Episode 4: Entry points and exit strategies

Episode 4

This episode, on Prosper:

Doug Carroll of Meridian Credit Union digs in to all the issues you need to consider to successfully sell your book of business. Then, Paulette Filion of StrategyMarketing.ca talks about improving your discovery process and client meetings, especially when it comes to female clients. Transcript below.

See all our episodes here.

Credits

Hosted and produced by Bruce Sellery

Mixed and edited by Jason Perrier of Phizzy Studios

Editorial direction and visuals by the Advisor’s Edge team

© 2019 Transcontinental Media G.P.

Connect

Email: news.advisor@tc.tc

Web: advisor.ca/prosper

Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

Subscribe

Text Transcript

Bruce Sellery: Hello, I’m Bruce Sellery. This is Prosper, the financial advisor’s podcast from Advisor’s Edge. Coming up, exit strategy. Thinking ahead to the day you may sell your book of business,

Doug Carroll: Is the person coming in going to carry on in the similar way, the way that they charge their fees, or are they going to just disrupt things and is that going to reverberate back on you?

Bruce Sellery: Doug Carroll, head of estate, tax, and financial planning at Meridian, on what you need to be thinking about now to do right by your clients and get the best price. And women and wealth, the stats say they outlive men and so if they aren’t already will one day be in charge of the family’s investments.

Paulette Filion: When we talk to financial advisors about their offices and how they’re presenting themselves, we talk about the fact that it needs to be a very social location, it needs to be something that women will feel comfortable in, like a living room.

Bruce Sellery: Paulette Filion of StrategyMarketing.ca on how to improve your client experience so female clients are served even better and don’t take their business next door. That’s coming up on Prosper.

Stefanie M: Hi, I’m Stefanie MacDonald, Group Publisher of the Advisor Group at TC Media. Advisor’s Edge is committed to your professional development. We’ve collaborated with our sister publications to create CE Corner, the premier continuing education destination for Canada’s financial professionals. At CE Corner, we have useful courses to enlighten and challenge you, while helping you meet your professional obligations. Go to cecorner.ca to earn credits from IIROC, FP Canada, the Institute, and Provincial Insurance Regulators. That’s cecorner.ca.

Bruce Sellery: There will come a time when you’re ready to pass the baton. You’ve served your clients well, and you’re ready to move on to your next chapter. What are some things to keep in mind when selling your book? Doug Carroll is the lead for tax, estate, and financial planning at Meridian Credit Union. He’s also a columnist for Advisor’s Edge and wrote a whole series of articles on this topic. Hello there.

Doug Carroll: Hi Bruce.

Bruce Sellery: It took blood, sweat, and maybe some tears for financial advisors to build their business. You’re not going to sell your book to just anybody. What are some of the most important things an advisor should consider when entertaining offers? What matters?

Doug Carroll: Well, I’m actually going to flip sides, because at times I want to look at it from the seller’s side, and then, the buyer’s side – because if you’re going to understand what kind of negotiating you’re getting into, then you want to see what the other side is looking for. So you’re looking for fit and particularly in terms of investment style. Is this someone who’s going to carry on what you have already laid out for your clientele? That’s one of the big things that that is going to allow for continuity of the kind of reputation you’ve built for yourself. And then the business model, is the person coming in going to carry on in the similar way, the way that they charge their fees, or are they going to disrupt things and is that going to reverberate back on you? So that’s a kind of key top considerations.

Bruce Sellery: What are some of the intangibles? How do you determine if the buyer’s going to get along, gel with your client group?

Doug Carroll: Unfortunately or fortunately a lot of advisors have built their practice based on really great personality, and the to the extent that they have a great personality, then it’s really difficult to duplicate that, so you want to know yourself and why it is that people engaged with you so that you can identify someone as a successor who will have similar capabilities to continue to engage with those same people.

Bruce Sellery: Selling a book is not like selling a house. In many ways, there’s a lot of different things. With the house, you put the sign on the line, put it up on a website. Here, you probably don’t want your clients to know until the deal is done that you’re considering.

Doug Carroll: Yeah, I’d say that that’s probably with quotes around it “until the deal is done” what a lot of people might think. On the other hand, some people would look at it as, ‘I’ve got a relationship with my clients. I’ve got a relationship with the people I work with and I want them to have a reasonable expectation of how we’re going to build this and how it’s going to transfer on because you’re taking care of people’s livelihoods.’ So it may be that you open up to that and let your friends know, your clients know, that you will be passing it on to take care of them.

