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As you advance in your career and begin to build financial security and invest for the future, you will build a financial team. Most likely, you will do this one professional at a time. You’ll find a CPA to do your taxes, a financial advisor for investments, and an attorney for legal matters such as estate documents. Ideally, each professional will be capable and will act in your best interest.
It’s natural to assume that their work will come together coherently. Yet it often doesn’t.
You may get a tax bill that no one anticipated. A provision in your will may fail to account for how assets are titled. An investment decision may create consequences that a brief conversation between your advisor and your CPA might have prevented. No one made a clear mistake, yet the outcome is less than it should have been.
I have watched this play out across decades of client work. The professionals involved are typically excellent individually, but they are not talking to each other. This has consequences that are easy to overlook until they become expensive.
The Cost of Working in Silos
Financial decisions rarely stay in neat categories. Investment choices may carry tax implications, a legal structure may affect how assets are managed, and timing alone can ripple across multiple areas at once. Even so, each professional tends to focus on their defined area. A CPA may assume the advisor is handling the broader picture. An attorney may not know enough about the investment structure to know what to ask.
In other cases, the lack of communication is less passive. Some professionals are territorial about their role, skeptical of colleagues in adjacent fields, or simply difficult to work with. Personality conflicts between members of your financial team can make meaningful collaboration nearly impossible.
Clients can also contribute to communication gaps. Collaboration takes time that gets billed. If a client is especially sensitive to fees, an advisor may hesitate before calling the CPA or attorney, even when that conversation would be worth far more in the long run than it costs.
Another common dynamic is a client’s reluctance to question the experts. Asking whether your professionals are talking to each other can feel like implying someone isn’t doing their job. Another part of you may assume that if an issue needed to be addressed, someone else would have raised it. These understandable reactions can allow small misalignments to persist far longer than they should.
Your Role as Team Leader
When coordination is lacking for any of these reasons, you as the client often become the relay who carries information from one professional to another. Important nuances can be lost when the work of holding everything together is done by the person least equipped to do it.
What is helpful instead is for you as the client to make coordination an explicit expectation rather than a background assumption. Give your specific permission for members of the team to share information. Before major decisions, ask your advisor whether they have spoken with your CPA or attorney about what you are considering.
Much effective coordination is almost invisible. An advisor speaks with the CPA before a transaction closes. An attorney reviews how an estate plan interacts with existing accounts. These exchanges are often brief, but they allow each professional’s expertise to shape a recommendation before it reaches you. Problems are more likely to be uncovered before they become costly.
Individual expertise matters. But in complex situations, making good decisions also depends on your financial professionals sharing information. When you support and expect their collaboration, you are no longer the communication relay. Instead, you are the leader of the financial team that works on your behalf.
Rick Kahler, MS, CFP®, CFT™, CeFT®, is the founder of Kahler Financial Group, a Rapid City, SD-based fee-only Registered Investment Advisor.
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Advisor Perspectives welcomes guest contributions. The views presented here do not necessarily represent those of Advisor Perspectives.