This is how the work actually runs: who does what, in what order, and what recurs every year. The deliverable is not a binder you shelve. It is a standing discipline that keeps every decision in your financial life talking to the others, so the next decision starts where the last one ended.
A financial plan answers the questions you had the day it was written. A coordination engagement answers the questions your life has not asked yet.
Coordination is not an event. It is a rhythm, designed so nothing waits for a crisis to get attention.
A cancer diagnosis is not treated by one brilliant doctor. It is decided by a room: surgeons, oncologists, radiologists, and pathologists review the same patient together, and one person stays accountable for the whole patient, not a single organ. That is the attending physician.
Your CPA, your attorney, your insurance agent, your banker: each is a gifted specialist. In most financial lives, almost no one is the attending. Driftwood is.
Here is one worked illustration, not a client.
The Harris family holds roughly $8,000,000: a taxable brokerage, vested and unvested RSUs, pre-tax and Roth retirement accounts, an HSA, two properties, a closely held operating company, and a $2,000,000 life policy, advised across a half-dozen specialists who rarely speak. Nothing here is exotic. What changes the outcome is whether the specialists move in order, and which state the family calls home.
Left to themselves, each seat does its own good work and quietly undoes another's. The attorney drafts an ILIT; the CPA's Roth-conversion ladder collides with it; the insurance seat funds a policy that inflates the taxed estate because no one sequenced the moves. The figure below is not a clever trust any one advisor could name. It is what surfaces only when all four seats act in the right order.
Same family. Same eight million. In Illinois the sequenced result is worth about $395,000; in Texas the same family's biggest opportunity is a lifetime of tax-free growth.
Your own state draws a different line. The Tax Atlas shows where →
The Harris family, illustrative and composite. Figures are educational models, rounded, to be confirmed with your own tax and legal advisors under current law. No such family exists; the tensions are real because they recur.
Four capabilities, in this order. The first two are open to anyone before there is a relationship; the second two are the engagement itself. Not sure where coordination is helping or costing you? The Coordination Assessment is a brief, neutral place to begin.
Diagnose
Where does your return go to tax?
See what taxes quietly take from the same holdings, by your state and bracket.
Open the Tax Diagnostic →Measure
What is coordination worth?
Put a figure on it, for your bracket, state, and portfolio.
See the After-Tax Lab →Coordinate
How do the pieces work as one plan?
Taxes, accounts, and estate kept consistent, the way institutions coordinate decisions, with every open matter carried in one register.
Manage
How is the portfolio built and held?
A low-turnover core, placed by tax and held with discipline, reviewed as one system, not one account at a time.
The first year is a defined sequence carried by three working sessions. Nothing is bought or sold until it has been modeled and you have approved it.
Nothing is bought or sold. We map your whole system: every account, the last return, the estate documents, your cash-flow needs, and the professionals already in your life. And we capture what paperwork never does: what your family is trying to accomplish, what must never happen, and the language you use for your own life.
We walk your household as one system and produce the written plan: where value leaks, where the seams are, and how one decision moves through all four seats before it is made, with the specific hand-offs to your CPA and attorney written in plain language.
The hand-offs execute in sequence, each modeled before it is made. We walk your Wealth Operating Manual end to end: confirm the decisions that still hold, retire the ones that do not, open the decisions ahead (a sale, a move, a conversion ladder), and set the exact conditions that would reopen each.
Every institution runs on a cadence. Medicine has the annual physical. A company has its board meeting. A family office has its investment committee. Driftwood has the Annual Wealth Operating Review, and its job is not a performance update. It is to make sure every decision ahead is a better decision.
Placement by tax, drift, and what the year ahead requires.
Bracket room, harvesting, conversions, sequenced with your CPA.
Titling, trusts, and beneficiaries kept current with the plan.
Coverage and ownership checked against the estate it serves.
Reserves, liquidity, and the year's known and likely needs.
Distributions, entity structure, and any path toward a sale.
The full annual agenda and its deliverables live in The Record.
Most firms sell you a portfolio and call it a plan. What we build is a standing record of your family's judgment: why each decision was made, and what would change it, so that ten years from now it still makes sense, even to a different advisor. That is the work these conversations begin, and the reason the relationship is a cadence, not a transaction.
The first read: your household as one system, where it leaks, and the seams where decisions are not talking to each other.
Append-only. Each decision, once every seat has weighed in, written down with its reason and what would reopen it.
The standing read on whether the seats are actually moving together, reviewed at every turn.
| Decision | Seats involved | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Charitable remainder structure for the concentrated position | Investments · Estate · Taxes | Modeling |
| Roth conversion ladder, sized to bracket room | Taxes | Monitoring |
| ILIT funding ahead of the business sale | Ownership · Estate | Waiting on counsel |
Every item here traces to one Coordination Review. The full record, the register, the manual, and the annual review, lives in The Record. See a household's Record →
You have seen how the work runs and what one variable was worth. There is one seat left to fill.
The Review is where the attending sits down with your whole household, sees it as one system, and tells you plainly whether coordination is worth something for a family like yours. If it is not, we will say so.
Request a Coordination Review →