Tom’s passion for philanthropy and for seeing families succeed is truly inspirational. I have seen him motivate and inspire even the most knowledgeable business owners, attorneys and advisors. His clear vision for what families truly need is revolutionary.

Watching Tom work with families is magical. His personal family story makes him all the more believable as he instructs business owners on how to prepare their family for the business and the money!

10! 10 ! 10! Best speaker on this topic we have ever had!

For wealth management advisors, Tom offers a full-service wealth management virtual office. He trains the sales force, motivates the clients, and inspires the advisors - infusing all with the tools they need for helping clients succeed at preserving their family and their wealth, while simultaneously growing the wealth advisor’s business. We brought Tom into all of our largest opportunities. Without Tom, we looked the same as everyone else. With Tom, we became the “Whole Family Trusted Advisors. 

Tom has a unique way of creating a scalable model to adeptly help families succeed not only financially but interpersonally. Creating strong family teams means preservation of family and wealth for generations. His model of” family governance and legacy creation,” blows up the paradigm of shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations. We recorded his “Family & Financial Blueprint” discovery process and it became a mandatory part of our training for all of our teams. It showed families that we cared about what was truly important to them.

Focusing on the Deming’s original work where 85% of the benefit of a project comes from the first 15% of the effort, Tom adeptly moves families through that 15% like no one I’ve seen. Families, thereby, quickly receive 85% of the benefit of a long process in just a few meetings.

Tom’s W.I.S.E. sales training with his Family & Financial Blueprint process and overall understanding of how to motivate and educate prospects to action, has revolutionized how I approach a client and how I help the family!

Independence verses Interdependence is Tom’s recipe for family success. Unintentionally we encouraged tremendous independence in our children to the point of them not knowing each other’s strengths, not realizing the damage this separation was doing. Tom helped us recognize how our independent values and abilities were important, but then showed us how to work together to build interdependence as we work to build and preserve the future of our family. It is difficult to break free of 30 years of family behavioral patterns but somehow Tom worked his magic showing us, with new eyes, the value each of us brings to the table. Then he showed us how to develop patterns of healthy communication. A miracle!” 

“I am a licensed ski instructor, but I found teaching my wife to ski impossible! Not because I didn’t know how but because I was the wrong messenger,” said Tom at our family meeting. Similarly, he said that we parents might know what lessons we want to teach our children, but we might be the wrong messengers to teach these lessons. If he delivers the ideas to the family, we parents get to participate and observe rather than being seen as controlling. Tom says his focus is on getting B.O.E. (Buy-in to Ownership to Empowerment) and he certainly did with our family. Tom is the RIGHT messenger! He has run over 300 family meetings. He is the most experienced person that I know of in the country at educating and motivating families to work together as a team. The value of this reaches far beyond our generation.

At one WPO meeting that Tom spoke at, one member left saying, “This was a waste of my time. My attorney and I have it all figured out.”  However, as he walked away, the member’s wife and daughter went up to Tom and I heard them say, “Now you know how big a problem we have!” The mother and children hired Tom on the spot to start their Family Meeting process and eventually Dad saw the value of Tom’s approach and he was “all in.”

Tom helped us create and deliver a “Family Philanthropy” program that became one of our most successful and productive major donor development programs. He inspired us to create a values card exercise based on the values evidenced by certain animal groups. These cards helped us involve multiple generations of donor families, from young to old, in caring about and then funding projects for animal advocacy. Our donor families loved it!

Tom knows how to present the capabilities of our firm to the sales and market leaders in a way that energizes us all. Over and over I see firms that do not know how to sell their capabilities internally, so they never are sold externally. Tom does this in spades and the results show up in my pocket!

Tom is an outstanding resource for us. We outsource the Family Governance/Legacy work to him while he helps us bring in clients of significant wealth. He runs the family meetings and makes us look good!