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Award-winning speaker and Globe and Mail best-selling author and international speaker Dr. Tom Deans believes that the unprecedented wealth transfer in Canada of $1 trillion will transform lives, culture, and the nation itself. Thought-provoking and contrarian, Deans is the author of Every Family’s Business, described as the best-selling family business book of all-time and selected by The New York Times as one of the Top Ten Books Business Owners Should Read. The book has sold more than a million copies in over 100 countries. His long-awaited sequel Willing Wisdom was released to critical acclaim and is already a Globe and Mail and New York Times best-seller.
Take away quote: “How we transition our wealth is actually as important, if not more important, than the amount or what we transition.”
Show Timeline:
02:30 7 questions to help families discuss estate planning
08:51 Incorporating family meetings to create a unique value proposition for advisors
10:27 Using a ‘Willing Wisdom Index’ to support clients and families with estate planning
20:00 Comfortable ways to approach difficult conversations in the current environment?
24:30 Helping clients to ‘move toward the chaos’ to build stronger client relationships,
26:43 Finding new ways of doing business to replace in-person social contact.
29:27 3 Actions advisors can do now to highlight gaps in estate plans
Links:
Website: https://www.willingwisdom.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/tomdeans
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomdeansphd
Want more?
Stephen Wershing: http://advisorchecklist.com/blog/
Julie Littlechild: http://www.absoluteengagement.com/blog
Episode Transcript:
Julie Littlechild:
Welcome to Becoming Referable, the podcast that helps you become the kind of advisor people can’t help talking about. I’m Julie Littlechild, and today Steve and I are speaking with Dr. Tom Deans. Now Tom, I think, brings some really great perspective on how advisors can deliver value to clients, and it’s particularly relevant in the current environment. And just by way of background, and there’s a lot more that we’ll get into, Tom is the author of Every Family’s Business, which was rated by the New York Times as one of the top 10 books that business owners should read. But we’re actually going to focus more on the sequel, Willing Wisdom, which answers a really critical question for all of us, and that is: How prepared is your family to inherit?
Julie Littlechild:
I’m sure you’ve had this kind of conversation with your clients. But on the basis of the work that Tom has done, he created a tool to help advisors called the willing wisdom index. And I can tell you I used the tool, and it really did help me to see some gaps in my own planning, and I thought I was pretty well prepared. So with that, let’s get straight to the conversation with Tom. Well, Tom, welcome. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Steve Wershing:
Yeah. Welcome, Tom.
Tom Deans:
Great to be here.
Julie Littlechild:
Well, I am excited to talk to you. In fact, I have wanted to get you on the podcast for quite some time. And this may make us look really smart, but what you have to say is probably more pertinent now than it has ever been in the past, so looking forward to that. But let me just ask if I could start us off by getting your description of the work that you’re doing with advisors and just to give them some context.
Tom Deans:
Yeah. It is a great place to start. I was a CEO of a large family business for eight years. And then had an unsolicited offer, and we sold. We sold that family business. And I realized that is something that our family had done three previous times. And in fact, we had never actually gifted an operating business to our kids. And so I wrote that book. I wrote that book 12 years ago. And that book is called Every Family’s Business. That turned into a professional speaking career, which led to the second book, the sequel, which is really going to make up I think the bulk of our conversation today.
Tom Deans:
It is a very different book on estate planning. It is not a technical book. It’s actually a book that helps families. It offers seven questions to help families start what is clearly an improbable, difficult conversation to have, which is: How are we going to leave the wealth that we’ve created? When are we going to transition? Are we going to do what most people do and just leave it all to the very end, and then the floodgates open? Are we going to prepare our heirs? Are we going to have transparency in our estate plans? Or are we going to do what 125 million Americans are going to do, which is, and I’ll give you a hint.
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