Wealth Management Questions.
Straight Answers.

Yes. As a Registered Investment Advisory firm, we are legally required to act in your best interest at all times. That is the fiduciary standard. It is a higher legal obligation than the suitability standard that applies to broker-dealers and commission-based advisors.

We do not earn commissions on product sales. We do not have financial incentives to recommend one investment over another. Our only incentive is your outcome.

We charge a fee based on a percentage of assets under management. No commissions. No product fees. No hidden charges. Our compensation is tied directly to the growth and stewardship of your wealth, which means our interests and yours move in the same direction.

We work with clients who have $1M or more in investable assets, with dedicated private wealth resources available for clients at the $5M and $50M and above level.

We keep our client list intentionally small. We are not the right fit for everyone, and we say so directly. If you are a better fit for a different kind of firm, we will tell you that too.

We are based in Fort Mill, South Carolina, serving clients across North and South Carolina and nationally. Our clients are business owners, executives, and families who are navigating complex financial decisions regardless of where they live.

Your assets are held at Raymond James Financial, one of the largest and most well-established custodians in the country. Intentional manages your investments but we never hold your money directly. This separation between advisor and custodian is a core safeguard for clients.

Most firms start with your portfolio. We start with you. Before we make a single recommendation, we use a proprietary psychometric assessment to understand how you actually think, decide, and relate to wealth. That process changes everything that follows.

We also work with a dedicated private wealth team at Raymond James that works exclusively with clients at the $5M and $50M and above level. That institutional depth is available to our clients at no additional cost. Most independent advisory firms cannot offer that combination.

We keep our client list small on purpose. Depth matters more to us than volume.

Three to five years before you intend to sell is the right starting point. Most business owners wait until they are in the middle of a transaction. By then, the most valuable planning opportunities are already closed.

Pre-exit planning covers tax strategy, business value optimization, estate structuring, and personal financial preparation. The decisions made in the years before a sale often matter more than the deal terms themselves.

The CExP designation is one of the most rigorous credentials in exit and succession planning. It covers business valuation, deal structuring, tax strategy, estate planning, and the personal financial transition that follows a liquidity event.

Most financial advisors manage portfolios. A Certified Exit Planning Advisor is trained specifically for the complexity that comes before, during, and after a business sale. That is a meaningful difference when tens of millions of dollars are at stake.

Most business owners have the majority of their net worth tied up in a single asset. The business. When that liquidity event happens, the challenge shifts from building wealth to stewarding it. That requires a completely different approach.

We help clients move from a concentrated single asset to a diversified, purpose-aligned wealth strategy. That includes tax coordination, portfolio construction, estate structuring, and the life planning that comes with a major identity transition. Selling a business is not just a financial event. It is a personal one.

An Employee Stock Ownership Plan allows business owners to sell some or all of their company to employees through a trust. It can offer significant tax advantages and allows the business to continue under employee ownership rather than being sold to a third party.

Whether it is right for your situation depends on your goals, the size and structure of your business, your timeline, and what you want your legacy to look like. It is one of several transition options we evaluate alongside third-party sales, family succession, and management buyouts.

The most effective tax strategies around a business sale require preparation years in advance. Qualified Opportunity Zone investments, charitable remainder trusts, installment sales, and entity structuring decisions all need to be in place before a deal closes. Once the transaction is complete, most of those opportunities disappear.

We work alongside your tax professionals to coordinate pre-exit strategy so the plan reflects both your financial goals and your tax situation. We are not a law firm or accounting firm and do not provide legal or tax advice directly, but we ensure someone is thinking about it before it is too late to act.

Estate planning is the legal and financial structure. Wills, trusts, beneficiary designations, power of attorney. It answers the question of what happens to your assets when you die.

Legacy planning goes deeper. It answers what your wealth is actually for. What values you want to pass on alongside the capital. How you want the next generation to relate to money. What your wealth should accomplish for your family over the next fifty years. Documents do not build legacies. Clarity does.

This is the question most wealthy families never ask directly. The research is consistent. Inherited wealth without context, values, and preparation is more likely to damage relationships and diminish motivation than to build on what the first generation created.

The answer is not less wealth. It is more intention. That means family governance conversations, values clarification, financial education for the next generation, and structures that incentivize responsibility rather than dependency. We help families do that work before the transfer happens.

Family governance is a set of structures, agreements, and processes that help families make decisions together about shared wealth. It covers how decisions get made, how conflicts get resolved, what values guide the family's financial behavior, and how the next generation gets prepared to steward what they inherit.

If your family has meaningful wealth and more than one generation involved, you need some form of governance. Most families do not have it. The absence of it is one of the leading reasons multigenerational wealth does not survive the third generation.

