HeyFi Generational Wealth Advocates.
You built a business that provides. Now take your seat at the table where your family's future gets decided.
Family governance for first-generation families.
Request a consultationBuilt for you, never defined by you
Written for the day you exit.
Never adopted for the life you live.
The businesses are producing.
The assets are real.
You have contracts signed, entities structured, trusts created, wills written and plans documented.
They're in your desk. A filing cabinet. A gun safe. For some of you, the underwear drawer.
And yet, the reason you're reading this right now is you're still missing one thing...
A family identity.
What it believes. What it will not do for money. How each person actually operates. Who should be deciding what.
That's harder than it sounds, and not because anyone is unwilling.
A family sees the best and the worst of each other, often in the same week. Everybody is judging everybody from inside the feeling. So the roles get handed out by who is loudest, who is oldest, and who let somebody down in 2016.
Nobody in the room can see the room.
And it doesn't stay at home.
You can't tell a professional who your family is if the family has never said it out loud. So you tell them what you have. Assets. Liabilities. Revenue.
Same in the business. Same with the people you serve. Same with every giving decision you have ever weighed.
Meanwhile the decisions still get made.
They just get made by default, by whoever pushed hardest that week.
Everything you have was created for your family.
But nothing can be defined by your family if it hasn't defined itself.
Which is why you have words on paper that struggle to translate purpose into action.
The research
A family that doesn't come together completely
will come apart generationally.
Researchers have spent decades on one question.
When family wealth is lost, what actually went wrong?
Three things, and they are not weighted the way most expect.
Technical failures. Investments, taxes, legal structures.
That's the part you've been working on. It is real work and it has to be done right.
It's also fifteen percent.
Heirs who were never prepared. Family education. Financial literacy.
Not their intelligence. Their readiness. What they understand about wealth, what they've watched you do with it, and whether anybody ever explained why.
Communication and trust inside the family.
Not soulless documents. Conversation. Connection. Collaboration.
Williams Group research on failed wealth transfers, with corroborating data from J.P. Morgan and Fidelity.
The communication and trust issue isn't waiting on a transfer to show up. It's in the house right now.
It's not because anyone is trying to create division. They just don't understand each other, they don't see the full picture in context, and they don't know their identity and importance to the family.
85% of what causes wealth to collapse is not what most advisors are paid to fix.
Without the family defining itself, the statistics tell the rest of the story.
By the most quoted estimate, 70% of wealth transfers fail. 90% by the third generation.
Those get quoted as a warning about money.
In hindsight, they're a consequence of conversations that never happened.
The seat
The seat
Your attorney drafts based on your input.
Your CPA files based on your input.
Your investment advisor manages based on your input.
Agents sell based on your input.
Each one an expert in the job you pay them to do.
Each one diligently looking for who your family is and what it needs from your input...
They're looking at the open seat where the person qualified to advocate on your behalf should be.
Without someone seated at the table who speaks for your family, everyone is left to speak to your family from the perspective of their own seat.
Attorneys
Protect legal risk.
CPAs
Calculate tax risk.
RIAs
Analyze portfolio risk.
Agents
Sell financial products.
They're all working with a different understanding of your family.
It just happens to be the understanding you filled out on their intake form.
It's not wrong... just incomplete...
The open seat isn't waiting for an advisor.
It belongs to you.
Take it.
Filling the seat
A family responsibility
Taking your seat isn't just a position.
It's a responsibility that can feel abstract, and it frequently leaves first-generation families overwhelmed.
So you answer the questions in front of you, the best you can, in that moment.
That works well enough while you're the one answering.
It breaks down fast when you aren't in the room.
The solution is simple, and you don't have to do it alone.
A HeyFi Generational Wealth Advocate can work with you to define the family framework and communication structure you use to lead the business of family.
When the family defines its purpose, establishes its objectives and casts the vision, advisors and family members alike can engage their own work in service of one mission.
Family governance has always existed for families wealthy enough that a succession plan required it. Which is why, if you've heard of it at all, it sounded like something other people have.
The truth is family governance is the missing answer to a question most never think to ask.
And the need behind it runs far deeper than succession.
Families are rarely told the reality that the more you have, the more noise will try to drown out the signal that is most important.
Installing your family governance plan provides a moat for a life worth protecting.
Every family has a cause that defines it. Most never chose theirs.
Clarity
Before a plan can be defined, the family defines itself. Your advocate helps you answer things like... Who are the members? What are their natural strengths? Where are the friction points? What is the purpose?
With clarity, opportunities in your family's capacity are revealed. Without it, they are lost or confused.
Alignment
This is where you define the mission, values and structure that align all the areas that matter most.
Faith. Family. Financial. Fun.
With proper alignment, there is cohesion. Without it, conflict is inevitable.
Understanding
A family that learns together earns together.
We know that's not how the saying goes. But plenty gets taught in most families without anybody understanding any of it.