Doug Carroll: So it’s something that you want to be careful to keep the constraints on and control the messaging so that you don’t surprise people because you could scare them. You could scare your own clients.

Bruce Sellery: So how do you market it? You don’t put the sign up on the front door that your book is for sale. How do you market it?

Doug Carroll: I think that a large part of what you do is you remain connected with the whole community. You have an idea of what your timeline is so that as you are nearing the point that you’re going to look to transfer that on, you already have a pretty good idea of the kind of person that you want to transfer on to and you may, in fact, know exactly who ideally you would like to do that with, and so you are able to then move through into that. It’s more of a seamless transition into that, hopefully.

Bruce Sellery: What are some of the politics that people should be aware of? I mean in some cases people sell within a firm, in some case not. How do you navigate those?

Doug Carroll: Well, I suppose when you’re selling within a firm, you want to maintain the positive, day-to-day type of interaction you have with your colleagues. But, at the same time, if you are someone who has built up your practice so that you can transfer it on, then that’s part of your own livelihood, of your own retirement and so you want to treat it like it’s a business deal. I mean it’s a big business deal for many advisors, even larger than a lot of the investment transactions. Trying to make sure that you harvest out what it is that you’ve sown long back into the past.

Bruce Sellery: If this was a house, you’d clean out the garage, paint the living room, there’d be certain things you would do to pretty up your asset. What should financial advisors be doing in advance to show potential buyers their business in the best light?

Doug Carroll: Well, there’s two main things that I would look at with that. Again, with a pretty good look at when you’re going to do it, make sure you understand yourself, again, what your skills are, have a job description of yourself. What are your high points of what it is that you do, and then apart from the job description for yourself and the other key people around you, have a procedure, have a systematized way that you go about dealing with your clients and how you run the practice, so that the person that’s going to step in can start turning the same crank that you’ve been turning and maybe not even miss a click.

Bruce Sellery: In an ideal world, how long would you say it should take to find the right buyer? I assume it’s not a day, is it a year?

Doug Carroll: I think that you want to, as a seller, be able to get as much value as possible. Again, flipping sides here. A buyer is probably going to want to spend some decent amount of overlap with you with reviews, so that’s probably going to be a business cycle, like a year’s worth. You’re going to want to be able to know how it is you do that well in advance, so I’d say at least two to three years, maybe even five years ahead of time. You already have it in soft, and then as you get closer to that time period, I’d say you’ve got to be really firm on how you’re going to go about it.

Bruce Sellery: What should advisors know about how pricing works? How do you factor in, for example, the reality that not all your clients are going to stay?

Doug Carroll: And that is the reality of it, is because everyone’s got a nephew or a niece who entered the business after you took them on and they’re possibly going to move away when you decide you’re going to retire.

Bruce Sellery: Or they just don’t like the new person.

Doug Carroll: That’s true.

Bruce Sellery: Or that’s the reason they had a meeting and they don’t like them.

Doug Carroll: That’s true. The different personalities, there is going to be attrition. So I think that the key part of that is to understand who your clientele is. So pricing, how you go about pricing is you’re looking about how repetitive the stream of income’s going to be out into the future. And that’s how businesses generally look at how they are valued, is what kind of a cash flow are they going to generate? And that’s what you want to do, is you want to show that you have a systematized way that you manage your clientele so the person coming in can say, “I expect to have a certain amount of income I’m going to generate off this, and therefore, I am willing to pay X amount of dollars to achieve that.”

Bruce Sellery: There must be some identity that an advisor needs to sort through to separate them from the magic of the business. Because if they are this charismatic rainmaker who really is the business, it’s going to be much harder to sell than if they have a machine that they drive that prospects, and fulfills, and delivers extraordinary client experience day in and day out.

Doug Carroll: That’s exactly it. You’ve got the two extremes. You’ve got some, what appear to be businesses, which is really somebody who has a great personality and there is no way you’re going to replace that person. And out on the other side, at the other end of the spectrum, is a perpetual motion machine that takes care of itself. In this case, with the financial advisory practice, you have to have somebody who has the technical skill to be able to deliver the investment advice and so it’s in the middle. It’s not just the person, it’s not just the operation. And again, that documentation of your job skills, your job description, the systems you use, will allow that person coming in, to as much as possible, realizing the value that you’ve built up.

Bruce Sellery: Are they mostly earnouts the way these deals are done or are lump sums common?

