Why I went independent, and why these two groups.

The clients with the most complicated situations were getting the most generic advice.

I noticed it because they kept arriving at my desk. An incorporated owner would come in with three entities, a buy-sell agreement, a decade of retained earnings, and a portfolio someone had built off a risk questionnaire.

What struck me was how little peace of mind any of it had bought them. They’d built something substantial and still couldn’t answer the questions that actually kept them up. Whether it was safe to spend. Whether it would hold. When they could start working less, and what that would cost them.

Those are answerable questions. They just take planning rather than a product.

Business owners and retirees are the two groups where planning does the most work, and where getting it wrong is most expensive.

They’re also connected more often than people expect. The owner I help today is the retiree I’ll help in fifteen years, and the staff in a group plan are somewhere in between.

Independent means I choose what to recommend, and it means I answer to the person in front of me. I’m in Victoria, working with clients across the provinces where I’m registered, in English and in French.

Guillaume Girard, CFA, CFP