Most people think what we do is picking investments and rebalancing a portfolio. That’s part of it, and it’s not as simple as it looks — building the right allocation, managing concentrated stock, knowing when to rebalance versus hold — but it’s the part people can at least see and evaluate for themselves.
The real work is everything around it. It’s the tax return talking to the portfolio instead of the two living in separate worlds — when to exercise options versus let them ride, how to plan around AMT, which account to pull from first in retirement, whether this is the year a Roth conversion actually makes sense. Most people don’t even know these are decisions being made — they just happen, by default, sometimes not in your favor, and nobody notices until the return comes back in April, or worse, never gets noticed at all.
Where it matters most is the moments that only happen once — for you. We’ve watched this play out for decades - in our experience, what feels unprecedented to you is usually something we’ve already seen before. We work with a lot of tech executives, and in our experience, the thing that trips people up is stock options or RSUs vesting around a job change or an IPO — a window where the tax decision and the investment decision have to be made together, in real time, with no do-over once it’s closed.
That’s really the essence of it: we already know your whole picture when that moment hits, so in our experience, you’re not figuring it out alone, under pressure, for the first time — and neither are we. That’s not something you can buy the week you need it. It only works, in our experience, if the relationship and history already existed.
And we intend to still be here. We’ve been doing the tax side since 1985 and the investment side since 1999 — three decades of watching people go through what you’re about to go through. We’re a family — the three owners are related — and we have a real succession plan eight years out. We have no plans to be rolled up and sold to a private equity platform next year. Eight of us work with about 180 relationships total, so when we say we know your whole picture, that’s not a figure of speech — it’s math, and it’s earned.