Our clients are successful people in both their personal and professional lives, and they enjoy what they have worked so hard to achieve. That level of success comes with complexities, as what they do no longer impacts only themselves and their family. Their continuing success affects employees, other businesses and communities. Through their support of charities and religious institutions, contributions to better health and environmental initiatives, and involvement in higher education, they strive to positively impact their world.
Our clients value our high-touch, personalized service. They’re concerned about making intelligent decisions with their resources so they may preserve their wealth, avoid unnecessary taxes, take care of the next generation of their family and give thoughtfully and generously to charities they feel passionate about. We derive great satisfaction from helping them do so.
One common theme we hear from our clients is that now that they’ve accumulated their wealth, they didn’t expect they’d still be concerned about outliving those resources. We help address these and other concerns so their focus can remain on enjoying this chapter of life.
It’s common for our clients’ children to become clients themselves. We facilitate family meetings for our key clients to address all important financial matters, including health, emotional and special needs issues. Doing so allows us to create customized and multigenerational wealth management plans to help serve their needs.
Our key clients have appreciated and benefited from our collaboration and cooperation with their CPAs and attorneys. Since the beginning of this practice, we have followed a value principle to be a trusted, responsive resource to the professional community. In over 30 years of doing so, the result has been a select network of some of the best professional minds in the Upper Midwest.
We have built our practice intentionally with a select number of clients so we can take care of important needs, some of which we can plan for and predict every year, while others arise through normal business cycles and the natural progression of life. When these issues arise, they require competency, capacity and connectedness to make the best decisions.
Serving the financial needs of such fine people has been more a labor of love than simply a career responsibility. To all our clients, we say thanks for the opportunity you give us to serve you, your business and your family.
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Services designed to address every financial priority
We provide complete wealth management: an extensive range of services that go beyond what you may have experienced or come to expect. We want you to know that you can count on us for any financial need you encounter. This is our commitment to a comprehensive approach that allows us to provide a high level of service and convenience for addressing your multifaceted life.
Our clients benefit most from our services when we supervise all of their resources. Wealth management should never be a track meet, where competitors try to outrun one another. Real wealth management brings competent professionals together who will collaborate and challenge one another to reach optimal outcomes and give you the right choices and guidance. To do that best, we are given constant access and supervision over the most meaningful accounts and information.
We begin with a thorough audit of your financial affairs. Our best work is done when our clients allow us to understand the most important details of their life, so we also want to understand your interests, passions, values and fears, along with your goals, assets, advisors and relationships. The better we know you, the better we can serve you.
We do this thoroughly because our clients demand satisfaction first in their relationships, next in service, and finally in wealth management.
We are accepting new clients by referral. For these clients we offer three tiers of service to provide the detailed, personal and tailored service you, your family and your business deserve.
A Second Opinion
We gladly offer as a foundational service a thorough second opinion of your financial affairs as they stand before becoming our client.
Goal Based Planning & Monitoring
As part of our client onboarding process, we complete a thorough audit of your finances, but we also try to form as complete a picture as we can of you personally – your life today, and your goals, fears, hobbies and aspirations, to help form what we call the Total Client Profile. We use this as part of the foundation for your Interactive Investment Policy, which maps out how your portfolio is to be invested. All of these are driven from your goals. Everything is planned around where you want to go and the best way to get there, and we monitor your portfolio through that same lens.
In times of major life changes, such as marital changes, a birth or a death of a loved one, your needs and goals are likely to change. A useful investment policy is living and breathing, adapting not just to markets, but to your life. This approach allows your policy to be completely responsive to your needs and goals.
The projections or other information generated by Goal Planning & Monitoring regarding the likelihood of various investment outcomes are hypothetical in nature, do not reflect actual investment results and are not guarantees of future results. Goal Planning & Monitoring results may vary with each use and over time.
