A productive meeting with your accountant or lawyer can leave you feeling that an important issue has been resolved. The questions were thoughtful, the discussion was useful, and the advice made sense.
Then, you return to your desk.
Who needs to do what? What information must be collected? Does the lawyer need instructions from the accountant? Who will tell the bookkeeper? What needs to be approved, and how will you know the work is complete? Who evaluates the work once its complete?
This is where many family offices face a gap: receiving advice and implementing advice are two different things. Someone needs to implement, manage, and be accountable the results. Or else, things just don’t get done. Plus, doing things takes time, and time is our most precious resource.
I regularly work with lawyers, accountants, and other professional advisors. For the most part, they are knowledgeable, capable people who are also enjoyable to work with.
But they also operate in the real world. As such, they face staffing constraints, competing deadlines, and need to run profitable practices while maintaining some reasonable work-life balance.
Giving advice verbally can be an efficient way for wealth management professionals to serve their clients. But what makes delivery easier for the advisor can make implementation harder for the family.
The conversation ends, but the operational work hasn’t even started. Someone needs to do the actual work to make advice become reality.
Consider a family struggling with a tax question involving several holding companies. The accountant explains a recommended approach, identifies some conditions, and discusses the timing. Everyone leaves the meeting with a general understanding of the plan.
But the family still needs to translate that discussion into action. Staff may need to assemble financial records, coordinate legal documentation, arrange payments, update bookkeeping, and retain supporting evidence.
If the advice exists only in the memories and handwritten notes of the people who attended the meeting, each handoff introduces room for misunderstanding. A qualification may be forgotten. A preliminary suggestion may be treated as a final decision. Two people may each assume that the other is responsible for the next step. Who evaluates their work?
The advice itself may be excellent. The process for acting on it is too often inadequate.
Family offices should make written advice an expected deliverable.
For substantive matters, a conversation is not good enough as the final work product. Investors need a memo that explains what is being recommended, why it is appropriate, what assumptions support it, and what must happen before anyone acts.
Ideally, professional advisors should also provide implementation guides, so that staff members (who are not themselves experts in every field) can execute the plans.
This does not mean every phone call requires a lengthy report. Documentation should be proportionate to the complexity and consequences of the decision. Sometimes a concise email is sufficient. A transaction involving several entities and professional firms may require a more formal memo.
The standard should be practical: could a capable staff member who did not attend the meeting understand the recommendation, identify the next steps, and act?
If the answer is no, then the process needs improvement.
A useful advice memo should address:
- The question being asked & answered and the relevant facts.
- The recommendation and its rationale.
- Important assumptions, conditions, and unresolved questions.
- Required actions, their sequence, and any deadlines.
- The parties responsible for implementation and review.
Not every advisor will know every detail of the client’s internal operations. That’s where staff must participate. The advisor provides and confirms the professional judgment; their family office helps translate it into a workable process.
The memo should become an operating procedure.
Written advice is valuable, but saving a PDF in a folder does not complete implementation.
So, turn recommendations into assigned work. Each action should have an owner, a deadline or trigger, and a clear indication of what completion looks like. Dependencies should be explicit: which steps require approval, which require another professional’s input, and which must wait until an outstanding question is resolved?
For recurring matters, the family office should incorporate the advice into its regular procedures. That might mean updating a quarterly review checklist, adding a reporting requirement, or documenting the information staff must prepare before the next annual meeting.
The procedure should also identify when to return to the advisor. Advice based on particular facts should not quietly become a permanent instruction after those facts change.
This is how professional expertise becomes part of the family office’s institutional knowledge. It remains useful when someone is on vacation, a new employee joins, or the same issue arises a year later.
AI can make this work easier to deliver.
Historically, documenting advice has required additional time from already busy professionals. AI can help reduce that burden.
With participants’ consent, a discussion can be recorded and transcribed. AI can then help prepare a draft memo, extract action items, identify unanswered questions, and organize a proposed implementation checklist.
The professional does not necessarily need to begin with a blank page. They can explain their advice, then review and correct the resulting draft.
That review is essential. AI can omit a qualification or make an uncertain observation sound definitive. An AI-generated meeting summary is not automatically an advisor-approved memo. Missing information should be flagged for clarification, not filled in with plausible assumptions.
Used well, this process gives the advisor a more efficient way to document their judgment and gives the client a clearer starting point for execution.
Family offices also need to change how they engage advisors.
An expectation should be established at the beginning of an assignment: we need both the advice and your help making it actionable.
Ask for a written deliverable. Agree on its scope and cost. Identify who will coordinate implementation. Where several firms are involved, make responsibility for the handoffs explicit.
Documentation is part of the service, and family offices should be prepared to pay for it. The relevant cost is the total cost of reaching a reliable outcome, including staff time, repeated clarification, delays, and corrections.
Professional advisors should no longer regard attending a meeting and offering an opinion as sufficient completion of a substantive assignment. Today’s advisor needs to help turn insight into action.
For family offices, the measure of good advice is not simply whether everyone understood it during the meeting. It is whether the investor and their staff can carry it out correctly afterward.
The conversation is the beginning. A documented, executable process is the deliverable.
