When a sailor embarks on a journey, they never set sail without having defined their destination and charted a clear course. With the help of their compass and experience, they navigate toward their goal, constantly adjusting their trajectory to adapt to changing winds and rough seas. Whether it's tacking, trimming the sail, or deploying the jib or mainsail, each tactical maneuver is a response to external conditions, all converging toward a common goal. These actions, though momentary, are always designed to serve the final destination, ensuring the quickest and safest arrival.
Strategic wealth planning follows the same logic. It involves setting a clear direction for one’s wealth while being able to react tactically to market shifts, opportunities, or life’s uncertainties. Every decision, whether related to structuring, tax optimization, or investment, must be aligned with the client’s long-term goals. Like navigation, it’s the combination of strategic vision and tactical adjustments that allows for the realization of deep aspirations while keeping the course steady.
The goal of strategic wealth planning is to align day-to-day decision-making with the client’s profound aspirations, considering their personal, family, and social ambitions. This approach, holistic in nature, transforms wealth management into a true tool for personal fulfillment.
Taking a Step Back: A Holistic Vision
Strategic wealth planning relies on the ability to move beyond a strictly financial view of wealth. It’s about seeing wealth management as a true lever for transformation, offering the client an opportunity to fully realize themselves through their assets. To achieve this, it’s essential to design a strategy that encompasses all dimensions of the client’s life, identifying key strategic issues and addressing them with precise, personalized tactical solutions. These strategic challenges aren’t found in the assets that make up their wealth, which often pose more constraints (geographical, economic, tax, etc.) than potential goals. Instead, they are found in the client’s family, professional, or social environment, and in their ability to communicate with this environment, which together form their understanding of reality and give them the strength to act, even modestly, to change it.
This holistic approach requires the advisor to deeply understand the client, both personally and in terms of their wealth. It involves immersing themselves in the client’s reality to continuously and effectively support them over the long term.
One of the fundamental elements of this planning is the advisor’s ability to take a step back and adopt a “helicopter view” of the wealth. This global perspective allows them to connect various assets, analyze their coherence with the client’s objectives, and evaluate their structuring for long-term continuity. With this comprehensive view, the advisor can not only spot opportunities but also anticipate risks, recommending solutions or adjustments that precisely address the client’s strategic challenges and deepest aspirations.
Entering the Client's Inner World: The Essential Bond of Trust
To even begin discussing strategic wealth planning, it is crucial to know the client in depth across several dimensions:
- Their journey: Whether an entrepreneur, executive, or heir, each journey influences wealth decisions.
- Key life moments: Major transitions, such as the sale of a business, marriage, or inheritance, often serve as pivotal points in wealth strategy.
- Deep aspirations: What are the client’s values and life goals beyond wealth accumulation? Non-monetary aspects also form part of the decision-making and success parameters.
- Family dynamics: Marriages, divorces, re-marriages, and the ambitions of family members shape wealth decisions.
- Understanding their wealth and its structure: It’s essential to grasp the overall composition of their wealth in its complexity to assess how assets interact and whether their structure is optimal for the goals set.
- The situation and details of family donations: Understanding financial operations within the family, whether formal donations or informal financial support, is crucial for adjusting the overall strategy.
These often personal aspects require a relationship of trust between the client and their advisor. In some cases, this trust is already established, allowing these topics to be discussed quickly. In others, the relationship of trust will develop gradually over time. When the client starts opening the doors to their personal life and sharing their goals, it demonstrates their willingness to collaborate sincerely, durably, and in the long term with their advisor by sharing what truly matters to them.
The Advisor as a Guide: Building Trust Step by Step
Strategic wealth planning is an evolving process. Trust is built progressively, as the client reveals and expresses their aspirations, which (or their priorities) may evolve over time. The advisor plays a central role as a guide, accompanying the client at every stage of their reflections and wealth decisions.
Over time, this relationship deepens, as wealth management is not solely about growing assets or achieving performance. It becomes a means for the client to reach meaningful goals, such as passing on their wealth, financing specific or philanthropic projects, or aligning their investments with their personal values. In other words, the wealth decisions made reflect a particular vision of tomorrow’s world—the vision of the person the advisor is working with.
Tactical Responses to Strategic Challenges
It is the course that guides the decisions, not the decisions that define the course, whether it’s about wealth engineering advice (structuring, tax optimization, inheritance) or financial recommendations (financing, investments). Strategic wealth planning precisely puts tactical actions at the service of one or more strategic directions, aligning the different interventions around a comprehensive vision.
The defined strategic course also prioritizes the tactical actions to be taken, ensuring that every decision fits into a broader, coherent framework, enabling the client to achieve their wealth goals more efficiently—and, above all, to “align who they are with what they do.”
Conclusion
Strategic wealth planning goes far beyond asset management. It’s a process that allows the client to fulfill themselves through their wealth, while ensuring that it aligns with their values and life ambitions. In short, their wealth serves their life priorities, not the other way around.
By building a relationship of trust and adopting a holistic and transformative approach, the advisor becomes a strategic partner throughout the client’s life.
For wealth advisors, this approach presents both a challenge and an opportunity: to become not just asset managers but also facilitators in the realization of meaningful life projects. By helping clients distinguish the ends (strategic axes) from the means (the supports, tax-related decisions, etc.), the advisor undoubtedly adds value and forges a relationship that is not only lasting but robust—because it is in harmony with the client’s vision, making it essential for the intergenerational success of the advice provided.