Risk Budgeting
All too frequently, advisors calculate risk into portfolios using only the investor’s capacity for risk, how much they can technically afford, without considering how the investor feels about the amount of volatility their portfolio may be subject to. We combine risk capacity and tolerance into a single risk budget, so you can have greater confidence in the management of your portfolio.
Portfolio Construction Solutions
Often overlooked, portfolio construction is one of the most crucial aspects of investing. We use your Interactive Investment Policy and your risk budget to determine your appropriate asset allocation; together, these three provide the overall framework for your portfolio. From there, we must determine the best way to manage your portfolio – active, passive or core/satellite – as well as the amount of risk to take in each asset class. This then allows us to refine a list of manager candidates that fit these criteria, which we may then evaluate based on consistency, style, process, performance, alpha, risk and other factors, until we are able to reasonably determine which managers will work best when combined in your portfolio.
Managing & Validation
We manage your investments with an eye on where you want to go, and how you’re doing on your way there. Rather than only report how your investments fare relative to benchmarks, we prefer to show you how much progress you’re making toward your own goals.
Retirement Plan Rollovers
Today, there is greater portability between the various retirement savings alternatives and IRAs than ever before. We have extensive history in helping clients successfully find and transition to the retirement plan best suited to their needs, while accounting not only for the near-term tax implications, but also their retirement income needs farther down the road.
All services in Focused, plus:
Financial Planning & Modeling
There’s much more to your life than simply transactions and returns. Similarly, there’s more to financial planning than just a portfolio and a retirement strategy. You have many things to plan for now, soon and well into the future, so we look at financial planning through a wide lens, and we develop solutions to keep you comfortable in the present while helping you reach your near- and long-term goals.
Retirement Income Planning
Retirement cash flow planning is a crucial part of your investment policy, and we plan early, thoroughly and often. We plan savings and retirement plan contributions and other investments to counter erosive forces like taxes and inflation, so your portfolio may provide your paycheck in retirement.
Dynamic Withdrawal Solutions
Planning techniques are constantly evolving, especially in today’s world for retirement cash flow. We must adapt to a changing environment. Formerly trusted vehicles for providing an income in retirement have become a thing of the past. You have to rely on your portfolio to produce your paycheck, and we’re here to help you remain independent, confident and in control. Dynamic Withdrawal Solutions are the result of a process of intelligently timing and ordering withdrawals from assets with different tax parameters or consequences. Through this process we create solutions, which are designed to optimize outcomes and give you options that will enhance your confidence in your retirement.
Risk Mitigation Solutions
In your career or business, you started with a goal – a vision. While taking advantage of opportunities to achieve that goal, you avoided threats, obstacles and risks. Now that you’ve come this far, a whole new set of risks has emerged as a result of your success, which may not relate directly to the function of your business, but we encounter them every day.
To help you steer around them, we regularly run fire drills based on certain sets of contingencies to see how well suited you are to overcome them, as well as seek opportunities to lay off burdensome risk, which will free up resources for other purposes.
Income Generation Solutions
As crucial as the sequencing of your withdrawals is how you regenerate that income. As your reliable income, perhaps a pension and Social Security, sustains your crucial needs, we use investment assets to create a pool for generating income to first fill any gaps meeting essential needs, then to support the things you want to accomplish. These of course come with many implications, so we’re here to manage the details for you and help you compensate for things like inflation and longevity risk, market risks, savings and withdrawal rates, and the unknown.
Tax-Free Portfolio Solutions
As a result of the financial crisis and recession, the world of municipal bond investing has changed dramatically. Styles and techniques for investing in fixed income are adapting to a brand new landscape, where the absence of bond insurance, generally rising rates not seen in a generation, reduced liquidity and a need to access lower rated bonds create a great need for thorough research and expert planning. Opportunities have not gone, however, they’ve simply moved, and we can help you build a professionally managed portfolio with strategies designed to help provide results in this new environment.
Bond prices and yeilds are subject to change based upon market conditions and availability. If bonds are sold prior to their maturity, you may recieve more or less than your initial investment. There is an inverse relationship between interest rate movements and fixed income prices. Generally, when interest rates rise, fixed income prices fall and when interest rates fall, fixed income prices rise.
