Ben Coats
⋄   PRIVATE WEALTH MANAGEMENT   ⋄   FRACTIONAL FAMILY OFFICE   ⋄

It's not what you make.
It's how much you keep.

For wealthy families whose financial life has outgrown a traditional advisor. We start with a clear picture of where you are — then build a disciplined, tax-efficient plan for how the family spends, grows, and passes on what you've worked to create.

Foundation Planning from $250,000. Fractional Family Office from $2 million.
15+
Years across PE, executive leadership & founding companies
MBA · JD
Harvard Business School · Columbia Law
Fee-only
Fiduciary, paid by you and only by you
National
Families served across the United States
WHO WE SERVE

Wealth that has outgrown the advice around it.

Some of our clients spent decades building a company, then sold it. Others are still running theirs — LLCs, S-corps, partnerships — wearing every hat at once. A few never built the wealth at all: they inherited it, in structures someone else chose, and now they have to live inside those decisions.

What ties them together is the same gap. Their financial life has gotten complex enough to need real coordination, but small enough that a single-family office doesn't yet make sense. Most are in the $250K to $50M range — too sophisticated for off-the-shelf advice, not yet at the scale for an office of their own. That gap is where we work.

◇

Founders & post-liquidity event clients

You spent years building a company or earning your way up. Then the sale closed, the IPO priced, or the vesting cliff cleared — and your life got a lot more complicated overnight.

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Business owners with operating companies

You're still running it. LLC, S-corp, or partnership; payroll and distributions; a personal balance sheet tangled with a business one. Entity, tax, and personal planning belong in a single strategy.

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Second-generation heirs

You didn't build the wealth. You inherited it — often in trust structures and entity arrangements someone else chose, and not always well.

HOW WE BEGIN

Where you want to be. One coordinated plan.

Every engagement starts the same way: a careful look at the whole picture — your balance sheet, your spending, your cash flow, the tax exposure baked into each, and the goals that don't show up on a statement. From that we build one disciplined long-term plan, and the rest of the work follows naturally from it.

01

Financial planning· where we begin

The plan itself — disciplined long-term planning for spending, saving, and growing the money, stress-tested against the things that change: markets, taxes, longevity, family.

02

Tax structuring

Multi-year strategies that treat the tax code as architecture rather than arithmetic. Entity strategy, S-corp election timing, owner-compensation planning, gifting, Roth conversion ladders, opportunity zones, 1031 exchanges — in coordination with your CPA.

03

Investment management

Portfolios designed around the balance sheet you actually have — concentrated positions, deferred compensation, private business interests, real estate, and the liquidity you need. Allocation that serves the plan, not the index of the moment.

04

Estate strategy & coordination

Trust structures, gifting strategies, charitable vehicles, and the design choices that determine how wealth moves to the next generation. We design the strategy with you and your estate attorney; the attorney drafts the documents.

Designed together at the outset — and reviewed together, every year that follows.
FRACTIONAL FAMILY OFFICE  ·  ABOVE $2M

Above $2M, the work gets more interesting.

Families in the fractional family office tier get everything in Foundation Planning, plus the more involved work a complex balance sheet asks for.

  • Advanced trust planning
    Multi-generational trust strategy, dynasty structures, ILITs, charitable lead and remainder trusts — designed with your estate attorney.
  • Private equity sourcing
    Identifying, vetting, and modeling private funds and direct deals appropriate to your balance sheet and accreditation status.
  • Private real estate sourcing
    Off-market and small-syndicate opportunities, modeled against the long-term plan.
  • Short-term rental structuring
    Entity design, tax election, cost segregation, and material-participation planning — coordinated with your CPA and attorney.
  • Family & generational planning
    Preparing heirs, structuring gifts thoughtfully, and helping the family decide what wealth is for.
Ben — portrait
Ben — portrait
Pacific Crest Trail — Sierras
Pacific Crest Trail — Sierras
San Tan — Gilbert at dusk
San Tan — Gilbert at dusk
WHY US

One advisor.
The whole picture.

Ben came to wealth management by a less common road — fifteen years of private equity, executive leadership, founding companies, and advising owner-led businesses through critical moments. He has been on your side of the table, and he brings those instincts to every engagement.

Operator, investor & advisor
Fifteen years across private equity, corporate finance, executive leadership of an international public company, and the founder’s chair of more than one young company. Clients arrive with concentrated stock, deferred comp, and operating businesses — Ben speaks the language because he has lived it.
Independent & fiduciary
Fee-only, always. Paid by you and only by you. No commissions, no proprietary funds, no product quotas, no hidden incentives. The advice we give is the advice we believe is right.
Deliberately small
Most firms collect clients. We choose them. The practice is intentionally small, so every family we work with has direct access to the principal — not a rotating bench of associates.
Read more about Ben →
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◇ TWO WAYS TO ENGAGE ◇
Foundation Planning
$250K – $2M
Comprehensive financial planning, tax structuring, investment management, and estate coordination for families building toward the next level.
Fractional Family Office
$2M and above
Everything in Foundation Planning, plus advanced trust planning, private equity and real estate sourcing, STR structuring, and family/generational planning.
CONTACT

We answer in person, and usually within two business days.

