We built the firm for specific client situations, not for a generic "HNW" market. The four profiles below describe the situations we coordinate most effectively. They are deliberately specific; a generic "high net worth" profile does not describe any of them.
Read the profile that sounds most like your situation. If two sound like you, read both. If none do, go to the final section directly.
You have a letter of intent on your desk, or you are six to eighteen months from receiving one.
The business you built is about to convert into liquid wealth. The decisions you make in the months before close will determine how much of that wealth you keep.
Most of those decisions sit at the seams between advisors. Your M&A attorney structures the transaction. Your transaction CPA handles the deal tax. Your wealth manager, if you have one, probably has limited experience with the coordinated post-sale planning you are about to need. Your insurance agent sees a one-time opportunity to sell large policies. No one is running the full plan from pre-sale tax optimization through post-sale reinvestment and long-term estate positioning.
We do this work alongside your M&A attorney and transaction CPA. We do not replace them. We sit between them and your long-term wealth management, which is the role nobody else is filling.
If this is your situation, request an introduction.
You have concentrated employer stock, a vesting schedule that runs for another decade, and a retirement date you can see from where you are standing.
The next ten years determine whether the wealth you have built gets efficiently transferred into the next forty years of retirement income, or whether it leaks to taxes you could have planned around.
The complexity lives in the coordination across every decision. Each RSU vesting event has a tax consequence. Each deferred compensation election window opens and closes based on your employment status. Each Roth conversion window opens and closes based on your income level. Each ISO exercise creates an AMT calculation. Each year you delay equity diversification compounds the concentration risk. No single advisor maps all of this against the calendar and coordinates the timing.
Each of these decisions is manageable individually. Making them in the right sequence, with the right timing, coordinated across investment, tax, and insurance, is the work most people do not know to ask for.
If this is your situation, request an introduction.
Your family has been working with the same estate attorney for twenty years. You are not looking to replace them. You are looking for someone to coordinate around them.
Multi-generational wealth typically fails at the coordination points, not at the drafting. The trust document says one thing; the beneficiary designations on the insurance policies say another; the investment accounts are titled in a fourth way; the gifting strategy was updated three years ago and nobody told the attorney.
The attorney who drafted the original structure often sees the family once a year, which is the right cadence for legal review but the wrong cadence for the hundred smaller decisions that affect how the structure actually performs. Those decisions happen at the wealth manager, the insurance agent, the CPA, and the family itself. Somebody has to watch for drift between what the attorney drafted and what is actually in place.
We integrate with your existing estate attorney. We do not replace them. Our success is measured by whether your attorney's drafting and our coordination work stay matched, year after year.
If this is your situation, request an introduction.
The business is your wealth engine. You built it. You plan to keep building it.
The coordination problem for operating owners differs from the coordination problem for pre-liquidity founders. The business stays the wealth engine, now and probably for the foreseeable future. Your planning has to account for that without being hostage to it.
Most owners who run operating businesses have a personal financial plan that is an afterthought. The business is "the plan." That framing works until it does not. The business and the personal wealth structure have coordination points. The coordination points are where the money leaks.
We build your personal plan as a distinct coordinated system that connects to the business without being dependent on it. If the business has a bad year, your personal plan still functions. If the business has an exceptional year, your personal plan captures the upside efficiently.
If this is your situation, request an introduction.
Bigham Wealth Advisory is not the right firm for every household. The situations below describe clients we typically refer elsewhere. We tell prospects this directly on the first call if the fit is not there.
The coordination methodology requires a level of complexity and time investment that does not fit smaller relationships well. There are excellent firms for households below this threshold. We will point you toward them if that is where you are.
Our methodology is built for households where wealth is already accumulated and the question is how to coordinate it, protect it, and pass it down efficiently. Households focused on debt reduction need different expertise. Some of our current clients did debt-reduction work with other advisors before the coordination work we do became the right fit for them.
We do not operate a transactional brokerage service. Every relationship at the firm runs through the Four-Pillar Protocol, which is structured around planning and coordination rather than individual trade execution. If you want execution-only brokerage, the major custodians you already use will serve you better.
The coordination model only works if the other professionals in your life are open to a coordinated approach. This is not negotiable. If you prefer your wealth manager to operate independently of your CPA and attorney, we will not be a fit.
Our methodology is explicitly not that. We believe in disciplined, coordinated, documented recommendations executed on a defensible cadence. We do not time markets, chase returns, or operate on conviction rather than process.
If your situation falls into any of these categories, we will tell you on the first call and point you toward firms that operate differently. Being clear about who we are not for is part of what makes us useful for the clients we are right for.
We review every request individually. If we are the right fit, you will hear from us within two business days. If we are not, we will tell you and point you toward a firm that is.
Not ready to talk? Many current clients read our writing for six to twelve months before reaching out.
