How Pisces Wealth began
Two advisors, one question nobody was asking.
The firm started in 2007 with a rented office, two client lists, and a stubborn belief that the conversation should come before the recommendation.
The beginning
“What do you actually want your life to look like?”
Clients would come in with a folder of statements and leave with a product. The plan, if there was one, was assembled backward from whatever had been sold. Both of them had watched good families make expensive decisions for no better reason than that nobody had slowed down to ask what they were trying to accomplish.
In 2007 they left, split the rent on a small office in downtown Lawrence, and made a rule for the new practice: no recommendations in the first meeting. The first meeting is for listening.
Nineteen years
How we got from there to here
Growth was never the goal. Depth was. Each of these was a decision to get better at something rather than bigger at everything.
The practice opens
Two advisors, one shared office, and a client list built entirely on referrals from people who wanted to be asked questions before being sold anything.
A crisis, thirteen months in
A new firm learning its business during the worst market in a generation. Nobody left. It turned out that clients who understood their plan behaved differently than clients who owned products — and that lesson shaped everything after it.
The process gets a name
What had been instinct became documented method: six steps, in order, every time. The Pisces Wealth Process™ made the experience repeatable without making it generic.
CEPA® and the business-owner practice
So many clients were business owners that both partners earned the Certified Exit Planning Advisor designation. Exit and succession work became a discipline of the firm rather than a favor we did for clients.
Four foundations, and a philanthropic practice
Advising and serving as trustees for private foundations taught us how differently intentional giving works when it's structured. The Philanthropic Blueprint came out of that work.
Six people, still in Lawrence
Serving families and business owners coast to coast, with institutional resources behind us through Integrated Partners — and the same rule about first meetings.
The name
Why Pisces?
Two fish, moving together, in the same current. It was meant as a description of a partnership — two advisors who decided the work was better done in tandem than alone.
Over time it came to mean something about the client relationship too. Your plan and your life should be swimming in the same direction, and someone should be beside you rather than ahead of you.