Doug Carroll: I think that a lump sum is relatively less common. If you think about it, again, a buyer who wants to take over from you wants you to be around to hold their hand in a positive way. If it was a lump sum and then the seller just disappeared into the atmosphere, then the buyer is left figuring it out. Chances are the price will be set based on a reasonable expectation between the two. And then over the course of the next year or two, there will be some kind of an earnout formula that would adjust the dollar figure.

Bruce Sellery: I’m going to ask a series of single biggest questions. Okay. So what is the single biggest thing that can derail these negotiations? You feel like you’ve got someone, you’re sort of dating, but you haven’t got a deal, what could derail it?

Doug Carroll: I think that it’s as simply as misunderstanding of where things are going. And so, at an early stage, you want to make sure that you do understand each other and where you’re going with this so that you’ve got some kind of a mutual direction that you’re going, a mutual memorandum of understanding you can work from so that you can identify early, “Hey, we’re not clicking. We should go our separate directions and start over with someone else.”.

Bruce Sellery: What’s the single biggest legal issue the seller needs to protect against?

Doug Carroll: I’d say that the big legal issue is, and this is coming from my way back time in law practice, don’t assume that the legal documents will correct for a poor relationship. Make sure that you trust the person who you’re working with. You’re going to be connected with them, and then the legal documentation will follow in behind that. So that’s the non-legal answer to the legal question.

Bruce Sellery: Right. What’s the single biggest tax issue that the seller needs to consider?

Doug Carroll: On the seller side of things, the payout that’s going to happen depending on the nature of what kind of a work arrangement you have, whether you’re an employee, or you’re an independent contractor, you own your own business, is whether it’s going to be fully taxable income, or if it’s capital gain. And then on the flip side for the buyer, the buyer’s using after-tax money to purchase before tax income stream. So you need to go through the analysis of those figures to know whether you are able to actually finance that in a reasonable way, finance for yourself or obtain financing if you need.

Bruce Sellery: You mentioned a memo of understanding. I assume a non-compete is a key thing for that the buyer would be looking for. They don’t want the seller to go around the corner and start up a new business.

Doug Carroll: Right. So as the seller, you don’t want disclosure at an inappropriate time, so you want to manage that. And as the buyer, yeah, you want to make sure that the person that you buy from doesn’t set up shop immediately next door. And so, have some reasonable restrictive covenant that says what the person will not do, for how long, and in what geographic area, and that puts some reasonable constraint on it.

Bruce Sellery: Selling your book. Doug, thank you very much.

Doug Carroll: Thanks, Bruce.

Bruce Sellery: Doug Carroll leads tax, estate, and financial planning at Meridian Credit Union.

Bruce Sellery: Coming up on Prosper, women want to connect with their financial advisor in a meaningful way.

Paulette Filion: It’s more of a conversation. It’s more of, “Well, tell me about yourself. Tell me about your family. How did you and your husband meet?” It becomes a conversation that is engaging, where someone’s genuinely interested in you as a person as opposed to simply how much money do you have in your account.

Bruce Sellery: Paulette Filion of StrategyMarketing.ca, on ways to do that, that fit with your personality. And Prosperous Practice, a quick tip on building your business.

Paulette Filion: One thing I learned that worked was to start the conversation early with all of your advisors, and put them in touch with each other so that everyone is on the same page.

Bruce Sellery: When you have a second, you can sign up for our daily e-newsletter and subscribe to our print magazine. You can do that on our website advisor.ca. You will also find a treasure trove of articles on industry news, tax issues, investments, insurance and practice management. We’ll be right back.

Stefanie M: Hi, I’m Stefanie MacDonald, Group, Publisher of the Advisor Group at TC Media. Did you know Advisor’s Edge also hosts advisor events? We’ve recently held conferences about ETFs, women in the financial industry, and improving your practice, in Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal. To learn more about our past and upcoming events, head over to our website at advisor.ca/events. But be sure to register early, as most of our events sell out.

Bruce Sellery: Client experience makes an enormous difference to the success of your practice. It is made up of a thousand different things, some tangible, some intangible, and what is crucially important to one client will make no difference for another. As financial advisors increase their focus on serving women better, client experience should be at the top of the to-do list. Said another way, how cleaning your bathrooms? Paulette Filion is a partner at StrategyMarketing.ca and the co-author of Invest in Her, The Smart Financial Advisor’s Guide to Winning Female Clients in 6 Easy Steps. Hello there.

Paulette Filion: Hi.

