For founder-run RIAs with aging books. Your clients’ heirs will inherit everything — and almost none of them are yours yet. Estate Watch is the relationship engine that makes you the whole family’s advisor, in your name: you deepen the clients you already have, and you win the next generation as clients of their own — years before the money ever moves. The book doesn’t just survive the handoff. It grows through it. And you only pay when it works.
Your relationship is with one person — usually the one who built the wealth. When they die, the money passes to heirs you’ve never really known, and most of it leaves within a year. The hardest part: 9 in 10 advisors believe they’ll keep those assets. The numbers say otherwise.
Industry research (Cerulli): advisors retain ~87% of assets passing to a spouse, ~62% to children, ~40% to grandchildren.
Clients rarely leave over performance. They leave because they stopped feeling looked after — and because they can’t point to what you do between review meetings. In a year when advice is getting commoditized, “I never saw the value” is the quiet reason the relationship cools.
Industry research (Morningstar): ~62% of clients who fire an advisor cite relationship, communication, and value; only ~11% cite returns.
Every tool you own helps you hold on. Estate Watch is built to grow — it turns a single client into a relationship with the whole family, so the next generation becomes your clients instead of someone else’s. Keep what you have, and win what you’ve never had a way to reach.
It does the relationship work you’d never have the hours for — under your firm’s name, with you in control. Two things, always on:
Estate Watch brings the entire household into one living record and keeps it current, so your work is visible to everyone, every month — not just at the annual review. Spouses, adult children, and heirs all see what’s being coordinated on their behalf, with your name on it.
The engine keeps you genuinely useful to the heirs long before the wealth moves — so by the time it does, they’re already your clients. Many become clients while everyone is still living. That’s not retention. That’s growth you couldn’t reach before.
It runs under your firm’s brand — the family’s point of contact is always “your office,” never a third party. It’s scoped to relationship, organization, and education — never investment advice without you — and nothing goes out in your name until you approve it.
At the handoff, Estate Watch is there, in your name, to carry the family through. And it hands you something no tool does: a measured figure showing how much of the book you actually kept and grew. Pay a success fee only on the households you keep — and if, after a year, your retention hasn’t beaten your own baseline, the base fee comes back.
“But don’t these families already have trust administration?”
Most do. And it doesn’t solve this. Trust administration moves the assets — it files, settles, and transfers. It does not keep you the family’s advisor, and it never introduces the next generation to you. Being present at the death isn’t the same as staying. That gap — between the paperwork being handled and the relationship being kept — is the whole reason Estate Watch exists.
This is for founder-run RIAs with aging books and a generation of heirs they’ve never met. We’re early, and honest about it: we’re forming a small founding cohort to build the engine around real firms, real families, and a real measured number. If that’s you, let’s talk — no deck, no pressure. Just a conversation about whether this problem is as real for you as it is for the advisors we’ve already spoken with.
Estate Watch is founded by Mason Mitchener and built close to the ground — where estates actually get settled, not in a slide deck. We also built a free tool that walks South Carolina families through the probate forms and deadlines, because we build real things for real families. The engine for advisors is the next thing we’re building — and we want to build it with you.