It’s no secret that more and more CPAs are offering financial services to their clients. 

In fact, financial planning questions now have a greater emphasis on the CPA exam than ever before. I find that encouraging. But if you think true financial planning is all about investments and annual returns, think again. 

Financial advisors are no longer hanging their hats on portfolio performance. They’re moving toward the holistic approach to wealth management, an approach that goes beyond financial services to account for any factor that touches a client’s financial life. The holistic approach recognizes that financial health is closely intertwined with physical, emotional, mental and social wellbeing. I’m guessing this wasn’t covered in your accounting school curriculum.

To move into this area successfully, you’ll have to do more than crunch the numbers and plug in investments. Clients and strategic partners will evaluate you based on how well you can really listen to clients and empathize with them. Those attributes are now more important than your advanced math skills, technical skills, and knowledge of the Tax Code.As Clayton Oates, founder of QA Business, wrote in the foreword of my new book Holistic Guide to Wealth Management (CPA Trendlines), “Empathy is an area we have only just begun to explore in our profession. It’s about the art of asking questions and listening. It’s about discovering new circumstances in your client’s business and personal life that were previously not discussed. Shared discovery helps create a genuine and lasting connection with your clients.”

In the introduction, Seth Fineberg, founder of Accountants Forward, explained that as a CPA, you are your clients’ most trusted guide. “You are the one who has been helping them in their financial lives the longest,” he wrote. “And even if your client tells you they already have a financial planner, it’s worth reaching out to that planner and potentially collaborating with them as part of your service to ensure that your client is getting the best possible advice. That’s because every single year, you know what they owe in taxes and why.” 

According to Fineberg, accountants know intimately where their clients’ spending goes and may already offer basic ways for them to save on taxes. In short, “the trust is there. The data is there. Why aren’t you helping them more?” he askedI began to ask myself the same thing as I started making deeper inroads into the accounting profession. Thanks to advances in technology and increasing affordability of a virtual family office model, you can provide your clients with access to a wide range of services. Experts can be brought in as needed to provide specialized knowledge about accounting, tax, estate planning, insurance, legal, philanthropic planning, investment and administrative matters. Best of all, the experts don’t have to be in-house on your full-time payroll. Again, as the client’s CPA and most trusted advisor, you direct the relationship and remain the central point of contact. 

Estate planning to cement client relationships

When it comes to providing the family office level of care, estate planning comes top of mind. On a recent podcast I hosted, Andreas Mazabel, head of advisor sales at Trust & Will said firms that are proactively adopting estate planning are finding it a powerful way to deepen relationships and better connect with their clients’ values and the extended family’s values. He believes advisors who are not incorporating estate planning into their practice are losing clients to firms that do.

“One thing we continue to see is that clients looking for advisors want complete holistic planning,” said Mazabel. “They tell us: ‘I don’t want to go to three or four different offices to get all of my stuff done. I want to go to one trusted source who really understands my goals and my gaps and can help me build a complete plan around that.” 

Mazabel said that for many years as an advisor, his focus was on building up a client’s assets. There wasn’t much emphasis on protecting those assets or transferring them tax-efficiently to NextGen or the causes they believed in, he noted. Like Mazabel, I’ve long believed you can connect generations with estate planning. It’s a great retention tool as well as a great prospecting tool. And thanks to online estate planning tools like Trust & Will, technology streamlines the process for clients. In the past, advisors would refer clients to an estate attorney and hope they’d show up. Once there, clients would have to endure uncomfortable conversations about health care directives, powers of attorney, and death. Now they can do it from the comfort of home and have an advisor walking them through the process. By making it easier for the advisor to be involved directly in the estate planning process, Mazabel says it’s much easier to hold clients accountable for following through. 

Trust & Will’s research has found that when a person comes to set up an estate plan on the platform without a financial advisor, there’s about a 25% chance they’ll go through the process and complete it. But when they come through a financial advisor, the completion rate goes up to 75%. That’s one of the many advantages of having a trusted advisor. 

When you consider that 55% of Americans don’t have any estate documents and only 31% have a basic will, according to Trust & Will’s 2025 Estate Planning Report, I can’t think of a better argument for the power of accountability.

Speaking of statistics, my good friend Michael DiJoseph, a senior strategist at Vanguard Investment Advisor Research Center, has long studied and quantified the value that a skilled advisor brings to clients vs. clients who don’t use financial advisors. Vanguard celebrated the 25th anniversary of its Advisor Alpha Study, which has consistently shown that skilled advisors add a full 3% (300 basis points) annually to a client’s portfolio. How? By holding them accountable to their plan and helping them avoid rash, wealth-eroding decisions during times of market volatility or personal stress. Over those 300 basis points, Vanguard believes 200 of that “alpha” comes from behavioral coaching, which could include trust-building activities such as estate planning. 

According to DiJoseph, the higher the level of trust a client has in their advisor, the more likely they are to make a referral. DiJoseph’s team has taken it a step further and looked into the three main components of trust. Emotional trust was by far the most important component:

• 17% of respondents rated “functional trust” (building portfolios, doing financial planning, etc. as the single most important type of trust. 
• 30% of respondents rated “ethical trust” (advisors’ interests are aligned with theirs vs. trying to sell them something) as the single most important type of trust.
• 53% of respondents rated “emotional trust” (softer skills: actively listening; asking good questions; treating clients like people, not portfolios) as the single most important type of trust.

From my standpoint, these stats are very welcoming for a profession that hangs its hat on trust. As I discuss throughout my book, working toward that ROR (Return on Relationship) is about developing emotional trust with clients and having a greater connection with them. That’s how you can introduce estate planning into your holistic type of offering to clients. Even better, it can increase revenue and provide clients with much appreciated peace of mind.

For forward-thinking CPAs, estate planning isn’t just an add-on service; it’s a cornerstone of relationship-centered wealth management that clients increasingly expect from their most trusted advisor. Build your ROR today!