Joshua Coleman, founder and chief executive of Momentum Advanced Planning, talks about his experiences dealing with his family's “sudden wealth,” and how and why this propelled him to launch his own financial advisory firm. Family Wealth Report does not necessarily share all of the views stated below, but is grateful to publish them and welcomes reader feedback.

As you’ve probably heard, the great wealth transfer—an estimated $30 trillion passing from Baby Boomers to younger generations—is well under way.

So it’s natural to assume that financial advisory firms are on the case, primed to guide multi-generational clients through the complexities involved with significant wealth. Surprisingly, however, the answer is not always yes.

Thirteen years ago, I was suddenly entrusted with managing my family's newly acquired wealth. Attempting to locate a single resource to create and implement a wealth plan, I was surprised to come up empty.

What I needed was a guide, a trusted advisor who could help create and implement a broad, comprehensive plan. Instead, I found a world of specialists, each working separately and independently. Before long, I realized that I would have to hire and oversee a team of specialists on my own. It would be my responsibility to identify, coordinate and oversee experts in tax, investing, insurance, actuarial, legal and estate planning.

Learning how to manage our family’s wealth plan was hard, time-consuming work. But it taught me valuable lessons. And it clearly illuminated the challenges we face in managing trillions of dollars in wealth transfer efficiently and effectively. High net worth families need more than just an investment portfolio and a basic estate plan. They require sophisticated and coordinated advanced planning.

Such planning, however, is increasingly hard to find under one roof. The financial services industry has, for many years, been fragmenting into specialized advisory functions. Driving them into their narrow silos is the increasing complexity of financial services, from tax to insurance to charitable giving.

This decentralization is a natural adaptation on the part of financial experts. But it’s bad news for wealthy Baby Boomers with complex, inter-related needs. Imagine custom-building a home in a world without general contractors—where it’s your responsibility to hire and coordinate design, electrical, kitchen and roofing specialists, and so on.

That’s the reality I found myself facing in managing my family’s financial plan. During this process, it became clear to me that wealthy families badly needed financial “general contractors” who could orchestrate a team of experts and oversee advanced plans.

Necessity is the mother of invention, they say. In 2011, I founded Momentum Advanced Planning. Our firm would provide exactly the services I’d sought but had been unable to find. We provide comprehensive, forward-looking strategies. We identify and vet specialists, help clients (and their advisors) establish clear objectives and expectations. We help navigate clients through implementation, and evaluate their progress over time.

At Momentum, we focus on the higher-level preparation that builds on core planning elements such as basic retirement saving, health insurance and standard estate documents. Advanced planning harnesses the power of strategic tax planning and what we call actuarial design and insurance architecture.

Advanced planning often starts with the very question that confronted me as I faced my family’s complex wealth management needs: “What do I do first?” This question can be especially intimidating when clients have newly created, first-generation wealth, as mine did.

There is no single answer to this question. With every client, our first order of business is to learn all we can about their situations, goals and values, in all of their nuances. The discovery process points the way to solutions that are comprehensive and multi-dimensional.

What does advanced planning look like in practice? One recent client scenario helps to tell the story. A married couple, owners of a successful distribution business, wanted to protect their wealth and translate it into income. But how would their need to mitigate current taxes jibe with their desire to create a charitable giving strategy? Would creating a succession plan impact their goal of generating consistent, tax-free income?

If these clients had to navigate the market for financial specialists on their own, I believe they would have ended up with a fragmented and second-rate solution. By assembling a team of hand-picked experts—tax, investing, insurance, actuarial, legal and estate planning—we created a sophisticated plan and set it in motion in a coordinated fashion.

The plan was designed and implemented in two parts. For the business, a key-man strategy was put in place, along with a defined-benefit plan that provides $1 million in executive tax deferral annually. A self-insurance program was also created; it provides $1.2 million annually in tax deferral.

As for the couple, a DAF-driven charitable strategy will support their philanthropy while allowing for a $2.5 million annual tax deferral. The couple also now have a sophisticated, insurance-based solution to provide $1 million annually in tax-free retirement income. Finally, we coordinated a dynasty trust with a 10-year grantor-retained annuity trust structure, which not only enabled asset protection but also froze the value of the couple’s business.

This sort of outcome validates our vision for our firm, of course. More broadly, it underlines the value to wealthy families of working with a one-stop, integrated provider of advanced planning.

Although the specifics of the plan worked for this particular couple, it is by no means an, across-the-board solution. The advanced planning needs of the wealthy are as diverse as the clients and their families. At Momentum, we serve clients who traverse several times zones and are involved in international affairs. They include diplomats, physicians, philanthropists, CEOs, entrepreneurs and hedge fund managers.

Each is seeking the same thing, however. They want to be sure that a sound planning framework is in place, that it is being implemented, and that the process is being managed every step of the way.