When Michael Gold talks about how wealth management should work for the ultra rich, he reaches for an unlikely comparison: spine surgery. Gold, founder and CEO of Westport-based Gold Family Wealth, underwent three spine operations and says the way his surgeons handled those decisions taught him something the financial industry has largely missed.
“I think that’s what’s wrong with the industry. Wealth managers want to appease the clients,” Gold says. “I had three spine surgeries, so I had to deal with neurosurgeons. Not at one point did the surgeon say, ‘So what do you think about this or that?’ They did a suite of tests, MRIs, CAT scans, X-rays. Then they laid out all the options from conservative to aggressive.”
A Different Kind of Advice
For Michael Gold Westport, the lesson was clear. Good advisors do not ask clients to guess at solutions before doing the work themselves. They gather every relevant fact, run the numbers, and then present a family with a full menu of paths forward along with the consequences of each one. That process, he argues, is what separates durable outcomes from ones built mainly to please a client in the room.
The stakes for getting this right are climbing. Ultra high net worth wealth is projected to grow roughly 6.7 percent this year alone, reaching nearly 59.8 trillion dollars globally, even as nearly half of today’s financial advisors plan to retire within the next decade. Michael Gold’s practice in Westport was built specifically around families with 20 million to 150 million dollars in net worth, a group he says often falls between mass affluent services and the ultra exclusive family offices built for billionaires.
Rather than appeasing clients with whatever they ask for, Michael Gold’s model leans on a network of specialists brought in on a fractional basis so families get depth without overpaying for a full in house staff. The goal, as he frames it, is confidence built on a full accounting of the facts, not comfort built on flattery. See related link for more information.
Find more information about Michael Gold Westport on https://www.goldfamilywealth.com/our-story/