Bruce Sellery: I referenced the bathrooms, tongue-in-cheek, because I think it’s a funny example, and it’s not because I think men don’t ever care about bathrooms, but it’s something you brought up. Is this a thing that you hear? Is this a thing?

Paulette Filion: Yeah, absolutely. When we talk to financial advisors about their offices and how they’re presenting themselves, we talk about the fact that it needs to be a very social location, it needs to be something that women will feel comfortable in, like a living room. But, we also talk about bathrooms because women notice particularly how clean the bathroom is, and what amenities are there, and are there towels? And hand cream, and soap, and towels that they can use.

Bruce Sellery: Very broadly speaking, how would you say women differ from men in what they notice and what they value in client experience?

Paulette Filion: Well, I think, I mean when we talk about client experience, we talk about it in terms of engaging them as a client, so what’s the process that you go through in terms of signing up a woman? And one of the big ones that comes up early on is the discovery, or what everybody refers to as discovery, and to many women, how financial advisors do this sounds like a grilling. It sounds like they’re-

Bruce Sellery: Name, address…

Paulette Filion: Yes. It’s like a checklist. Whereas with the financial advisors who have best practices, especially when it comes to women, it’s more of a conversation. It’s more of, “Well, tell me about yourself. Tell me about your family. How did you and your husband meet?” It becomes a conversation that is engaging, that where someone’s genuinely interested in you as a person as opposed to simply how much money do you have in your account?

Bruce Sellery: One of the things you talk about is connecting with women in a meaningful way? What does that mean on the side of the financial advisor? So you’re asking these really great relationship-building questions of the client, what should the financial advisor share of themselves, if anything? Because if I think about just like chatting with someone and getting to know them, there would be a volley back and forth of disclosure.

Paulette Filion: Well, for sure, that most of the attention should be on her and her life. Because it’s important that you uncover everything about her. Because women see their entire lives as interconnected. It’s all about the reason they invest is to really stay in their home, or help their kids, or travel, and everything’s related to family. Everything’s related to the people that they love in their lives. But having said that, we say to financial advisors, the best way you can show that you are interested in her is to also show that you’re an interesting person beyond financial information, beyond the work that you do in wealth. And we say, say whether that be you’re skiing with your family, or it’d be that you love to travel, or you coach Little League, or whatever it happens to be, you’ve got to be more than just about the money. And so we encourage that.

Bruce Sellery: Now, some women show up in these offices with a male partner, some with a female partner, and some solo. Is there a nuance for single women coming to that office, particularly in the day and age that we live in, this would seem to be important to build a relationship, and yet, men are more aware these days than they would have been even five or ten years ago about where that line needs to be on what’s appropriate and what’s not appropriate to talk about in that way?

Paulette Filion: Well, again, you’d think that if it’s a single woman coming through the door that she get all the attention. But again, there’s a lot of misconceptions about jumping to conclusions by saying, “Well, she probably is not interested in investing, or she probably doesn’t know a lot, or she probably lacks confidence.”

Bruce Sellery: And poor her because she doesn’t have a spouse?

Paulette Filion: Exactly. Exactly. And so we say before you, you jump to any conclusions about it, just say, “Tell me about yourself. Tell me how you started investing. Tell me about what’s important in your life. What is it that you do?” We’ve interviewed women who are professionals, who are single, who are very successful, and some of them would tell us, “My financial advisor has no idea what I do for a living.” And how can that be?

Bruce Sellery: As long as the money shows up by automatic transfer.

Paulette Filion: As long as the money … Exactly.

Bruce Sellery: Now, so you talked about initial discovery. Another touchpoint is results review. It’s probably not quarterly, but let’s say it’s annual, what should an advisor ask in terms of how they talk about performance? Because some clients, men or women, love the nuance on performance and they love, love, love getting deep into the analysis. Others don’t. I do this for a living, and I’m not super interested in knowing the intricate details of how performance works. How can a financial advisor with a female client find the right balance for what needs to be delivered?

Paulette Filion: Well traditionally, the review of the portfolio is all about what are the holdings, the asset allocation, the returns over a certain period of time, what’s the plan in terms of investing moving forward. And again, a lot of times women, but not just women and men too, don’t relate to that. They don’t know what that means. What does that mean? And again, if women are focused on goals, it’s if I want a certain level of income in retirement, let’s say I’m looking for $8,000 in retirement income monthly. Relate the portfolio, that right now we’re at $5,000-

Bruce Sellery: Am I on track?!

