going through things myself and being on the other side of advice and really seeing how there's gaps or things that would've been really helpful to get to the end result, right?

Hubert Klein: Absolutely. Okay. So look at that. We have a fifty fifty split. It almost seems like a mathematical impossibility in polling to have a straight fifty fifty split, but we have it. So it looks like a 50% of you have been part of a coordinated advisory team experience and the other 50% haven't, which is a good thing that we're doing this webinar today, Michele, because we're going to help them understand how this can help them going forward.

Michele Martin: Great. Great. So Hubert, one of the things that I think is really important, and you're on the valuation side, so you tend to get involved oftentimes in valuing a business or valuing a piece of real estate. There's so many things that your team does with some deep technical expertise. And a lot of times I'll get brought into situations where we're pretty far along. Let's say someone's selling their company and they have an idea of what that number needs to be for them. And it's kind of that thing they come in and they say, they're sitting in front of you and I, and they're saying, "Well, I spend a million dollars a year. I want to keep my lifestyle and if I sell the company for 20 million or whatever they feel their number is. And so that tends to dominate the narrative early on. But one of the things that I see often is that there's such a focus on working through the business side, and we're all guilty of that with if we're running a company or even in our professional lives that we're doing the work, but not necessarily taking the time to think about that personal impact.

And so I think that's one of the things that we try to pull out as soon as we can, is to actually start thinking about. So on the left here we see planning really with all of the advisors that you're bringing to the table, making sure that you're including people. What is the transaction structure? What are the options that are there? What kind of tax situation have you had in the past versus currently? Do you have loss carry forwards that are going to help you with the transaction? Do you have other outside investments that are going to influence how we think about things? And most importantly, can we get in front of things quickly enough so that we can potentially build in some tax advantage strategies to minimize the taxes on the structure of the deal, so to speak? So these are all things that oftentimes too, the owner of the business is working on and then their spouse comes in and is saying," I hear all this noise, but how does this really affect us?

How does it affect our family? How do we think about what this looks like going forward? "And so really working alongside here's the business plan, here's the options we have and timeline and things we should be doing, and then running models and putting it in black and white and doing cashflow projections and financial plans to actually demonstrate that if you sell your company for X and you put this money to work for you, you can expect to generate this much in cash flow on an after tax basis each year. That really seems to put people's minds at ease and it's an iterative process, but getting involved early kind of changes the dynamic of the conversation a bit and it's a much broader conversation.

Hubert Klein: Michele, I mean, that's the process, right? And what I always hear is business owners are great at working in their business, but really don't always work on their business. And I think that's where you're coming in is they know I've run this business for 20 years, so she or he can turn around and say," If I continue to do revenue volume of X, I'm going to put X number of dollars in my pocket. "But that whole dynamic changes if there's a potential transaction or a transfer to the next generation, what happens to that disposable cash flow that they've relied upon? Also, the other part is what if you have to take a hit in your cash flow and change your standard of living and that's where your process comes in.

Michele Martin: Exactly. It's so incredibly helpful and it also aligning expectations and possibly even if you're early enough to the game, you're making adjustments in the company that you can do to increase the value or even tax strategies that you can implement to increase the after tax number. So again, we'll say it again multiple times, but early is better for planning and being thoughtful about what this really looks like. So on the outline here, we've talked about the investment portfolio and I like to think about investments really from an integrated perspective with what is happening in the result of the planning as a result of thinking about what is the situation. And so it's truly the implementation phase. And Hubert, I often think the CPAs, the attorneys, your team, you folks are all very involved in the structure of the deal and really the deep expertise on the tax side and the deep legal advice.

And where we come into it from a wealth management perspective is understanding those concepts, but truly implementing all the work that's been done up to that point. And so that is really our job and that's where investment management comes into play and actually looking at what is your current portfolio, what is that doing for you, how much risk are you willing to take on, or quite frankly, how much risk do you need to take in order to meet your goals? But this slide is really interesting from a standpoint of, I think, looking at that whole part of the fact that so many families have concentrated holdings, and it could be operating company interests. I know you can speak to that immensely in terms of valuing company interests and real estate. Right.