This is where truth gets shared. How it's defined. How knowledge gets tested. How risk gets weighed.
That gap runs generationally, and closing it takes a repeatable design.
With family understanding, all members expand collectively. Without it, everyone wanders independently.
Strategy
This may surprise you, but by the time we get to strategy, 85% of the important work is already done.
That doesn't make strategy insignificant. It makes it fun.
The plan gets customized to exactly who you are. Everyone is on the same page. You engage the right people, to accomplish the right task, for the right purpose.
With clarity, alignment and understanding... strategy is the part you enjoy. Without them, every strategy meeting just feels like work.
Execution
A well designed plan in a drawer is not execution. It's hoarding with a paper trail.
Here's the HeyFi perspective on what execution is... it's called life.
With the focus now set, execution is about more. Enjoying more. Growing more. Loving more.
When your documents, plans, and pursuits are all defined by the cause.
Clarity. Alignment. Understanding. Strategy. Execution.
Will be written into your non-binding Family Constitution, integrated into the fabric of family operations, and available to your advisors so they can support what matters most to you.
A note from the founder
What is a Generational Wealth Advocate?
That's the question I get more than any other.
I started using the term because of a pattern I watched crush successful business owners. They had figured out the revenue piece. The rest of life often felt like a mess.
Spouse. Kids. Faith. Enjoyment.
They all pull in different directions and often conflict with their business pursuits.
I get it...
It is
Communication.
Trust.
Financial Literacy.
Family Values.
That's the 85% I focus on.
In 2001, I walked away from vocational ministry on a mission to “figure out the money thing,” and figure it out I did. Before long I was helping clients figure out their money thing professionally. That was the start of 25-plus years spent advising families like yours. Collectively, billions in assets. From the Greatest Generation to Generation Alpha.
Even after early success, I realized that the business required me to spend considerable time and navigate questionable characters. Simultaneously, the knowledge that my wife and small children were at home reminded me that there were other priorities in my life as well.
By 2005, I had started my family's office to make sure that my business ventures were always part of the most important thing in my life.
I had read books, heard sermons, and received motivational messages telling me that balance or priorities were the key to fulfillment.
It turned out the strategy and execution consuming almost all of my attention, and my clients' attention as well, was 15% of the equation to build wealth... generationally.
The other 85% was not asset protection, estate planning, tax strategy, or the perfect financial plan.
You read that right. Most of us are never intentional about transferring knowledge and developing relationships.
Without them the risk of divorce, drug and alcohol addiction, and mismanagement of resources skyrockets.
The truth that I have come to is that trying to balance or prioritize each area of your wealth feels like an internal conflict... almost like a quiet war.
And alignment is how you win it.
In 2019, HeyFi Generational Wealth Advocates was birthed.
I felt convicted that other families needed an advocate who would help them integrate their values into their generational wealth pursuit.
My family values?
Faith, Family, Financial freedom and Fun.
They will forever be referred to as F'd Up Wealth.
Here's the story about why...
At my father's funeral I realized for the first time that he had passed those values down to me and they all started with F.
If you'd have met my father, he would've appreciated the delivery. I was also a son of a broadcaster but you can save that acronym for another day.
Your family will have its own way to convey its values. The process doesn't have to be overly serious to be effective. It just needs to get done so that everyone can do their part... aligned.
Your Advocate will help you define your family's identity and purpose.
When you are ready to build wealth beyond business... We're here to help.
What people say, and what they don't
What people say
This man impresses me. There are few I know that hold themselves to the high standard of excellence, integrity and truth that Joe holds himself to, and he is a man of his word. His understanding of the financial industry and business world place him at the top of his field. I thank the Lord He connected me with a man of such wisdom and integrity to help with the finances I've been blessed with.
What I've taken from Joe is a vision put into practice. I look forward as the years go by to watching it multiply over and over.
Joe seems to be able to communicate clearly with a broad range of individuals. From my observations, his goal is to find the recommendation that is best for the individual client rather than the offering that will make himself the most money, a rare individual indeed.
Joe represents that rare combination of competence and passion in equal high measures. (Often, you only get one or the other.) He has an amazing grasp of financial strategies and opportunities. At the same time, he's not about building wealth for wealth's sake, but rather for all the good that it can do in a hurting world.
You'll notice there are no family names on this page.
That isn't an oversight. It's a promise.
What gets said in your family's sessions stays in your family.
Request a consultation
Request a consultation
HeyFi Generational Wealth Advocates exists to move your family from abstract to absolute in its dynamic and governance.
The first step is a consultation with HeyFi's founder, Joe Sugg, Generational Wealth Advocate.
In your consultation, discuss what your family needs and get answers to any fee and process questions you have. You'll determine if what we do is the right answer for your family and if we even like each other... because life's too short to be around people that you don't like!
If it's a fit, you'll get a custom solution that best meets your needs and know exactly what the next steps look like.
If it's not a fit, we part as friends.
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