Done well, charitable giving is not separate from your wealth strategy. It is part of it. Donor Advised Funds, charitable remainder trusts, and private foundations can all be structured in ways that align your values, reduce your tax burden, and create a giving legacy that outlasts you.

The question we ask first is not how much to give. It is what the giving is actually for. That clarity changes every structural decision that follows.

The Enneagram is a nine-type system of human personality that maps the core motivations, fears, and behavioral patterns that drive how people think and act. It is one of the most psychologically sophisticated personality frameworks available and has been validated across decades of research and clinical application.

In financial planning, the Enneagram reveals why people make the decisions they make with money. Why some people can never hold enough cash to feel secure. Why others give wealth away before they have secured themselves. Why some clients freeze when markets drop while others act impulsively. These patterns are not random. They follow a predictable structure that the Enneagram maps with remarkable accuracy.

Inspired by published research connecting Enneagram psychology to financial behavior, Intentional built a proprietary assessment that analyzes 193 data points about how you relate to wealth specifically. Not career. Not relationships. Wealth.

The assessment analyzes 193 data points across seven dimensions. What motivates your financial decisions at the core level. Your typical action pattern when money is on the line. Your thinking pattern and how you process financial complexity. Your blind spots and the wealth patterns you cannot see in yourself. Your instinctual drives around security, belonging, and intensity and how those show up in financial behavior. Your think, act, feel sequence and how that shapes the way financial guidance lands for you. And your areas of strain across psychological, emotional, vocational, and overall wellbeing dimensions.

The result is the most complete picture of how a person makes financial decisions that most clients have ever seen of themselves.

The Enneagram has been the subject of substantial academic research and has shown strong correlations with established personality frameworks including the Big Five. It is used by major corporations, clinical psychologists, and executive coaches globally.

Our proprietary application of the Enneagram to wealth management is inspired by published research at the intersection of personality psychology and financial behavior. The connection between how people are psychologically wired and how they behave with money is well established in behavioral finance research. We have built a process that makes that connection specific and actionable for our clients.

The assessment takes approximately 30 minutes and is completed online after your introductory call. It costs nothing. New clients receive a detailed written report and a personal debrief with a certified Enneagram coach who walks through the results and what they mean for how you make financial decisions.

Most clients describe it as the most complete picture of themselves they have ever seen.

A financial advisor typically manages investments and may provide basic financial planning. A wealth manager integrates investment management with tax strategy, estate planning, liquidity planning, philanthropic strategy, and the broader life decisions that come with significant wealth.

At a certain level of complexity, a financial advisor is not enough. The decisions become too interconnected and the cost of a mistake becomes too high. That is when wealth management becomes the right fit.

A Registered Investment Advisor is held to a fiduciary standard, meaning they are legally required to act in your best interest. They are fee-based and do not earn commissions on products they recommend.

A broker-dealer operates under a suitability standard, meaning recommendations only need to be suitable for your situation, not necessarily in your best interest. They often earn commissions on the products they sell.

Intentional is an RIA. We are independent, fee-based, and fiduciary. We made that transition deliberately because it was the only structure that allowed us to serve clients the right way.

For clients with $5M or more in investable assets, we work alongside a dedicated Private Wealth team at Raymond James whose sole focus is clients at this level. That partnership provides access to private banking, advanced lending strategies, trust services, and institutional resources that most independent advisory firms cannot offer. This access comes at no additional cost to our clients.

At $50M and above, the complexity is not just financial. It is generational, relational, and structural. The margin for misalignment is essentially zero.

For clients in this tier, we work with a separate Raymond James team that works exclusively with ultra high net worth families. This is not a shared resource. It is a dedicated group built specifically for the complexity that comes with wealth at this scale. Services include bespoke private investments, private banking, full trust services, family governance, philanthropic strategy, and comprehensive risk management. This partnership comes at no additional cost to our clients.

Alternative investments include private equity, private credit, real assets, hedge funds, and other non-traditional assets that do not trade on public markets. As wealth grows, public markets alone often become insufficient for meaningful diversification.

Whether alternatives belong in your portfolio depends on your liquidity needs, time horizon, risk tolerance, and overall financial picture. We evaluate every alternative the same way we evaluate everything else. Does it fit your life, your timeline, and your actual goals? Access is not a reason to invest. Alignment is.

A private wealth advisor serves clients with significant assets and complex financial lives. The work goes beyond investment management to include tax coordination, estate planning, business succession, philanthropic strategy, and family governance. The relationship is deeper, more involved, and more integrated than traditional financial advisory.

Private wealth advisors typically work with a limited number of clients intentionally, because the depth of the relationship requires it. Volume-based advice and private wealth management are fundamentally incompatible.