A growing number of financial advisors have come to an important conclusion: Wealth management is the key to greater success. Even if you're already highly successful as a traditional CPA, you probably realize that the best way to achieve even greater success is to provide comprehensive wealth management to your clients.

Wealth management is, by definition, a holistic approach to understanding and providing solutions to all of the major financial challenges of an investor's financial life. From a client's perspective, this means having all financial challenges solved. From your perspective, it means the ability to profitably provide a wide range of products and services in a consultative way. There are three essential components to true wealth management:

1. A consultative process. Your wealth management process must enable you to gain a detailed understanding of clients' goals and their most significant financial wants and needs. This allows you to establish close relationships with clients that help you serve them better and retain them over time.
   
   
2. Customized choices and solutions. What you offer clients must be designed to fit the full range of each individual's needs. The select group of services you use might include investment management, insurance, estate planning and retirement planning.
   
   
3. Delivery in close consultation with your clients. Whether or not you are a CPA by training, top wealth managers provide their services by working closely with clients on an ongoing basis. The key is that they know how to identify clients’ specific needs and how those needs change over time. And they don’t just identify needs — they proactively design solutions around those needs.

If, up until now, you have been focusing solely on investment management, you can see that you need to expand the scope of your offerings if you want to be a wealth manager. In its simplest terms, wealth management can be summed up using a single, all-encompassing formula:

Wealth management = investment consulting + advanced planning + relationship management (or WM = IC + AP + RM)

Investment consulting is the core offering for many wealth managers and the foundation upon which they begin the client relationship. Advanced planning addresses four key areas of financial needs that affluent investors have beyond investments: wealth enhancement, wealth transfer, wealth protection and charitable giving. Relationship management focuses on three areas: fully understanding and meeting clients' critical needs over time; assembling and overseeing a network of financial experts to help you meet client needs; working effectively with your affluent clients' other professional advisors, such as their attorneys and accountants.

Wealth management breaks the familiar mold in which affluent individuals must contract with a range of professionals, each specializing in a single area: the investment advisor managing portfolios, the insurance agent selling life insurance, the accountant handling taxes and the attorney taking care of estate planning. As their finances have grown ever more complex, this compartmentalized approach has become less appealing to wealthy individuals wishing to streamline their affairs.

John Bowen is the Founder and CEO of CEG Worldwide, LLC, a leading research, publishing and consulting firm serving independent financial advisors, CPAs, insurance representatives and registered investment advisors. Download the latest research from CEG Worldwide or learn more about our coaching programs for financial advisors.