Part 2 of “How to Work With the Wealthiest Segment of the Population” — a four-part series from The Advisor’s Fuel Podcast with Adam Koós, CFP®, CMT®, CEPA.
Most business owners have a plan for everything except themselves.
They have a plan for the next hire, the next location, the next product line. But ask them what happens to their money when they finally step away from the business, and the answer is usually a shrug. As the old saying goes, a dream without a plan is just a wish — and you can’t invest a client’s money and simply hope they’ll have enough to retire someday.
That’s the gap a real financial planning process closes. In Part 1 of this series, we covered how to start the exit-planning conversation and get an owner to the table. This post walks through what happens next: the exact meeting-by-meeting planning process our firm uses for business owners and their spouses — the same process, incidentally, that works just as well for non-owner clients, and one that converts prospects into clients more than 90% of the time.
Here’s how it unfolds.
The process starts with a discovery meeting, and it’s the longest meeting we do with anyone. For a typical (non-owner) client, it runs two to two and a half hours. For business owners, it can stretch even longer — we’ve had discovery meetings go four and a half hours, split across sittings.
That length is deliberate, and it’s where a lot of advisors push back. Here’s what we don’t do:
We still gather all the usual data — but we do it in person, and we don’t get to it until we’re two-thirds to three-quarters of the way through the meeting. The first portion is almost entirely soft questions: who they are, where they grew up, what shaped the way they think about money. Some get a little uncomfortable — questions about faith and money, about whether they’d want to give back to a school or cause someday, about health and longevity for them and their parents.
The reason is simple. We want to ask every question they’d expect, and a lot they never imagined we’d ask, so we can build a genuinely comprehensive, fiduciary-driven plan — retirement income, investments, tax, estate, and insurance, all of it. That kind of plan takes a real time investment from both sides. But by the end of that meeting, the odds that this prospect hires you are extremely high. Getting to know someone at that depth is what earns the relationship.
If the discovery meeting is us peppering the client with questions, the education meeting flips the script. Now we’re the ones teaching.
This meeting runs about sixty minutes, and it covers:
It ends with a risk assessment — and we’re careful to call it an assessment, not a quiz. We tell clients plainly: this isn’t what determines how we invest your money. The financial plan does that. The assessment tells us how aggressive you want to be; the plan tells us how aggressive you need to be. In a perfect world, those two things marry up.
When they don’t, that’s the real work. A very conservative client whose plan says they need more growth means a conversation about saving more, spending less, or retiring a little later. A high-risk-tolerance client whose plan says they don’t need the risk is an easier fix — keep the bulk moderate, and let them be aggressive with a small slice if they want to.
The financial planning meeting is where everything comes together. It runs about ninety minutes, and we feed everything from the first two meetings into planning software (we use MoneyGuidePro; eMoney, MoneyTree, and NaviPlan all do the job — find what fits you) to run a cash flow analysis. The question we’re answering: are they on track to make work optional?
If they’re not, we figure out which levers to pull — retirement date, expenses, savings.
But here’s the move most advisors skip. When a plan looks great, we break it on purpose. We’ll literally tell the prospect, “Your plan looks great. Now let’s break it.” Then we push expenses up, pull the retirement date in, and stress-test the guardrails until they nearly snap. It shows the client exactly how much room they actually have — and it builds more confidence than a clean plan ever could on its own.
From there we move into the ancillary advice: income planning, tax planning (Roth conversions where they make sense), estate planning (more than half our clients don’t have a current estate plan, so we’re often introducing an attorney), and a full insurance review — life needs analysis for both spouses, long-term care, home, auto, and liability. Miss the insurance piece and one bad event can blow up the entire plan.
For a business owner, the business is often 80% of their net worth — so it has to be treated as a hard asset inside the financial plan, with an assumption about when it will sell.
The rule here: always value it conservatively. When an owner tells you what their business is worth, they’re usually wrong, and usually to the high side. That doesn’t mean the number is fixed — this is exactly where exit and business-transition planning can increase the value — but that’s the subject of Parts 3 and 4 of this series.
A plan that sits in a drawer doesn’t help anyone. Two final steps keep it alive.
The six-week follow-up meeting. Its whole job is momentum. Did the introductions we made — to a CPA, an attorney, an insurance professional — actually turn into meetings? We track it all on an action-item sheet so nothing gets forgotten and the client always knows their homework. (And there’s always homework.) This is also where we set the cadence for ongoing reviews: annual meetings in January, semi-annual check-ins in March and September, with the door open anytime in between.
The Safe Haven Kit. This one’s near and dear to me. It’s a way to get a client’s entire financial house in order in one secure place. It starts with a checklist — will, powers of attorney, healthcare directive, trust documents — then a password organizer, a spot for passports, and every statement that matters: bank, brokerage, insurance, CDs. We drop-ship a fireproof safe, help them build the kit, and upload everything to an encrypted online vault. (If your planning software already includes a vault, use it.)
Then the part that matters most: we give the client’s executor or trustee limited access — just names and contact info, nothing sensitive. But if the worst happens, one switch flips, and the family has everything they need at the exact moment money is the last thing they want to think about.
That, top to bottom, is the planning process for the owner and spouse — and very nearly the same one we run for every other client.
This whole approach is the foundation of what became Adrenaline. A few years ago my friend Leo — an advisor I’d known for 14 years — called on a Tuesday night, at the end of his rope. He asked me to teach him how we run our practice, top to bottom. Over the next 14 weeks and 27 hours of Zoom calls, I did exactly that. His team brought in $7 million in new AUM in those 14 weeks, grew 41% the following year, and, more importantly, Leo got his energy for the business back.
That’s why Adrenaline exists — to hand growth-minded advisors the same systems, without the decade of trial and error.
If you want a repeatable planning process that earns trust and actually converts, here’s where to go next:
Listen to the full episode here. And if you missed it, start with Part 1 of the series.
Stay tuned for Part 3, where we get into growing the value of the business itself.