Why Us?
What are the individual elements that in combination make The Advocate Group unique?
We Serve a Select and Specific Clientele
The pressures of piloting a successful corporate career are mighty forces. Our clients have borne this pressure and maintained their successful career focus to the point where they now recognize that they have become, or soon will be, wealth creators. We serve families who wish to join with us in order to become confident that they are maximizing every element of potential in their employers’ compensation system, as well as in the management of their diversified investment holdings. The majority of our practice is devoted to serving the unique investment and planning objectives of select executives at Minnesota’s publicly traded and large private companies.
We are a Collaborative Family Office
We share our suite with an accounting firm (Accounting Resource Group) and a law firm (Fleming Law). The law and accounting firms are completely independent of the Advocate Group 1 and we do not share revenue or provide referral fees; yet we operate in a collaborative, team environment. Our clients are not obligated to use the legal or tax services of our suitemates, yet many clients value the “One-Stop-Shop” or “Family Office” environment of our suite. All clients indirectly benefit from our association with Accounting Resource Group and Fleming Law because the three firms share research, knowledge, and professional insight with each other… none of us is as smart as all twenty of us.
We are Comprehensive Advocates
We are charged by our clients with the responsibility of proactively bringing to the front any issue, across the broad spectrum of life and finance, which might enhance or strengthen the family. Through an intensive discovery process we are empowered to help our client families make confident decisions around what we all discover matters most. We are advocates who possess expertise in the broad disciplines of cash and stock-based compensation, employee benefits, estate planning, insurance, risk management, tax planning, and investment.
We are Firm-centric, Not Advisor-centric
Advocate Group clients are clients of the firm, not a particular advisor. We believe that to properly honor the investment of trust and time which our clients place with us, our firm’s commitment should extend beyond the active professional life of any individual team member.
We Exercise a Pristine Standard of Care for our Clients
We are a Branch Office of the Nation’s largest “Independent” broker dealer 2 and registered investment advisory firm, LPL Financial. The term independent means that LPL manufactures no financial product or service nor is LPL engaged in the Investment Banking Business. Our firm is therefore under no tacit corporate pressure to represent any particular financial product, service, or inventoried security to the public. The Advocate Group does not custody assets, our financial records are maintained both internally and externally, and we are audited every year by LPL. We are supervised by FINRA and the SEC, continuously electronically monitored by LPL, and every position in every client’s portfolio is known every day. We place no complex financial derivatives in client portfolios whose valuation is unknowable.
We use Sophisticated Technology
We utilize a cutting edge client service platform that provides each client with a personal Financial Homepage that consolidates all investment, financial projections, and estate planning data in ONE secure location, accessible whenever desired from any global location where internet access is available. The consolidated information is updated on every market day. This information feeds into our planning tools, which keep the client and their advisory team continuously informed and focused.
Watch a two-minute audio-visual overview of our Client Service Platform
1. Accounting Resource Group and Fleming Law are neither endorsed nor affiliated with LPL Financial.
2. As reported in Financial Planning Magazine, June 1996-2008 based on total revenues.