Hubert Klein: Well, we often see, and you do as well, is that the largest asset holding outside of the personal residence for most people is the family-owned business, the stock portfolio, or if that family-owned business is invested in real estate, and each one of them throws off different levels of cash flow and has different levels of risks that are all taken into account through your planning process. We talked about this the other day, and I think it's important a lot of people understand that we are going through the largest transfer of wealth in the history of the country. First, they said it was going to last 20 years, and it looks like it's going to go beyond the 20-year mark. We're seeing a lot of this planning taking place now, people looking to transfer their wealth. We also have an election year this year. We talked about this too, Michele.

There's a lot of favorable tax treatments from an estate tax side for planning strategies that you can take advantage of, but we don't know what's going to happen after the election or what may happen going forward. Those are things we all consider because each one of those asset classes can also be treated differently as well, as well as the gifting opportunities and taking advantage of the unified exclusion. Can you just talk about the process, I guess, and what you and your team are going to do? Sometimes it's, okay, we convert something to cash and we put it into an investment account. Sometimes we put it into something with a guaranteed return for maybe some sort of annuity and also the components of life insurance and what your team does and what you look at and what you evaluate working with. We always know generally there's a lawyer involved, there's an estate planning lawyer that's involved, and talk about that integration with that whole team to make sure everybody is working towards the client goal.

Michele Martin: Absolutely, Hubert. And I think this kind of speaks to the whole idea of, it really depends on if, let's say that it's someone coming out of a company transaction where they have company stock, whether that's publicly traded or not, a concentrated position is something that we deal with quite frequently. And you think about particularly today with tech stocks and the Mag seven and how much portfolios have become more concentrated and have had massive gains in them. We're seeing that concentrated, thinking about concentrated holdings and diversification of risk really matters. The other thing that I would say here is we look at that and gauge our client's willingness to diversify those holdings, but I'll bring you back to the dot-com days and start thinking about some of those names, the Ciscos of the world, those names that just went through the roof. And we have positions now where, and I won't name current companies today, but where we see an event that could occur where the valuation of that company or the value of that stock declines precipitously in a very short period of time.

And if you're looking at just the dividends from that stock or really relying on that in your portfolio, it is an adage people say, "Oh, my investment advisors always want me to diversify." Well, what we find time and time again is that diversification really does spell consistent returns. And particularly when we're thinking about portfolio construction, having consistent returns and consistent cash flow is what really, really matters to build a sustainable plan and feel confident that even in different market cycles, in election years, in periods where we've seen a big run in markets, that you know that your portfolio is going to sustain that test of time. And so that's where diversification becomes really key.

I would reference the solutions, and we have a series here on our first series. Derek and Joe talked a lot about planning opportunities with grats and slats. We even mentioned charitable opportunities, but the big thing to think about with those entities is that it's really important for our team or an advisor that you're working with is to understand the distribution strategies and thus the resulting taxation and the structure of those trusts. And we build the portfolios around that. And oftentimes those trusts are separate, even though you as a client may have access to some of that cash flow, we're looking at that vehicle. So for example, in a SLAT, that could have a couple different goals to it. It could be that it creates spousal income with less concern about distribution to the heirs. So we would build a portfolio that is much more income focused, maybe a little bit more conservative dividend type equity holdings, but also probably more of a fixed income component where if we're building a SLAT and it's more for the next generation and that's the goal and the grantor decides that that's really the purpose of that, then obviously a growth strategy in that makes much more sense.

So I think what's really important is that depending on the plan and the complexity of that plan that we're sitting down and kind of building upon each of these strategies to say, "Okay, so how do we meet the foundational needs of your cash flow and your liquidity?" Liquidity is really important because if we hit those market times where we're seeing volatility, that liquidity in the portfolio helps to bridge that without having a huge negative impact. So those are just some pieces to think about around trust. Okay, so

Hubert Klein: Michele, you hit on a couple of good things. So you talked about the concentration portfolios. You wouldn't name companies, so I will do it for you in a hypothetical fashion, but you talked about stocks that were appreciating stocks versus dividend paying stocks, and both of those should be given consideration in a plan. I know from personal experience, I have friends who say, "Oh, my NVIDIA's through the roof today." And then NVIDIA takes a hit next week and everybody says, "I lost all this money," but you're still ahead of what you bought it at, so you're ahead and you're not selling your stock, but that whole dynamic would change if they retired tomorrow and they wouldn't want that volatility of a stock and they're more into what is the cashflow going to be? I want something with less volatility, more stability. So that's all a part of the process, right?

