Monthly. Long-form. One situation, fully unpacked.
Case-study depth on the moments that shape a financial life — selling a business, transferring a generation of wealth, designing a giving structure that lasts. Twenty minutes of reading. Years of clarity.
The piece you’d want before the meeting.
Building Value exists for the reader who’s close to a decision. The owner whose business is two years from a sale. The family whose estate plan was drafted in a different decade. The donor weighing a private foundation versus a DAF for the next twenty years of giving.
Each issue takes one real situation — anonymized but otherwise intact — and walks through everything: the math, the mechanics, the trade-offs, the order of operations, the mistakes we’d have flagged.
One situation at a time
No 47-bullet “comprehensive guides.” We pick one decision, one client archetype, and stay with it.
Real numbers, not vibes
If we say “the tax savings were meaningful,” we show the spreadsheet. If we say “the structure worked,” we explain how we’d know.
The order matters
What we did first, second, third — and why. The sequence is usually the thing that decides whether a strategy delivers.
What we’d do differently
Every issue closes with the candid version. The thing we’d change with hindsight. The signal we missed the first time.
Eight stories worth your time.
Selling the business: the year before, the year after.
A $14M exit, walked through month by month — what we did in the twelve months on each side of the closing, the QSBS election we caught two weeks before it would’ve been too late, the family conversations that mattered, and the things we’d handle differently if we ran this play again.
Transferring $12M across three generations.
The 15-year-old estate plan that almost stayed in place — and what we found when we rebuilt it from the ground up. Three generation-skipping trusts, seven grandchildren, one quarterly family meeting that changed everything.
The 18-month diversification plan for a $6M concentration.
A VP at a Fortune 500 with 72% of net worth in company stock. The 10b5-1 that did the work, the CPA coordination that kept the taxes sane, the portfolio that took its place.
Retiring three years early on the same balance sheet.
The withdrawal sequence, the Roth conversion ladder, the healthcare bridge. A couple who wanted to go from 65 to 62 — and the year of work that made the math hold.
Building a $5M DAF — for a 25-year horizon.
The donor who wanted to give now, decide later. What we funded it with, why we chose a DAF over a private foundation, and the giving cadence we’d recommend for a family this size.
The inheritance nobody was ready for.
A $4M inherited IRA, a SECURE Act ten-year clock, and a beneficiary in her peak earning years. The distribution plan we built and the tax we avoided.
A family business, three siblings, one estate plan.
What we did when only one of three adult children wanted to stay in the business — and how we structured equal value without splitting the operating company.
The pre-IPO planning window most founders miss.
What a founder can do in the eighteen months before liquidity that compounds for decades after. QSBS, gifting at low valuations, irrevocable structures.
One long-form piece. First of the month.
The pieces in Building Value take real work to write. We publish one a month, and we’d rather you read it slowly than rush through it. Subscribe and we’ll send the new one when it drops.
Often forwarded inside families, between CPAs and attorneys, and to the prospect who’s still thinking it through.