When Michael Gold talks about what good wealth planning should look like, he does not start with markets or products. He starts with his own experience as a patient. The founder and CEO of Gold Family Wealth, based in Westport, Connecticut, underwent three spine surgeries, and the process his surgeons followed left a lasting impression on how he built his firm.
“I had three spine surgeries, so I had to deal with neurosurgeons,” Michael Gold Westport says. “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 Complaint About the Industry
Gold contrasts that experience with what he sees across much of wealth management. “I think that’s what’s wrong with the industry. Wealth managers want to appease the clients,” he says. In his view, an advisor who simply asks clients what they prefer, without first doing the research a surgeon would do, is skipping the hardest and most valuable part of the job.
Applying the Standard at Westport
At his Westport firm, Gold has tried to build that surgical discipline into how his team serves ultra high net worth families, a group he describes as operating inside a complex web of legacy goals, family dynamics and multigenerational coordination. He argues these situations cannot be handled through standardized models, and instead require the kind of thorough, option laying groundwork his own doctors used before any decision was made.
Michael Gold’s Westport based practice for these families has become, in his words, the intellectual engine of the entire organization, with frameworks for modeling and family coordination feeding advisory standards used across the whole firm. For Gold, the lesson from his own surgeries is simple. Serious decisions deserve a full workup before anyone asks what the client wants to do. See related link for additional information.
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