I get it, everybody loves to watch the market go up, but we know historically there's been fluctuations and you have to manage those expectations with the people that you're consulting with. You want to talk a little more about that process and what it is and how your team meets with them and works with the advisory team?

Michele Martin: Absolutely, Hubert, and you hit on a really important point is accumulation and investing over your working life is very different than the distribution phase. And so you can invest in NVIDIA and say, "The sky's the limit." But it's a great example, right? And so once you are in a different situation, you're going to end up meeting Uncle Sam at some point. You're going to need when you cash that out to pay the gains on that. Now, there's solutions available such as direct indexing. Many of you have probably heard of that. It's a very intentional tax loss harvesting strategy for separately managed accounts, and it allows you to generate losses in a portfolio while you mirror an index. It's kind of the latest and greatest around the kind of access that clients are given, but it's a very tax efficient way to also include concentrated positions in that.

There's many ways to think about concentrated positions in the market, and that's probably another segment for us to talk about. But I think one of the things that we talk to our clients about is it's the discipline, and that's what an investment team brings to the equation, is the discipline to look at it and say, "Well, at least take off some of your gains and do it methodically over a period of years so that you're being efficient, but also managing that downside risk." So the other thing that it's a statistics I love, there's actually been white papers on it, and when you think about risk in your portfolio, most of the time, what we see is that clients that come to us that own a business or have been accumulating assets and building their own portfolio, their risk profile is typically more on the aggressive side.

When you begin to draw off your portfolio and have income needs from that portfolio, you can actually step down. So if you're in an aggressive growth, you can step down to a growth or even a balance type 60 / 40 portfolio, and the returns over time mimic a growth portfolio. And the reason for that is because you're taking assets off of it and it's continuing. So think about it, dollar cost averaging, you get the benefit of the market and buying in the dips. On a distribution strategy, you get the disadvantage of distributing during the dips. So taking a little bit more conservative approach actually gives you very similar returns to portfolios where you're taking on more risk. So it's an interesting discussion, but once people start to experience it and see that in their portfolios, it becomes quite evident that it does play out. So Hubert, we should talk maybe a little bit also about, we've been talking about companies, but many business owners also own real estate.

They have owner occupied real estate or something tied to the business, right?

Hubert Klein: It's usually the second largest asset to the business. And in some cases, the value of the real estate might be worth more than the business that occupies the real estate. We've seen that happen a lot in the last 15, 20 years where real estate values, especially in the Northeast, have skyrocketed because of the scarcity of land and buildable space. So it's an important thing to consider. It's an asset that's treated slightly different because there's a whole host of other issues with tax issues and depreciation recapture in every situation you need that you need to work with all your advisors. And I think Michele, you touched on one thing that relates to all this is you talked about the step down. The person with a nice growth portfolio comes to a point in their life and they want more certainty and security and care more about the cash flow and the income and how do we balance the business or the proceeds from the sale of the business and are we going to keep the real estate and lease it to somebody else and get the cash flow?

Are we going to convert that to cash and invest it? But my point here is everything changes as we move forward from today. And I think the key takeaway I got from you is your team is ingrained in what's going on today and forward looking with the client and the client's team to be ready to pivot if the client's desires or needs change. And I think that's an important people need to understand too. I always used to laugh when I was doing the tax work and the accounting work is the client would incorporate and get the corporate book and put it on the shelf and they would never fill out the first page or the initial shareholder meeting. And it sat there and it say, we're incorporated, but that's not how the wealth management process works and it's not how your team works. And you don't implement the strategy and let them go on their way.

So you can talk more about that, how time changes, needs change and how a good planning team is responsive and receptive.

Michele Martin: It's so true, Hubert. So coming into a planning scenario with your team at hand, all your experts together, there's a lot of things. I have a story which I love. A client came to me and we were really starting almost from scratch. They didn't have an estate plan, very concentrated position, high level executive in a Fortune 500 company and really just needed to move from kind of a shotgun approach to a really comprehensive, thoughtful plan. And so we've engaged an estate planning attorney that we work with often. Their CPA and I worked very closely together in terms of starting to just map out this master plan. And it was literally a document after we had done all the analysis. There were some really quick hits in terms of thinking about things like allocation in their 401k. And obviously we needed to get wills and potentially some trusts in place just due to the fact that they had a very large estate tax problem if they didn't do something and update their documents.