A first conversation costs nothing and commits to nothing. Tell us a little about your situation and Ben will write back to schedule a call — or a meeting at our Gilbert office if you happen to be nearby.

Coats Wealth Management
Gilbert, Arizona  ·  By appointment
Serving families across the United States
ben@coatswm.com  ·  617-913-3019
FAQ

A few questions, asked often.

A single-family office is a dedicated team — a CIO, a tax director, an estate counsel, a controller — assembled to serve one family. They are powerful, and typically don't make economic sense under roughly $100 million in wealth. A fractional family office offers the same coordination at a smaller scale: a single principal who sits above your tax, investment, financial, and estate picture, works alongside your existing professionals, and keeps the strategy current.
Foundation Planning is a comprehensive advisory engagement — financial planning, tax structuring, investment management, and estate coordination — available to families with $250,000 or more in investable assets. Fractional Family Office, available above $2 million, includes everything in Foundation plus an advanced layer: advanced trust planning, private equity and private real estate sourcing, short-term rental structuring, and family/generational planning. The difference is not how much we care about the family — it is how much complexity the balance sheet can support.
No. We do not draft trusts, wills, LLC formation documents, or any other legal documents — that work belongs to your attorney. What we do is design the tax and estate strategy your attorney then drafts, recommend the entity structures you may want to consider, coordinate the work across your specialists, and make sure the final documents actually reflect what your family wants. Ben's legal training (JD, Columbia) informs how the strategy is built; it does not make the firm a law practice.
A fiduciary is legally obligated to act in your best interest — duty of care and duty of loyalty. We are also fee-only, which is separate and equally important: we receive no commissions from insurance companies, fund providers, or anyone else. The only person who pays us is you. That eliminates the most common conflicts of interest in our industry.
Our clients fall into three groups: first-generation founders and executives (often in the year before or after a liquidity event), business owners running active operating companies, and second-generation heirs working inside structures someone else put in place. Most have between $250,000 and $50 million in investable assets. We work with clients across the United States; most of our work is done by video, phone, and email, with in-person meetings when they matter.
For most clients we plan a formal quarterly review and remain available between meetings as questions, decisions, or opportunities arise. The cadence is set by what is happening in your life, not by a schedule on a spreadsheet.

We are a fee-only firm. The only person who pays us is you. We use a hybrid fee schedule — flat quarterly fees for smaller portfolios and percentage-based fees on the larger ones — so that pricing scales sensibly with the size and complexity of the work. A minimum of $250,000 in investable assets is required for ongoing management on new accounts.

Two exceptions to the minimum: entrepreneurs building promising businesses we want to support before they are at scale, and family and friends of existing clients.

Assets under managementFee
$250,000 or less$600 quarterly (flat)
$250,001 – $500,000$900 quarterly (flat)
$500,001 – $750,000$1,500 quarterly (flat)
$750,001 – $1,000,000$2,250 quarterly (flat)
$1,000,001 – $2,000,0000.80% annually on this tier
$2,000,001 – $5,000,0000.70% annually on this tier
$5,000,001 – $10,000,0000.60% annually on this tier
$10,000,001 and above0.50% annually on this tier
No. Most of our clients arrive with professionals they already trust, and we work alongside them. When a relationship is missing a specialist — a sophisticated estate attorney, a CPA comfortable with closely held interests — we can introduce candidates we have worked with before.
Yes — within our advisory lane. For STR investments, we design the entity structure, plan the tax election strategy (LLC vs. S-corp), coordinate the cost segregation work, model the material-participation requirements that unlock the STR tax treatment, and integrate the position into the larger financial plan. The legal documents are drafted by your attorney; the property management is run by you or your operator; the CPA files the return. We make sure all of it lines up.
The firm is based in Gilbert, Arizona, and we serve clients across the United States. Most of our work is done by video, phone, and email, with in-person meetings when they matter.
The first conversation is an introductory call — no cost, no obligation. It usually lasts about an hour. We ask about your situation; you ask about ours. If we both think there is a fit, we lay out what a deeper engagement looks like.
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COATS  ·  WEALTH MANAGEMENT
It's not what you make. It's how much you keep.
Gilbert, Arizona  ·  By appointment
Serving families across the United States
ben@coatswm.com  ·  617-913-3019
Investment advisory services. Fiduciary. Fee-only.
© 2026 Coats Wealth Management