Addition by Subtraction
Wealth advisors are busy. So are their clients—buried, just trying to keep their heads above water.
When families are overwhelmed, most advisors reach for logistics. But solving the symptom without addressing the cause won’t move families forward.
The most common response is to help them optimize, organize, and—if you’re a family office—take things off their plate.
That would be a mistake.
In Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey (an amazing book for new dads, especially the audiobook), he finds out he’s going to be a father and immediately shifts his approach—what he calls “the process of elimination.” He writes about a moment where he realized he was making B’s in five areas of his life: family, foundation, acting, a production company, and a music label. So he shut down the last two, and focused on making A’s in the ones that mattered most.
Simplify. Focus. Conserve to liberate.
In The Ride of a Lifetime, Bob Iger recalls working with a consultant after becoming CEO of Disney. The consultant asked about his priorities. Iger writes:
“I’d given this considerable thought, and I immediately started ticking off a list. I was five or six in when he shook his head and said, ‘Stop talking. Once you have that many of them, they’re no longer priorities.’”
Addition by subtraction.
There are plenty of tools to support this—conversation, whiteboarding, an Eisenhower Matrix—but we built an exercise in our FamilyOS to give clients a way to think about their Roles and Priorities.
Roles:
Parent, child, spouse, sibling, cousin... Which roles deserve the most time and attention right now? There’s no right answer—this is up to the client. But if “spouse” or “parent” is the highest priority, then their energy and calendar should reflect that.
Priorities:
What’s the one thing a family needs to accomplish in the next year?
Do you know? Do they know?
Families are busy. Accomplishing one or two meaningful priorities per year is a huge win. In Three Big Questions for a Frantic Family, Patrick Lencioni calls this the family rallying cry—a single, agreed-upon top priority that gives the family focus for the next 2–6 months. It prevents everything from feeling equally urgent.
Addition by subtraction is a skill that Visionary Advisors learn to perfect—because the outcomes are incredible.
How do you think your clients feel when you give them permission to focus on what matters most—and let the rest go?
They love you for it.
It creates alignment.
It deepens trust.
And it opens the door to conversations that are long overdue.
