by Wendell Cayton

Let’s make 2004 the year it all comes together!

We believe that no other system or collection comes close to The Macaulay Group’s Comprehensive Wealth Management System.

To fully understand THE SYSTEM, you must understand its six strategies. Together, these strategies and their tactical implementation make up The Macaulay Group’s system. Five of the strategies are operational; the sixth is a “Master Strategy” that governs the implementation of the other five.

The result is a Comprehensive Wealth Management system that, we believe, will best allow the achievement of your financial goals. To the extent that you are achieving your goals and raising the bar to even higher standards, you are doing these things—your choice is simply whether you want to develop them yourself or buy them.

1. Computerize your business. That’s right, I said business. It’s important that you under­stand that we view each client household as a business. You are obviously the president; we want to be your CFO. Business owners would not dream of running their operations without a monthly balance sheet, cash flow statement, statement of changes in financial position, and a tight grasp on where they stand at any given time with inventory, credit lines, payables and receivables.

   It has always amazed me that when we sit down with our clients’ personal affairs, they make decisions with a collection of unconsolidated monthly statements. Furthermore, they have no idea of the net after-tax, after-fee return on investment. They have outdated wills, trusts, and insurance policies, and they have not run multiple scenarios with state-of-the-art professional planning software. My group invests a lot of money to make all of these resources available to all of our clients as part of the added value we bring to the table.

2. Build a Team. By definition, Comprehensive Wealth Management must be very different for any two people. Depending on your situation, you may have a need for experts in financial planning, estate planning, business valuations, liquidity options and strategies for owners of closely held business or large real estate holdings, insurance and long-term care planning, charitable giving, taxes, legal matters, borrowing money, selling a business, ESOPs, option grants or investment management. While we are certainly not experts in all of these areas, we do work with individuals who are. When you hire The Macaulay Group, you immediately have access to the whole first string.
3. Protect and preserve your existing wealth. Our clients are already wealthy—they have made their money building a business or practicing medicine or law or playing baseball or climbing up the executive ranks of a successful public company and saving their money. The last thing they want is someone new coming in trying to be a hero. We focus on getting our clients competitive returns while helping them to avoid landmines:a. We are ruthless in keeping fees down.
   b. We hold managers accountable for performance and buy/sell decisions.
   c. We pride ourselves on finding and cutting out unnecessary fat.
   d. We bring modern investment techniques to the table to help protect the downside.
   e. We do a complete insurance needs analysis (life, disability, and liability).
4. Planned Giving and Estate Planning. Bottom line . . . what is the most tax-efficient way to get your assets from you to wherever you want them to go? There are two separate and distinct facets of this equation (while you are alive and after you’re gone), yet they need to be coordinated—not only with each other, but also with your entire Wealth Management plan. We have done an unusually high level of work with clients who have a large percentage of their net worth in a closely held business or practice, clients with large IRAs or qualified plans, and clients with quite a few stock option grants.
5. An Organized Set of Checks and Balances. If you buy a Mercedes but don’t perform scheduled maintenance, you will have problems. If you are in a situation where you have built a substantial net worth and are faced with some of the issues I have mentioned in this letter, you cannot simply review things “once in a while.” There should be a yearly, monthly, weekly, and daily service checklist.
6. Master Strategy. This is the strategy we employ to implement the preceding five operational strategies. It includes a “Launch Strategy” designed to get your custom-designed system off the ground with minimal disruption to your current financial life. We then proceed to build on your customized system in a very structured manner, focusing on one operational strategy at a time and working to create a stable, productive environment.