But this was a really accomplished individual. And he looked at me because I laid it out and I said, "We can probably get this done over maybe the next 18 to 24 months." And he said, "Oh no, not us. We get things done. We're going to get it done in six months." And lo and behold, it took us about 30 months to execute on everything that we had talked about because to your point, the family, he and his wife needed to discuss the concept. They needed to get comfortable with it. Things were changing within his company and potentially his position. And so to your point, Hubert, it's an iterative process. It's something that we go through and that's why it's really important. That's why you do the annual tax planning meeting with your team. You sit down and you talk about what's changing in your life.

And so much of it is about life changes, death, divorce, grandchildren, some things that might. There's so many family dynamics that can affect it. And quite frankly, there's also events that are financial in nature that perhaps it's created an opportunity or it's maybe taken a toll on things and we have to self-adjust. So you hit it on the head. This is a lifelong process and oftentimes even we've been focused on estate planning. I'm a big proponent of starting with the foundation and being really mindful of what it is you're putting aside in irrevocable trusts and grats and slats and all that sounds really great, but it's something that over time you can build upon and implement in your plan once you have full assurance and are really comfortable with where you're at and the next steps that you can take.

Hubert Klein: And you said there's a foundation, so I always liken everything to building a house. You have your foundation, you have your structure, but then things change, especially if you're looking at the future and cash flow needs and all that, planning for your children's college or your children's education. But a lot of things people don't plan for today is you have the house, what if you have an unexpected need for an addition? You have an elderly parent that's now going to live with you that's going to require additional cash outlay and services. Or you have an elderly parent or a family member or even a spouse who now needs full-time care at an assisted facility. That's why the plan always has to be ready to morph and change because the plan may be static today, but things are changing. And it's not just the kids get off the payroll or move out, but there's mom, dad, or a grandmother or something like that, that the plan has to be ready to pivot to make sure there's enough resources to still take care of the family and it's changing needs over time.

Michele Martin: Without a doubt.

Hubert Klein: And what we didn't talk about yet is the preservation of the step up in basis, which we'll probably get into on this slide, but that's a big thing as well is the planning to take advantage of the current tax laws and minimize the estate taxes while being able to probably transfer some of this during the lifetime and preserve liquidity by shifting assets into the future generation. But again, it's a balancing act about not just trying to beat the estate taxes. That's an issue for a definitive event in someone's life, but still preserving liquidity and not always giving away an asset that was throwing off the cash flow. So it's a balancing act.

Michele Martin: It's so true, Hubert, and that really gets back even to concentrated positions. So thinking about how aggressive are you going to get, particularly with someone who is older, how aggressive do you really get around addressing that issue versus thinking about the step up potential? And so it's definitely kind of a moderating situation that you would have. So again, and I always think it's taking bites off the apple. You're doing it over time, just the same thing as the annual exclusion gifts. You're doing that over time and it really builds up and creates momentum, so to speak, in terms of your gifting capabilities and what you're doing.

Hubert Klein: And I think that's what comes into play, like we've said, is it's not a rush to take advantage of the exclusion and take advantage of discounts and valuation and all that because the giving away is the giving up of the rights, but you can't really do that unless you know what the plan says your needs are going to be. And even if you're giving away some of that concentration to a future generation, you don't want to handcuff yourself on the other side of there was an asset that may have been sold that you may have gifted a piece, you need to know what the needs are going to be on a forward looking basis.

Michele Martin: So let's talk about valuation a little bit and how those opportunities can affect family planning and really thinking about the execution around that, Hubert.

Hubert Klein: Well, I have two examples always. Since you're in Minnesota and I love Minnesota and I love the ride from Minneapolis to Rochester, it's beautiful. But on that ride, there's a lot of farms, a lot of cornfields and other things. And you take a family business that's a family farm, whether it's corn, cattle, soybeans or some sort of fruit crop versus the family business that's in the plastic injection manufacturing. Two different, totally different styles of business, different issues on owners. And one of the big things is the issue of liquidity, right? Because if someone was to pass, both businesses have value, but there may be liquidity issues if the family wants to keep the family farm and they have to pay a sizable estate tax and then the person with the plastic injection business has the same tax issue, but one might be harder to sell than the other depending on the market at the time.

