Minding the Gap
There were 45 of us in the room that night in 2020: financial planners, estate attorneys, divorce attorneys, and CPAs. Wine glasses on the table, name tags half off, and a one-page case study face down in front of every seat, waiting for me to read it aloud.
None of it would have existed without my FPA Board colleague, Frank Allen, who in 2017 first floated the idea with me: what if the Financial Planning Association actually got to know the attorneys and CPAs we worked alongside every day, instead of just referring business back and forth? And it grew into something real because of two women in particular. Laura Mason (Wong), an attorney, opened the door to the Memphis Bar Association. Karolina Calhoun, a CPA, did the same with the Memphis chapter of TSCPA. Without them in the room, it stays an FPA event. With them, it became something else entirely, fifteen to twenty people from three professions who technically knew each other for years but had never really compared notes.
I wrote every case study to the strengths of whoever RSVP'd. If a divorce attorney with deep experience in irrevocable trusts was coming, and an estate attorney who worked with ultra-high-net-worth families was on the list too, the case study became an ultra-high-net-worth divorce, and I made it messy on purpose. It gave the CPAs a chance to shine, especially with a glass of wine in hand. It gave the financial planners room to talk about what these decisions would actually cost or save over twenty years, not just this one.
I read the case study out loud, one page, sentence by sentence, written to be read that way. I would stop and ask the room what they'd do next. We used pop culture as the shared language, Saved by the Bell, A Christmas Story, whatever gave everyone the same starting point, and then we solved the case together, in real time, weighing options and comparing strategies.
The events sold out faster every time. The case studies grew more complex because people showed up ready to think, not just network. And what I watched happen, over and over, was colleagues who'd known each other for years in the Memphis community discovering how much they didn't actually know about each other's work. Referrals started moving. Consults started happening.
Two years after that first event, I'd just moved to Nashville, which meant a three-hour drive home instead of ten minutes. That drive gave me something I hadn't had before: time to think about why these mixers kept selling out and what the real ingredient was.
Plenty of events offer networking. This was watching a genuinely complex case get solved live, by the right people, in the same room, at the same time. And what struck me on that drive was quieter than "everyone should talk more." These were smart, experienced professionals who had worked alongside each other for years. Most of them simply didn't know what was possible just outside their own discipline, what a trust attorney could structure, what a CPA could see coming two years out, or what a planner could model over a decade. That ceiling was invisible to everyone standing under it. And clients were the ones who absorbed it, quietly, every time.
It was on that drive home that the rest of it hit me: this wasn't how my real business life worked day to day. Nobody was reading a case study out loud and pulling the right experts into the same room on a random Tuesday. The coordination that made those nights so valuable didn't exist anywhere else, not for the professionals in that room, nor for the clients whose actual lives were far messier than any case study I could write.
These days I’ve gone beyond noticing the gap and clients hire me to be the one to mind it. I'm grateful for the professional relationships that let me to see the potential for coordinating advice on a complex balance sheet, and glad you spent a few minutes reading this first edition of The WealthHolder. Whether you're a wealth holder frustrated with navigating the complexity of your own financial life, or a financial, tax, or legal professional who wants that same coordination your client families, I'm glad you're here.