Paulette Filion: Am I on track? And what do I need to do? Am I on the right track and do I need to do anything special, or different, or should I invest more, should I accelerate a down payment on a loan? What is it that I need to do to achieve the goals that are important to me?

Bruce Sellery: How do advisors need to customize how they communicate to their clients? And I ask, because we’re in an era in which there are so many ways. So back in the day, it was a meeting in the office, and then it could be, later there was email newsletters, and some advisors have a profile in social media, or they could do a podcast or whatever. What ways should an advisor or how should an advisor think about customizing how they communicate to female clients?

Paulette Filion: Well, again, one size does not fit all.

Bruce Sellery: Asking the question, do you prefer to hear from me by phone?

Paulette Filion: And certainly asking the question, how best can I communicate? But it’s not just about communicating about the money. I mean I used to get newsletters from financial advisors and they talked about RESPs. I don’t have any children, so that’s absolutely irrelevant.

Bruce Sellery: And you get the newsletter, you think, “Do you know me?” Like, “Why are you sending that to me.?”.

Paulette Filion: Exactly. There’s a common element. And I often talk to financial advisors who send market updates to their clients. They say, “Oh, I send that, and that’s of great value.” And I go, “Okay, so if I’m the recipient of this market update, what do you expect me to do with it? Do you expect me to advise you on what I think about? Do you expect me to comment on, I disagree with what the economist says?”.

Bruce Sellery: Right.

Paulette Filion: I mean it should show that you know me, in particular. And it doesn’t have to be money-related. It can be, if you know that I love the opera, you can send me something on the opera and say, “Hey, I saw this in the paper and thought you might be interested in it.” Because that shows that you know me, not me as a general client, but me as Paulette.

Bruce Sellery: What does that advisor’s CRM need to do in order to provide some process here? Because a lot of financial advisors work with many, many clients, and spouses, and siblings, and kids and, and, and, and, and, and if they don’t have brilliant working memory, they can’t keep that all in their head. Can they put those interests into their CRM?

Paulette Filion: Absolutely. And we say that’s how the CRM is a value to you. No one expects you to remember every minutia of detail about every single client. But if you’ve stored it somewhere, if you’ve put in that I like the opera, or that my great concern, what keeps me up at night is whether or not I’ll be able to stay in my home, then you need to use that information to customize your conversation with me. It’s a matter of just checking it before you call me, before you talk to me to make sure that you’re recognizing me not just by my name, but by my likes and dislikes.

Bruce Sellery: One of the things that is another touchpoint that has long been a part of the relationship is some sort of client appreciation, and maybe it’s a gift, maybe it is an event, it’s something a little bit extra. How would you guide financial advisors to think about that when it comes to their female clients?

Paulette Filion: I mean advisors spend a ton of money on these client appreciation events. And Judy and I met someone who actually holds about 10 of them a year.

Bruce Sellery: Wow.

Paulette Filion: And a great deal of money, and time, and energy is spent.

Bruce Sellery: Hopefully not 10 golf tournaments.

Paulette Filion: No, no. They were all-

Bruce Sellery: Customized…

Paulette Filion: Customized in different ways and meant to reward their clients, but also asking them to bring a friend, so it was part prospecting and part client appreciation. But the real appreciation, showing, again, by back to best practices with some advisors do, is showing a true knowledge of the individual and making small gestures that show that not only do you appreciate me as a client, but you recognize that my life is far more than just this portfolio.

Paulette Filion: We met one financial advisor who had a client whose son lost his very first job, and she just mentioned it in a conversation with him. He wrote a little note to the son and said, “Hey, I lost my first job too. You will survive this. It’s a matter of picking yourself up and dusting yourself off.” And she was so appreciative of the fact that he did this, that she sent two clients his way.

Bruce Sellery:  Of course.

Paulette Filion: Yes.

Bruce Sellery: Now the inverse is what happens when people have a bad client experience? And I don’t know this to be true, and I bet we don’t have the data on it, but do you believe that women talk more about the negatives than a man would who would maybe brush it under the carpet? Do women have a higher standard or difference?

Paulette Filion: Yeah. Two things related to that. First of all, women don’t expect the financial advisors to be perfect. So mistakes will happen, for sure. But taking ownership and saying, “I’m sorry that this happened. I didn’t mean for it to happen or it was an oversight and it’ll never happen again.” That is a very important part. So women do not judge you by one error or one mistake. But if there’s a pattern that develops where you’re saying “sorry” more than you’re doing anything else, then women will judge you by that collective pattern of missed opportunities, I think.

