How We Work
The family-centered process.
Five stages, one continuing relationship.
Colony pairs trusted guidance with creative problem-solving, helping families anticipate what comes next and stay ahead of complexity with confidence.
How Colony works with your family.
Track your progress through each milestone.
Discovery
Client Need
Before anything is recommended, a family needs to know whether this is the right fit, and on what terms.
Colony’s Solution
Colony takes time to understand your family’s full picture before any engagement begins, going beyond what traditional advisory services are built to do. You leave with a clear sense of fit, and we leave with a clear understanding of your family’s needs and priorities.
Your guide through every situation.
Complexity rarely arrives on schedule. These are the moments when your family is most likely to want a steadier center, and what we do when they do.
Liquidity Event
We develop and implement planning strategies aimed at achieving your family’s objectives and maximizing after-tax wealth, with long-term flexibility.
Advisor Transition
When a trusted advisor retires or changes firms, continuity can be disrupted. We preserve the knowledge and reconnect trust, planning and investments.
Retirement Planning
As a career chapter closes, compensation and benefits need restructuring into your family’s plan. We coordinate those pieces into an orderly transition.
Family Transitions
Divorce or the loss of a spouse alters decision-making and responsibilities. We help manage the change and keep details from slipping away.
Rising Complexity
As wealth layers, your family juggles entities, advisors, trusts and reporting. We align those responsibilities so you can focus on what matters.
How we stand apart.
The industry has a usual way of doing things, and families are rarely usual. Each of the five below is somewhere we built something different, rather than ask your family to work around an arrangement that was never designed for it.
The trustee
Usually
The trustee sits at a bank or a third party, sees only the trust, and changes hands as staff move on.
At Colony
Colony Trust Company has been the corporate trustee since 2018, in the same building as the people doing the planning.
How advice is paid for
Usually
Advice arrives with a product attached, and the recommendation is shaped by what the firm is able to sell.
At Colony
Fee-only, no commissions, and the principals invest alongside your family in the same strategies.
The investment shelf
Usually
A house model, assembled from whatever the parent firm distributes that quarter.
At Colony
Open architecture with direct LP access and negotiated terms, so the allocation answers to your plan rather than to a shelf.
Who holds the knowledge
Usually
The reasoning behind past decisions lives in one advisor’s head, and leaves the day they do.
At Colony
Held institutionally and employee-owned, with a team sized so a transition never costs your family its own history.
What gets coordinated
Usually
Your family is the one carrying context between the attorney, the accountant and the custodian.
At Colony
That coordination is the service: the estate balance sheet, the entity structure and the tax position read together.
Can our approach work for you?
Colony helps your family navigate the moments when complexity increases, continuity is tested, or the next step needs a steadier center.
The window that matters closes at signing. Once a business sells, most of the planning that would have reduced the tax on it has expired: gifting into trust, charitable structures and valuation work all depend on being in place beforehand. Your family's position also changes character overnight, from one concentrated asset into a portfolio that now has to fund everything.We work the sequence in advance. That means modeling what the proceeds have to do, deciding how much is lifestyle capital and how much is legacy capital, and moving the parts that belong outside your estate before the number is fixed. For one family that meant separating $15.0M of lifestyle capital from $5.0M of legacy capital, and moving the legacy portion along with a portion of company stock into Spousal Lifetime Access Trusts, using part of both lifetime exemptions.If the sale has already closed there is still work worth doing. It is just narrower.
Divorce, or the loss of a spouse, changes who decides what at the moment when attention is scarcest. Beneficiary designations, trustee appointments, account titling and the estate plan were all built around a structure that no longer exists, and each of them fails quietly rather than loudly.We hold the list. That means working through what the change actually touches and in what order, and handling the parts that carry deadlines: the estate administration, the retitling, the trust that now needs a different trustee. Where Colony Trust Company is already involved it can step in as executor or co-trustee, so your family is not looking for someone new during the hardest months. In one case that is exactly what happened, five years into the relationship.Nothing in it should depend on your family remembering it.
Closing a career chapter turns a compensation package into a set of decisions with different deadlines. Deferred compensation, restricted stock, options and retirement accounts each have their own rules about when they can move and what it costs to move them, and they interact with one another.We restructure that into one plan: which accounts to draw from and in what order, what the tax impact is in each of the first several years, how much has to stay liquid, and what the rest of the portfolio needs to return for the plan to hold. Long-term cash flow simulation is what makes those questions answerable rather than guessed at.Most families find the useful output is not the number. It is knowing which years are the flexible ones.
Complexity arrives one reasonable decision at a time. An entity here, a trust there, another advisor, another custodian, and no single day on which it became too much. The cost shows up as your family relaying information between people who should be talking to each other.We start by drawing the estate balance sheet: what your family owns, and how it moves between people, entities and trusts. Most families have never seen all of it in one place, and it is usually the exercise that surfaces the trust funded with the wrong asset, the beneficiary designation that contradicts the will, or the entity nobody has looked at in years.From there the coordination becomes Colony Family Offices’ job rather than yours, and consolidated reporting keeps the whole picture visible instead of reassembled from statements each quarter.
When a trusted advisor retires or changes firms, continuity is what breaks first. The reasoning behind past decisions tends to live in one person's head, and it leaves with them. Your family inherits the structure without the explanation for it, which makes the next decision harder than the last one.We rebuild that context deliberately: reading the documents against your family's circumstances now rather than the ones they were drafted for, and reconnecting the planning, the trusts and the investments that drifted apart while the relationship was winding down.It is also the natural moment to ask whether the arrangement still fits. A trustee named twenty years ago, or a plan built for a different tax regime, often does not, and correcting it now is easier than carrying it forward.
Let’s talk.
Our promise is to bring clarity to your financial framework, continuity to the relationship, and trust to every step forward.