And we see that a lot of estates have liquidity issues. Everybody has the land rich cash poor scenario, which is typically the family farmer. And then you have the other one who is value tied up in the business, but the business is worth nothing without the owner who's been running it for 30 years. And there's liquidity issues in valuation, there's valuation techniques that we can look into and try to do some planning. But many, many times these types of things or the risk is insured with some sort of life insurance. And I think that's what provides liquidity in a lot of these situations. So Michele, you want to talk about what you consider and what there is on the life insurance options and what the different types of vehicles that people might consider?

Michele Martin: Sure. I mean, so life insurance is obviously to your point, Hubert, largely for that liquidity to provide that liquidity within an estate. And there's a lot of ways to think about it. One of the most simple is just a term policy. Oftentimes younger families will build that in. You can have that as part of a company plan, that sort of thing. It's very reasonable and inexpensive and a good idea for income replacement. Getting into other types of strategies where you're dealing with more of a permanent policy and actually forming even an ILIT at that point, an irrevocable life insurance trust to separate those proceeds from your personal estate, that becomes really important if you're bumping limits. And again, you have to think about state limits, not just federal limits on the lifetime exclusions. So those are some pieces. There's also the ability to invest within life insurance policies and that income is tax deferred.

So you can have tax deferral of an investment portfolio alongside of the protection of life insurance with it as well. But I think one of stepping back on all of those different solutions, one of the big things that we try to do with our partners is to really determine what that need looks like to first really say, okay, so based on your estate and based upon the valuation or the things that we can approach this with, what do we believe the estate looks like is projected to become. Real estate investors is a key example of that, asset rich, liquidity poor almost in every case. And so you really have to do an analysis and take a look at what that estate tax liability may look like. And typically we're not suggesting that you cover every penny, but that you're doing enough within the family dynamic to achieve what you're trying to accomplish so that if you own a real estate investment firm or you're a developer or you're in that business that you're allowing the family to continue with the business, that real estate and those assets.

Same with farms, same with ranches, same with any hard asset is figuring out what that looks like. And then you can solve to that issue with life insurance. And I also have families where we've solved to it not only with life insurance, but also really with an eye towards portfolio growth and saying if we can get this portfolio and continue to invest in this portfolio, we get a step up in basis with the portfolio at the time of death as well. So again, it's not just one answer. It's oftentimes several answers put together to think about what that estate liability may look like.

Hubert Klein: Right. And I guess everybody understands a step up in basis and all that, that really is pushing or deferring the tax burden out to another generation, deferring it out. We're accountants and financial, we use terms that ordinary people don't use every day. So we just want you to understand that there are strategies we can help you with.

Michele Martin: So one other example I'll bring up, and it really isn't, it's an estate issue in a way, but it was just a really cool sample on, it was an apple farm family legacy in Western Wisconsin. And this was a situation where the individual, it was just the matriarch of the family lived on this apple farm and literally made very little income. And so it was taxing on the family and the cash flow. And she actually sold the property. It had great value outside of being an apple farm and did a 1031 exchange for that. And the income that she generated, she was earning maybe 50,000 a year and stepped that up to almost $300,000 a year in income based upon the 1031 exchange. And that's just a case in point where you're paying attention to deferring the gain, getting additional income, and also then to your point, taking advantage of the step up in basis upon her death where the family would not pay.

In essence, that property was sold without any estate tax or capital gain tax paid. The family just dealt with the estate tax issue.

Hubert Klein: There are four polling questions. Two have already been on the screen. The next one is coming now.

Michele Martin: Here it is. And sometimes I think it's interesting on C here, it's like discussing sensitive topics. If you're working with clients that can be difficult or even just ourselves, how much do you want to share? But it does affect the quality of planning over time if your advisors know all the situations.

Hubert Klein: Right. But I guess that's the whole thing, right? Is the goal is to be a trusted advisor. We always kind of joke within the profession that we know more than the priest, the rabbi, the minister, and the imam about our clients. They tell us that. And I think that goal is if we're the trusted advisor, we're ahead of a lot of these things, but also we have to be on the alert for this type of stuff as well.

