The ethical will is the advisor retention play

Eric Becker wants private wealth to spend less time on documents and more time on the conversations families have around them, and the founder and co-chairman of Cresset, the Chicago multi-family office, used an interview with InvestmentNews to argue that the industry is approaching the largest transfer of assets in its history with the wrong party in the center of the frame. An estimated $84 trillion is expected to change hands over the coming decades, Becker noted, and most of the attention has gone to the machinery—trusts, tax strategies, succession structures—while Becker's formulation deserves a wider audience than it will get inside an estate-planning seminar. "We spend a great deal of time preparing assets for heirs," he said. "We also need to prepare heirs for the assets."

That inversion is a commercial strategy, and Cresset is an instructive messenger: the firm reports more than $260 billion in assets under management and advisement, and its platform pitch in August pulled a $4 billion UBS team to Boca Raton, per PWD's coverage. When a firm of that scale has its founder talking about ethical wills, it is deliberate; Becker is describing the next thing a multigenerational wealth business has to be good at once the machines of transfer are in place.

An ethical will, in Becker's description, is a personal document that captures values, experiences, life lessons, and perspective, separate from the legal instruments of estate planning. He wrote his first one in 2007 because he wanted his children to have his words if something happened to him unexpectedly, and he describes it as a living document that can evolve along with the family. It works alongside an estate plan, he stressed, because an estate plan holds financial assets and cannot hold the context that makes those assets mean anything. "It preserves a form of wealth that cannot be held in a trust: perspective," he said.

Becker's argument assigns the advisor a role that looks modest but carries real commercial weight: ask better questions—what does this wealth mean to your family, what do you hope it makes possible, what values do you want your children to understand—and then, just as importantly, stay quiet. "The advisor does not need to provide the answers," he said. "In fact, I do not think they should." The advisor's job is to create the conditions for a conversation and to bring in estate attorneys and family governance specialists when the moment calls for them.

That framing is quietly radical for the economics of the advisory business. The advisor who convenes the family conversation is present when the next generation starts deciding whether to keep, sell, give away, or reorganize the family's wealth, while the advisor who only prepares the trust remains a vendor to the estate plan. Those are different businesses with different pricing power, and the difference usually shows up a decade later, when the successor generation decides whether to stay or move.

Becker draws a direct analogy between money and judgment: capital compounds over time, and so do life lessons, with the experiences and values transmitted from one generation shaping how the next one makes decisions, builds businesses, and navigates difficult periods. For entrepreneurial families, the asset at greatest risk in a conventional transfer is the entrepreneurial mindset itself—the resourcefulness, resilience, and willingness to act that created the wealth in the first place—more than the portfolio, and a check-the-box estate administration can preserve the financial assets while quietly losing that mindset.

This publication has argued before that exit plans break when value, liquidity, and succession run on separate clocks, and the same logic applies on the family side: the conversation about what wealth is for should not wait until the inheritance event lands, when families are often grieving, heirs are often unready, and legal documents leave no room for values. Conducting that conversation while the senior generation is healthy is the low-cost version of work that becomes far more expensive in a crisis.

The most durable asset in the $84 trillion handoff is the relationship between the advisor and the family that outlives the current generation of decision-makers. Becker's point is that the industry has been so busy preparing assets for transfer that it has forgotten to prepare the people who will inherit both the money and the responsibility, and the advisor who starts with the heir is building the only retention plan that actually works. Becker wrote his first ethical will in 2007; with the biggest generational transfer in wealth management history now underway, the rest of the industry is catching up to an idea that has been compounding in Cresset's founder's office for nearly two decades.