What We Don’t Do and Why

Focus is key for our business and for yours. Focus does not only mean keeping your eye on a target; it also means excluding everything else. What do you focus on in your business and what do you exclude? At Entrepreneur Aligned, we exclude a number of things from our services. We choose to focus on a few keys that actually matter and help our clients live their remarkable lives.

Tasks we exclude

So what do we not do? Here are a few examples:

• We do not prepare tax returns or draft estate plans.

• We do not scout and recommend individual venture capital, private equity or private real estate deals.

• We do not charge assets under management fees.

• We do not enable client trading for client accounts.

Why not, you ask? We do not do the above tasks, because we are helping clients optimize for their remarkable lives. Remarkable lives are enabled by money, but they are not focused on money. We want to keep the focus on the objective and the strategy that best supports attaining that objective for our clients. These strategies are typically built around a few key elements:

• Clarify what you need in your life for it to be remarkable for you and your family. In most cases, this involves freedom of time and enough cash flow to let you do what you want with that time.

• Grow wealth through maximizing the equity and cash flow potential from your primary business within the time and risk exposure you are willing to allocate.

• Manage your big risks through legal construction, cash flow planning and insurance so that there are no single failure points if things go wrong.

• Make sure that all the pieces work together so that you do not give up time or money fixing things as they break.

The reasons why

We do not prepare tax returns or draft estate plans, because there are other great professionals who focus exclusively on those skills. Instead, we focus on helping clients clarify the strategy that best supports their remarkable life and we highlight where tax and legal are needed to implement it. We thoroughly vet all professionals serving each of our client families and make recommendations when new providers are needed.

We do not scout individual private investments for clients because, again, there are firms focused exclusively on finding those very best deals. Our focus is on understanding if and when it makes sense to use these tools. Then, we help clients find the best tool for a specific job. We are like a hardware store employee helping you choose the drill you need. We are not the tool company manufacturer nor even the hardware store employee who orders inventory. Judgment and understanding how all the financial elements fit together is our focus - not building tools.

We do not charge assets under management fees or sell products, for that matter, because our focus is on complete understanding of what our clients need and providing guidance on how to get there. If we tell a client to sell one of their businesses and invest in a portfolio of mutual funds with that money, we need our clients to have no doubt that we are recommending this solely for their benefit. Conflicts of interest, even when well managed, are still something that we all are aware of.

We do not enable trading in client accounts, because tactical trading of individual securities or market events do not help create remarkable lives. They provide stress, distraction and volatility, which are all available in abundance for business owners to begin with. The biggest lever available to business owners when growing wealth is the ability to generate both significant cash flow and equity appreciation in a closely held business. That is where the domain expertise and leverage of experience, employees and capital are held. We do not want to waste time as amateurs playing in someone else’s game - the game of trading in capital markets.

How we help you

These are a few things we have chosen to exclude, so that we can focus where we add value. Can we help you clarify the definition of the life you want to live and how to align financial resources to live it? Can we help you grow wealth inside your business by taking on the rest of the personal wealth tasks, so that you can focus? Are we successful in helping you manage risks and avoid single failure points in your financial life? Are all the pieces working together so that you are not pulled into firefighting, fixing and implementing? If the answer to each of these questions is a resounding, “YES!”, then we have hit our target and are focusing on the right things.

Focus matters. Keep working on the things that matter, and ignore the rest.

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If you have a question or simply want to talk through your financial planning, we are here to help.

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DISCLOSURE: Jarrod Musick is an officer of Destiny Capital and Entrepreneur Aligned, a DBA of Destiny Capital. This article is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for your investment, business, or personal financial decisions. We recommend consulting with your wealth advisor, CPA/tax advisor and/or attorney, as applicable to your situation, prior to implementing any new tax, legal, or investment strategy.

ABOUT JARROD

Jarrod was born into financial planning and solving financial problems. With his financial advisor father Steve telling stories about finance around the dinner table from an early age, the idea that everyone has a different financial situation was always there. After an early professional career spent in nonprofit and government, Jarrod came back to his roots helping people plan and invest in 2011. Since then, he has worked with individual clients, led internal teams and ultimately became partner and the CEO of Destiny Capital in 2017. With a passion for helping entrepreneurs change the world, Jarrod ultimately oversaw the creation of Entrepreneur Aligned in 2020. With both Destiny Capital and Entrepreneur Aligned, Jarrod leads teams that help people live lives of abundance where money is simply a tool to let everyone be a positive force for the world around them. When he isn’t working with the talented teams for EA and DC you can find him chasing his twins, wily trout or a podium spot at an OCR race.