Why I Only Take 12 New Families Per Year
I cap my advisory fee at $20,000.
I also limit myself to 12 new families per year.
Those two decisions are connected.
They reflect the same philosophy:
Depth over scale.
The Incentive Problem in Wealth Management
Most advisory firms grow revenue two ways:
Gather more assets.
Add more clients.
If fees are purely percentage-based with no cap, revenue grows automatically as markets rise.
If intake is unlimited, revenue grows through volume.
Both models reward expansion.
Neither model inherently rewards depth.
When I decided to cap my fee at $20,000, I removed the incentive to simply gather larger and larger portfolios.
If a client grows from $5 million to $8 million, my compensation does not rise proportionally.
That forces discipline.
If revenue won’t grow automatically from asset size, it must come from delivering value to the right households.
And that means I cannot dilute my time.
The First Year Is Not Light Work
When a new family comes on board, the first year typically includes:
Full balance sheet review
Tax return analysis
Retirement income modeling
Portfolio restructuring
Guardrail design
Estate coordination
Risk identification
That is not a transactional process.
It is architectural.
If I onboard too many families at once, one of two things happens:
Planning becomes templated.
Or service quality drops.
Neither aligns with a capped-fee model.
Why Twelve
Twelve new families per year averages roughly one per month.
That pace allows:
Focused onboarding
Real integration
Proper follow-through
Attention to existing families
Because existing families deserve the same depth as new ones.
Limiting intake preserves that.
Fewer Families, Higher Standards
In Grosse Pointe, many affluent households already have advisors.
What they often lack is structure.
Not just asset allocation.
But integration:
Income durability
Tax sequencing
Survivor planning
Estate alignment
That level of work requires time.
Time is finite.
When fees are capped and intake is limited, the business model forces me to prioritize quality over quantity.
The Alternative Model
If I removed the fee cap and doubled the number of households, revenue would increase.
But depth would decrease.
Meetings become shorter.
Planning becomes more standardized.
Clients become accounts.
That’s not what I want to build.
Alignment Matters
By capping fees and limiting new relationships:
Clients are not penalized for growing wealth.
I am not incentivized to overextend.
The model rewards long-term retention, not constant prospecting.
It creates a ceiling on scale.
And that ceiling protects standards.
This approach is not designed to be the largest.
It’s designed to be deliberate.
And deliberate planning is rarely built on unlimited growth.
