OUR SERVICES

A family office, scaled for families just beginning to need one.

Single-family offices coordinate the tax, investment, financial, and estate planning of a family in one place. They are expensive, slow to build, and rarely make sense under $100 million in wealth. We offer the same coordinated experience — at the scale of a single, deeply engaged advisor — in two tiers calibrated to where you are.

THE TWO ENGAGEMENTS

Every engagement begins with the same disciplined plan.
What varies is the complexity layered on top of it.

Foundation Planning
$250K – $2M

A comprehensive advisory engagement built around a disciplined, tax-efficient long-term plan. Includes financial planning, tax structuring (including entity strategy and business-owner work), investment management, and estate coordination with your attorney.

Fractional Family Office
$2M and above

Everything in Foundation Planning, plus the advanced work that a complex balance sheet asks for: advanced trust planning, private equity sourcing, private real estate sourcing, short-term rental structuring, and family/generational planning.

WHAT FRACTIONAL FAMILY OFFICE MEANS

Most wealthy families don't lack good advice.
They lack coordination.

Their attorney knows the estate plan. Their CPA knows the tax return. Their investment advisor knows the portfolio. But no one is sitting above all of it, asking how the parts fit together — and whether the strategy that made sense five years ago still makes sense today.

A fractional family office fills that seat. You keep the specialists you already trust. We coordinate them, translate between them, and own the strategy that holds it all together.

HOW WE WORK  ·  EVERY ENGAGEMENT

Four phases. One coordinated relationship.

01

Discovery

Every relationship begins with a careful look at where you are: your balance sheet, your tax exposure, your spending and cash flows, your estate documents, your business interests, and the things that matter to you that don't show up on a statement.

02

The plan

We build a disciplined long-term plan: how the family spends, how that spending stays funded across the decades ahead, and how the whole picture stays tax-efficient through the changes in your life and the law. The plan is not a binder — it is a working document we revisit and revise.

03

Coordination & execution

We sit alongside your other advisors and put the plan into motion. Your CPA files the strategy. Your estate attorney drafts the documents. We make sure the work of each one reflects the strategy of the whole — and we close the loops between them.

04

Stewardship

A plan is only good as long as it stays current. We review the entire picture at least annually, and quarterly for the most complex relationships, adjusting as life and law change.

FOUNDATION PLANNING  ·  THE FOUR CORE SERVICES

The work every client engagement is built on.

01

Financial planning(where we begin)

Disciplined long-term planning for spending, saving, and growing. We model your cash flows decade by decade, stress-test them against the things that change, and design every recommendation to be tax-efficient end to end. Retirement and longevity planning, education and family gifting, insurance and risk review, business-exit planning, charitable giving design — all of it lives inside the plan.

02

Tax structuring

Multi-year strategies that treat the tax code as architecture, not arithmetic. For business owners: entity strategy (LLC vs. S-corp vs. partnership), S-corp election timing, owner-compensation planning, accountable plans, and tax-efficient business-expense design. For everyone: gifting strategies, charitable vehicles, Roth conversion ladders, basis planning, qualified opportunity zones, 1031 exchanges, and the dozens of smaller decisions that compound over a lifetime. We design the strategy in close coordination with your CPA.

Entity formation itself (filing LLC articles, drafting operating agreements) is performed by your attorney or a registered agent service. We design the structure and recommend the choice — we do not form entities.

03

Investment management

Portfolios designed around your actual balance sheet — concentrated holdings, deferred compensation, business interests, real estate, and the liquidity you need to live the life you want. Portfolios serve the larger plan, not the other way around.

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. Your estate attorney drafts the documents. We make sure the documents reflect what you actually want and we keep the strategy current as the law and the family evolve.

FRACTIONAL FAMILY OFFICE  ·  THE ADVANCED LAYER ($2M+)

Above $2M, the financial life of a family typically has the complexity to justify a deeper layer of work.

01

Advanced trust planning

Multi-generational trust strategy, dynasty trusts, irrevocable life insurance trusts (ILITs), charitable lead and remainder trusts, grantor-retained annuity trusts (GRATs), spousal lifetime access trusts (SLATs), and the design work that determines how assets move into the next generation while staying inside the lines of current tax law. We design the strategy in close partnership with your estate attorney, who drafts the documents.

02

Private equity sourcing

Identifying, vetting, and modeling opportunities in private funds and direct deals appropriate to your balance sheet, accreditation status, liquidity needs, and overall strategy. We do not run a captive fund, and we do not accept compensation from fund managers. We source from the market and bring you the best fit for your plan.

03

Private real estate sourcing

Identifying off-market and small-syndicate real estate opportunities, modeling the economics, and helping you decide which deals fit the long-term plan. Coordination with the attorneys and CPAs who execute the deal mechanics.

04

Short-term rental structuring

For families building short-term rental portfolios, the tax and structural decisions can be worth more than the rental income itself. We design the entity structure, plan the tax election (LLC vs. S-corp), coordinate cost segregation studies, model the material-participation requirements that unlock the STR tax treatment, and make sure the whole position fits the larger plan — all in coordination with your CPA and attorney.

05

Family & generational planning

Preparing heirs, structuring gifts thoughtfully, and helping families decide what they want wealth to do (and not do) for the next generation. These are not soft questions — they are the questions that determine whether wealth survives a generation.

WHO THIS IS FOR

We work best with three kinds of family.

  • Founders and senior executives in the year before or after a liquidity event.
  • Business owners running active LLCs, S-corps, and partnerships.
  • Second-generation heirs working inside structures someone else chose.

If any of these sound familiar, we may be the right fit:

  • You've experienced or are anticipating a major liquidity event and feel the weight of decisions that can't easily be undone.
  • You run an operating business and aren't sure your entity structure is still working for you.
  • You inherited assets in trust or entity structures you didn't choose, and you don't fully understand what they do.
  • Your CPA, attorney, and investment advisor have never been in the same room.
  • You suspect you are paying more in tax than you should, and no one is taking responsibility for changing that.
  • You worry less about returns than about what your wealth will mean for your children.
  • You don't want another product pitch. You want a strategy, and a person.
C
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.