Transform wealth management by asking questions about family values, vision, and legacy—not just investments.
Clayton Christensen was a great professor of marketing at Harvard who coined the phrase “the job to be done.” He found it helpful for companies to think about their product or service as being hired by their customers to do a job. By asking the question, “What is the job to be done for the customer?” he believed an organization would be empowered to improve its product design, develop marketing strategies and create advertising that had greater power to influence customers’ decisions. He believed in the value of the question so much that he created a consulting firm with that question as its core value proposition.
With that kind of pedigree, it behooves any advisor to ask this question of themselves and their business model: “What is the advisor’s job to be done?” Upon reflection, the answer will always start with “It depends.”
The “Job to Be Done” Differs Based on the Client
Observations over the past three decades have revealed that asking this question tends to shatter a lot of narrow thinking by advisors. Investment selection and portfolio management are almost always key parts of an advisor’s job to be done for clients; however, as a client accumulates greater wealth and as technology advances, deploying capital thoughtfully into the markets becomes less central to the client’s actual needs.
Asking the question, “What is the advisor’s job to be done as wealth increases and technology advances?” is both challenging and liberating. It is challenging because it implies that some “cheese has been moved,” and a potentially painful change needs to be made (see Spencer Johnson’s lovely little book Who Moved My Cheese? [1998]). It is liberating because it forces the advisor to think about the actual needs of their prospective clients. And, because so few advisors are willing to break out of their narrow frame of reference, the question can reveal opportunities that would otherwise remain invisible.
Very-High-Net-Worth Clients Have a Different Type of Problem
In June 2025, LinkedIn published Jack Kelly’s Wealth Report, which revealed that as of 2024 there were 1.8 million US households with a net worth of over $20 million. This is an extraordinary number of people who are having an experience of wealth that is historically very different from the typical client of a financial advisor. For mass-affluent US investors, the big financial challenge is to accumulate enough wealth to retire with confidence that their assets will fund the next 20 to 30 years of their lifestyle and provide adequate resources to support declining health and increasing dependency. For these investors, the advisor’s job to be done is to invest thoughtfully, diversify appropriately, and grow the money enough and fast enough to cross the finish line with some dollars left over.
This is not true for the 1.8 million households who have $20 million or more in net worth. They have good reason to expect that not only will they be able to live a comfortable retirement using a low-risk investment strategy, but they will have a meaningful amount of money left over when they cross that finish line. If we think in terms of the advisor’s job to be done, for these clients the task is very different.
First, the asset management task is simpler. Not only is technology making the challenge of deploying capital easier for advisors, but these clients don’t have the same need for the money to grow rapidly, or the same anxiety about the future as their mass-affluent neighbors. At the same time, the wealth management task is much more complicated. The advisor must add a new job to be done: What should the client do with the money they won’t need or use? The big question for most of these clients is, “Whom should I give this money to?”
What Makes the Advisor’s Job to Be Done So Difficult?
Most advisors have much more experience with accumulating wealth than with distributing it. By some estimates, the Baby Boomer generation will transfer as much as $10 trillion of wealth that they will not need to, or do not wish to, spend on themselves. This represents a big challenge for many high-net-worth clients. There is no easy answer to the question of whom to gift their money to because most destinations for their wealth are not emotionally satisfying.
There are only four “destinations” for wealth, and each poses an emotional problem. The first destination is taxes: high-net-worth clients can allow their wealth to be distributed to various government entities. Of course, for a family that has accumulated $20 million or more in net worth, taxes have always represented the biggest hurdle they have had to overcome to achieve their goals. Because of this experience, most wealth creators are highly tax avoidant. This destination is the opposite of “emotionally satisfying.”
The second option is for them to spend it on themselves. To some extent the whole activity of accumulating wealth is to create financial security for one’s future, but the value system of wealth creators does not typically tend toward self-indulgence. These people will own nice things and spend money on meaningful experiences, but the drive to create, save and accumulate money runs deep. Making spending on themselves the primary destination for their wealth is not emotionally satisfying for most uniquely successful families.
A third option is to support one or more philanthropic interests. Many uniquely successful families do generously support various causes they believe in, but only a small number see philanthropy as personally meaningful. In the second half of their lives, people who have achieved a high level of success will often reflect on their personal story and the meaning of their life journey. Being able to give money to a personally important cause is a good thing to do, and for some people this is meaningful enough. But for many others philanthropy is too detached from their own life story and is not emotionally satisfying.
Which causes them to turn to the fourth option: gifting to the next generation. Many uniquely successful families see this as the ultimate destination for their wealth. And there is an entire estate-planning industry set up to help them gift their wealth to their children and grandchildren in a tax-efficient manner.
But even this highly meaningful destination represents a painful problem, because the next generation’s values are often at odds with the values of the wealth creators. In these families, the next generation grew up in very different conditions than their parents or grandparents. They enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle and enjoyed the indulgences that their family’s success provided. This means they did not develop the same value system as the wealth creators. They are inclined to spend this money and often don’t have a well-developed sense of how to manage this wealth over the long term.
For many wealth creators, this disparity in values rankles. When they think of their lifetime of hard work being spent by their children and grandchildren on big houses and nice cars, they wince and ask themselves, “Is this the meaning of all I have accomplished?” As they reflect on their estate-planning strategy and the values of the next generation, they struggle emotionally.
What Is the Advisor’s Job to Be Done?
Fortunately, there is much that a thoughtful advisor can do to help them. In this case the advisor can stimulate their client’s creativity and help to resolve their struggle by asking a better question: “What do I want this wealth to be doing for the next 100 years?”
There is a fifth option, but it is hard for most clients to discover it for themselves. These wealth creators can create a vision for their wealth that is personally meaningful and connected to their values. This can become the foundation for their family meetings and a process that invites the following generations to contemplate how they will participate in pursuing that vision.
Featured Webcast
To explore how to help families clarify their values, define roles and develop a vision, join us on Wednesday, October 22nd for our quarterly practice-management call: The Family Legacy: Expanding a Vision of the Advisor’s Job to Be Done.