Our Comprehensive Wealth Management services center around meeting whatever financial need you may encounter, while accounting and adjusting for the effects it may have on any other aspect of your financial life. It includes all services listed in the Focused and Enhanced Plans, plus:
Estate Planning
Our clients are not new to the subject of estate planning. They’ve been crafting plans while enduring substantial changes in laws, rules and solutions over many years. Our clients value our work with them and their CPA and attorney because we bring a different perspective, which dates back to rules that have migrated since 1980. Simply put: No other topic can have more implications for generations.
Successful estate planning is not just about how to pay for or avoid a tax. It’s about the implications, and it’s about making certain that the plans you make create the intended impact. We must go beyond planning the future of your estate equally and find opportunities to reach equitable outcomes.
Our clients are intentionally impactful people. Their success came from the roots of values, skills and determination – often the hallmarks of their ancestry and community. It has been said, however unfortunately, that 50% of people cannot name their great-grandparents by first name, and 90% cannot recall their great-great-grandparents’ first names. Our clients consider the generations beyond them, and we like to think those prodigy will look back and be able to recall much more than a first name, but the legacy left for them and recognize it in themselves.
Estate Liquidity Solutions
Planning for required liquidity can help you feel more in control, fund and plan charitable giving, avoid taxes and probate, as well as protect assets for you and your family’s future. Trusts are a great way to ensure that your resources are safe and used as you intended as you transition into and through your retirement years. We also offer a transfer on death agreement that protects your estate and ensures it goes directly to your heirs, making things that much easier on your loved ones.
Charitable Planning
Charitable giving is a high priority for our clients. Since “it’s not what you do, but the way that you do it,” we are professionals in helping clients carefully and thoughtfully plan their giving, so it has the impact they’d hoped it would, as a driver of progress through philanthropy.
Family Communication Facilitation
Some decisions carry a great deal of weight for you and your family’s future. Especially in times of major transition, it helps to have everyone on the same page. It has been common for us to host such meetings with clients’ families to help bring everybody into concert during times of change.
Full Dress Rehearsals
Rather than repeatedly ask and worry about the question “If something happened to you tomorrow, would everyone know what to do?” we prefer to go right ahead and answer it. Full dress rehearsals allow us to design and simulate action plans with you and your family, as well as your tax, legal and banking advisors for when the unexpected happens.
Business Succession Planning
Deciding whom to entrust the future of your business to once you’ve retired is only part of the equation: You want the transition to go seamlessly, and you want what you’ve grown and nurtured for all this time to provide for you and your family’s future the way you had planned. We’re experienced at helping our clients’ transition into the next leg of their journey – for themselves and their business.
Investment Banking
Raymond James is a full-service investment bank with national and international capabilities. Comprised of more than 500 capital markets professionals, Raymond James is one of the most highly regarded middle-market equity offering and advisory practices in investment banking today.
We have helped clients research direct investment opportunities, advised regarding strategic relationships including potential purchase and sale opportunities, and helped with large scale direct financing for commercial debt requirements.
Collaboration & Coordination Systems
We enjoy the working relationships we’ve built with the other professionals our clients rely on because it truly allows us to consider decisions from all angles. Your tax, legal and banking advisors, as well as your trustees and family executor or personal representative, all have roles to play when pieces are moving, and our clients enjoy being able to rely on us to coordinate, choreograph and execute a plan on their behalf when change or challenges arise.
Aggregation Solutions
For key clients, our account aggregation software allows us to consolidate all crucial information in one place, with the highest level of security, allowing us to address any situation in its entirety and quickly communicate with and delegate tasks to the appropriate people efficiently and conveniently for you.
There is no assurance that any investment strategy will be successful. Investing involves risk and investors may incur a profit or a loss. Asset allocation and diversification do not ensure a profit or protect against a loss. Past performance is not indicative of future results.
