Barry Glassman, vice president of Cassaday & Co., in McLean, Va., is both a coach who calls plays for client's assets and a quarterback who excels at team leadership. The team he leads is a network of highly trained specialists—including estate planners, accountants and attorneys—who render coordinated services. Together, they apply their various disciplines to solve clients' complex problems without their having to suffer the inconvenience of making the rounds to see these professionals one at a time.

Due to his emphasis on a network of coordinated services, Glassman is well positioned to attract and retain high-net-worth clients who, various surveys show, are demanding more customized service. This quest for customization is one reason that many clients fire their existing advisors and seek new ones. These malcontented clients' demands for a high level of personal service are expected to escalate as they shop for new advisors in this turbulent market.

Custom Service

Perhaps no service model is more customized than this—having several highly trained professionals making sure that nothing slips through the cracks for a given client. The emphasis on his network of professionals fortifies Glassman's practice during what will undoubtedly be a difficult period for financial advisors. In the wake of the recent devastation in the markets, everyone will be competing harder.

When Glassman moved his practice toward high-net-worth clients in the late 1990s, he quickly realized that their needs could not be adequately met without solutions from specialists. One day, he says, a realization hit him like a ton of bricks: Rendering client service the right way requires a high level of coordination and collaboration between specialists that would be the mirror opposite of what is typically the case in the medical profession.

"One of the biggest problems in the healthcare industry is that medical specialists [don't tend to] communicate face-to-face," Glassman explains. "Can you imagine meeting your primary care physician and all your medical specialists in one room to discuss your diagnosis?" The Mayo Clinic does so, but this model is a rarity in medicine.

Thus, the disparate, disjointed services of the healthcare industry gave Glassman a negative example to avoid in developing his practice's network of specialists. By contrast, Glassman resolved to engineer a network that would perform for clients in a comprehensive, coordinated fashion.

Glassman brings his clients' financial specialists together in a two-tiered network. Core advisors include the client's estate planning attorney and the family tax professional and, of course, himself. Others include the client's insurance professionals, business attorney and accountant. Lisa Poff, whom Glassman facetiously refers to as his "director of follow-through," attends meetings, takes minutes, sends summaries to attendees and follows up on assigned tasks.

For advisors looking to expand their practice beyond the investment-only niche, Glassman's strong commitment to networking may prove instructive. One recent collaborative success involved a family with a $400,000 annual income that sold a family business in 2007 generating another $5 million in income.

The client could have delayed paying the majority of the state tax the family owed until April 15, 2008. However, Glassman's network of experts met in October 2007 and decided to prepay the client's 2007 state taxes to avoid a serious alternative minimum tax problem in 2008.

"If they had waited until the following April 15, it would have been too late," Glassman says. "This is a common problem easily solved by the whole team coming together. If this is the first liquidation event for a client, he or she won't know to plan for this kind of tax problem until it is too late."

Glassman has limited his practice to 100 client families, so that he can provide his high-net-worth families with the same level of expertise and sophistication that multifamily offices offer their ultrahigh-net-worth clients. With $315 million in assets under management and an average account size of $3 million, his team approach to client service bears little resemblance to his rugged-individualist phase as a solitary broker building a book of business back in 1994.

Glassman believes that too many advisors focus on sophisticated products, such as hedge funds and private equity investments, that only the ultra-wealthy have access to.

"I decided to take the perspective of collaborating on refined strategies, not just products," Glassman says. The advisor's services are included in his fees, a percentage of assets under management ranging from 1% down to 0.25%.

Steps to Success

The key to effective teamwork, Glassman says, is timing. He laments that most families wait for an event like inheritance, retirement or sale of an asset before consulting their team of advisors. "Unfortunately, these last-minute efforts are often too late to put certain strategies into place," the advisor explains.