The great wealth transfer is really a trust transfer, not a check

For years, our industry has talked about the great wealth transfer. We talk about trusts, estate plans, tax strategies, beneficiaries, and the trillions of dollars expected to pass from one generation to the next. All of that planning matters. 

But I think we focus too much on the money. 

For financial advisors, the real challenge isn't whether the assets successfully transfer from one generation to the next. It's whether the trust does too. 

I see this from a somewhat unique vantage point. My father started the wealth management division of our family oriented firm in 1989, and the firm itself dates back to 1972. Today we've grown into a multifaceted ensemble with more than 30 team members and six partners. 

Growing up in the business, I was around many of my father's original clients. In some cases, I knew their children long before I ever became their advisor. Today many of those children are business owners, executives, and parents themselves, building wealth of their own while beginning to think about what happens to their parents' wealth. 

Here's what I've learned: being trusted by one generation gives you an opportunity with the next. It doesn't give you the relationship automatically. 

Too many advisors wait too long to build relationships with their clients' children. The first meaningful interaction often happens when the parents begin serious estate planning, when health issues arise, or, worst case, after a parent dies. By then we're trying to establish a relationship at the exact moment the next generation is dealing with a major life transition. 

That's backwards. If an advisor has worked with a family for 20 or 30 years, we shouldn't be meeting the adult children for the first time when they inherit the portfolio. We should already know them. That doesn't mean they need to become clients immediately. It means they understand who we are and feel comfortable talking with us. 

Advisors spend years learning everything about the first generation: their business, retirement goals, risk tolerance, charitable intentions, family dynamics. But ask a simple question: how well do you actually know their children? That is where our industry has work to do, and it is a theme our advisory committee has explored around passing on purpose, not just wealth in estate planning conversations. 

There's another mistake advisors make: assuming the next generation wants the same client experience their parents wanted. They often don't. They may communicate differently, want more technology, or build businesses of their own. That doesn't mean the principles of good advice have changed. It means how we deliver that advice has to evolve. 

My own background taught me this in an unexpected way. Before entering wealth management, I spent more than a decade in sports and entertainment in several capacities – marketing, sponsorship, and public relations. I also spent time covering the University of Florida Gators and the Chicago White Sox as a writer. I was a journalist before I was an advisor, and that still shapes how I approach client relationships. 

When I meet with a client, particularly someone from the next generation, I don't want the conversation to feel like intake paperwork. I approach it more like an interview. I prepare questions, let the client talk, and listen for the story underneath the numbers. What are they actually trying to accomplish? What did money mean in their household growing up? Those answers tell us more than a risk-tolerance questionnaire ever could. 

Part of my perspective also comes from being a second-generation advisor myself. There is an assumption that being the child of a successful business owner hands you an easy path. In reality, the family name may open the door, but it doesn't establish credibility. Clients who worked with the first generation for decades aren't automatically comfortable transferring that relationship to the founder's son or daughter, which is consistent with recent reporting on advisor succession planning tools built for RIAs. It's one reason I helped establish a study group through our broker-dealer, Osaic, with other second-generation advisors, where we discuss succession and the challenge of evolving a legacy firm without losing what made it successful. 

Succession isn't an event. It's a process, and the same is true inside our clients' families. 

The solution isn't complicated. Advisors need to create opportunities for the generations to know one another before a major transition forces the conversation. Getting multiple generations into the same room is only the beginning. How advisors conduct those conversations, and whether the next generation feels like a participant rather than an audience, determines whether that meeting actually builds trust. 

The assets may be inherited. The advisor relationship isn't. The next generation gets to decide whether to keep us, and structured financial planning built for the long term, as our colleagues have written about why planning is the only strategy that holds in every market, is only as durable as the relationship behind it. That is why measuring success solely by assets retained after an inheritance misses the point. The relationship should have been built years earlier. 

Would the children choose us if their parents hadn't? That's the harder question, and it's probably the one that matters most. 

The great wealth transfer will create enormous opportunities for our industry. But the firms that succeed won't simply be the ones with the best investment strategies or the largest books of aging clients. They'll be the ones that understand wealth can be transferred. Trust can't. Trust has to be earned one generation at a time.