The Process
The EVOKE® Process
A comprehensive, five-step onboarding process tailored for entrepreneurs and business owners, designed to uncover your goals, values, and vision so I can build your financial plan with purpose.
Five Steps
From first conversation to ongoing partnership.
Each step is intentional, collaborative, and built around what matters most to you.
- 01
Exploration
A 30-Min ChatA relaxed conversation about your goals and questions. I listen. I don't pitch.
- 02
Vision
One Page PlanWe get clear on what your money is for, and put what you want on one page.
- 03
Obstacles
Getting OrganizedAn hour organizing your wealth until everything is in one place.
- 04
Knowledge
Wealth PlanYour financial plan, and for owners, a value assessment, value acceleration, and exit plan.
- 05
Execution
Year-Round CadenceAn ongoing partnership: focused meetings through the year.
EStep 01
Exploration
Thirty minutes, and most of it is you talking. I want to know what you are building toward, what is keeping you up, and what you would actually want from an advisor, which is a question surprisingly few people have ever been asked outright.
Then I show you how I work. EVOKE® is the process I take every client through, and I would rather walk you through it properly than have you take my word for it. After that the floor is yours: fees, credentials, how I am paid, what happens if you leave. Nothing is off the list.
There is a short form beforehand, about five minutes of it, so the call is spent on you rather than on background. No cost, nothing to sign, and if I am not the right fit for you I will say so on the call rather than three meetings from now.
VStep 02
Vision
An hour, and the part of all this I look forward to most. You see your One Page Plan for the first time: what you told me matters, what you want, and where things stand, in your own words and figures. We write the top of the page together, along with the questions worth answering next. One page, not a bound proposal, and not a pitch.
It is yours to keep whether or not we ever work together.
There is preparation, and it is the reason the page is worth reading. You share the detail behind the numbers, and each of you answers three questions about the life you would want if money were not the constraint. Separately, and without comparing notes first. Where two answers differ is usually where the most useful hour you have spent on your money begins.
You each take a short risk assessment as well, on your own. There is no right answer and nothing to prepare for, and it tells me something a conversation rarely does: how much movement you can genuinely live with, rather than how much you believe you ought to be able to.
By the end we will both know whether this is a fit, and it is genuinely fine if the answer is no. You still keep the page.
OStep 03
Obstacles
An hour, and the one meeting that is genuine work. We spend it inside eMoney, the planning software I use, connecting your accounts and gathering the documents until your whole financial life sits in one place instead of across eleven logins and a filing cabinet.
It is the least glamorous hour of the process and the reason the rest of it holds up. Advice given without the full picture is a guess, however confidently it is delivered.
You connect the accounts yourself while I talk you through it, so I never see or store a password. There is some gathering to do beforehand and I send a checklist for it. By the end you have a single view of everything you own and everything you owe, which is something most people have never actually sat and looked at.
KStep 04
Knowledge
An hour, and the one where you get the whole plan rather than the one page. Income and expenses, what you own and what you owe, insurance, investments, retirement income, tax, and how your estate is actually arranged rather than how you have assumed it is.
The aim is not a thick document. It is that you can see what to do next and why, which is a different thing and a rarer one.
If you own a business, the Value Opportunity Profile comes with it: a baseline estimate of what the company is worth today, quality and risk ratings across eight areas of the business, and a Roadmap to Maximizing Value that puts the improvements in order. Most advisors cannot produce that, which is why I hold the exit planning and value growth credentials alongside the planning ones.
Your business and your personal life end up in one plan instead of two. They were never separate anywhere except on paper.
EStep 05
Execution
Not a meeting, and not a document you receive once. This is the year, and every year after it.
We meet through it, and each meeting has one subject, timed to when it can still change the outcome. Tax planning while there is a year left to act on it. Benefits at open enrollment. Estate and gifting before year end. Goals whenever the life has actually moved. Decisions made in December are rarely the cheapest ones.
Between those you have someone to call before you decide rather than after, which is usually worth more than the meetings themselves. Nothing sits until next year because nobody was watching it.
Let’s chat.
A complimentary 30-minute conversation about your goals and where you stand. No pressure and no pitch: I am there to listen, and to tell you honestly whether I can help.
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