Bruce Sellery: For our financial advisors listening out there who want to really do an end-to-end review of their client experience, how do they go about auditing it from the perspective of a female client? What would be best practices on that?

Paulette Filion: Well, best practices is really making sure that women are included. If she’s in a partnership with a man or a woman, making sure that the two partners attend the meeting. I have some financial advisors who will not hold a meeting, will not have a meeting without both partners being present, and they will accommodate that if they have to move the meeting three or four times. And they find that once they’ve done that, once they’ve moved the meeting to make sure that the partner, the female partner is there, women start taking more ownership and begin to say, “Okay, I don’t want to-

Bruce Sellery: I can’t get out of this. It’s a priority for the advisor.

Paulette Filion: I’ve got to go, so I’m going to go. But they also make sure that women have a say. They look at them, they engage them in conversation, “What do you think? I heard from Bob or Mary, what’s your point of view on this particular aspect?”

Bruce Sellery: I want to come back just before we go to the physicality here. We talked about the bathrooms. Bringing it full circle here, what are some other things that we should think about? Is it the magazines on the table have some diversity? Is it beverages? Just give me a little.

Paulette Filion: Well, we often talk to financial advisors saying, “Does your waiting room, does your board room, look like your living room? Is it a place-

Bruce Sellery: Depends what the living room looks like, geez. Black leather couch.

Paulette Filion: Maybe not.

Bruce Sellery: And hasn’t had a vacuum in months.

Paulette Filion:  But it should be a place for conversation. It should be a place that I feel comfortable in, that I’m comfortable in my chair, where I have proper china and not bottles of water with no glasses, where I feel, not a sense of success, but a sense of alienation. I mean, women have talked the imposition of the big boardrooms with pictures of men at golf tournaments, or the big heavy mahogany walls, and chairs that are oversized that make a woman feel like she’s smaller than she actually is, all of those things. Because women are the ones who for the most part noticed the environment in which they find themselves and they make a judgment call. Are you inviting me into this conversation or are you trying to command the meeting?

Bruce Sellery: Fascinating stuff. Thank you, Paulette.

Paulette Filion: You’re welcome.

Bruce Sellery: Paulette Filion, a partner at StrategyMarketing.ca and co-author of Invest in Her, The Smart Financial Advisor’s Guide to Winning Female Clients in Six Easy Steps.

Bruce Sellery: One last thing before we go. We call it Prosperous Practice. It’s a tip from a financial advisor on how to do more good work with your clients.

Cindy David: Hi there. My name is Cindy David. I am a financial planner who focuses on business succession and estate planning for clients who are approaching retirement or are in transition with their businesses. My tip is about preparing your business for sale. How it works is that people often think it happens overnight and it ends up being a lot longer than they expect. For tax purposes, for instance, there can be some planning that takes up to two years to implement, like calculating safe income on-hand, or cleansing the company of passive investment income in order to be onside for the capital gains exemption, and working with a financial planner like myself to establish where is cash going to come from when you’re retired and you no longer have a paycheck.

Cindy David: One thing I learned that worked was to start the conversation early with all of your advisors and put them in touch with each other so that everyone is on the same page. Financial services, accounting, and legal aspects have gotten so complicated. It can take some time for you to learn and understand all of your options so that you’re making good decisions. Expect your advisors to work together as a team and participate in group meetings so that you are not left trying to explain the advice you’ve been given from one specialist to another. Often there can be cost or tax savings discovered when your advisors know each other and work well together.

Cindy David: One thing I learned that didn’t work was that retiring can feel like a new full-time job, from learning how to invest and manage the money you get from cashing out on the sale of your business, waiting for the dust to settle on some of the tax planning with regard to flowing money into trusts versus holding companies versus personal tax paid dollars, and figuring out which bucket to spend from, planning for gifts to children and charities, and making sure that your estate planning wishes are going to come to fruition.

Bruce Sellery: That’s this episode of Prosper, the Financial Advisor’s Podcast from Advisor’s Edge. Our email address is news.advisor@tc.tc. Send us your questions, comments, or ideas, or connect with us online. Twitter is @advisorca. Facebook Advisor’s Edge Magazine. LinkedIn is advisor.ca. Don’t forget to click the subscribe button and tap out a super-quick little review that’ll help other advisors hear about us, which would be really good for the world. Thanks for listening. Now go out and prosper.