We created the entities, made the elections, and drafted the trusts. Do families understand their complex world? Do we understand what we are creating for…

We created the entities, made the elections, and drafted the trusts. Do families understand their complex world? Do we understand what we are creating for our clients?

Imagine that every wealthy family had a “wealth machine”, a great big contraption with gears and rotors and knobs and dials, a finicky but eminently useful apparatus that the family uses to create wealth. It belches out its fumes as it powers through every day, generating more and more wealth. What does a family do with their wealth machine? They feed it everything they will use to create wealth: hard work, great ideas, a whole lot of money. Sometimes they fill it with land, buildings or other property. They load the machine with the work of accountants, lawyers and other advisors, and the impact of the markets and currencies.

All of these inputs - all of this stuff - create the substance of wealth, and it starts to accumulate, and it starts to get heavy – growing into a tough-to-deal-with substance as everything is combined. But the family members continue to shovel the stuff they have paid for and created into the wealth machine, a little some days, and a lot more on others, exhausting the family members with the hard work it takes to keep up with the demands of the machine.

Inside, the gears blend and pound it all into a murky “potential wealth” slurry that will grow the capital, hard work and ideas into more and more wealth. But wealth creation is a messy business, as all of these components that create the juice of wealth creation leave behind the sludge of complexity dripping out of the wealth machine. The sludge turns into an incomprehensible muck that - if you look deep enough – you can see what it is made of.

It turns out that the sticky, noxious ooze is made of the family's own excess - dozens of legal entities, tax returns all over the country, too many management agreements, and questions about who should serve as fiduciary. It contains an endless number of investments that can only be understood with that team of lawyers, CPAs and consultants that must opine on every decision before it gets made (it takes years of study to be able to see through the dense, murky sludge).

The byproduct of wealth creation is complexity - and families are left with their brooms and mops, cleaning up the mess.

We have two objectives. First, we try to get the wealth machine to work better - to create more wealth with less stuff. Second, we help clean up the current mess, and - if we are lucky - tune the machine to produce less sludge. Families maintain the wealth machine with expensive wealth oil, which usually is bought by the billable hour.

Can we build a better wealth machine? Can we build a cleaner version, the eco-wealth machine, perhaps; one without the drip-drip-drip of complexity taking over our clients' lives?

Part of the Wealth Machine series.

Register for Notre Dame, October 28–30, 2026, and attend my presentation and the other sessions.