On being sold, and being served.
Most families of substantial wealth have been pitched. Few have been positioned.
The pitch is fluent. It is also generic.
There is a difference between an advisor who is competent and an advisor who is positioning the family. The competent advisor answers the question that is asked. The advisor who is positioning has spent enough time with the family to know which question is the one to be asking, and how the answer will read in five years rather than five quarters.
Most principals of substantial means have met the first kind. Some have met the second. The shorter version of the difference is below.
The pitch is fluent. It is also generic.
A pitch sounds the same in any room. The names of the products change; the architecture of the conversation does not. There is a problem the principal is told to be worried about, an instrument that solves it, a chart that reads more cleanly than the world it represents, and a soft close phrased as a private opportunity.
The fluency is real. The fluency is also the warning. A presentation that has been delivered three hundred times is not, by construction, a presentation that has been built around the family in the room.
The cost of acting on a pitch is rarely zero. It is paid in instruments held that the family did not need, in fees paid for advice that did not contemplate the family's actual position, and in a year or two of the family's attention spent on a structure that turns out, on later examination, not to fit.
Positioning takes longer. It looks duller in the room.
Positioning takes longer. It looks duller in the room.
An advisor who is positioning the family begins with the family, not with the instrument. The first conversation is not about products. It is about what the family is trying to do, who is in the room and who is not, what was decided in the previous decade, and which of those decisions still fit.
The second conversation rarely produces a recommendation. The third is often where the recommendation is written down, and even then it is qualified — sequenced, reviewed by counsel the family already trusts, and held against alternative paths the advisor has thought through and rejected on the family's behalf.
This is dull work. It is also the work that, ten years later, does not require unwinding.
Two questions for the second meeting.
First, ask the advisor what they have not recommended in the last twelve months. Not in the abstract — what specific instrument, structure, or strategy was on their desk and was set down. The answer reveals whether the advisor's process is selection, or whether it is enthusiasm.
Second, ask who in the family has the relationship. Not on the engagement letter — in practice. If the answer is the principal alone, the family is one transition away from starting over. If the answer names the spouse, the next generation, and the family's own counsel, the relationship has been built to last beyond the original meeting.
Both answers can be evasive. The evasion is itself the answer.
If you have been pitched, ask to be positioned.
A first conversation, in confidence, with a senior principal of the firm.