Michele Martin: That's right.

Hubert Klein: Somebody says they can't see the question, Bella. If you can't see questions or you're having an issue, please put it in the chat and the team who's handling the webinar will get back to you and help you there. Okay, so look at this. One of the problems is getting information. I would say that's probably an industry-wide problem. Getting information is not hard. Getting all the needed information, I think Michele, is one of the biggest problems we see.

Michele Martin: Yeah, without a doubt.

Hubert Klein: All right, Tom.

Michele Martin: So I think we'll conclude with this and just really talk about aligning expectations, right, Hubert? And I love it how you talk about whoever is kind of the lead at one given time may not be the lead person later. And we often find this in wealth management. It's the attorney and the CPA that are typically leading the discussions and the transactions and the business side. And over time, the wealth advisor really steps in and understands what's going on. And oftentimes that portfolio and some of these other strategies become core to ongoing cash flow for our clients. So it is a thoughtful handoff. It's a coordinated experience. And I think that it's really important that we think about that over the life of the client. And then here we're just talking on this slide about good advice working together. And I think one of the things that I see where we as advisors can really bring value is to have that discovery process together where we're looking at what the client situation is, evaluating the different types of things that may be solutions or strategies that we should consider and working through that together so that we're looking at those interdependencies or ruling some things out and then going to the client with some options based upon all of the expertise at the table.

Hubert Klein: So Michele, it's fair to say this is kind of how your team works, right? You would go step one through six as part of the process. You'd work with the outside advisors and we understand, listen, we do a lot of what we call the one-stop shop and a lot of this and Michele's team does, but Michele's team also works with other outside advisors knowing that people have people that they want to work with and we work with them as well. Michele mentioned somebody at one point in time is the leader. I always kind of look at it as a quarterback. As a Giant fan, trust me, I know quarterbacks are a problem, but at certain points in the process, somebody else may be the quarterback for a phase. Michele's team may be the quarterback in the planning phase and what the mix of the portfolio composition should be.

Then an attorney may step up if there's trust and everything involved and they will be the quarterback of the legal side. And then maybe there's an accountant at some point that is outside of our firm that is working with the family and can tell you what they know about the family business, with the historical and provide the information. So at any point in time you could change quarterbacks, but the strategy of all three quarterbacks is for team client to win, not team wealth management, not team lawyer, not team CPA. So all three of them collectively want team client to win that game.

Michele Martin: I couldn't agree more, Hubert. And so just to kind of conclude our thoughts here, one way to think about that is if we have both advisors and people that are on the other side, the clients of this, if you're seeking advice and you're looking to build a team, I think hopefully this helped you think about what your team could look like and should look like and how you draw in the experts that you need to get the best possible and most comprehensive advice. And for those of you that are advisors or professionals on this call, hopefully this kind of spurs you to ask yourself, are we thinking about things holistically and engaging other experts to really work in the best interest of our clients and understand that there's multiple solutions and that each client has a unique fit that works best for them?

Hubert Klein: Right. And I think that's the important takeaway. There's a multitude of opportunities, many of which we discussed here and many of which we haven't covered here, but it's part of a process. And again, team client is the one that we serve and we have to be open to all that because if someone says, "I need to open these three trusts and I want to do X, Y, and Z," you tell them you're happy to help them facilitate it, but let's plan and review everything and make sure. It may have worked for your neighbor next door, but let's make sure it's going to work for you long term. So Michele, I thank you for your time, your treasure, and your talent and sharing that with everybody today. There are a lot of questions in the chat regarding the polling questions, so they're being captured. Our team will get back to you on that.

If there was a problem, we will let you know and make sure everybody who's here for the requisite time will get the credit, but the team will reach out to you. If there's any other questions you may have, if you fire them in there now, we'll do our best to answer them, but we know your time is valuable. We thank you for giving it up today to listen to Michele. Any questions, reach out to Michele and her team. I will say the good thing about them is they're accessible. So I think that's the important part of somebody who handles a very important part of your business and your personal life is that somebody who's accessible and responsive and is willing to listen. So again, Michele, thank you very much.

Michele Martin: Thanks, Hubert. Have a great day.

Hubert Klein: There's a fourth polling question coming up right now.

^{Transcribed by Rev.com AI}