A High End, Intensive Educational Seminar on How to Plan Well Despite a 90% Fail Rate
Presentation Goals
Most successful business owners and people of means can provide a fairly clear statement of what personal success looks like for them and their families. Even so, regardless of culture, governmental or tax structure, or even time itself, the majority of estate and financial plans fail as measured against those self-identified success markers.* This presentation is designed to foster a re-orientation of how to approach planning – starting with the end game goals as opposed to the circumstantial barriers (e.g., taxes, liquidity, business cycles, etc.) – and thereafter addressing some of the tools to achieve those goals.
Ideal Audience
Personal Planning Success is designed primarily with business owners in mind, in part because of their unique challenges and opportunities. The presentation can be effective for people who have generated or received their wealth independent of closely-held business interests – provided that they have an interest in the stewardship aspect of wealth and its transfer.
An ideal audience is one that knows and trusts each other, and one that is willing to be disclosing and engaged with the topic by raising questions relevant to their circumstances. Your presenter seeks to make this presentation a “shared life” experience, and an audience welcoming of that approach will ensure success.
Presentation Format
Full Day Seminar
Personal Planning Success can be a full day experience. The topics are essentially as described for the Part 1 and Part 2 half-day sessions below.
Half Day Seminar – Part 1
Part 1 of Personal Planning Success focuses on a more productive method of defining and communicating success factors to various stakeholders, including indentifying the virtues and values that should drive the planning and behaviors that will lead to the achievement of those success factors. While fostering the next generation’s ability to succeed in a business may be part of the discussion, a broader view of true legacy planning will be a significant focus.
Half Day Seminar – Part 2
Part 2 of Personal Planning Success will presume a working understanding of the concepts covered in Part 1. To be somewhat direct, the speaker will refuse to do this part independent of Part 1’s concepts. That said, Part 2 will focus on two things: structure and techniques of estate and financial planning instruments and strategies. The discussion will not be so much on the technical fine points – that’s the job of appropriate advisors – as on how crafting a tailored structure and selecting the right techniques will enhance likely success measured from the attendee’s point of view.
Condensed Half-Day Seminar
The concepts of Part 1 and Part 2 can be condensed into one half-day session, with some loss of depth and perhaps a necessary reduction in time for discussion. Pursuing this option will require a fair amount of discussion to determine its appropriateness for your particular audience. Factors that would suggest that the presenter would be comfortable with this approach would be the size of the audience (for instance, the larger the audience, the less interactive the session is likely to be anyway), the familiarity with certain aspects of the presentation (although the presenter submits that it is important to distinguish “sophistication” with respect to estate and financial planning from the concepts covered – please feel free to ask about this point), and the like.
Shorter Sessions/Key Note Presentation
Various concepts can be pulled out of the Personal Planning Success structure and focused on independently. For example, the following subjects can be used for a 30-50 minute presentation:
Identifying Your Core Values
True Inheritance Planning
Why Your Estate and Financial Plan Is Likely to Fail
The Importance of Focusing on the People in Your Planning
One or more structural topics or techniques can also be productive topics for shorter sessions. Making these fit the “shared life” approach will be a focus of the presenter in co-developing a shorter session.
* “From shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations” is an almost universal, cross-cultural proverb that perhaps first appeared several thousand years ago in China as “from rice paddy to rice paddy in three generations.”