Estate planning is the most underutilized growth strategy in wealth management right now, and the stickiest.
Most advisors refer it out. They stay on the sidelines of the conversations that would move them upmarket, expand their relationships and keep the next generation from leaving.
Eighty percent of heirs leave their parents’ advisors within a year of the wealth transfer. $124 trillion is expected to change hands over the next two decades. Do the math on your own book. If you manage $200 million and lose 80% over the next 10 to 15 years, that’s $160 million walking out the door, not to market downturns or better performance, but to the next generation choosing a different advisor. Most practices are positioned to lose it.
The advisors who go deeper are seeing something different. They’re winning larger clients by delivering comprehensive planning in-house. They’re expanding wallet share by managing more of the financial picture, not just investments. They’re capturing the next generation before wealth transfers, building relationships while parents are alive, not meeting kids for the first time when it’s too late.
They’re building the stickiest client relationships in the industry.
The difference comes down to the conversations estate planning creates. Most clients aren’t lying awake worrying about asset allocation. What keeps them up is whether their family will be okay and whether they’re building something meaningful.
“If something happens to me, is my family protected? Do they have enough liquidity? Will my kids have to deal with courts and legal delays? How do I want to be remembered? What influence do I want to have on my kids beyond just money? What am I building that outlasts me?”
These are the most intimate conversations you can have with clients. You learn about their relationship with family and money. You understand what kind of impact they want to make with their life’s work. You get insight into goals, dreams, and values you’d never access by tweaking portfolios. That depth builds relationships clients don’t leave.
Most Advisors Don’t Actually Offer Estate Planning
Look under the hood. Their estate planning service is a handoff to an attorney. They stay on the sidelines of the most important wealth conversations happening in their clients’ lives.
Every year, we survey the industry on the state of estate planning. Every year, we find the same thing. Wealthier clients worry as much about their families as they do about tax exposure. No one wants the wealth they spent a lifetime accumulating to become a curse. They don’t want families torn apart by arguments over inheritance.
Advisors who help families navigate these complexities earn trust that lasts for generations.
Advisors who go deeper than a simple handoff see different results. Relationships get stronger because clients feel understood at a personal level. You guide the process and make estate planning part of your value proposition, working alongside attorneys the client trusts.
You start managing more of the client’s financial life, rather than just the investment accounts. This naturally expands your revenue per client. You shift your client base toward families with more complex needs and higher assets. You become the advisor wealthy prospects choose because you can deliver what others refer out.
Answer those needs, and you become indispensable. Solve those problems, and your practice grows.
But the problem is most advisors can’t scale it.
The Infrastructure Problem
Estate planning has been structurally impossible to scale. Not because advisors aren’t capable. Because the infrastructure doesn’t exist.
Think about what it actually takes today for most advisors. Tracking beneficiary designations across dozens of accounts. Coordinating with attorneys through email. Rebuilding documents from scratch every time something changes. Manual, fragmented, impossible to systematize.
For newer advisors, estate planning opens the door to holistic service and helps you move upmarket, but you can’t afford the hours per client. You’re stuck serving smaller clients while watching larger prospects choose advisors who can handle comprehensive planning.
For experienced advisors, you want to deepen relationships and keep assets in-house when clients pass away, but you can’t scale sophisticated planning beyond your top 20 clients. The growth opportunity sits in your book, but you can’t capture it.
So you make a rational choice. Only do comprehensive estate planning where the revenue justifies the hours. Everyone else gets a referral.
This is why 80% of heirs leave. You can’t build deep relationships at scale with manual infrastructure. And you can’t grow by serving only your wealthiest clients while referring everyone else out.
Technology Is Finally Making it Possible
Estate planning has stayed in the realm of Excel sheets and slide decks while everything else in the advisor toolkit modernized.
It doesn’t have to be that way anymore.
Technology can make complex planning itself scalable, and it completely changes the equation. Artificial intelligence can show you the full estate picture across 200 clients and identify what needs attention. Systems turn fragmented estate data into coordinated, living plans. Platforms let you visualize complex structures and show clients what different decisions mean in real time with just a few clicks.
This all exists now.
And when technology handles background tasks, you have time for conversations that matter. You can serve your entire book with sophisticated planning, not just your top tier. You can treat attorneys as true partners, with everyone working from the same data and making decisions faster.
The advisors who figure this out are building growth engines. They’re winning larger clients by keeping estate planning in-house. They’re expanding relationships with existing clients by managing more of their financial lives. They’re capturing the next generation before wealth transfers, turning one client relationship into two, then three, across multiple generations. By the time wealth transfers, they’re not strangers the heirs inherited, they’re the advisors the kids already know and trust.
That depth translates directly to growth. Deeper relationships. Wallet share expansion. Next-generation capture. Referrals that compound.
All while you build a practice clients can’t imagine leaving.
