Ultra-high-net-worth (UHNW) families and their advisors face a unique and growing set of challenges: maintaining trust across generations, simplifying complex structures, aligning legal and financial frameworks with personal values, and ensuring continuity in advisory relationships. While technical expertise remains essential, the difference-maker today is how effectively advisors communicate, engage, and educate their clients, and their clients' heirs.
leafplanner is purpose-built to help family offices and advisors solve these pain points by transforming how families of wealth interact with their information, advisors, and planning process. Through its dynamic, visual, and relational platform, leafplanner makes complexity understandable, fosters transparency, and supports multigenerational engagement and continuity.
Building Client Confidence and Increasing Referrals
The Challenge:
- 85% of HNW clients believe that more frequent or effective communication would increase their confidence in their advisor.
- 81% say this would also make them more likely to refer their advisor to others.
How leafplanner Helps:
leafplanner delivers a centralized, shared view of the family’s structure and plans, allowing advisors to communicate proactively, visually, and with greater alignment. By providing clients with a tangible, exportable, and easy-to-understand plan, advisors elevate their perceived value, enhancing both trust and referral potential.
Reducing Confusion After Client Meetings
The Challenge:
Many clients walk away from advisor meetings feeling overwhelmed, or worse, more confused than when they arrived.
How leafplanner Helps:
leafplanner turns abstract complexity into visual clarity. By mapping people, entities, documents, and responsibilities interactively, it transforms static conversations and dense language into a living picture of the family enterprise, ensuring clarity, not confusion.
Retaining Clients Through Wealth Transitions
The Challenge:
51% of clients with $10M+ in assets say they would consider replacing their advisor upon receiving a large inheritance.
How leafplanner Helps:
leafplanner supports advisors in establishing continuity and foresight well in advance of wealth transitions. With a proactive, documented plan in place, clients are more likely to feel prepared and trust that their advisor has the family’s long-term interests at heart, mitigating risk during moments of transition.
Aligning Planning with Client Values and Intentions
The Challenge:
Only 10% of clients believe their estate plan reflects their actual goals and priorities.
How leafplanner Helps:
leafplanner prompts advisors to document and integrate personal goals, family values, and interpersonal dynamics, not just legal structures. This ensures that planning is not only technically sound, but deeply personal and aligned with client intent.
Retaining the Rising Generation of Heirs
The Challenge:
- 70% of heirs change advisors after inheriting wealth.
- Only 72% of heirs even know the value of their inheritance.
How leafplanner Helps:
By providing controlled, role-based access to family plans, documents, and advisors, leafplanner invites the next generation into the conversation early. This gradual, transparent onboarding fosters trust and continuity, well before assets change hands.
Explaining Complex Structures Without Losing Your Audience
The Challenge:
Only 21% of heirs understand the legal and structural mechanisms behind their wealth transfer.
How leafplanner Helps:
leafplanner brings complexity to life in a visually digestible format. Clients and heirs can easily see how trusts, entities, roles, and people interrelate, eliminating the need for whiteboard sessions or dense legal language.
Introducing Heirs to the Advisory Team and Process
The Challenge:
Only 17% of heirs are introduced to the professionals managing their future wealth.
How leafplanner Helps:
leafplanner includes built-in tools to showcase the advisory team, with role definitions, contact information, and clear responsibilities. This “who’s who” of the family office builds familiarity and trust across generations.
Educating Heirs on Managing Wealth
The Challenge:
- Only 12% of heirs receive formal education on budgeting or investing.
- Just 5% receive any broader wealth education.
How leafplanner Helps:
leafplanner acts as a living family guidebook. It contextualizes wealth through goals, documents, planning tools, and narratives, giving advisors a platform to educate and empower heirs, not just store data.
Conclusion: Turning Complexity Into Clarity, and Clarity Into Continuity
The future of family office advisory is not simply technical, it is educational, relational, and visual. leafplanner addresses the root causes behind client disengagement, generational disconnects, and advisor turnover by centralizing everything a family needs to understand its wealth, governance, and relationships.
Whether the goal is retaining clients, empowering heirs, or differentiating your advisory offering, leafplanner transforms complexity into trust, and trust into enduring relationships.