Most advisors at this stage of a career are looking for ways to grow. Hire more people. Add more clients. Build more layers. I'm doing the opposite.

This month I'm in the middle of a transition that takes my staff at Long Family Office, the wealth management side of my practice, down to one person plus me. The other side of what I do, Build Prove Sell, runs separately with my daughter Ellen and a project manager and has always been small by design.

I'm eliminating some people and moving to partner with a group called Savvy Wealth, a roughly $10 billion firm that's providing the back office: trading, compliance, customer service, the whole operational layer. The work I actually do, the work clients hire me for, stays exactly where it is.

The math of letting go

For years I was paying multiple vendors and employees for the things I don't like to do or can't do as well as a larger platform can. Trading desks. Compliance. Customer service. None of that is why a client sits down with me. They sit down with me because they want somebody who has been through and understands what they're going through and will walk through the next decision with them.

Handing those functions to Savvy frees up time. It also gives Long Family Office marketing heft I couldn't put behind it on my own. The clients keep the relationship they came for, and I get the hours back to do the work I actually love.

Plans don't change anything, implementation does

The industry sells plans. That's mostly what exit planning looks like at scale. A firm builds you a binder, charges you for it, hands it over, and moves on to the next one. There's usually an insurance product or a referral fee tucked in somewhere so the math works.

One of my clients pulled a big black binder off the shelf while we were talking. He said, "I paid $100,000 for this binder, but I didn't get the $100,000 in value because I don't know how to implement this. It's too complicated and too long. What I needed was somebody to help me implement, not just give me the plan."

That's why he hired us. We don't draft exit plans for people. We know where we're going, but we're going to do the next thing and implement. Then the next thing, and implement. Then the next thing, and implement. After a while the client looks behind them and is amazed at how much they've accomplished.

You can't do that at scale. It requires hour-long meetings every two weeks for years at a time. It requires actually knowing the family, the business, the tax picture, the next generation. The deeper the work goes, the smaller the practice has to stay.

Who we keep room for

We work in the ten to twenty exit planning client range. Engagements run three to four years on average, though some families have stayed eight years, twelve years, fourteen. By the end of an engagement we will know more about a client than their accountant, more than their lawyer, more than their doctor, more than pretty much anyone except the husband and the wife. That's not a sales pitch. It's the structural consequence of doing the work the way it has to be done.

This year we have capacity to add another ten or twelve clients, which is part of why I'm doing the Savvy transition now. The model only works if the operational layer doesn't pull me away from the relationships.

What the smaller firm frees up

The same logic runs through how we manage portfolios: hold a small number of things you actually understand, with conviction, and don't outsource the thinking to an index. I wrote about that approach separately.

I have five kids and nine grandchildren. My time is important to me. But I love what I do, so the goal isn't to retire or wind down. The goal is to keep the balance between being with my family and providing real help to the families I work with. The Savvy transition is what makes that balance hold as the practice keeps going.

The truth is I'm having more fun in this work right now than I ever have. The reason is that I've kept it small enough to actually do the work I love with people who become my friends and appreciate what we do.

Find Implementers

The key takeaway is this: when you're choosing who to bring in for the work that actually matters, look at how they work, not just what they sell.

A plan you can't implement is worth less than the binder it sits in. A firm built to scale can't walk every owner through a decade of decisions, one by one, the next thing then the next thing.

If you're three to five years out from a transition, find people who will be there when the next thing comes up. Then the one after that. Then the one after that. That's the work. Everything else is just paperwork.

If you want the bigger picture of how we approach this, I laid it out in my book, Bulletproof Your Exit. Or connect with me to start the conversation.