For Wealth Advisors
Your clients trust you with their wealth. Who is helping them protect the value of the asset creating it?
Why this matters to an advisory practice
When a business-owning client's plan relies on the future value of the business, the plan carries a risk that no portfolio review will surface. The investments can be positioned perfectly and the plan can still fail, because the number the business was expected to contribute does not arrive.
The difficulty is practical rather than conceptual. You already know the business matters. What is harder to come by is a defensible way to assess the risks inside it, without becoming an operations consultant yourself and without sending your client to someone whose first instinct is to sell them a transaction.
Helping a client understand and address business risk is not just about improving the plan. It strengthens your role as a trusted advisor and keeps you involved in a conversation many clients will eventually have around succession, transition, or sale. The question is whether you remain part of that discussion after a transaction occurs.
What I am, and what I am not
I am a specialist resource you bring in, in the same way you would bring in a tax specialist or an insurance specialist.
I do not manage money. I do not sell financial products. I do not broker deals or act as an M&A advisor. I am not a valuator, and I am not trying to take over the planning relationship. The client stays yours, the plan stays yours, and I report into the conversation you are already having.
Why advisors work with me
I have spent more than four decades inside and around operating businesses, including senior roles as CFO, CTO, COO, and CEO, and nearly three decades working with owner-managed businesses.
That background matters because this work is not about selling a financial product, producing a valuation, or steering a client toward a transaction. It is about looking at the business the way an outside party would look at it, identifying the risks that could affect future value, and helping the advisor bring better questions into the planning conversation.
How I work with a referred client
The engagement begins with a diagnostic. I work through the business the way an outside party would assess it, and I look for the risks that would affect value, transferability, saleability, and future performance.
From there I prioritize. Some risks are worth addressing immediately, some can wait, and some are not worth the effort they would take. Sorting them is most of the value.
Where implementation is needed, I help identify the right specialists and bring them in alongside the professionals the client already works with, including you.
When to introduce me
Six situations where the conversation is usually worth having.
A client's plan relies on a business sale or transfer to fund retirement, and the value written into the plan has never been tested.
A client is somewhere within three to five years of wanting to step back, and no successor has been identified.
A client has had an unsolicited approach from a buyer, a competitor, or a private equity firm.
The business is the largest asset in the plan and the part of it you understand least.
A client is bringing family members or key employees in as future owners.
A client keeps deferring the conversation about what happens next, and you suspect the reason is that nobody has yet framed it in terms they can act on.
Common questions
No. Neither one, in any form. My work stops at understanding the business and the risks inside it.
No. You brought the client in, the planning relationship is yours, and I have no interest in changing that. I am most useful to advisors who come back to me repeatedly, and that only happens if I am careful about this.
Owner-managed businesses where the owner's own future is tied to what the business is eventually worth. Sector matters less than that dependence.
Usually more relevant, not less. The risks that reduce what a buyer would pay are the same ones that limit how much freedom the owner has now. Addressing them early is what creates options later.
What stands out is a phrase he uses that I've come back to more than once: operating issue or deal issue; same issue, different timing. The gaps that surface in a transaction are rarely new. Gerry's work makes them visible earlier, when owners still have time to do something about it.
If a client's plan depends on the business, it is worth knowing what the business is actually worth.
It is a thirty-minute conversation. Bring a situation, or bring a general question about how this would work alongside your practice.