Private wealth has grown considerably more complicated in recent years, and Michael Gold thinks the advisory industry has been slow to catch up with that shift. The founder and chief executive of Gold Family Wealth in Westport, Connecticut, has spent 25 years watching families accumulate more advisors without necessarily gaining more clarity.

Business succession, tax strategy, estate planning, and philanthropy used to sit in separate lanes for most wealthy families. Gold says that separation no longer works well when a single decision, like the timing of a business sale, touches every one of those areas simultaneously and without warning.

Complexity Without Coordination

Gold points to business owners who have had to delay a sale by a full year just to re-characterize assets and avoid excessive tax drag, delays Michael Gold attributes directly to advisors who never compared notes before a transaction was already well underway.

Nearly three quarters of privately held business owners expect to transition or exit within a decade, according to industry estimates, representing trillions of dollars moving through exactly the kind of complexity Gold describes seeing every day in his own Westport practice.

Coordinating the Complexity

Michael Gold’s Westport-based ultra-high-net-worth practice was designed around that reality, building governance and risk-mapping frameworks meant to function across specialties rather than within just one narrow lane. His conclusion, after decades in the field, is that complexity itself is not really the problem families face. Uncoordinated responses to that complexity are.

That distinction shapes how Gold’s Westport team onboards new clients, starting with a full inventory of every advisor already involved in a family’s affairs before adding a single new recommendation. Only after mapping those existing relationships, he says, does it make sense to talk about strategy, because a strategy built on top of uncoordinated relationships tends to repeat the same mistakes it was meant to solve. Refer to this article for related information.

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